PhD Comics creator at Stanford

Jorge Cham did speak at Stanford after all, which was good for me since it made my drive a lot shorter (although I was prepared to drive up to Berkeley…). And his talk was one of the funniest I’ve ever been to. It was also packed; the Clark Center Auditorium was filled with guffawing grad students (along with a couple of brave professors and undergrads). Whenever he does his next speaking tour, I highly recommend it, especially for all you grad students and ex-grad students (however you became “ex”). [photos]

HCI blogs

I read a lot of news online, geek and otherwise, but lately I've been trying to read more about human-computer interaction online. There are certainly a lot of blogs and web sites on society and technology in general, but I'm thinking more about resources that focus on HCI and usability. Here's what I've found so far, in no particular order. I welcome more suggestions:

By the way, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mix HCI entries with everything else, like entries about food, in one blog, but it seems like having two blogs wouldn't really solve the problem.

User interface design patterns by SAP

Also last month, I went to a San Francisco Bay Area ACM meeting on component-based user interface design, which turned out to be a talk on UI design patterns. Aha! It turns out that SAP has developed an extensive collection of design patterns for their domain of business applications, and they have an extensive web site for designers. The main points I got from the talk:

  • SAP has 3 types of patterns
    • patterns for frequently discovered user requirements
    • patterns for composing UIs from components
    • patterns for executable UI components
  • The only way to drive adoption of patterns is to build them into the tools that designers and developers use
  • SAP validates their patterns through user testing
  • Patterns do "freeze" UI innovation overall, but the patterns themselves will evolve over time
  • There is always a tension between those who use the patterns and those who deviate from the patterns to innovate on the UI

BayCHI April meeting on search

Time to plow through my backlog of stuff to post. Last month I went to the BayCHI meeting on Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information, which was about social search and recommender systems. I got a few things out of that meeting.

How do you recommend to someone that they'll like obscure song B if they like popular song A? How does the connection between those two songs get made in the first place? The speakers from Netflix, Live365, and Pandora agreed that you need experts to make that connection, since the public at large doesn't know enough to make that connection on its own.

Also, if a person likes a popular song, you can't recommend a completely obscure song that appears unrelated even if it is. The user must be gently led down the long tail.

Finally, I started using Pandora for listening to music. I gave it one song, "Venus de Milo" by Miles Davis, and it set up a station that played that song and about 100 other songs that are similar. An instant instrumental jazz station, perfect for listening to at work.

PhD Comics creator speaking at Berkeley

I'll take a day off if I have to: Jorge Cham, the creator of the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper, is speaking at UC Berkeley on May 4. (For a while, he was also tentatively scheduled to speak at Stanford the next day, but that just disappeared from his web site.) It's the Dilbert of graduate school. If you've never been a grad student, it may not be that funny. But if you have, it is absolutely hilarious. Go on, procrastinate! You can't resist…

Visiting Mars and Cuba… in San Jose

Two Saturdays ago Brian, Will, and I went to the Tech Museum of Innovation to check it out. None of us had been there for years, so we wanted to see what it was like now. Well, sadly, we all found that it was mainly focused on kids and that we had outgrown it. So while it was good to go once, I don’t think I’ll be spending $10 for the museum again.

Now, the IMAX movie at the museum, Roving Mars, was excellent for the most part. The photos of Mars were amazing, especially when they’re 80 feet tall. But the transition between actual footage of the launch from the ground and computer graphics of the rover flying through space was seamless — so seamless that it made me start to question the other images I was seeing. Were the images of Mars artists’ renditions or real satellite photos? (I think they’re the latter.) Still, I’d recommend the movie to anyone interested in the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which have lasted much, much longer than anyone dreamed.

Afterwards, Tao joined us for Cuban food at the nearby Los Cubanos restaurant [photo]. Very tasty, and very filling — we completely stuffed ourselves and still had leftovers. By the way, when I did a web search on the restaurant, I found two addresses and two phone numbers. Ugh. The real address is 22 N. Almaden Ave (not Blvd, and not San Pedro St), and I don’t remember which phone number is right.

Dueling juggling videos

Once upon a time there lived a comedian named Chris Bliss. Chris liked to tell jokes, and he also liked to juggle. One day he juggled to the tune of a Beatles song, and audiences were thrilled. The act was taped and posted on the web, and soon e-mail started flying through cyberspace. "You gotta see this act, it's amazing!" they exclaimed.

But not all were amused. The juggler enthusiasts were incensed. "Juggling three balls like that is easy!" they cried. "And his movements, they are not graceful!" One of them was particularly sick of the praise that Chris's video got, so he made his own. It was set to the same music, but this time, Jason Garfield used five balls, not three.

True, Jason's act was more skillful technically and it was arguably more graceful. But Chris's "lack of grace" has a point — the juggling was set to rock music, so Chris's juggling mimics the jerky, abrupt movements of a rock musician. It's the whole package that's impressive, not just the juggling.

And so the moral of the story is… uh… just go watch the videos…

Good ideas going nowhere at work? Set up a market

The management of a technology company realized they didn't and couldn't know all the great ideas within the company. So they set up a marketplace, where ideas become stocks and employees can buy and sell shares in them. The more valuable the idea, the more valuable the stock.