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A Feel-Good Social Network Story

Jeremy Handcock — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 07:23:41 +0000

There's a lot of trash talk about social networks these days, and rightfully so: the lack of adequate privacy controls, the lack of control over data given to third parties, and the creepy targeted ads rub a lot of people the wrong way. For a moment, forget all that. Let me tell you a social network story that will warm your heart like chicken soup.

A few weeks ago I was walking home from work in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle. It was the day after a snow storm that effectively crippled the city, so there were very few people out and about. I was hobbling up the hill on the treacherously icy sidewalks, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sparkle of a shiny iPod in the snow. Someone's prized iPod had been left behind! Such sadness!

What do I do? It seemed near impossible to find the rightful owner, but surely a less-than-honest person would come by soon and take the lost iPod as his or her own. So I picked it up and vowed I would do my best to return it.

I tossed around a few ideas while I was walking home. Maybe I'd put a post on Craigslist, or maybe I'd go back to that street and put up a poster. Both seemed rather futile. I checked out the collection on the iPod and the owner was clearly into music. It was a magnificent collection, and in fact, we had quite similar tastes. I also checked the Settings menu and the iPod was named as in, "John Henry's iPod". Bingo—Facebook! I will look up the owner on Facebook.

I got home and did just that. Fortunately, the owner had a relatively unique Irish name and there was only one such Facebook user in Seattle. So far so good, but was this the right dude? Enter Last.fm, the social music network. His Facebook profile had a public link to a Last.fm profile, and sure enough, his music on Last.fm matched his iPod! I was 99% sure that he was the owner.

I sent him a message on Facebook and he responded saying that his prized iPod was missing from his bag. Yes, I know it is! He quoted the romantic inscription on the back of the device (a gift from a loved one), which sealed the deal. Without a doubt, I had found the owner.

We arranged to meet so I could return the iPod. We shook hands, he thanked me for being so honest, and he handed me an envelope. Just a thank you card, he said. It's unnecessary, I replied, but I kindly accepted the envelope and we quickly parted ways. At home, I opened the card and it was a gift certificate for my favourite Seattle bookstore, Elliot Bay Book Company—again, similar tastes! It was a very nice gesture.

Social networking is a technology that deserves scrutiny, although these rare little gems demonstrate the power that networks have to create truly positive and unexpected interactions. I was a late adopter of Facebook and I'm still a little wary. All the same, I can't deny that this story made me feel really good. And, as my friend Sando put it, I'm cultivating some serious iKarma.

Design that disappears

Jeremy Handcock — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:33:17 +0000

I read a lot about software interaction design these days. I recently read an article providing this bit of advice: create designs that allow people to forget about the software they're using. As an example, if you're trying to pay your bills using your bank's website, you should be able to focus on the financial aspect of the transaction (to whom do I owe money, and how much?) rather than the website itself (how do I see how much money is available in my chequing account?). There is nothing terribly new or interesting here. Such advice is somewhat of a platitude in the field of interaction design, as it probably is in other design disciplines. This idea of designing for people to forget about the software they're using reminded me of something though: Mark Weiser's 1991 article, The Computer for the 21st Century. I came across Weiser's article a few years ago when it was assigned reading for one of my HCI classes. The Computer for the 21st Century is considered to be a manifesto of ubiquitous computing wherein Weiser speaks generally about computing technology, not specifically about software user interfaces. Even so, there is a lot in this article that is worth looking at if you're interested in software interaction design. The first two sentences contain all the meat:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

You might translate the first sentence as, "The most profound software designs are those that disappear." Weiser downplays the role of technology in manifesting the disappearance:

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.

