Becky Hurwitz

(warning: this is causing my browsers to crash on mac 10.6.2; they are loading fine on windows)

We Feel Fine
by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

wefeelfine.org

This piece is beautiful.  An interactive visualization again of blog post data including statements relating to emotions.  This is a constantly changing data set, refreshing every 10 minutes and gathering information from blogs on LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySPace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.  The data set includes basic data associated with each post snippet like author’s age, gender, location, date of post, the weather in that location (sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy); and a more abstracted field based on processing the blog text — feeling.

The filters really do give you a lot of control over how you see the data and are rather intuitive.  This visualization, unlike The Dumpster, does not feel impersonal.  There are a lot of blobs bouncing around the screen just as with The Dumpster, but the ability to choose filters based on feeling, gender, age, weather, location, and date, somehow make it easier to relate to the authors of the blog quotes.  They are a member of a group of people that I define and can related to — 30 something women living in California, posting on a sunny day.  I think also, maybe because the data set is so much larger or maybe because the authors of the mined-blogs are inclined to write different kinds of content, the snippets do not seem petty or fleeting expressions as in with The Dumpster.  These snippets feel weighty — sincerely happy, sad, depressed, hopeful.

It’s a beautiful visualization.  Even though my blog is not a part of this, exploring it, I feel like part of the thousands of people online working, surfing, shopping, whatever, and also feeling.

(warning: this is causing my browsers to crash on mac 10.6.2; they are loading fine on windows)

The Dumpster, by Golan Levin, with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg for the Whitney and the Tate online gallery, 2006

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/

The Dumpster by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg for the Tate and Whitney online gallery

This piece is amusing and good looking.  From a usability perspective, the interface is not very intuitive and from a visualization perspective, the various tools for visualizing aspects of the data in the set are not very effective.  But, I’m inclined to say — who cares?  It’s amusing and good looking.

This is a data set of 20,000 blog posts from 2005 made by teens discussing their breakups.  Millions of blogs were analyzed for content about breakups and these posts were selected.  In addition to the text of entries, the set includes demographic data about authors — gender, age and NLP based data about the type of breakup, and emotions expressed by the authors.

One of the goals of the visualization is to represent emotional content as data without emotional value.  It does feel sort of removed — clicking on a breakup displays blog entry text, but I don’t feel empathy for the writer, partially, I think, because the writer is represented by a vibrating orange blob and not with a face or any context.  Also partially because the blob-person is one of 200 in the main window and one of 20,000 in the pixel view to the left.  These blobs don’t seem like distinct individuals but a small part of the group of 20,000.  The bits of the blog entries mentioning the breakups are often full of emotions that are clearly fleeting — meanness, anger, sadness, relief — I feel sort of embarrassed that blogging about a breakup as a teen could mean freezing reactions in perpetuity in this piece and because some of these posts are deeply petty.  Some of these expressions feel familiar enough that I feel embarrassed for me and not just for the writers.  That, to me, is funny.

AND, if you want to geek out about the theory behind this, the statements the artists are trying to make about individuals in society, the emergence of what the Tate and the Whitney dubbed “net art” — there are a lot of essays on the site and around the net.

For the data exploration assignment,  I used Tableau, data visualization software and the Battle-related deaths dataset v5 2002-2007 the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP).  This and other UCDP datasets are available online at: http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/data_and_publications/datasets.htm.

This is one of my visualizations charting battle deaths (y axis) over time from 2002 through 2007.  Each different bar shows the sum of estimated battle deaths in that location for that year.  I created a filter to change the color of any battle where the U.S. was involved with a pretty striking result — the is reported as having been involved in the battle locations with the highest battle deaths in 2003-2007.

Battle-related Deaths per Battle location (2002-2007), US Involvement highlighted in orange

Tableau
Our class is licensed to use Tableau at no cost during the term.  Usually, the standard software is $900 and the deluxe is $1800 — pretty steep.  I was happy with it for this assignment.  It automatically parses data from many formats.  I loaded mine as an excel file.  The parsing was done well — Tableau assigned fields as nominal and ordinal correctly.  I had to do a fair amount of reformatting of the geographic fields to make them recognizable to the mapping tool.  Tableau has a mapping tool!  If you have geographic data, you can plot associated ordinal data on a map using a variety of tools.

