Earlier this year, Brad DeLong suggested that he should get rich and then give a large grant to me to do a study. I’m all for Brad getting rich and I happily await the day including the check he’ll send my way as a result. However, in the meantime, it’s good to know that there are some other sources of potential funding for work on information technologies.

Yesterday, the MacArthur Foundation announced a new initiative in Digital Media and Learning. They have committed $50 million dollars over five years to this. I was fortunate to be one of the recipients of a research grant. My project will be a look at young people’s uses of the Internet with particular focus on their skills and participation. I will also be conducting a training intervention (on participants randomly assigned to the control versus the experimental group) to see if we can create a program that helps people improve their online abilities (in such domains as efficiency in content navigation and evaluating the credibility of information).

Generally speaking, the goal of this initiative is to gain a better understanding of how young people are using digital media in their everyday lives and how various types of learning are taking place outside of the classroom through the use of such media. MacArthur has also launched a blog to discuss related projects.

The press conference was simulcast in Second Life and some participants captured a few screenshots, including ones from Teen Second Life.

As you can imagine, I’m super excited about all this and so will likely be blogging about related issues in the future (hah, not that I haven’t already).

• Spotlight Blog on Digital Media and Learning
  MacArthur’s blog as part of the Foundation’s initiative on Digital Media and Learning
  (tags: blogs)
• Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning
  (tags: technology education)

• TagCrowd
  “Create your own tag cloud from any text to visualize word frequency.”
  (tags: tagcloud tagging visualization)
• Cultural Renaissance or Cultural Divide?
  by Bill Ivey and Steven J. Tepper
  (tags: article cultural-capital divide inequality)
• A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available
  (tags: stats ToRead)

• Participatory Art
  Article in Time from 1969 about Hungarian-born artist Victor Vasarely
  (tags: art games fun article)
• Fresh Angles
  article about Charles Simonyi’s house – an amazing place to be sure
  (tags: architecture art article)

Remember all the concerns about GMail reading people’s emails with the goal of displaying targeted ads? I was among those expressing reservations back when the service was first introduced. I continue to believe that it is important to be generally conscious about how much of our email and other activities are stored and potentially analyzed by Google and other service providers. Nonetheless, it’s also interesting to pause on occasion to see the level of sophistication – or lack thereof – that some of these services have reached nowadays.

Sometimes I am surprised by how well the ads on the sidebar match the content of my messages. For example, from very little text, GMail seems to be able to tell if a conversation is conducted in another language and serves up ads consistent with the language of the correspondance (here I’m referring to some experiences with Hungarian).

Today, however, I was reminded that there is still considerable room for improvement in the system. I am in the midst of corresponding with some friends about an evening outing consisting of drinks and dinner and possibly dancing. There is no information in the messages about the location of all this (even at the city-level) so it’s hard for the ads to be targeted in that way. Our email addresses either end in gmail.com or educational institutions scattered across the country so even if GMail analyzed that information, it wouldn’t help in this case. We also haven’t mentioned any restaurant names to provide clues.

There is one piece of specific information that has come up, however: “I’m flexible (except the usual Thai food allergy problem).”

Given this note, it was curious to see a link to “Thai Restaurant Iowa”. The word “allergy” is right next to “Thai food” in the above sentence. So what are the chances that information about Thaid food restaurants is going to be of interest?

I have no idea why I’m smiling in that photo. There was not much fun about the scene. The Chicago area saw record-setting weather yesterday. Apparently this is the earliest measurable snow since snow has been measured in the city. Yikes. Thursday’s snow beat the record by six days! It’s not as though I wasn’t already very happy in California, but I guess the weather thought I needed more reminding of why I should just stay put and enjoy the sunny and warm days.

• Flickr coincidences
  (tags: flickr stories)

Over the weekend I found a few fun Flickr tools. I’ve bookmarked these (see del.icio.us links), but they are worth a separate post.

First, Steeev’s Flickr Projects is a goldmine. The resources there are mostly Greasemonkey scripts, which requires that you use Firefox and that you download Greasemonkey. (For the non-techies in the audience, it’s not that painful. The instructions are pretty straight-forward on that site. Just remember, as with all Firefox extensions, you’ll have to restart Firefox after the installation.)

My favorite script from Steeev’s site is FlickrPM. It adds useful links next to each user’s name. You can now quickly find out whether they have any images in the Explore archives, view their images in order of interestingness, jump to their mail or profile page directly, all via a direct link right next to their name.

There are several other goodies on that site, it’s worth a look.

Another interesting Greasemonkey script imports information about the Upcoming event with which the photo may be associated. I no longer remember, but this may also be the script that lets you add a tag with Upcoming event information from your Upcoming event list seemlessly to any Flickr photo.

Finally, for some fun, check out Museumr, which lets you place any of your Flickr images (or probably any image from anywhere online) in a museum setting. Here is an example.

