I’m preparing for a short trip to Buenos Aires and am seeking advice on how to approach the trip for least amount of fatigue. CT folks seem to have a wealth of experience in the travel domain so I thought I’d ask if anyone had ideas for me. I am only going for a few days so when I get there at 9am I want to be ready to start exploring town instead of spending hours in bed. But is that realistic after a ten hour flight? I have a three hour layover in DC, which may add to my fatigue. I’m usually not so good at sleeping on planes (except in business class) so I don’t know if I can count on that much.

I have lots of experience with cross-continental travel and long flights so that’s not the issue. (The longest trip was probably when we moved to Honolulu from Budapest for a few months.) I have been taking such flights ever since I was nine, but it has always involved significant time-zone changes. Is it the long trip, the time-zone change or a combination of the two that causes one to be completely useless after a trip from the U.S. to Europe? I’m hoping most of it has to do with the time change so I can avoid it this time around.

For entertainment, I am bringing the manual of my new digital camera and a small English-Spanish dictionary and phrasebook, both of which I was happy to find in my favorite dictionary brand today at the local store. (I wouldn’t bother with a dictionary for a few days, but I figured it was worth getting one given my move to California in a month. I hadn’t planned to get a phrasebook, but I am a sucker for those little Langenscheidt books.)

This week, Chicago has been hosting Gay Games VII. It’s been fun to have all the various high quality sports competitions in town. Of course, as a spectator, there is not much difference when you watch the competitions at these events vs others since most sports tend to be divided by gender. However, couples sports (like figure skating or dancing) may look a bit different. But actually, only if you focus in on the gender aspect.

It should not be much surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that I opted to go see the Dance Sports event. I only made it to the A-level competition of the men’s Latin dances and the women’s 10-dance, but this was just as well since this is the highest level under international rules. It was superb.

Anecdotally, my impression has been that most people in Chicagoland have either been excited about the Gay Games in town or haven’t paid much attention. But of course there is the occasional hostile approach. You really do have to wonder why people can’t just let others be as you’re standing there in the ballroom with all the energy and enthusiasm from both the crowd and the participants. Better yet, imagine if peope realized that they could even get something out of these events themselves, like enjoying the hard work of some very talented people.

The surprise of the event for me was to find out that the World Champion couple for men’s Latin hales from Hungary. In the Gay Games this week they placed third. I found out from them that Budapest will be hosting this year’s Same Sex Dance Competition . This made me wonder how the competition (and related associations and studios) got that particular name. Is use of the term “gay” exclusionary? Is it less politically charged to say “same sex”? Is the idea that not everyone who participates is gay? Anyone know the history of this? Apologies if I’m missing something obvious.

…, …, …!

I’m going to Australia in about two months. I’ve been interested in visiting ever since I read Jill Ker Conway‘s Road from Coorain, which was almost 15 years ago.

The reason I’m particularly excited about all this today is because I just received my tourist visa. Via email. Cool. Yes, talk about a good use of IT by government services. I had submitted my application just four days ago. (Anyone want to tear into this regarding security concerns?)

I got very anxious earlier this week when I realized I needed a visa to go to Australia. I feel like I’ve done my fair share of standing in lines for visas at 5am. Luckily, after a bit of browsing I realized that citizens of certain countries could apply for visitor visas online.

I HATE getting tourist visas. I don’t like the process involved in getting student/work visas either, but tourist visas bother me more. I don’t see why Australia needs to know so much about my various medical conditions just to allow me to visit for a week. In any case, being able to fill out the form in my living room without having to run around for x copies of y dimension passport photos made a big difference.

My most frustrating visa experience to date was at the Canadian embassy in NYC a few years ago. It was unbelievable how they treated people. They also sent people home, one after another – after the requisite five hours of standing in the freezing cold, of course – for paperwork that they never stated was required. I decided not to return to Canada until I could go without having to obtain a visa.

Looking for a summer [or insert appropriate season] hobby? Consider joining the Flickr Monthly Scavenger Hunt group!

Each month, you’re given a list of items for which you have to post photos. The challenge is made a bit easier by the fact that you can use photos taken at other times. (I think the really hard core version would not allow people to look in their archives, but it’s hard enough as is so it’s likely a reasonable rule.)