There’s a new free/public version of Tableau available for download and also a public competition for visualizations made using this tool.

Tool download: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/download
ReadWriteWeb and Tableau Public Challenge info: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/viz-contest

I’m taking Information Visualization and have been looking around for interesting data sets to work with for my first assignment.  Ultimately, I’ll probably try to work with a data set measuring information about thermostats and energy usage, but for this early assignment, I’m looking around for data sets of development, governance, peace and conflict information.

I found some data sets that I can work with, some groups doing interesting things with development, governance, and peace data.

US Gov Data Sets – data.gov

PRIO Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) — http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/

World Governance Indicators, World Bank — http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/resources.htm

Millenium Development Goals (MDG) Indicators, UN — http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Default.aspx

Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) — http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/data_and_publications/datasets.htm

Global Peace Index — http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/home.php
An index “that ranks the nations of the world by their peacefulness and identifies some of the drivers of that peace.”  The U.S. is 83rd of 144.

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) — http://www.sipri.org/databases
Facts on international relations and security trends
SIPRI multilateral peace operations database
SIPRI military expenditure database
SIPRI arms transfers database

Some interesting ordered lists on wikipedia:

list of Ongoing Conflicts
list of Countries by Population Size
list of Countries by GDP per Capita
List of countries by refugee population
List of cities by population
List of countries by urban population

Buzz, living up to its name, is generating headlines and is the new favorite case-study for my iSchool class discussions.   Frequently, there’s some tech story in the headlines that makes its way into a wide range of class discussions — often discussions about policy, ip, security/privacy; sometimes about design — the iPad vs Kindle.  Google is dominating these last few weeks with Buzz, the social networking system that Google unleashed on its Gmail users a few weeks ago.

With respect to UX (user experience) Buzz is a cautionary tale about user testing without rigor and with respect to policy, Buzz is a terrorizing tale about hard-coding settings into technologies that do not fit with people’s communication and social norms and bearing the litigious fallout.

Imagine yourself as a person who uses Gmail.  You are also a person who maintains a blog (or a few blogs), a collection of photographs on Picasa, a number of bookmarks and feed subscriptions in Google Reader.  You use this email account for communicating with a lot of people with whom you maintain a range of types of relationships — grandparents, close friends, some social acquaintances, coworkers, clients.   Based on these relationships, with any given contact, you may have preferences about what blogs or photos sets you reveal or conceal.

Buzz aggregates your various digital communications and publishes them into one place (Buzz) and to a set of people from your contact lists.  It also publishes your location to this feed.  It’s easy to think of some benefits of aggregation and of sharing geolocation data, but the issue with Buzz was that many users were unclear about how to opt in/out of Buzz when it was released and so were opted into default settings that did not take into account that a person might want to regulate what information they share with what people in their contact list.

User testing
Google reports that it tested with 20,000 or so employees.  Google employees were testing this system in a Corporate Gmail accounts so their contact books were not full of such a range of contacts as the average Gmail user.

Legal/Regulatory

• 2/9/10 – Google releases Buzz (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-buzz.html)
• 2/16/10 The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the FTC urging “charging that Google’s recently launched Buzz service violates federal consumer proteciton law” (http://epic.org/privacy/ftc/googlebuzz/Google_Buzz_Press_Release.pdf); with specific recommendations “to require Google to make the Buzz service fully opt-in, to stop using Gmail user’s private address book contacts to compile social networking lists, and to give Google users meaningful control over their personal data”
• 2/17/10 — class action complaint filed in San Jose federal court on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a 24 year old Harvard student, Florida resident, by law firms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. William Audet of Audet & Partners LLP in San Francisco (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7034912.ece)

It is
An expensive mistake for Google in court and in public opinion.  A good lesson in usability testing and looking for test-design weaknesses.  And likely, a major landmark in shaping the ways that users can control and adjust settings for social computing applications.

I’ve got my fingers in a lot of pots for the coming few months.  I’m working on the Virtual Tribunal — the work for the moment is mostly coordination.  Our team has grown, which is terrific for our project, and now it is really time to start making our system.  What this means for me — I’m leading UX and also sort of project managing the project.  So, I’ll be leading choices and work about usability, site content, navigation/flow, and also coordinating the project.  We’re really starting from the beginning of the development process right now with the goal of delivering a sort of working prototype/pilot in the winter to renew grants and to continue work.

