Screenshot: A Weblog

Are you interested in Web 2.0? Maybe you are taking a course on the topic soon. Hell, maybe you are teaching a course on the topic soon ;) Whatever it is, last month the new-to-me but old-to-the-internet Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication had a special issue on social network sites. Besides just trying to tackle the problem of defining a "social networking site" - which at least is a more manageable task than defining the mostly meaningless in my mind phrase "Web 2.0" - there is a a somewhat interesting study of who, demographically, does and does not use social networking sites. There is also an interesting article on identifying what in practice causes a reader to react to an email as a flame that connects nicely with a recent article in the New Scientist Blogs summarizing research on why people flame online when they would not behave the same way offline. Good stuff to bookmark and read when some free time comes along....

Posted by Amanda at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

It is slightly frightening that we have moved past saying that just having a high school degree is not enough, to just having a college degree not being enough to just having a law degree not being enough. Okay, that is an exaggeration, and these people definitely seem well employed, but this is an interesting look at the mind-numbing grunt work some lawyers are getting hired to do. It feels like the legal analog to programmer outsourcing - the good jobs are the creative jobs, and the competition for them is strong. Certainly this type of skilled temp/contract work is prevalent in both fields, particularly for new graduates.

Posted by Amanda at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the weekend, the DARPA Urban Challenge took place, in which about a dozen autonomous vehicles navigated their way through desert and city landscapes in a timed obstacle race. I was bummed out that I wasn't able to watch the livecast of the event, but a nice highlight video of the qualified round has been posted at the Urban Challenge page (you can see about two minutes in that at least one car took out a stop sign....) and they'll be posting a highlight video of the finals soon.

In the meantime, there are videos starting to show up on YouTube and Google. Some of my favorites include:

• Qualifying Round Footage of the winning car, CMU's "Boss", Part One and Part Two
  
• Highlights of the MIT vehicle's run, with some interesting background audio of the team discussing its behavior
  
• The much reported on collision between Team Cornell and Team MIT
  

But if you search around for DARPA Urban Challenge 2007 you can find tons of stuff in this vein....

Posted by Amanda at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)