This is an important point. Too often, I believe, people developing software products tend to think that applying a certain technology is a means of creating a great user interface. At the risk of overgeneralizing, I would say that engineering-minded folks are especially susceptible to this line of thinking. In fact, the most compelling designs are those that embrace the psychology behind what makes software easy to use, even if such designs are created with age-old technology. These are the designs that will "disappear." As Weiser says, "… only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals." Welcome to the 21st century. He wrote that 19 years ago, yet it rings out just as loudly today. Share:

Learning from strangers

Jeremy Handcock — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:00:03 +0000

I'm behind in my blog reading lately and I just now came across Whitney Hess's great post My Best Advice for Conducting User Interviews. If you're new to interviewing, I highly recommend checking out her tips to see what it's all about. Her advice is applicable whether you're doing casual or empirical user research. I also highly recommend checking out the more substantial reference Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies by Robert S. Weiss. It's a wonderful book complete with methods and advice for every stage of the interviewing process including participant selection, preparation, conducting the interview, taking notes, analysis, and presentation. I bought this book when I was in graduate school to prepare for interviews with my research participants and it was immensely helpful. It's also highly approachable, even if you don't know anything about research. Conducting interviews is actually my favourite part of doing user research. I love talking to people about their work, learning about how they work, and listening to their stories. It's hard work (and as Whitney says, it can be pretty mentally exhausting) but going in prepared will make the process much more fulfilling. Enjoy these two references, and happy interviewing! Share:

Almost famous

Jeremy Handcock — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:52:51 +0000

It has been a whole year since I graduated in Toronto. My, how time has flown! In an overdue attempt at a victory lap, I tried to publish some of my research at the VLHCC 2010 conference. Unfortunately, I didn't make the cut. It was worth a shot though and I'm glad I made the attempt. In the spirit of openness, I've posted the paper that I submitted to the VLHCC program committee. It's my thesis boiled down to an 8-page nugget entitled Supporting Collaboration in Software Development with Discrete Event Streams. The reviewers were looking for more of a splash than I was able to provide, which is totally fair. Instead of a study examining how users work with an older (yet pervasive) idea like event-based awareness, the reviewers were clearly on the lookout for novel technology. All the same, I think there are some valuable findings in this work. New event-based collaboration tools like Google Wave, Salesforce Chatter, and Yammer have some neat ideas, but the unfortunate reality is that there is scant empirical understanding of how people use these types of tools to collaborate in a shared workspace. It seems that the new wave of tools are designed on the backs of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, not user research. I've tried to address some of the void in my paper and I hope it might generate some ideas in the minds of others for future work. I'm always open to chat about ideas in this area, so feel free to get in touch! Share:

Cheap data mining tricks

Jeremy Handcock — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:08:20 +0000

A few months ago, I made a jump back into industry after my brief but enjoyable stint in the world of big science research. My niftiest project at Institute for Systems Biology is described in a software article that I recently published along with Eric Deutsch and John Boyle in BMC Medical Genomics. mspecLINE: bridging knowledge of human disease with the proteome is about using a fast, simple data mining technique to find relationships between diseases and proteins and display them in a way that's useful to scientists who study proteins using mass spectrometry. The technique we used comes from a class of data mining algorithms that are really elegant: dead simple to program, easy to scale, blazing fast relative to other techniques, intuitive, and also highly effective. Given all these great qualities, I thought I'd spend some time talking about these algorithms in case they might be useful to you as well. They're derived from the Normalized Information Distance (NID), a "universal distance measure for objects of all kinds" (Vitányi et al.). NID is based on Kolmogorov complexity and is inherently incomputable, although it can be applied to real-world problems through some simple heuristics. The first of these heuristics is the Normalized Compression Distance (NCD). NCD allows you to measure the similarity between two objects (e.g., documents) using the compressed form of their string representation. The idea is very simple: objects that are similar compress similarly, while objects that are dissimilar do not. NCD has been successful in many applications: music clustering, protein classification, anomaly detection, and a number of other cool apps. The second of these heuristics---and the one we applied in our work on disease-protein association mining---is the Normalized Google Distance (NGD). NGD is a bit of a misnomer in that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Google, but that's what the authors first called it in the literature. NGD can be used as a measure of the semantic distance between two terms in some knowledge base. As with NCD, the basic idea is very simple: two terms that occur often in the same documents in a knowledge base are semantically related, while two terms that never occur together are unrelated. In our case, the knowledge base was MEDLINE, an index of 15 million (and growing) biomedical research articles. You could apply this technique to any knowledge base, however. Vitányi et al. describe how you could determine the semantic distance between two terms (e.g., 'horse' and 'saddle') using Google's search index. The great lure of NCD and NGD is that they're really fast. An obvious alternative technique is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), which simply doesn't scale for use with very large knowledge bases. NCD and NGD could be easily implemented as a MapReduce algorithm and thus they scale really easily. They're also parameter-free techniques, which is another great advantage over LSI---no need to worry about optimal dimensionality. Being general measures of similarity, NCD and NGD are pretty flexible and could be applied to many search, clustering, and classification problems. I suspect that they'll never be as good as a finely-tuned, domain-specific technique, although they're probably a good starting point and worth a look if you're shopping for something cheap and effective. Share:

