Recent Travel

I've been to Germany for ICWSM 2016, then Paris, then Hong Kong, then Japan for ICA 2016. You can see some of my travel photos in Instagram. 4 weeks on the road.

ICA 2016, Fukuoka, Japan

Had a great and busy time at ICA 2016: one paper, one panel presentation, moderated a session, and won an award! (Google is being impossible with photos and tables as usual. So much for interfaces.)

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on the new Computational Methods panel, for the CM interest group. I tried to give the crowd an exhortation to engaging with such methods, because we as social scientists have a lot to offer computational analyses. You can see the slides in SlideShare, but I don't spell it all out in the slides when I present. My presentation got a nice tweet too!

Presenting on the Computational Methods panel.

As part of the Games Division pre-conference in Tokyo at Nihon University (I love the neighborhood there, the Ekoda stop on the Seibu-Ikebukuro line), we all went to Akihabara, and of course we saw and did cool things, like engage in deep discourse with Mario, the working-class Italian-Japanese plumber.

"You don't think quantitative and qualitative methods
are complementary? Explain!"

I also was lucky enough to run into Sanrio's Gudetama in Hong Kong and then again in Japan.

Gudetama!

I also won the very first "Best Reviewer Award" for the ICA Games Division, which is a great honor and we need more motivations like this, as reviews are an important part of the quality of the discipline. Awards for organizing, best papers, and best reviewer!

Yelverton Seven

We held the seventh installment of the Yelverton Sessions (Yelverton Seven) in conjunction with CSCW 2016. Named after the location of the third meeting, held in Yelverton, England, the Yelverton Sessions involve both intensive work sessions combined with cultural and natural places of interest not only as a break but as inspiration. And, a lot of coffee and good food. They usually, but not always, are in conjunction with a conference.

We voted to name it after the third session as by then we realized that yes, this was a sustained effort we wanted to continue. And, who doesn't like the word Yelverton?

1. Yelverton One, Bangor Maine and Fredericton Canada (ICA 2011).
2. Yelverton Two, Flagstaff Arizona and The Grand Canyon (ICA 2012).
3. Yelverton Three, Devon England (ICA 2013). 
4. Yelverton Four, Bainbridge Washington (ICA 2014).
5. Yelverton Five, Hong Kong (WUN Understanding Global Digital Cultures 2015).
6. Yelverton Six, Austin Texas (2016).
7. Yelverton Seven, Santa Cruz California (CSCW 2016). 

We don't have Y8 scheduled yet, but it will happen at some point!

HICSS 2016

Just spent a great week in Hawaii at HICSS 2016. Some great people and great papers! Also a few not so great papers and some not great presentations, which are not problems I recall from previous HICSS.

And, I am now co-chairing the new Games and Gaming mini-track in the Digital and Social Media track, so, there's some work to do there. Should be awesome!

Update: The G&G mini-track has been approved and the CFP is out!

Linux and Continental

Turns out, Continental uses Linux on its on-board entertainment touchscreens (the touch interface is mostly terrible, though). Mine crashed when I tried to quit the sad suduko implementation, so I grabbed some screenshots of it booting up. There was a lot of glare, though, so you can clearly see me and my iPhone. Long boot sequence. The images are probably out of order, and I didn't get the beginning since I had my phone off. Click for larger images where you can maybe read the text.

Thai Food Blog

I am very tempted to title this "Food Porn" but I think some people don't know the phrase (no it does not typically mean anything to do with porn, it's just foodies have a similar reaction to it). But, the photos are beautiful. Makes me think I need to re-post all the food from my defunct UM blog.

Thai Food Blog

Disruptive Technology and Global Networks

Connect three parts of a NYTimes article Arab women as flight attendants (Some Arab Women Find Freedom in the Skies).

Most coveted are long-haul routes to places like Toronto and Sydney, Australia...

They watch bootlegged DVDs — “Desperate Housewives,” “Sex and the City” — bought on layovers in Bangladesh and Indonesia.

As the networks of Arab expatriates in the gulf countries become stronger and as cellphones and expanding Internet access make overseas communication more affordable...

Classic globalization technologies: global physical connectivity (long-haul routes), global cultural connectivity (the bootleg DVD network), and global communication connectivity (the Internet and cheaper cell phones). By allowing new social roles, they are disrupting old ones.

Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for some young Arab women...

This disrupts older, traditional family patterns.

For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten her marriage prospects.

These technologies will be seen as a threat by those who strongly value traditional norms. I feel compelled to add how women in Saudi Arabia aren't even allowed to drive, which is horribly repressive (and takes away half of the market for auto sales), but it doesn't follow from the technology aspects here. It does fully relate, however, to women's allowed roles in the Middle East. Do recall that there are dozens of different cultural traditions there (cultural, religious, historical, geographical...), don't think of it as one cultural hegemonic bloc.

Color and Emotional Resonance

Although the NYT has a piece on the importance and power of touch, I want instead to direct you to this UM personal website, a collection of beautiful photos of Michigan and a ton of other places (like Ann Arbor!). The photographer points out how cameras don't really capture exactly what we see with the human eye, so indeed you do want to review and modify your digital photos but should not consider it modifying the record of reality since that isn't what you captured anyway.