Aside from that, I’m finishing my degree.  It’s the end of 2 years. I’m working on 2 really exciting projects — one for a User Interface design class designing a CAPTCHA for a mobile device; and one for a User Experience class, analyzing usability and needs around programmable thermostats (a project in conjunction with Berkeley Lab).  I’ll write separate entries about these projects.

I’ve been reflecting on what I have done in grad school and whether I satisfied the goals I had when I applied/enrolled.  I’ve also been reflecting on how my goals have changed as I’ve been in this program and considering where I should be heading next.

When I enrolled in school, I was hoping to combine my various skills — in ui design, documentary photography, multimedia production and my interest in social justice to study and participate in work creating technologies that would help more people communicate and have access to information they needed/wanted.

I found the study of ICTD (information, communication, and technology for development) and also in studying communication/technology policy issues.  With respect to ICTD, the UC Berkeley iSchool staff includes people who are primarily interested in studying the ways people are using technologies in developing economies, in the ways that institutions can promote development goals through technology projects, in designing interfaces and objects that are suited for people living in developing economies.  I traveled to Uganda last summer with other iSchool students to study technology projects to support agriculture and farmers.  And now, through a recommendation from my boss from the Media Lab, I’m working on a project that has everything to do with how a technological artifact can be used to promote social justice.

After these 2 years at Berkeley, I think I have a good start at understanding some of the history and academic discussion about development.  I feel like I have a strong understanding of technology studies.  I would like deeper understanding of development policy and practice, about economics, about peace and conflict resolution, and about human rights research and advocacy .

It’s clear to me that what I really care about is people and social justice.  I’m happy to work on technology projects that serve social justice objectives, but I suspect that sometime in the not-too-distant future, I might also find that widening my scope to include projects that are not tech-centered will make sense.  I feel an emotional attachment to doing this work and I want to keep doing it.  I also know that I want to balance my emotional interests and reactions with a strong  analytical framework for thinking through the issues of development and social justice as thoroughly and responsibly as I can.  I think practice and study are both ways of gaining this framework.

One class I’m taking this term is in UX Research method and practice.  Some useful resources from class and for the next phase of my work on the VT — writing requirements.

Jacob Nielson, Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

What (Definition of Usability)
Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.

Usability is defined by five quality components:

* Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
* Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
* Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
* Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
* Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Surprisingly useful, usability.gov; includes decent descriptions of methods.

UX Phases from the Usability Professional’s Association

Analysis Phase
• Meet with key stakeholders to set vision
• Include usability tasks in the project plan
• Assemble a multidisciplinary team to ensure complete expertise
• Develop usability goals and objectives
• Conduct field studies
• Look at competitive products
• Create user profiles
• Develop a task analysis
• Document user scenarios
• Document user performance requirements
Design Phase
• Begin to brainstorm design concepts and metaphors
• Develop screen flow and navigation model
• Do walkthroughs of design concepts
• Begin design with paper and pencil
• Create low-fidelity prototypes
• Conduct usability testing on low-fidelity prototypes
• Create high-fidelity detailed design
• Do usability testing again
• Document standards and guidelines
• Create a design specification
Implementation Phase
• Do ongoing heuristic evaluations
• Work closely with delivery team as design is implemented
• Conduct usability testing as soon as possible
Deployment Phase
• Use surveys to get user feedback
• Conduct field studies to get info about actual use
• Check objectives using usability testing

Curious about who is working to build capacity in IT. Found some organizations/projects in the country and hope to speak with people involved.

Bar Camp, Oct 3-4, 2009

(http://barcampphnompenh.org) was held at Pannasasstra University (PUC); there are 1100+ people registered on the site as attending; sponsored by local and international companies.

Conical Hat Software

(http://www.conicalhat.com) Based in Phnom Penh, produces software in Khmer Unicode.

Digital Divide Data
(http://www.digitaldividedata.org/) NYC based, operates internationally. Socially responsible, digitization, data entry and conversion, digital publishing content to XML, building digital libraries.

Grameen: Village Phone
(http://www.villagephonedirect.org/contents/) same program as in Uganda; Grameen offers Village Phone as a microfranchise — they help people purchase a phone and run a business of selling airtime/phone use to other people.

