links for 2008-03-19
March 19th, 2008-
(Telegraph) – sad
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create your own makeover
links for 2008-03-17
March 17th, 2008-
“a vector-based graphic design tool with support for rich text, ideal to quickly write short documents, manuals, posters, illustrations, schemas, plans, flow charts, and much more.” – I haven’t tried this yet, but sounds promising
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(NYTimes Magazine) interesting article about transgender students in American colleges (especially focusing on women’s colleges since those seem to be most receptive)
Girls and money
March 16th, 2008I bought some Girl Scout Cookies on a street corner yesterday. The box says: “The Girl Scout Cookie Program promotes financial skills such as goal setting, decision-making, customer-service and money management.†Okay, I buy it. I mean, literally, I have bought numerous boxes this season (and the last, and the one before that, etc.).*
But there was an interesting part of the experience this time that I thought was worthy of a note. Two girls were selling the cookies (with two women who were presumably their mothers behind them), but a little boy was next to them handling the money. The boy was clearly younger, probably the little brother of one of the girls. I think it’s great that he’s learning math and dealing with money. He should learn about things of that sort. But wait, wasn’t the purpose of this program to help girls learn such skills?
The incident reminded me of an anecdote in Babcock and Leschever’s book Women Don’t Ask
Once, when their daughter was three, Linda stopped in a drugstore for something and the child saw a stuffed animal she wanted. “Do you have enough money to buy that for me, Mommy?†she asked. “Do girls have money, or is it just boys that have money?†Linda was horrified. Their family habits had unwittingly communicated to their daughter that men control money, not women. She and her husband now make sure that their daughter sees Linda paying for things frequently; they also bought their daughter a piggy bank so that she can have money of her own.
Again, I’m all for little boys learning about money and arithmetic, but the purpose of this program is that girls learn related skills. Given all the situations in everyday life where men are the default for handling money, it would seem important to emphasize girls’ exposure to it in the context of a Girls Scouts program.
To be sure, the girls were quite active in the selling process (attracting folks to the table, offering samples) so it is not as though they were passive observers. But if anything, this suggests that they were not shy to interact with the customers and thus could have been given the responsibility of handling the money. I only recognized these dynamics after I left the table. If I’d been paying more attention, I would have just handed one of the girls the money. Next time.
[*] No worries, I don’t eat most of these cookies myself, I give them to the students in my lab. I also try to make some healthier snacks available as well, but these cookies tend to be pretty popular.
Links for 2008-03-15
March 15th, 2008-
(IHE) – why it’s counterproductive to require foreign students to sign that they do not want to immigrate to the US after their education
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– I ordered one of these T-shirts, couldn’t resist the geeky fun
Links for 2008-03-14
March 14th, 2008-
online image editor
Mini interview on Canadian radio
March 13th, 2008Usually, when I get invitations for talks or interviews with the press, the focus is my research. Last week, however, in an interesting twist, I got an email from the host of a Canadian radio show asking me to chat with her about my experiences with taking pictures of cheese labels.:) I was amused and was happy to talk. The interview is available here.
I’m glad Spark contacted me, because I didn’t know about the show, but am now happy to have it in my RSS feed reader. Spark taught me about speedcabling, something I’ll have to try in my lab one of these days.
As a mini-update for those not following me on Twitter (most of you, I presume), right now I’m on my way to the University of Minnesota to speak in the seminar series of their Institute for Advanced Study about my research. It’s a campus-wide talk with people expected in the audience from all sorts of departments, which should be fun. It’ll also be nice to catch up with some prominent sociology bloggers.
Links for 2008-03-13
March 13th, 2008-
(Chicago Tribune)
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interview with my Mom in a Hungarian online magazine about women pursuing scientific careers
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(NYTimes) – I’ve been saying issues addressed in this piece this for years
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Neat tool to create music video from images (uploaded or linked from sites like Flickr)
links for 2008-03-11
March 11th, 2008-
(NYTimes) – the extent to which online companies track user behavior
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(NYTimes)
links for 2008-03-10
March 10th, 2008-
(The Reality-Based Community) – some reflections about women in WWII
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(The Observer) – #33 Crooked Timber
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Web page previews in a whole new way, seriously
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neat way to browse photos on various sites (supports image searches, Flickr, etc.)
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dying professor gives inspirational last lecture to his students at CMU
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(UNESCO)
links for 2008-03-09
March 9th, 2008-
(CommonCraft video) – an explanation of the service that non-geeks should also understand
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tagging tweets – in case anyone was wondering why those # signs suddenly showed up in all sorts of messages
links for 2008-03-08
March 8th, 2008-
(BBC News)
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free file-recovery program (Windows)
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“Broadcast Ourself”
links for 2008-03-06
March 6th, 2008-
(The Huffington Post)
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(NYTimes)
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(NYTimes)
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(IHE)
links for 2008-03-05
March 5th, 2008-
🙂 perhaps this could be a fun social event for my research lab
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(NYTimes Blogs)
links for 2008-03-02
March 2nd, 2008-
yet another content aggregator (from your and your friends’ sharing sites)
Links for 2008-02-28
February 28th, 2008This is a very cute GMail how-to video
February 27th, 2008More here on what went into creating it. I love the care with details like the cursor and the stars.