The point being, besides I hope you have a good color monitor, that color is an immensely powerful factor for the human visual system.

Why Skype on the iPhone

I do not recall if I have explained this adequately, but, even if I have, I will do it again. Why Apple and AT&T should allow a Skype app on the iPhone.

I do not use AT&T to call internationally on my iPhone. I never will. The cost is horrific. AT&T could change that, but they don't. Thus, I will never, ever, call internationally on my iPhone. Except for when ICA was in Montreal, but, I didn't when I was in France. And I don't call Israel or the UK on it, I use Skype. So, offering international calling on the iPhone via AT&T is a waste of time and probably does not generate much revenue. Sure, some people call internationally, but, iPhone users are connected and have better ways to do this.

Allowing a Skype app would thus not decrease revenues much. However, such an app would be an amazing value-add, and would probably boost sales and thus boost overall use, which would increase revenue.

Imagine if you could offer a cell phone with free international calls, and, in fact, free calls period. Would it sell? Yes, it would. Granted, free only if the recipient of your call has Skype. Not too hard to do (although the Skype interface on Windows is horribly busy and even I had a hard time parsing all the visual cruft it throws at you).

The iPhone is a flat-rate, I pay whether I use it or not. AT&T and Apple get paid, and I get the ability to call internationally (since I don't do that with it now). Win-win.

Right now, with no Skype, and with Skype phones and Android out there in the wild? Lose-lose for Apple and AT&T. And me too.

Geography

I am going to a wedding in.... somewhere. Somewhere I have never heard of, PA. But the geography is rather striking in the current Google maps satellite view, with NE/SW ridges running to the south and bumpy hills to the north. Ha! It's my old friends,  the Appalachians!

Home Again

I will miss having my posts have a correct timestamp. PAX was awesome. I tend to write short posts, Kotaku has a bunch of long posts. Hmm didn't see Crecente, but there was a lot to see (I could have walked right past him). Aha! He filmed this about five feet to my left (I got out of there, since I was holding my Fallout 3 poster with one hand, so only had my right hand to grab flying boxed figures and fend off accidental elbows). If he had only swept the camera to the right a little more! Now I have to go and clean up all my mobile posts (add tags and expand them and links and such).

Did I do what I set out to? Pretty much. Here was my list:

• Wil Wheaton: Awesome panel! 
  
• Spore: Yes, it is cool.
  
• The Keynote: Eh.
  
• Jonathan Coulton: Too late, given time zones.
  

3/4 is good. And I have like 60 Rockstar stickers, so I am happy about that. I saw more Halo 3 than I ever imagined, especially Griffball at the Rooster Teeth booth. The Fallout 3 marketing is awesome. 

5 Senses

The Internet, and games, don't do smell. Smell is an amazingly powerful sense for humans in terms of visceral response. The market (Pike Place) smells really good, too (besides the colors).

Yes They Do

Like chocolate and peanut butter almost. Seattle. Coffee. Go figure.

Morning

Cheese. Almost.

Ha!

Some of the signs around town were really funny in-jokes. "There are doors to the convention hall in front of you." Followed by: "> enter doors"

$4 Snapple

Kennedy airport is indeed terrible. Too small, too crowded, too ugly. The board at the gate had contradictory information. Conflicting PA systems. We stood for ten minutes, not moving, in the jetway, a small space that gets warm when full of people. No explanation. And $4 Snapple. Bad design! I hate bad design. Fix it.

The Seattle airport is clean, functional, and not crowded. It is great.

PAX!

It's official. I'm headed out to cover (as a freelancer) and enjoy PAX. Liveblogging from the iPhone will be positively normal. And, I've never been to Seattle. I'll be waking up around 5am local time, so maybe I can catch the fish market (humor of "catch" fully intended -- on TV they always throw giant salmon there). Items I hope to catch from the schedule:

• Wil Wheaton
  
• Spore
  
• The Keynote
  
• Jonathan Coulton

Of course the one thing I didn't do was pre-register so I will have to hang out in line to get in. And, given that I am on East Coast time, I don't know if I'll make it until 3am (aka 6am) for the late-night. (I'm kidding, I will not be bringing you coverage of that, I will be sleeping.)

Airport! Danger!

For the last three summers, IIRC, this sign has been up at ACK, the Nantucket airport. Maybe it is not up in the off-season. ACK is a very small airport, in the middle of nowhere on the island, and, if you didn't notice, it's on a small island. Let me be clear: small. Not a lot of people. Yes it gets relatively busy, I am aware of that: relatively. There are really never many people there compared to large regional airports that do not serve seasonal destinations. In other words, it is not a sensible terrorist target (the it's on an island part helps, but don't cite the Bali bombings because I've been to Bali and it is much larger, and very different in several other relevant ways).

High risk? Really? No. And what is "red", is that "we know one is about to happen"? (Let us change the posted placards first!)

Ok, DHS says it is "orange or high" for all airports. (Well which is it, orange or high? Please choose one.) Elevated, High, Severe. This sound like the US Postal Service's naming for mail, "Priority" and "First Class". Honestly if you're going to use a labeling scheme, use labels that are easily differentiated from one another.

Hello Kitty

Hello Kitty (Japanese), in Chinatown, in Montreal.