InSTEDD: Mekong Collaboration Program
(http://instedd.org/mcp) I’ve mentioned InSTEDD before — they do disease and disaster reporting work; develop software, systems, teams, for doing this internationally.

InSTEDD: iLab

iReach

Informatics for Rural Empowerment and Community Health (http://www.ireach.org.kh/).

NiDA
National Information Communication Technology Development Authority (http://www.nida.gov.kh/index.php?language=en). Est. 2000 to:

• develop and implement IT policy
• monitor and audit all IT projects in the nation
• has 6 different concentrations: 1. policy and strategy coordination, 2. infrastructure, 3. human capacity, 4. policy environment, 5. content and application, 6. enterprise development

The English version of the website has a call for input with a due date of 2004. I’m not sure if this is true of the Khmer version of the site also.

Open Institute

(http://www.open.org.kh/en) Involved in various ICTD projects in Cambodia including

• Khmer Software Initiative, http://www.khmeros.info
• Open Schools Program, http://osp.open.org.kh
• Women’s Empowerment for Social Change, http://women.open.org.kh
• Open Learning (E-Learning) Program, http://elearning.open.org.kh
• Lexicography
• The River of Knowledge
• Mirror Publication, http://cambodiamirror.wordpress.com

Robib “is one village but also every village in the world”

(http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodiaschools/villageleap/intro.htm) Robib is a group of 6 villages in the north-central Cambodia. And is the pilot for a project to build 200 schools in rural Cambodia. Apple-Japan, the MIT Media Lab, and Deutsche Bank have donated computers for these schools. Private donors pledge about $14,000 to build a school. The website for Robib indicates that this project is meant to help in many sectors — not just education. Computer and internet access is meant to provide market linkages between local artisans and foreign patrons, also, the telemedicine services are provided using the computers/internet. sounds a bit like the Millennium Village projects. The last thing written on this site seems to be from 2005. I’m curious about the status of the village now.

Samasource
(http://www.samasource.org/) Mentioned in blog postings before — Samasource is based in the Bay; they do great work in socially responsible outsourcing/tech capacity building. K and Southgate did some scouting for them while they were in Uganda, and Eric is now working for them in SF. They’ve done work in Cambodia.

Yejj
(http://www.yejj.com/) Phnom Penh based. Web production.

Trying to get a sense of who among and how large a sector of the population could use a tool that is (a) written (b) computer-based. So, digging for numbers about literacy and telecom ownership, usage, access. I’m not just interested in computer and internet ownership/access. I’m also interested in radio, tv, newspaper. There is already successful KR/ECCC programming on radio and tv. It might be a good idea to build on those existing successes. The following stats are basic demographic and specific educational stats — from the National Institute of Statistics (http://www.nis.gov.kh/index.php/home).

GDP per Capita: $739 (2008)
Population: 13,395,682 (2008)
Male: 48.6%, Female: 51.4%
Population growth rade: 1.54%

Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey 2004 (http://www.nis.gov.kh/index.php/statistics/surveys/cses/cses2004result)
Educational attainment and enrollment
43 percent of women aged 25 and over have none or only some education (not completed first grade). The corresponding figure for men is 20 percent. Only 0.4 percent of women have post-secondary education, and 1.8 percent of men. Adult literacy rate, population aged 15 and over, is 60 percent for women and 80 percent for men. Some 3.7 million (55 percent) of the population aged 5-24 years were enrolled in the formal school system in 2004. The share has increased from 46 percent in 1999. Of the 20-29 year old in the labor market in 2004 some 17 percent have completed lower secondary school.

Educational expenses
Educational expenses per student for one school year include school fees, tuition, textbooks, other school supplies, gifts to teachers, and contribution to building funds. Households estimate educational expenses to below riels 50,000 (US $10) for pre-school and primary school students, for upper secondary to riels 393,000 (just below US $100), for technical/vocational riels 1.1 million (just above US $250), and for university riels 2.1 million (just above US $500).

Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia, 6th ed, 2008, introduction:

“For every illegal eviction of the city dwellers or land grab by a general, there will be a new NGO school offering better education, or a new clean-water initiative to improve the lives of hte average villager. Such is the yin and yang of Cambodia, a country that inspires and confounds. Like an onion, the more layers you unravel, the more it makes you want to cry, but these are spontaneous tears, sometimes of sorrow, sometimes of joy.”