Crossing the border on eggshells

Jeremy Handcock — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 04:27:38 +0000

As someone who regularly crosses the Canada-U.S. border by road, I've been closely following the trial of Peter Watts, a Toronto sci-fi writer. He was charged with resisting and obstructing a U.S. border officer following a vehicle search last year. It's worth noting that U.S. officers conducted the search on U.S. soil as Watts was returning to Canada (a so-called "exit search"). Yesterday, a jury in Michigan convicted him.

Photo courtesy Arnold C, Wikimedia Commons

When I first read the story as it was popularized on BoingBoing.net, it scared the crap out of me. According to Watts' version of the events, an officer punched him in the face and maced him during the incident. At some point, the officer apparently ordered Watts to the ground and Watts asked what the problem was instead of immediately laying on the ground. That simple question, according to Watts' account of the trial, was a display of non-compliance and therefore a felony crime. Yikes. He's now awaiting sentencing and facing up to two years in a U.S. prison and a $2,000 fine. However you interpret these accounts and the incident in general, I think there's pointed advice in here for Canadians crossing the border:

The United States is a foreign country. Weird and unexpected things sometimes happen to people visiting foreign lands.
U.S. border officers might stop and search your vehicle before you re-enter Canada. (Personally, I didn't know they did exit searches.) So, don't be freaked out if you see U.S. Customs and Border Patrol vehicles in your rear-view mirror when approaching the Canadian border.
Whenever interacting with U.S. border officers, comply with their commands immediately without question. This point might seem like common sense to seasoned border crossers, but apparently even the slightest hesitation could land you in the slammer. The American slammer, no less. From what I've read, a U.S. prison ain't a pretty place.

Personally, I've never had any weird things happen at a Canada-U.S. border crossing. I've found the U.S. officers to range in demeanour from cordial to coldly stern, which is pretty much par for the course when crossing any border. After reading this story, however, I think my palms will be a little more sweaty than usual. Here's hoping for friendly future crossings for you and me! Share:

Collaborating in virtual worlds

Jeremy Handcock — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:17:05 +0000

I recently watched a Frontline episode on avatars and virtual worlds that summarized some really interesting research going on at Standord's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL). This short clip is a good overview: The projects underway at VHIL show a lot of really exciting potential for collaboration in virtual worlds. They have a number of studies that suggest real-world social phenomena transfer into virtual worlds and that what happens in virtual worlds seems to impact real-world behaviour. In other words, users don't seem to finely distinguish their experiences in the virtual world from those in the real world. IBM is already using Second Life for remote collaboration in a big way, as are many other organizations. Meetings, conferences, you name it: it's all being done in virtual worlds. When I first heard about this form of collaboration, I thought it was a little gimmicky. It couldn't possibly replace informal, ad hoc communication in the workplace and it couldn't be any better than picking up the phone. Glancing over this research has changed my viewpoint, though. Virtual worlds are clearly more than isolated, independent realities. I'm actually pretty keen to try out a virtual world meeting. Are you on Second Life? If so, let's make up an excuse to have a meeting! (As soon as I figure out how to get more stylish clothes on my avatar.) Share:

So you want an elected Senate? Think twice.

