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)

I was curious to see how – if at all – the top search engines decided to celebrate Halloween. The above collage collects the holiday logos. Don’t look too hard in the bottom right corner, there’s nothing there to see. To be sure, MSN did have Halloween content on its homepage, but no special logo design that I could notice. The others all had something fun to greet users.

Tonight I look forward to greeting trick-or-treaters. I don’t usually get to do that, but my impression is that there are plenty of little kids in my current neighborhood so hopefully they will be stopping by.

Taken: October 27, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

On Saturday, I was feeling a bit under the weather so I cancelled my plans and stayed at home in an attempt to beat the oncoming cold. Not having gone outside all day, I was faced with the challenge of finding something to photograph in the house. Note that this is my temporary home so many of my more cherished and interesting possessions are not with me.

Monkeys were my favorite animal before I switched to being a big turtle fan in my early teens. This particular pouch (that’s what it is, it actually holds things) was availble in turtle form as well. However, I decided to get one of those for my brother while getting a monkey version for myself. I use it to hold batteries and assorted small gadgety things when I travel.

• In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year (WaPo)
  I’m not surprised that MySpace would be declining in popularity, but this article hardly has the evidence to justify this title.
  (tags: myspace article)
• Kizmeet
  “Find your missed connections” – Saw someone, but didn’t get to exchange contact info? This system will try to help you find each other. Of course, the problem is that it would require quite a large user base for this to actually work.
  (tags: social search)
• Phishing Attack Targets MySpace Users
  (tags: article myspace security phishing)
• National Geographic’s Map Machine
  I haven’t had the time to take a detailed look at this and figure out how it’s different from or possibly better (?) than other existing options
  (tags: maps)
• Hate Crime Statistics 2005
  [thanks]
  (tags: stats crime)
• Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) – Sample Items
  (tags: data literacy international comparison)

• Tech support stories
  (tags: users technology internet skill)
• Experts crack cancer ‘gene codes’
  (tags: news article health)
• Board dots game
  (tags: games)
• List of flash games
  (tags: games flash)
• For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monsters (New York Times)
  – the attached cartoon is very good
  (tags: article news health)
• e Boo Boos – Misspelled Items and Auctions on eBay
  (tags: skill search-engines ebay)
• BluePrint
  move objects around so the ball hits the target
  (tags: games flash)

Taken: October 26, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

The Board of the Center was meeting on Thursday and Friday. On Friday, Board members had lunch with Center Fellows, which gave me an opportunity to catch up with mentor Craig Calhoun. To social scientists Craig should need no introduction. To others, I’m not sure it will mean a lot to find out that he’s the President of the Social Science Research Council. (To be sure, the SSRC plays an important role in the social sciences, but it is not clear how widely it is known otherwise.)

In any case, he’s a very careful and interesting thinker and I had the good fortune to meet him exactly ten years ago when he moved to New York to chair the Sociology Department at NYU just as I was starting my graduate studies there. For those who don’t know the details of my grad career, I left a year later to join the Sociology PhD program at Princeton. However, I continued to stay in touch with Craig.

He was already thinking carefully about the social aspects of information technologies in the 1990s, which made conversations with him particularly interesting for me. One of the first related pieces I read in this domain was his paper on Communities without Propinquity Revisited [pdf]. Since he’s been thinking about these issues for quite a while, I’ve always found him to be a very helpful sounding board for ideas about my work. He kindly agreed to chat with me about where my thinking on my book is these days and gave me some helpful feedback.*

One of Craig’s unusual abilities – that is, it is way too rare among academics – is his capacity to make meaningful comments without elaborating on points at unnecessary lengths. I also find him to be one of very few sociologists who uses “big” sociological terms in a way that actually makes the discussion more meaningful and succinct rather than derailing the conversation and suggesting pretentiousness. It’s such a pleasure to engage in discussions with him.

It was great to have him here and thus my Project 365 photo dedicated to our lunch.

The photo is posted with Craig’s permission. Here’s a more traditiona shot.

* I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that I’m working on a book. You’ll be hearing more about that here as things move forward, I’m sure.:)

• Background Image Library
  download all sorts of reference images such as number charts, maps, the periodic table of the elements, etc.
  (tags: reference maps resources)
• Candidate disavows ‘friends’ on his MySpace page
  (tags: article myspace politics elections)
• Fight Hunger: Walk the World Viral Video Contest!
  curiously, it’s only open to people 18 and over; you’d think young people could do a good job with this, why exclude them? [linksthanks]
  (tags: videos contest charity)
• The Information Factories (Wired)
  (tags: ToRead article)
• Official Google Blog: Do you “Google?”
  (tags: google language search-engines yahoo)
• The high priestess of internet friendship
  (tags: socialsoftware article)
• Add This!
  (tags: social-bookmarking rss feeds tools)
• 10 Tips for Freelance Success
  freelancing advice
  (tags: freelancing tips)
• Do It Yourself: Painting a Mural
  (tags: diy decoration)
• L8tr
  helps monitor when a site becomes available again
  (tags: tools firefox extension)
• Google Brin Creator
  a response to Google Page Creator – very funny (for background, the co-founders of Google were Larry Page and Sergey Brin) [thanks]
  (tags: funny google)
• AVCutty
  software to capture images from videos
  (tags: tools software donationware videos image edit)

Taken: October 25, 2006

We get great lunches at the Center thanks to our wonderful chef Susan Beach. On Thursday, we had more food (and thus more desserts) than usual due to the Board meeting. Dessert of the day was blueberry pie with the usual option of fruits.

Each day, we get amazing soups, entrees and salads in addition to a yummy dessert. Susan is selling calendars with her most requested soup and salad recipes, it’s worth checking out on her Web site.

• In the past 10 days, Obama has turned American politics upside down.
  Obama 2008
  (tags: politics)
• Cool visualization & music
  (tags: cool fun visualization music)
• TigerTube Home
  Massively Mini Media – mp3 player for tweens
  (tags: technology mp3 video music gadgets)
• Jeux Chiants
  fun Flash games (see blog post below)
  (tags: games)
• Double jeu
  addictive game, difficult
  (tags: games)
• The Vloggies
  (tags: videos)
• Shut Up and Sing
  documentary about the Dixie Chicks after Natalie Maines made the comment about being ashamed that George W. Bush is from Texas
  (tags: politics movies trailer)
• FF56! Fight for Your Freedom!
  “an interactive graphic novel game that allows teens to step back in time to experience the events of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956”
  (tags: games hungary history)

Vivian’s recent comment wondering whether my work would interfere with my ability to post Friday time-sink amusements reminded me that I should not abandon my important role in keeping you from doing whatever it is that you had planned to do when you sat down at your computer.

This weekend’s amusement is brought to you by Jeux Chiants (yeah, I know, you’ll have to excuse my French).

Of the large selection, my highest recommendation goes to Double Jeu. You won’t miss much by not speaking French, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Just don’t let either ball drop. Hah, and doesn’t that sound easy? The one thing you’ll miss out on by not speaking French is the derogatory comments after you mess up. I managed to get up to 24.5 seconds. If anyone does it longer and understands the resulting comment, I’d be curious to hear if you ever get a true heartfelt congratulations.

I thought Labyflou was reasonably amusing and you can get it the first time around. It’s also not addictive, once is about enough.

Le jeu du ver is not bad. It’s one of those games that starts out almost too easy, but then gets significantly harder with each level.

Finally, La souris est invisible is a good reminder of how dependent we may or may not be on visual cues when using the mouse.