The July list has just been posted. It looks considerably harder than last month’s list, not that that was easy. I think for #8 “Hot pink” I can recycle my “Oink” entry from June. And probably few will have my particular take on #13 “Pest”. But what about entries like #11 “Most exotic animal for your location” or #14 “Road sign with wildlife on it”? This should be interesting…

The newest photo set in my Flickr stream is called “In Flight“. I have flown 32,773 miles since January 1st this year. I boarded a plane 25 times so far in 2006. (It is not even because I started the year with a flight back to Chicagoland from NYC.) Since you can fly direct almost anywhere I go from Chicago, there has only been one trip that required a layover, when I was going from NYC to Santa Barbara via San Francisco (there) and Los Angeles (back). So I’ve been on 11.5 trips that required flying in less than half a year. Yikes.

Conveniently, I already had Premier status in United’s frequent flyer program even before the year began so I get even more miles in my account than I actually fly. There are additional perks. For example, I just found out on Sunday right before boarding the plane from San Francisco to Chicago, that I now have several e-upgrades, which entitle me to upgrades for no cost. So I conveniently got to spend the redeye in business class. It was great.

I’ve always wanted to fly on the upper deck of a big plane and I got to do it this time. It’s not that special, but it was still fun looking down at everything from even higher up (I don’t mean in flight, but while on the ground).

It’s good to know that San Francisco is another United hub. This means that they have a separate Premier check-in and security area that always cuts down on the wait so this next academic year when that becomes my home base airport, I can still get through check-in quickly.

No thanks to Jim Gibbon for siphoning off a few hours of my time today with that Gapminder pointer. Nonetheless, I wanted to send him a shutout and welcome him to blogging seeing that he comes from a bit of Crooked Timber lineage. Kieran and I shared an office for a couple of years while in graduate school at Princeton. And it is in this same office that Jim now spends a good chunk of his graduate student days (granted, right now he’s doing summer research in Germany). Welcome to blogging, Jim!

To try to decipher what it is about 129 Wallace Hall that leads to all this blogging, you can check out a light switch, a chair component, a scooter, part of the wall, parts of the building and its door for clues on this collage – all the product of an afternoon when I didn’t feel like working on my dissertation. Those were the days… You think you have no time in grad school, but then you become faculty and all that blogging, taking pictures and surfing the Net… oh, never mind.

How does the popularity of Facebook compare to MySpace among a diverse group of college students? What types of blogs are students most likely to read? How many have ever visited Instapundit or Daily Kos?

As mentioned earlier, last month I gave a talk at the Beyond Broadcast conference hosted at Harvard Law School. The conference folks have now made the presentations available in both audio and video format. You can listen to or watch my talk misleadingly titled “Just a Pretty Face(book)? What College Students Actually Do Online”. (The title is misleading, because the talk is not about Facebook or even social-networking sites more generally speaking. Rather, it’s about what young people do online and how it differs by type of background.) I have put the presentation slides online in case you are curious to see the specifics (those are hard to follow on the video and there wasn’t enough time for me to mention stats in the presentation).

I should note that these are all still preliminary findings as I need to do more data cleaning and there’s tons more to do on the analysis front. But I don’t anticipate major changes in the findings presented given the size of the sample.

If you prefer text over these various other options I will be writing up the findings this summer and will post a link once it’s done. But if you can’t wait to find out the answers to the above questions then I recommend clicking on one of the above links. (All this information is toward the end of the presentation.)

Okay, fine, I won’t make it that difficult. The quick answers to the above questions are (again, for this group of college students):
1. Facebook is more popular (Facebook 78%, MySpace 51%)
2. Political blogs are the least popular type of blogs (from among the ones asked, which included personal journals, arts/culture/music, technology, sports)
3. 1% have ever visited each

There’s lots more info in the presentation.

Recall that many of you took a survey back in January here on CT about your use of various sites and services. I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you a summary of the responses and that is forthcoming as I analyze the college student Internet use data. I thought reporting the former may be more interesting in the context of the latter thus the delay.

I wanted to send my parents something nice the other day (just because) and ended up playing around with One True Media. I wouldn’t spend too much time coming up with something elaborate as they hold your material hostage to a large extent, but it’s worth a try.

So here’s a little trip down memory lane.. a few images of my brother and me from a few decades ago.

I’ve posted lots of photos and a few videos from this past weekend.

The Princeton orchestra gave a nice performance, here is a snippet from what sounds like a waltz. They ended with Star Wars:

Here are some videos from the fireworks with music, including the singing of Old Nassau.

Recently I stayed at an intriguing hotel that is worth a mention: the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. (I was unimpressed by the reservation part of the experience, but the stay made up for the annoyances incurred at that stage.)

Upon entrance, you almost have to step on the projection of two people sleeping in bed to get to the receptionists and/or the elevators to access your room. I wonder how many people who notice this just walk right across the image versus how many decide to walk around the picture. Big plastic red penguins are scattered across the building, not just in the designated museum section, but also in the hallways. I didn’t care for some of the installations (like the film about a woman and a man having a seemingly pleasant dinner judging from their facial expressions despite the fact that mice are walking all over their food), but some of it was neat (like the falling letters on a screen where the viewer becomes part of the image).

