Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
Making a note of this so I don’t lose it before the next time I teach Data Structures – a couple of videos not just visualizing but also translating the intermediate states of sorting algorithms into audio, it appears by playing a note corresponding to the magnitude of each data item in the collection being touched as the sort proceeds. We use visualizations like this in class already, but the audio adds a fun wrinkle.
My attention was caught by this description of a company that provides cheap eyetracking for websites on contract. As the article says, full eyetracking studies, whether you do them yourself or contract a consultant, are quite expensive. The title suggests that they keep the costs down because they are using webcams – but I suspect the real savings aren’t the cheap hardware, it is that they have developed a bank of testers who can use their own computers at home and get paid for viewing websites and sending back the data. The way the GazeHawk system then works is that … Continue reading Heat Maps on Demand
This latest variation on ATM skimmers is terrifying: gas pumps are being found with skimmers installed inside them, some with Bluetooth capabilities so that the thieves do not have to do anything more than park near the pump to get the card data off them. Krebs on Security has some good information on this new twist on ATM skimmers, as well as a few photos. I don’t even know what the advice for the average consumer is here. With ATMs, you can recommend that people use machines they are familiar with and pay attention to if they appear to have … Continue reading Skim and Go
I’ve read a couple of interesting videogame related items in the past few weeks – it is times like this that I wish I could assign followup reading to students after they leave a class. I liked this weblog post about recent research into the correlation between videogames and violence not just for the links to some current research, but because of the critiquing of the papers and the general conversation about video game violence going on right now. While I’m not entirely on board with the post’s undercurrent of sceptibility about any psychological research, there are some really interesting … Continue reading More thoughts on video games
In preparation for some work I’ll be doing this summer, I read Nielsen and Pernice’s Eyetracking Web Usability over the past few days. The book reports on the results of a massive eyetracking study that they performed to analyze how people use the web. My primary interest, actually, is in their methodology, which is not part of the book but is available free online as a separate report, “Eyetracking Methodology: 65 Guidelines for How to Conduct and Evaluate Usability Studies Using Eyetracking. But I thought I would start with the publication of the results, both to see what they had … Continue reading Don’t Look Now
I find myself with a number of colleagues looking at ecological monitoring, so this article about using web crawling for ecological monitoring caught my eye. You might remember the trends tool at Google that got a lot of attention last fall that mined the queries people typed into Google, correlated them with known cases of the flu, and then watched new queries as they came in to try to spot new locations where the flu had cropped up as it was starting. The idea here is the same – take the data that has already been maintained by Google or … Continue reading Maybe Google could do this for you too…..
Interesting to see that in light of concerns, Yale has delayed their switch to Gmail to allow additional conversation. The article from the Yale Daily News brings up some interesting points I hadn’t thought of about outsourcing academic email to Google, including the fact that much student data might then be stored in servers overseas, and apparently Google will not disclose specifically which countries students’ email might end up stored in (and thus, which country’s laws may govern access to students’ email).
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, wherein we are encouraged to weblog about the work done by women in the sciences! If you don’t know much about Ada Lovelace, this video, albeit for kids, about Ada’s life and accomplishments is a decent short biography. Or, you know, try Wikipedia ;) Why do people still care? Because the Bayer Facts of Science Education survey out this month of women and underrepresented minorities in the sciences (particularly chemistry fields) says that 66% felt that stereotypes that women and/or minorities do not do math and science contribute to their underrepresentation. School science classes was … Continue reading Barbara Liskov Rules!
I know that a lot of schools are looking at outsourcing more and more services to save money – both physical services like facilities maintenance and technological services. I liked this student perspective in a recent Yale Daily News on Yale’s plan to transition their email to Gmail. Besides enumerating some of the privacy and accessibility concerns that such plans have raised, the article argues for an open process when making such a significant change. It seems, from these students’ perspective at least, there are questions they would like to have answered about the services Gmail will provide before a … Continue reading Gmail.edu
I am teaching information security this term, so expect more security related content over the next couple of months. First up, if you’re wondering how easily traceable you are on the internet, visit Panopticlick. A project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the site looks at what unique information it can collect about you via your browser – even if you have cookies off. Based on information like your time zone, your screen size, what fonts your browser has access to, and what plug-ins you have, a “fingerprint” is created for you, and the compared against the fingerprints of all of … Continue reading Cookie-Free Tracking