• Amazon Grocery
  (tags: shopping amazon)
• Weblo
  a new market, a new game? buy and sell virtual property, collect taxes on your area
  (tags: finances games money)
• Postcrossing – The Postcard Crossing Project
  send and receive postcards to and from people in other countries
  (tags: fun community social)
• MozBackup – Backup tool for Firefox and Thunderbird
  awesome program to transfer all Firefox settings to another machine
  (tags: firefox software)
• FeedVision – Mister Tipster RSS Display
  $135 for an RSS reader gadget?!
  (tags: rss reader gadgets)
• Some figures about Europeans’ time spent online
  (the whole bit about comparison to print media is not very useful given that the online time include email uses, hardly a relevant comparison)
  (tags: internet users stats)
• Why Facebook Matters – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on social networking
  (tags: article facebook SNS)
• Slate Zeitgeist Checklist
  “What Washington is talking about this week.”
  (tags: news politics)
• Cartoon – Company time
  (tags: funny cartoon)
• On the Internet, promoters dog MySpace posts (Chicago Tribune)
  I’m quoted regarding ad/spam-like linking in MySpace
  (tags: article myspace press hargittai)
• Playing with images
  randomized symmetrical images; you can vote on whether you like it or not and system takes this into consideration [thanks]
  (tags: photos symmetry fun)
• Implicit Association Test
  interesting tests to take about prejudice
  (tags: research)
• Futurephone
  free international calls to over 50 countries; one wonders what’s behind a service of this sort
  (tags: phones free international)
• Tweens and Teens Online
  list of sources on the online habits of 8-14 year olds (the compiled report costs $695, but several of the sources that went into it are available for free at least to some extent)
  (tags: teens surveys stats report)

• Business 2.0: The Disruptors: 11 Innovators
  (tags: article web20 ToRead)
• Flickr Upcoming.org event details
  Greasemonkey script for showing upcoming.org event details on Flickr photo
  (tags: flickr upcoming greasemonkey script)
• Steeev’s Flickr Projects
  a goldmine of Flickr Greasemonkey scripts
  (tags: flickr greasemonkey script)
• Words Starting with D: Definitions
  (don’t ask…:)
  (tags: reference dictionary)
• FWDitOn.com – The Funny Email Repository
  (tags: email humor funny)
• On and Off the ‘Net: Scales for Social Capital in an Online Era
  (tags: research article social-capital)

• Google Print and Amazon’s Search Inside service increase book sales
  (tags: books google amazon)
• Top Web Videos
  presents Top 10 from nine video sites (e.g. YouTube, although not Google Video and not Yahoo! Video)
  (tags: top10 videos)

• More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the Site’s Demographic Composition Continues to Shift
  (tags: myspace stats)
• Not Missing the SAT
  many colleges seem to be doing just fine without requiring SAT scores from applicants (may not work at larger universities due to scaling issues)
  (tags: article college students)
• Flickr/Yahoo! Mail API beta Photo Postcard Hack
  one of the best hacks to come out of Yahoo! Hack Day
  (tags: yahoo flickr api postcard ecard)
• Personalized, Discount Rubber Stamps from America’s Stamp Depot
  (tags: products-services)
• The Gender Chip Project
  documentary about five young women’s career paths in science fields
  (tags: movies women science)

Yahoo! hosted a party the other day celebrating the third birthday of del.icio.us and the registration of its millionth user. I found out about it thanks to a listing on Upcoming. It was a fun reason to return to Yahoo! headquarters just a few days after Yahoo! Hack Day.

There was some overlap in attendance, but I thought the demographics of this crowd was noticeably different from that of the one at Hack Day. There were more women and I no longer contributed to skewing the average age – toward ancient – considerably.

In the background was a screen showing additions to the site real-time. It’s fun to imagine the dozens of users, at any one minute, clicking on their del.icio.us bookmarklet (or whatnot) entering information and contributing to the overall value of the site.

The first person I met reminded me of the shallow shmoozing that went on at Silicon Alley parties in the late 90s. (I’m sure they went on at Silicon Valley parties as well, but since I was living in NYC at the time, I have experience with that bit.) He wasn’t even a del.icio.us user. Worse yet, he spent most of our brief encounter questioning the service. Why bother showing up? I won’t embarrass/dignify him with a link to his company’s Web site.

I did better with the next round of folks I met. I stumbled into a group of people who already knew each other through a Flickr meetup group. We spent a good chunk of time sharing our adminiration for that service and community.

Next, I went over to say hi to Andy Baio whose links page has often inspired posts around here. We’ve exchanged emails about numerous things in the past so it was nice to meet in person finally. I also got to meet some folks from the Flickr team including its co-founder Stewart Butterfield, and Matthew Rothenberg whom I look forward to seeing next week when I go back to Yahoo!, this time for research purposes.

Finally, I ran into our CASBS Librarian Trisha who, conveniently for me, took a picture of the swag, which consisted of a cute T-shirt (the back shows the party information as a del.icio.us entry) and stickers.

Overall, it was a fun event. It’s neat to be in the area and have the ability to just hop on over to these things.

