Taken: November 2, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

On Thursday, Amanda Hinnant defended her dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Hinnant! She is my first student to defend. She is also the first graduate of our Media, Technology and Society PhD program.

As you can perhaps tell from the photo, I participated in the defense virtually. We used Skype and it worked very well. I could see Amanda and the other committee members. I didn’t have a webcam in my room, but I figured it wasn’t nearly as important for the folks there to see me. They did hear me, however.:)

Here are some other photos from the event.we

• PhD in Technology and Social Behavior
  new joint program at Northwestern
  (tags: education northwestern)
• Pet Peeves in Customer Service – AOL News
  (tags: article products-services)
• Army Recruiters Accused of Misleading Students to Get Them to Enlist
  (tags: news article politics military)

Taken: November 1, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

I was at a restaurant the other night and noticed that their featured wines for the day (the week?) were Hungarian ones. I thought that was interesting. I didn’t recognize any of those wines, but I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to wines so that’s not too surprising. I did look through their entire wine list and ordinarily they don’t have any Hungarian wines.

When I took the photo, I thought the shadow of my hand taking it might look interesting. (I didn’t have too much choice over the matter, but I could have minimized the interruption.) In the end, I don’t like it, but so it is.

Is this new? Did Flickr finally add a favicon to their site or did it just change it? I don’t recall seeing this before. I’m pretty sure I would’ve noticed it had it been there earlier. One reason is that I’ve been trying to figure out how to apply a Flickr decal to my car. I wasn’t sure if the pink dot should be on the left of the right. I guess the blue goes on the left.

Ooh, this is cool. You can view a tag cloud of the most common words in U.S. presidential speeches, declarations and letters since 1776. Slide the arrows on the bar to move from the representation of one document to another. The bottom of the page has a detailed description of how the tag clouds were generated, it looks like a careful approach. What a neat idea. [thanks]

Taken: October 31, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

Tricia had the perfect Halloween decoration in her office from my perspective. The purple pumpkin is a good representation of my Northwestern roots.:-)

• Deja View’s Wearable “after-the-fact” Digital Video Camcorder
  (tags: technology gadgets video)
• Stephen Raudenbush
  Department of Sociology, Univ. Chicago
  (tags: people sociology research)

Credit Slips is a group blog focusing on “all things about credit and bankruptcy”. Not only does this blog have a great list of contributors, but they also bring in some star guests.

This week, Viviana Zelizer from Princeton’s Sociology Department has been guest blogging on topics ranging from the importance of personal ties in economic transactions to economic exchange across generations in families, the gendered aspects of spending and the intersection of economic transactions and intimate relations. (The latter is also the topic of her most recent book on The Purchase of Intimacy). She is great at talking about these issues so I highly recommend checking out her posts.

Full disclosure, Viviana was one of my mentors in graduate school. However, I think that makes me particularly qualified to comment on how helpful her work is in understanding questions about how social relations and cultural context influence economic processes. Be sure not to miss out on this treat.

• ACLU Defends Free Speech Online
  (tags: aclu rights)

Taken: October 29, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

Little commentary here, I think it’s obvious why I took this photo. The sunset on Monday was amazing. This is the palm in front of the Center’s main office, on the side of the parking lot.

Taken: October 28, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

I decided that my photo for this past weekend had to include something about the schools I have attended. Why? Interestingly (and very pleasantly) several people from my past decided to get in touch with me recently. In fact, when I stopped to think about it, I realized that one of these old friends was from Smith, one was from my time at NYU, and one was from my first couple of years at Princeton. Can you spot a theme after reading a bit about these people?

Wendy I met in college while hanging out in the Computer Science Department lab a lot. Cecil was our tech support guy at NYU where we shared an office, sort of, since as the departmental Web master I got to have some nifty space in the IT corner. And Paul was getting a Master’s degree in Engineering from Princeton where we were part of the same entering cohort of graduate students (me in Sociology). I haven’t been in touch with any of these people in at least five years so it was a delight to hear from them. And all on the same weekend, it had to be commemorated.

It occured to me that Stanford has a row of streets named after colleges and universities. On Sunday night I went looking for the street called Princeton and the above photo is the result. Here it is from another angle. But I picked the above photo, because I preferred its composition.

In honor of Halloween, the staff at the Center gave each fellow a list of previous office occupants. (As a reminder, I’m spending the year at CASBS thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to bring communication scholars here.) Below is my list of ghosts from the past.

Bay, Christian
Bauer, Raymond
Opler, Morris E.
Hymes, Dell H.
Beattie, John H. M.
Heady, Earl O.
Cohen, Albert K.
Millon, Rene
Shaffer, Jerome A.
Jenkins, James J.
Tannenbaum, Percy
Lydall, Harold F.
Mandelbaum, Maurice
Kothari, Rajni
Barber, Cesar L. Joe
Hartz, Louis
Mazrui, Ali
Neisser, Ulric
Peterson, Osler
Said, Edward
Cohen, Ronald
Graves, Theodore
Vaillant, George
Goody, Esther Newcomb
Dawes, Robyn M.
Watson, Richard Allan
Kaestle, Carl F.
Prewitt, Kenneth
Scott, Rebecca J.
Cawte, John
Weber, David J.
Lougee, Carolyn Chappell
Nipperdey, Thomas
Ashenfelter, Orley
Hermalin, Albert I.
Meinwald, Jerrold
Palloni, Alberto
Weber, Elke U.
Lerdahl, Fred
Camarillo, Albert M.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
Green, Martin B.
Rév, István
Cook, Karen S.
Twining, William Lawrence
Grimshaw, Jane
Biernacki, Richard G.
Gruenfeld, Deborah H.
Fisher, Philip
Katzenstein, Mary F.
Katz, Jonathan N.
Hargittai, Eszter

It may seem silly to focus on individual offices, but given the special architecture of this place, each office is a distinct part of the Center. Its architect William Wurster did a wonderful job of constructing a place that offers considerable privacy to each office occupant while also fostering interaction among community members. Perhaps some of the pictures I have taken convey that. There are no hallways here, just rows of offices and gardens in between.

Being given an opportunity to be at the Center is already humbling enough, but to think that all of the above people had been in the exact same spot working away is quite amazing. It’s neat to find some connections. For example, I only brought a few dozen books with me to the Center, but one of them is Carl Kaestle’s Literacy in the United States so it was really fun to see his name on my list.

I could spend days browsing the lists of the various offices, there is so much exciting history here.

• 101 Uses for an ID Card
  a contest sponsored by Liberty – Protecting Civil Liberties Promoting Human Rights; I’m afraid this is too late by the time it will be posted on my blog, but it’s still interesting to note
  (tags: privacy politics creativity contest)
• Web2point2: The Point is (still) people
  (tags: conferences web20)
• Zotero
  Firefox extension to help with research by automatic cpature of citation information, etc. – only compatible with FF 2.0 [Thanks]
  (tags: firefox extension)
• Complete Sun and Moon Data for One Day
  helpful to figure out when trick-or-treaters are expected to come around
  (tags: reference calendar calculator)
• The Spending Diaries of Six New Yorkers
  (tags: nyc money article)