m cameron jones

Ingbert pointed out that the easy request bookmarklet is broken for I-Share requests through other CARLI libraries. Here is an updated bookmarklet which should get you working again.

Just gave my presentation on “Teaching Design with Personas”. I’ve uploaded slides in [ PPT ]. I’ll upload pdf or pptx when I get home and manage to fix my laptop. As is typical, I went a bit long which means that I had to rush the last slides, and the session chair eventually cut me off two bullet points from the end.

Here is the abstract for the paper:

Design is a central activity in HCI, but a design-centered approach to HCI has only recently gained traction in human-centered computing education. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of persona-based design methods in HCI and human-centered computing education. We describe the experiences of our students in learning, practicing, and using personas in a number of design contexts. From these experiences, we identify common patterns of use and misuse and characterize challenges in incorporating and using personas in the classroom. We conclude with advice on how to effectively teach design using personas.

My sister just forwarded me an email she got, supposedly from her bank, which she suspected (correctly) of being a phishing scam. I checked it out and it is pretty convincing. I haven’t seen a phishing scam in a while since I’ve adopted the practice of never clicking on any link I receive from anything claiming to be a financial institution in my email. If it is really my bank or paypal account, I go to my account directly and look for the information they are supposedly sending me.

Anyway, I decided to fill out the phorm — with fake data of course — just to see what the scam looked like. As I was doing this, I realized that there are loads of scripts and applications which already do this: ruin my efforts at free, open, public wikis, and force me to disable comments on my blog — SPAM BOTS!! What would happen if we took the tools developed by these con artists and spammers, and used them against themselves? What if we pointed spam bots at these phishing sites? Could we choke them out of existence? Or, would they just start implementing CAPTCHAs — possibly making them appear more legitimate?

I wonder why ICANN isn’t doing something about policing the registration of “Phishing domains” (i.e., domains which are deceptively similar to legitimate ones and serve to con people). I know that this is a delicate and difficult problem, but I believe that some solution exists out there.

Another thought that had occurred to me was along the lines of digitally signing HTML, to prevent people from copying the HTML of legitimate sites, thus making it more difficult to reproduce the look-and-feel — but this goes against my love of copy-paste as a primary method of technology production.

It’s that time of year again!

The 28th Annual Symposium of the Special Interest Group on Cameron Jones (SIG-CAM) will take place this Friday, October 26, 2007 at the Grotto (aka. Mert Bay’s apartment) located at 212 W. Healey, Apt. 303. Champaign, IL. SIG-CAM is the premier annual symposium devoted to research and scholarship related to Cameron Jones. The symposium will focus on current trends and challenges in beverage markup, digital drunkenness, drink recommender systems, and the impact of new media on society.

We invite interested parties and experts from academia, industry, and government to attend SIG-CAM 2007. The opening Plenary will start at 7:00 PM at the Grotto, with a reception will follow the plenary at the Blind Pig bar in downtown Champaign sometime later Friday evening. If you can’t make the plenary, try to meet up with us later at the reception!

You can find a map of locations for SIG-CAM 2007 on Google Maps by searching “SIG-CAM” on maps.google.com.

i.e., Cameron’s Birthday Party this Friday, October 26, 2007 @ 7:00 PM

Sometimes I feel like I neglect my friends. I thought for a while that I was becoming antisocial, but I realized that this is not the case, and that really I am just lazy. Keeping in touch with so many people can be stressful, and I don’t “do stress”… so I tend to just shutdown. However, I do Google-stalk my friends as a way to keep up with what they are up to and try to feel like I know what is going on in their lives — Facebook has made some of this easier. Today, I Googled my old friend Kal and saw he has revived the wonderful Kal’s Gift Shop. I used to host the archives of KGS on my website, but now Kal has chosen Big Brother to host it for him. I can’t complain though, they have more reliable hosting than I do.

Anyway, this one goes out to all those people I’ve neglected to call recently — especially you Kal!

PS - no birthday party this year, just drinks next Friday somewhere in Champaign if you’re around.

–update!–
It looks like Kal has left the Gift Shop to stagnate for about a year — almost to the day. Which had me confused, because I thought that posting was from today (no year in the date). So, maybe this will motivate Kal to start posting again (again).

So, I’ve just returned from 2 conferences and thought I’d upload my slides.

4S 2007 - Montreal, QC, Canada
I was on a great panel organized by Tolu Odumosu from RPI on Technological Appropriation. Other panelists included: Tolu Odumosu, Ron Eglash, Min Suh Son, Shib Shankar Dasgupta, and Tarleton Gillespie was our Discussant. Here are the slides from my talk:
Web Mashups: Technological Appropriation in Web 2.0 [ PPTX | PPT ]

ISMIR 2007 - Vienna, Austria
I presented 2 posters and 1 paper at this year’s ISMIR. We had the MIREX DIY Service Poster, Jin Ha Lee’s dissertation research poster, and my paper on Human Judgments of Music Similarity from MIREX 2006. Here are the slides for that presentation:
Human Similarity Judgments: Implications for the Design of Formal Evaluations [ PPTX | PPT ]

I am visiting Yahoo! Research on Thursday, June 28, 2007. The slides for my talk are available here in both ppt and pptx format.

In this talk I cover some recent research I’ve been doing on the role of copying in the production of web mashups. I talk about the Yahoo! Pipes system and it’s “cloning” function. I also present some preliminary findings from a clone analysis of Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps web mashups source code. Some of this research is part of my dissertation work, where I’ll be studying cloning in open-source.

I also presented some of these findings (the Google Maps parts) in my CSNA poster from earlier this month.

I got a new Wii today! Replaced the stolen one… only took 2 months to find a Wii in stock. Anyway, the new Wii number is 6806 5821 7727 9940 if you want to join my Mii Parade.

It was totally random luck (or maybe fate) that we got the Wii. By a random set of circumstances, I ended up spending an extra day at my parents’ house this weekend. My brother and his two kids were visiting too. My parents went to Toys R Us this morning to get training wheels for my nephew’s bike and while they were there, saw they had Wii’s in stock. They picked one up for me, and boy am I glad I stayed the extra day! YAH! WII!!!! Now, I just have to get my characters back up to Pro level on all sports

My brand new laptop died today - most likely because of some flaky software conflicting with Vista. Anyway, this required a full system reformat and restore to fix. As I was recovering my files, I stumbled across some old photos from past trips. I also found this great video from my trip to Vienna in 2004 for the CHI conference.

I don’t think there is much explanation needed… it is an awesome robotic, self cleaning toilet found in the Europaischerhoff in Munich, Germany.

I get so tired of having to log into the Library website to request books. The worst part of the whole system is having to enter my 14 digit library ID number — TWICE! So, I wrote this bookmarklet which fills in the form fields automatically for me, inputting my ID number and last name. It also preselects “Campus Mail” for delivery and if you are using I-Share, it selects UIUC as your home library.

I made a generator form for it, so you can make your own bookmarklet. The generator runs entirely client-side in Javascript, so I don’t keep your ID number or anything, but you should be warned that the bookmarklet stores your ID number in plain text — meaning if someone got hold of your bookmarks, they’d be able to request books under your account and other devious things.

So, enjoy!