• Geekspeak still baffles web users
  BBC article on recent UK Nielsen/NetRatings study (no info on sample size or response rate)
  (tags: article skill terms surveys)
• What Is This Creepy Site Advertising? | Ask MetaFilter
  deciphering a Web site
  (tags: skill code community marketing)
• Line Rider
  careful, addictive
  (tags: games creativity fun art)
• PhishTank
  user submitted phishing messages
  (tags: phishing reference)
• E-Mail is for Old People
  requires subscription; includes reference to my work: “Students have not given up on e-mail altogether. In fact, a survey of more than 1,300 students at the University of Illinois at Chicago earlier this year found that 86 percent of them still use campus e-mail regularly. Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor of communication studies and
  sociology at Northwestern University who conducted the survey, says
  students often ignore messages coming from their colleges,
  considering them a form of spam…”
  (tags: article technology students press quotes)
• Extreme Pumpkin Carving
  interesting pumpkin-carving ideas
  (tags: halloween howto)
• Boo Bags
  how to make mini Halloween bags
  (tags: howto halloween)
• List of social networking sites
  (tags: SNS reference)

• AcademicBlogs
  wiki for listing academic blogs
  (tags: blogs blogging academia)
• NoScript
  it may be a bit tedious to actually implement it, but I figured it was worth taking note of for future reference
  (tags: firefox extension)
• How to Make Paper – a photoset on Flickr
  (tags: crafts howto)

• Niall Ferguson: Why Churchill Opposed Torture
  (tags: politics article)
• 50 Most Powerful Women in Business 2006
  (tags: article top10 business women)

There are 2,122 images in my Flickr stream viewable to all, 2,868 viewable to me (the number’s in between there somewhere for family & friends). It’s so much fun to be able to go back and remember various things from the past year by being able to browse photos of people, events and places. It’s also a delight to communicate with people on the site and learn about others’ interests, passions and environments. If you’re not yet a user, I highly recommend it! Here are some instances of Flickr mentions on this blog.

UPDATE: I really didn’t want to have to do this, but after reading some related threads over on Flickr Help it looked like it may be hard to avoid clearing the cache so I did. Things are now back to normal.

Original post:

I apologize, this is yet another post about a technical problem I am experiencing. And believe me, I am not finding these amusing nor do I think they are a particularly good use of blog space, but there’s always the hope that a reader may have an idea for a solution. So far E-BLOG readers have been very helpful so that keeps me motivated. (Which is not to say that if you’re sick of these posts you should stop helping me out with the hopes that then I’ll stop posting about them.:)

The problem: Flickr looks like a mess when I pull it up in Firefox. Here is a screen shot of the welcome page:

It looks like the css file is not being considered when rendering the page. Curiously, some pages do come up okay. For example, when I click on “all sizes” for an image, I get what I’m supposed to get.

But I get the above mess not only on the welcome page, but on each individual photo page and also on others such as my Favorites or “Recent comments you have made”, etc. And yes, it’s the same when viewing other people’s accounts as well.

This all started yesterday around the same time that Flickr was experiencing upload problems. For a few hours I just figured it had to do with that. I didn’t see why they should be related, but I figured there were just all sorts of general site problems. However, eventually I realized that no one out there was commenting on this and it had been a while so I pulled up Flickr in IE. It rendered just fine.

So what in the world is going on here? I cleared my Flickr cookies to see if that could help, but no change. I checked and I’m running the latest version of Firefox so no upgrading to do there.
I disabled all extensions in case something there might be a problem, but nothing changed.

I’m really hoping to avoid having to clear cache altogether as I have all sorts of things set that I don’t want to have to retype again on other sites. It is possible to just clear cache for one site? And yes, I’ve done lots of forced reloads.

Any thoughts on how I can get Flickr to show up correctly again in Firefox? I really don’t want to have to run IE parallel to Firefox.. but viewing the site this way is very annoying. Thanks!

• A Pale Blue Dot
  Earth from a distance
  (tags: photos science cool)
• BBC – Radio 4 – The Invention of Childhood
  (tags: children history radio)
• Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
  “Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small.”
  (tags: article research inequality)
• REM & Muppets – Furry happy monsters
  (tags: videos funny)
• Ottobib
  converts ISBN number into full bibliographic citation information; the ability to then export to a reference program like EndNote would be great
  (tags: tools books)
• Rape victim settles with UC
  what in the world was this faculty member thinking?!
  (tags: article news rights)
• Friday Night Waltz
  (tags: dance bayarea)
• The Web 2.0 Drinking Game
  (tags: funny web20)

The New York Times has an article about GMail’s increasing ability to identify spam correctly (including a lower case of false positives when it comes to legitimate commercial email requested by the user).

What caught my eye was the illustration accompanying this article (on the left in this image below).

GMail calls spam “Spam” not “Bulk”. So why does the illustration show a Bulk folder? On the right, I have copied what all this looks like in GMail. How hard would it have been to get that right?

UPDATE: As a commenter notes on my Flickr stream, it looks like they lifted the image from Yahoo! Mail. Hah!