Jeremy Handcock — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:22:33 +0000

Senate reform in Canada has received newfound attention lately thanks to Stephen Harper's recent appointments that give the Conservative Party a plurality in Parliament's upper chamber. Conservative dominance in the Senate increases the likelihood that pending Senate reform legislation will be approved, notwithstanding any challenges to legislation's constitutionality by the provinces. According to recent polls, the majority of Canadians support reform and I think many consider the Senate to be a stodgy relic of the country's colonial days. The most popular option among reformists is to have an elected Senate, similar to how it works in the United States. At first glance, this seems like a good option: the more democratic the Senate is, the better, right? In my opinion, this view is short-sighted and I encourage Canadians to dig deeper as the reform debate is reopened.

Canadian Senate primer

For those of you not familiar with how the Senate works in Canada, the Governor General---the head of state and the Queen's representative in Canada---has the authority to appoint individuals to the Senate when seats become vacant. In reality, the Governor General only makes appointments on the advice of the Prime Minister, so the PM ultimately decides who sits in the upper chamber. Once appointed, a Senator holds his or her seat until the age of 75. The Senate was originally designed to provide representation balanced by each region of the country and sober second thought to legislation passed in the lower chamber of Parliament, the House of Commons. The Senate considers each bill passed by the House of Commons and may approve the bill, request amendments to the bill from the House of Commons, or reject the bill altogether. If the Senate approves a bill, the Governor General approves it and provides royal assent---a formality from colonial days---and then the bill becomes law. See the Wikipedia article on the Canadian Senate for more background.

Senate reform

Senate reformists in Canada generally support electing Senators rather than appointing them, or abolishing the Senate altogether. A recent survey conducted by Harris/Decima found that a majority of Canadians want Senators to be elected by the voters of the region they represent. The next most popular option was abolishing the Senate, while very few support the status quo. Advocates of an elected Senate believe that it should be a democratic institution and the actions of a Senator should reflect the will of the people that he or she represents. Moreover, the Senate should be responsible to the electorate. My issue with an elected Senate is just that: votes in the chamber would be highly influenced by the public opinion of the day. Facing re-election, Senators would pander to the latest polling numbers over the long-term interests of their region and the country. Raw partisanship in the House would bleed into the Senate as parties seek to differentiate and define themselves for the next election campaign. In this sense, more democratic isn't necessarily better. To me, the fundamental purpose of the Canadian Senate is to provide non-partisan review and sober second thought to legislation on balance with the will of the elected lower chamber. With this in mind, abolishing the Senate altogether is not an option. As broken as it may seem, the status quo or a variation thereof may best reflect this purpose.

How does the Senate currently behave?

Proponents of an elected Senate argue that Senators simply toe the party line along with their colleagues in the House, so the unelected Senate can block the will of elected House. If this theory is correct, the Senate behaves as follows:

If the Senate is dominated by members of the governing party, it will approve the bills passed by the House without amendments.
If the Senate is not dominated by the governing party, it will block bills passed by the House by requesting amendments or rejecting them.

Obviously, both of these behaviours are less than ideal, so I set out to see if there is actually any evidence of them. Using the LEGISInfo database from the Library of Parliament, I found all the occasions where the Senate amended or rejected bills introduced and passed by the House of Commons. I'd hoped to go all the way back to 1867, but LEGISinfo only has data from the 24th Parliament to the 40th Parliament (from 1962 to the end of 2009). For each amendment or rejection, I found out whether the governing party at the time had a plurality---the most seats of any party---in the Senate, which is a decent indicator of how easily the government could move bills through the Senate. Because the number of bills introduced and passed by the House can vary widely between Parliaments, I was really interested in the proportion of rejected or amended bills relative to the total number of bills that received royal assent in a given Parliament. As you can see, the proportion of House bills that were amended or rejected by the Senate doesn't seem to be directly related to whether the governing party had a plurality in the Senate at the time. In other words, the Senate does not behave in a purely party-disciplined fashion. Quite the contrary: there are many instances where the governing party had a plurality in the Senate but returned legislation to the House for amendment. You'll also notice that for most Parliaments, fewer than 10% of the bills were amended or rejected, meaning that the Senate has generally respected the will of the elected House. (By the way, the Senate rejects very few bills from the House. It has rejected only three bills in the past 50 years).

So, do you really want an elected Senate?