Links for 2008-02-26
February 26th, 2008-
a site dedicated to tracking instances of words spelled upper case with a lower case L
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post a picture, ask a question, hopefully get an answer
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(Seattle Times)
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.. and nine other things (vinegar, newspaper, etc.)
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(NYTimes Freakonomics Blog) – interesting Q&A with an interesting person
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new event invite service (like evite)
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(The Nation) – man sentenced to prison in Morocco for creating fake Facebook profile
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(The Independent)
Explaining Google’s popularity
February 25th, 2008I should be prepping for class, but I want to add an alternative perspective to a question raised about Google’s popularity. The Freakonomics blog features an interesting Q&A with Hal Varian today, I recommend heading over to check out how Google’s chief economist answers some questions submitted by readers last week.
The Official Google Blog takes one of the questions and posts an expanded response to it. The question:
How can we explain the fairly entrenched position of Google, even though the differences in search algorithms are now only recognizable at the margins?
Varian addresses three possible explanations: supply-side economies of scale, lock-in, and network effects. He dismisses all of these (see the post for details) and then goes on to say that it’s about Google’s superior quality in search that makes it as popular as it is.
I don’t buy it, especially the dismissal of the lock-in factor. While I realize that it seems as though another search engine is just a simple click away (and sure, technically it is), I have observed too many Internet users in my research to know that in reality it is not that simple at all. First, there is the lock-in that comes from having Google as the default search engine in some browsers (e.g., Firefox). Of course, related issues apply to other search engines as well. Why does Yahoo! still enjoy a sizeable market share in search at least in the U.S. one might ask? It is probably related to the fact that more people seem to have a personalized version of Yahoo! as their start page in their browsers than any other customized starting page. Or maybe it is because Yahoo! also offers sufficiently good search results.
This then leads us to another issue: the assumption that users carefully consider or realize that there are differences in what search engines return in response to their queries. There is room for much more research here (some of it one of my students may pursue soon), but based on what we know so far, some people tend to have a tremendous amount of trust in results presented by Google. One could say this is due to Google’s superior quality, but research has found that even when results are manipulated and the less relevant ones are offered up on top, some users will click on them presumably because they believe them to be the most relevant. (I’d really like to see that study replicated on users of other search engines to see how this compares across services. Also, additional tweaks to that study design could help us learn more about these issues.)
We still have a lot to learn about the extent to which users actually consider the quality of search engines when using them. Presumably as long as they find (or think they have found!) what they are looking for they will be satisfied. However, again, research (e.g., here, with more in the works) suggests that some users are very bad about assessing the quality of the material that shows up on pages linked from search engine results, which then puts into question their ability to evaluate search engine results quality.
I am not suggesting that Google is not a good search engine nor am I even suggesting that it is not necessarily the best search engine (although how one defines quality in this domain is tricky). I would love to see some really careful studies on this actually. What I am suggesting is that equating market share in searches should not be confused with quality of search results. I know that there are some very talented folks at Google working on search quality some of whom I know and with whom I have had very interesting and helpful conversations. I’m grateful for the work that they do. Nontheless, that’s a different issues. My point here is that I would not dismiss lock-in factors and others in explaining the service’s popularity based on what my research has taught me about how people use search engines.
I have to add one more note here as it is related and it is something I have been trying to insert into discussions of this sort for years. It may be helpful to remember that most search engine market share data look at proportion of searches not proportion of searchers. Since power users are more likely to be Google users (various data sets I work with supply evidence for this), I suspect that if we were to look at market share based on user figures Google’s share would be smaller than it seems based on figures about proportion of searches. I’ve been commenting on this for years, but the statistics that continue to be discussed concern searches not searchers. Of course, both figures may be relevant, but which one is more relevant depends on the particular questions asked. When discussing quality, it seems that proportion of users would be just as important to consider (if not more) than proportion of searches since presumably all users would want to use the highest quality search engine. Point being, if Google is so superior and that explains its popularity then why doesn’t it have a much larger market share especially regarding proportion of users?
UPDATE: Before trying to explain Google’s popularity today with why people turned to it in the earlier part of this decade, I think it’s worth noting that the Web of 2008 is very different from the Web of 2001/02 when people started migrating over to Google in masses. Explaining that trend doesn’t necessarily say much about why people may stick with it today and what, if anything, would inspired them to try a new service now.
UPDATE 2: Perhaps worth noting here is that I think of “lock-in” not in the completely restrictive sense of the term. Of course, I know that there is no technical lock-out from other options, my point was that given how people use the Internet for information seeking, something similar is going on nonetheless
Links for 2008-02-25
February 25th, 2008-
(WaPo)
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(Slate)
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.. because it is their academic belief that women cannot be put in a position of authority over boys/men.
FriendFeed anyone?
February 23rd, 2008FriendFeed helps keep track of friends’ contributions to a myriad of sites (e.g., additions to their blogs, Flickr and del.icio.us accounts, Twitter, etc.). I’m wondering about additional friends who may use it since currently I only have two on the service.
Several things are far from intuitive, but for now I’ve figured out everything I was looking for even if not as easily as one would hope. (Look for the feed of the feed aggregation under “Settings” and then the “secret key” tab. If you want to turn off notification about the feeds of your friends’ friends then click on “Hide entries like this”, which will give you an option to specify removing material from those people.)