The hotel just opened this Spring. It’s a museum-hotel mix with various contemporary art pieces all over. The visit was much more fun than your usual hotel stay and it made me wish more hotels would put some interesting twist on the experience.

Andrew Sullivan is trying to get to know his readers by asking them to send him pictures of the view from their windows. Not surprisingly, photo-sharing site Flickr has a group devoted to this topic linking to a whole separate Web site on window views. Kevin Drum responds with a view from his window. I’m afraid on this one, I win. If you post on Flickr, tag your photo with viewfrommywindow or add it to the group and post a link here. Alternatively, post a photo on “view from where I read EBLOG”.:)

Did I mention I’ve been traveling a lot? It continues. All of this is coming up in just the next week. Yikes. My plan is to be taking lots of photos at some of the upcoming events so look for updates soon after.

For your weekend listening pleasure, some Hungarian political campaign music. I had meant to blog about this a few weeks ago during the elections (it’s just one of about a dozen posts I haven’t managed to get around to recently), but it’s not as though it’s any less relevant now.

The song was written explicitly for the Hungarian Socialist Party‘s campaign in the recent parliamentary elections. I like it – it’s reminiscent of Hungarian pop/covertly political songs from the 1970s. I didn’t like it the first time I listened to it, but got pretty hooked the second time. I wonder if it’s at all of interest if you do not understand the language and/or are not familiar with the style. (No need to get into how unique the style is, maybe it’s not, but it still reminds me of lots of Hungarian songs from a while ago, songs that don’t tend to make it to the Billboard charts despite being quite good.)

The most commonly recurring words are “igen”, which means “yes” and “Magyarország”, which means “Hungary”. The bottom of the page suggests that the song was also made available as a ring tone for cell phones, which seems like an interesting idea.

So what are other exampes of political campaigns creating their own songs? I can think of campaigns adopting songs for their purposes and playing them at victory time, but those songs weren’t written for the campaigns explicitly. Bonus points if you can link to the examples.

If you’re even just a semi-regular visitor to this blog, you will have likely noticed the lack of action around here. Here is a bit of update about what’s been going on and some pictures in case you’re curious for a visual recap.

I have been on the road a LOT in the past few weeks and will continue to travel quite a bit in the coming weeks. And as if things weren’t busy enough, my laptop’s hard drive decided to give up service a couple of weeks ago so that’s made things even more insane than usual. More on that later.

For now, a rundown of recent events with links to related photos.

Three weeks ago I was in New York for an NSF-sponsored meeting at NYU about creating a research network for people doing work in Social Informatics. It was a small group made up of really neat folks whose work I admire so it was a Saturday well spent. More on that as things progress.

I stayed at the Washington Square Hotel (it’s rare that I stay at a hotel when visiting NYC) and got to take part in an unrelated event, my friend Marcy’s birthday celebrations. Pictures from this trip are here.

Next, I boarded a plane on early Sunday morning (Apr 9th) to participate in the Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions. Luckily, I got upgraded to business class, which was very helpful given that I was in the midst of a 6-day 4-stop trip.

The meeting turned out well and I plan to be writing about it in more detail as soon as things calm down. Santa Barbara is beautiful so it was nice to have the opportunity to visit. Pictures from this trip are here.

Next came a talk in the Information Science speaker series at Cornell. My last trip to Ithaca was 15 years ago when I participated in the Cornell Summer College Program. It was great to be back. There are numerous folks on campus who do work related to my interests so it was a really fun and engaging visit. See photos here.

In the meantime, I’ve also been to Princeton twice and will be returning again as I’m reinterviewing my dissertation respondents. But I’ll post about that some other time.

I’ve been traveling a lot recently (four locations in the last week), which has given me new opportunities to find interesting gender signs. A twist on the topic I hadn’t explored much before is whether taking care of children is assumed to be a female responsibility. I found a couple of examples recently that suggested inclusivity. At the San Francisco airport, both men’s and women’s restrooms show a diaper-changing image. At JFK, there was a separate area for families.

FYI, the gender signs pool on Flickr has over 100 photos now. Don’t be shy, join in on the fun.

I’m on my way to Cornell to give a talk in the Information Science Colloquium tomorrow. There are several great people at Cornell across numerous departments studying IT-related topics so this should be a fun trip.

It’s been almost 15 years since I’ve been to Ithaca. That first visit was for the Cornell Summer College Program for high school students. I still have very fond memories of it and one of my closest friends to this day is someone I met that summer in 1991. Unfortunately, the program no longer offers full scholarships for international students. Bummer.

As a side note, I would like to recommend the Cornell campus-to-campus shuttle from NYC. It’s not only comfortable, it has wifi. I’ve never blogged from a bus before, it’s a nice option to have.

It’s that time of year when one of the most popular pages on my Web site is the one I compiled a few years ago with a humanist feminist modern version Haggadah. For those not in the know, the Haggadah is the text that gets read during the Passover meal. The traditional version is not particularly inclusive in various ways. The version I compiled a few years back does not refer to any higher power, is inclusive of both Jews and non-Jews and refers to modern-day plagues such as hunger, war and racism making it a bit more timely.

Since the date of Passover changes from year to year, I have a hard time keeping track. I messed up this year by scheduling a talk for the first night of Passover. Bummer. It’s a really nice holiday that I enjoy quite a bit. I’ll have to be much more careful next year to make sure I’m available to take part in it.

Today’s Lifehacker special is a piece I wrote on “Public speaking do’s and don’t’s”. I list ways in which one can prepare for a talk and suggestions for how to make the most of a presentation. I welcome additions to the list, in the comments here or to the original post.

I won’t replicate the entire piece here, but I do want to mention one of the issues I discuss. One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to presentations has to do with most people’s inability to stick to the time they have been alloted for their talk.

Few people are such amazing speakers that the audience can’t get enough of listening to them so it is best to wrap up a speech on time. One of the most common pitfalls is to add “brief” introductory remarks to one’s prepared talk. There is usually nothing brief about such comments. Moreover, given that most conference presentations – the ones with which I tend to be most familiar – are supposed to take about 15 minutes, adding just three minutes of intro uses up 20 percent of the time allocation. However, most people are already short on time so this way they get even more behind.

I have considerably less experience in industry and other realms. Is this better elsewhere?

A related pet peeve concerns moderators who are unable to tell people that it is time to wrap up and give the next person a chance to speak.

I was at the Bulls vs. Knicks game last night. What a great ending: the perfect shot in the last second. Here is the recap of the last minute:

The Bulls were ahead 102-99 after Songaila hit two free throws with 51.1 seconds left in overtime. Crawford went 2-of-3 from the line after being fouled by Andres Nocioni to make it a one-point game. After Nocioni converted two foul shots with 8.3 seconds left, Crawford’s 3 tied it at 104.

There were 4.6 seconds left. Gordon saved the day by scoring in the last second (tenth of a second to be precise). It was awesome.

All this made me wonder: why do we bother – those of us who do:) – watching the first three quarters of basketball games? So much happens in the last few minutes almost regardless of what happened up until then. This is a layperson’s view and I certainly don’t have the stats to back this up, but it seems to me that this is quite often the case. Sure, we watch the game, because of the sheer enjoyment of the sport. Still, it seems that few sports competitions have as much riding on such a tiny last segment of the game as basketball.

So do we watch to figure out the optimal last-minute strategy? The Bulls did a horrible job with free throws last night so it was an especially good bet to foul them in the last few seconds. But would there have been a different strategy to retrieve the ball if they had not been doing so poorly on that front? I’m not saying that we have to be rational about our sports-viewing habits, but sitting through an entire basketball game seems particularly irrational.

UPDATE: I realize something out-of-the-ordinary happened at this game that I didn’t even really mention: the fact that one of the Knicks players ran into the stands. Frankly, from where I was sitting, this was easy to miss. There was some commotion at some point and then we saw a player leave the field, but it was not clear what had happened until I got home and checked the news.

JoAnne at Cosmic Variance discusses graduate student culinary experiences inspired by this article in Symmetry Magazine.*

Jonathan Bagger, a Physicist at Johns Hopkins reminisces about his grad student days: “I lived with four housemates in Princeton. We had an ongoing competition to see who could make the cheapest meal. The winner, at 17 cents a serving, was pigs’ feet. Not cooked the way pigs’ feet normally are, but simply broiled.”

At least some people can recall their grad student eating experiences (then again, are these experiences you necessarily want to recall?). For me, several years are a complete blank. What saved me was a fellowship in my fourth and fifth years that came with money to be spent at the student center cafeteria. It was more money than you could possibly want to spend in the dining hall so you ended up inviting friends. That was a nice perk. Unfortunately, it was only after my fellowship with that program had run out that we realized you could spend those points in the faculty dining room eating good meals. Not that I’m complaining. At least I had some regularity in my eating habits for those two years.

[*] If I didn’t happen to own symmetry.org they could have a much cooler URL.