There is no evidence in these data to suggest that our current Senate system doesn't work according to the principle of providing non-partisan review. Also, there is no evidence to indicate that the Senate does not respect the will of the elected House. Without getting into the substance of each amendment, I'd say the Senate is not as broken as most people think. In fact, its current form is probably better than any of the alternatives. Given the behaviour shown above, I would much rather stick with the Senate we have instead of turning it into a poll-driven, elected body that is motivated to act out of short-term interest. There are as many opinions on senate reform as there are Canadians, although one thing is certain: there is a bumpy road ahead if the government decides to proceed with senate reform legislation. Keep these things in mind as you consider all the options. Share:

google wave and collaborative tools

Jeremy Handcock — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:40:05 +0000

My initial reaction to the Google Wave demo at I/O was luke warm. C'mon, it's just a nifty UI over publish/subscribe messaging! Along with pubsub, the federated aspect of Wave---the seamless integration of users across multiple domains---is just standing on top of vanilla XMPP. From a cynical point of view, Wave is much more of an engineering feat than a shining piece of technological innovation. It's not all about recycled technology, though. The exciting part of Wave is the collaborative abstraction of XMPP that is centered around conversations rather than individual messages. As someone interested in developer tools, I see a lot of potential in Wave. The presenters at I/O actually had a demo of a Google Code issue tracker extension that allows you to create, follow, and respond to conversations in a bug report using Wave (see around the 1:02:30 mark): Very, very nice. After watching the demo, I realized that Wave-based developer tools could share a lot in common with the ideas I wrote about a few weeks ago---integrating artifact streams with work streams in a microblogging tool: In both scenarios, I think the proposed value comes from: 1. aggregating and persisting conversations in one place; and 2. enabling easy ad-hoc communication between participants. In any case, it looks like Google Wave may provide a nice framework to play with my ideas, so I'm excited to see how it shapes up. Share:

microblogging at work: workstreams and artifact streams

Jeremy Handcock — Sat, 02 May 2009 18:06:41 +0000

One of the reasons that Twitter has become so popular is that it is a successful ambient awareness tool. With each tweet from a friend or person of interest, you get a subliminal sense of what he/she is up to. Each tweet also represents an opportunity for ad hoc, informal communication between Twitterers: In Wired Magazine and then more recently in the New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson discusses social proprioception, his term to describe the social 'sixth sense' that comes with microblogging. Proprioception is a really wonderful metaphor for describing ambient awareness and I think it can extend beyond social settings into the workplace as well. Yammer, for example, is your Twitter at work. I've never seen Yammer in action, but I think it's a really interesting idea. Just as you publish your lifestream on Twitter, you publish your workstream on Yammer---micro-level updates about what you're working on. Say you only have a once-a-day standup meeting with your team in the morning. Wouldn't it be nice to get more fine-grained details of what everyone is up to throughout the day? I could also see microblogging at work as a great way to close some of the distance in a distributed team. You get regular updates from team members afar, potentially a greater feeling of social connectedness, and opportunities for ad hoc communication. Microblogging at work is a fine idea by itself, but what about combining workstreams with artifact streams inside a microblog? The developer awareness tool that I created for my research was the artifact stream part---Aufait feeds you discrete tidbits about how your project artifacts are changing. I focused on source code, bug reports, documents, and automated builds, although the artifact could really be anything. If I put these artifact streams alongside a team's workstream, I get something like this: To me this seems like a natural fit. It augments all of the nice things about microblogging with additional awareness information that is really important for software developers. You can use a hash (ie. #sprocketdev) to publish a conversation to your team's channel and of course you can poke around other channels and people just like on Twitter. The screenshot above is Jaiku on AppEngine. Jaiku is Google's freshly open-sourced microblogging platform and it works pretty much like Twitter. Getting the aritfact streams in there is just a matter of publishing events (ie. version control commits, bug report updates) into Jaiku via its API. From there, you can get your hybrid workstream/artifact stream from Jaiku's web interface, RSS, or even using its API. I'm going to take this up as a project so I'll let you know how things come along. If you have any feedback or are interested in collaborating, feel free to get in touch! Share: