Monday, January 31, 2011

Paper Reading #4: Cross Currents: Water Scarcity and Sustainable CHI (20)

Title: Cross Currents: Water Scarcity and Sustainable CHI
Comments: Vince Kocks, Aaron Kirkes.
Reference Information:
Cross Currents: Water Scarcity and Sustainable
Tad Hirsch, Ken Anderson
CHI 2010 April 10-15, 2010 Atlanta, Georgia, USA CHI

Summary: In Tad Hirsch's article Cross Currents: Water Scarcity and Sustainable CHI, he spends the majority of the paper discussing the current water situation in New Mexico. The region offers up a very unique climate, with private citizens, agricultural, and industrial groups all attempting to get their fair share of access to the local water supplies.

There are several different forces at work when it comes to water conservation. The traditional school of thought says that people will be environmentally friendly if you give them a financial incentive, such as the cap and trade system. However, for individuals, legitimate enthusiasm for protecting the environment can be much more effective than a solely financially based incentive.

Toward the end of the article, Hirsch touches briefly on various technologies that could be used to create an incentive for people to conserve water. One approach is a simple cost-savings meter, which shows the user how much money they've saved by conserving water. However, in his research, Hirsch found that public shame or guilt can be a strong motivator when it comes to protecting the involvement, so a meter which shows you how you're doing compared to your neighbors was proven to be an effective incentive.

Discussion: Much like the Rwanda article, I found that this one did not talk about the actual computer aspect of the issue. He went on at length about the various social issues at play, such as the current system where you're budgeted water based on how much you currently use, so no one wants to use less in case they need more in the future. However, beyond the household meters, he did not mention any particular technological solutions.

I do feel that he presented the issue fairly and completely however. Water conservation is a complex issue, and it's not going to be solved overnight. One interesting aspect of the article was the fact that none of the various parties could actually agree on what the term "sustainable" means, and what time period it should entail.

Book Reading #7: Opening Skinner's Box

Title: Opening Skinner's Box
Reference Information: Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. 2008 W.W. Norton & Company

Summary Information: In the opening chapter of Opening Skinner's Box, Slater discusses the titular experiment: Skinner's Box. Skinner was the behavioral psychologist who invented the theory of Operant Conditioning. Slater goes into great detail about his theories, some of his more well known experiments, and some of the controversy surrounding the scientist.

Discussion: This book has a very interesting style of writing to it. At certain points, Slater is very professional, such as when she's talking about Skinner's experiments revolving around behavioral reinforcement. However, at several points in the book, Slater starts using a conversational tone, distracting the reader away from the topic at hand.

Book Reading #5: Design of Everyday Things

Title: The Design Of Everyday Things
Reference Information: Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. 2002 Basic Books

Summary: In the second chapter of The Design of Everyday Things, Normand continues building upon the ideas laid down in the first chapter. His opening theme is about falsely blaming yourself when technology goes wrong. Quite often when one encounters difficulty using a particular gadget, it's the designers fault, not your own. However, if a person encounters a series of poorly designed gadgets, they can begin to exhibit signs of learned or taught helplessness. From this topic, Normand moves into discussing the Steven Stages of Action, and the psychology of people's actions. Using these seven stages, he relates them into the area of design, and tells the reader what sort of questions to ask one's self while designing.


Discussion: I found this section section of The Design of Everyday Things just as interesting as the first section. This part was more psychology focused, but the section on self-blame and learned helplessness was very interesting and insightful. I felt that it's 7 questions to ask yourself while designing were a bit overly-complex, and almost require an explanation as to what the question's asking just so you can figure out how to answer it.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Book Reading #4: HCI Remixed

Title: HCI Remixed
Reference Information: Edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald, Reflections on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community.

Chapter 24:
Summary: In Chris Schmandt's paper A Simulated Listening Typewriter: John Gould Plays Wizard of Oz, Schmandt describes the early days of speech recognition. The researchers at the time were presented with a difficult problem: They needed to perform user test to determine where to focus their speech recognition research, but since computers capable of the type of research they needed to perform did not exist, they had to come up with a unique solution. Using human typists hidden in the next room, they were able to emulate the sort of text to speech tests that they needed in order to continue on with their research.

Discussion: This article was a lot of fun to read. The various tests they came up with were fairly innovative, and interesting to read about. The level of detail they went to in order to make the simulations realistic was amazing.

Chapter 25:
Summary: In the paper Seeing the Hole in Space, Steve Harrison discusses early attempts at office telepresence. The project, interestingly enough, was inspired by an art project in which two different locations three times zones away were linked together with a live video feed, creating a metaphorical "Hole In Space". The office telepresence project was initially hard to get off the ground, because the computer scientists are Xerox PARC traditionally did very little A/V research.

Discussion: The "Hole In Space" exhibit sounds like it would have been a fun one to come across by accident. The article seemed to have trouble focusing on one thing for long. It would have been nice to hear more results about the office telepresence project.

Chapter 26:
Summary: Scott Jenson discusses Edward Tufte's 1 + 1 = 3 concept in a paper of the same name. 1+1=3 describes a visual effect in which two parallel lines actually create a third visual artifact in the blank space between them. He discusses how this principal can also apply to design, and gives the example of elevator buttons.

Discussion: I've always be baffled at how elevator designers can never seem to agree on a single set of pictograms. This article helped shed light on how complex the issue can be.

Chapter 27:
Summary: In her article Typographic Space: A Fusion of Design and Technology, Jodi Forlizzi gives a brief overview of the technology behind typography. She then moves onto describing advances in the display of text, using motion to convey things traditionally limited to audio, such as pitch, tempo, and loudness.

Discussion: Given the length of her article, I'm surprised how long Forlizzi spent describing the history of typography on computers. However, the motion text she described was incredibly interesting, and I'd love to read more about it.

Chapter 28:
Summary: In Steve Whittaker's paper Making Sense of Sense Making, he takes a look at A. Kidd's article, "The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker". Kidd makes two claims in his paper: Computers are used for, and good at storing information, and that computers are poor at making sense of information we encounter.

Discussion: Whittaker draws some interesting conclusions from Kidd's ideas. I'm not sure if I agree with his "AI Won't Save Us" outlook. Given a sufficiently advance artificial intelligence, there's no reason it couldn't at least make a best guess at what information is useful to us, similar to Google Mail's new "Priority Inbox" feature.

Chapter 34:
Summary: In Revisiting an Ethnocritical Approach to HCI: Verbal Privilege and Translation, Michael J. Muller draws a parallel between Ethnohistorians and HCI workers. Both groups need to facilitate communication between powerless groups (Native Americans and computer users), and the groups which control all the power (politicians and designers).

Discussion: Muller makes a very interesting comparison on his paper. I'm not sure it's the best idea to immediately assume that users are less informed than the designers in the field of HCI however. Users know when something "feels" wrong, and it's up to the designer to make interfaces feel intuitive.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Paper Reading #3: Multi-lifespan Information System Design in Post-Conflict Societies: An Evolving Project in Rwanda (19)

Title: Multi-lifespan Information System Design in Post-Conflict Societies: An Evolving Project in Rwanda
Comments: Aaron Kirkes, Chris Kam.
Reference Information:
Multi-lifespan Information System Design in Post-Conflict Societies: An Evolving Project in Rwanda
Batya Friedman, Lisa P. Nathan, Milli Lake, Nell Carden Grey, Trond T. Nilsen, Robert F. Utter, Elizabeth J. Utter, Mark Ring, Zoe Kahn.
CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Summary: In 1994, 800,000 Rwandans, belonging to an ethnic minority group known as the "Tutsi" were murdered by their neighboring Rwandans belonging to the majority ethnic group, the "Hutus". This troubled period in the country's history has naturally caused a great deal of cultural trauma. Now that the region is politically stable, all of Rwanda has to live side by side, knowing that their friends and family are potential murderers, and deal with the war criminals.

At the end of the conflict, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was created to deal with the war criminals. 15 years later, the ICTR is finally coming to a close, bringing an end to this bloody chapter in Rwanda's past. Before the tribunal is brought to a close however, a team of scientists went into the tribunal and created a series of 49 videos. These videos record the first hand experiences of judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, investigators, interpreters, and staff.  The contents of these videos represent a highly important piece of Rwanda's history. It is the authors' belief that these testimonials should not be allowed to fade from Rwanda's cultural memory. In order for a tragedy like this to be avoided in the future, Rwandans need to actively acknowledge their past.

The CHI angle of this project comes from the authors of this paper's plans to distribute these videos. The Rwandan infrastructure is highly mixed. Personal internet is almost unheard of, but internet cafes are fairly common in cities. In rural areas, internet is much harder to come by, but cell phones are fairly common. Taking these different means of access into consideration, the researchers came up with the following distribution methods: Video DVDs, Web-based Videos, Audio Clips Delivered Through SMS Requests, Printed Quote Cards. Recognizing this issue could not be solved with a "one size fits all" solution, the researchers worked with various different Rwandan organizations to figure out which distribution method fit each group's unique needs. Their findings can be found in the included graphic.

Discussion: This was a very interesting article, but it's relation to CHI seemed a bit strained. I've come to understand CHI to be something very design-oriented. This group didn't do anything particularly innovative with it's distribution of the material, only its decisions on how to distribute.

However, just because I think that this project is not nessisarily remarkable in the field of CHI does not mean that I think it is unimportant overall. What these researcher's did for the people of Rwanda should be commended. As stated by one of Rwanda's citizens, "This [project] is very different. Usually researchers come, ask questions, do their work, leave, and the first we see of it is a book sitting on someone else’s bookshelf!".

Monday, January 24, 2011

Paper Reading #2: Edits & Credits: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration (18)

Title: Edits & Credits: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration
Comments: Ryan Kerbow, Aaron Kirkes.
Authors: Kurt Luther, Nicholas Diakopoulos, and Amy Bruckman
Venue: CHI 2010; Atlanta, Georgia; April 10-15

Summary: The authors of this article begin by explaining how attribution and "credit" are an extremely efficient motivator for online collaborative, often philanthropic efforts. They explain how this dynamic is at play in open source projects, collaborative wikis, and more creative works.

For the rest of their article, they choose to focus on Newgrounds.com, a popular online Flash portal. Early on in Newground's history, animiators have organically gotten together and created a system of collaboration known a "Collab". Collabs have two main formats: A heavily-structure call for pieces of a certain quality, or a "first come, first served" model, where quality is generally forsaken in the name of having a large amount of collaborators.

Collabs are gathered by a leader, who's job it is to integrate the collected pieces into one cohesive piece of animation. This can actually be one of the most difficult jobs, since a poorly arranged collaboration can have clashing animation styles juxtaposed against each other, or a collaboration where the style is too uniform can come off as bland, and not worthy of a collaboration in the first place.

Discussion: On the whole, this was a fairly good article. When I first read that it was about Newgrounds, I was worried that it was someone trying to turn their internet pass time into a research paper. However, it did a very good job of analyzing the Collab culture which has sprung up around Newgrounds.com. It seemed like a missed opportunity to bring up open source projects and wikis without also analyzing those collaboration and credit cultures. It seemed like there would have been some interesting parallels you could draw between Flash artists and open source programmers.

Book Reading #3: HCI Remixed

Book Reading #3
Title: HCI Remixed
Reference Information: Edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald, Reflections on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community.

Chapter 1:
Summary: In William Buxton's article My Vision Isn't My Vision: Making a Career Out of Getting Back to Where I Started, he discusses one of the first computer music systems. It was highly advanced for its time, and he spent a good portion of the article discussion its various inputs the system had. At the end of the article, Buxton reveals the true purpose of the music system to the reader. It was actually an advanced platform designed to study HCI, and it just had the fortunate side effect of also being a highly advanced music creation platform.

Discussion: The twist at the end completely caught me by surprise. It seems strange at first to imagine that they'd create such an advanced computer system just to study HCI, but their reasoning made sense, and they obviously collected a great deal of data from it.

Chapter 4:
Summary: In Joseph Konstan's article Drawing on SketchPad: Reflections on Computer Science and HCI, Konstan constructs and argument showing how closely intertwined HCI and Computer Science are, and why they should remain that way. He shows through the example of the SketchPad software how advances in human input devices such a light pen can inspire new algorithms, and how existing computer science ideas such as constraints can be repurposed for dealing with user drawn shapes and diagrams.

Discussion: As a fan of Tablet PCs and pen input, it was interesting to see where the field got it's start. I'm also a firm believer that HCI and Computer Science should remain so closely tied together.

Chapter 5:
Summary: Wendy Ju discusses the invention of the mouse, along with HCI's "demo" culture in her article The Mouse, the Demo, and the Big Idea. While discussing the origin of the computer mouse, relates it so the so called "demo" culture, and how with a simple demonstration, a good presenter can turn normal hype into proof of a concept or product's worth.

Discussion: Anyone who saw the original iPhone unveiling knows the power of a good demo. They're often people's first impression of a product, and can make or break whether or not it's successful.

Chapter 18:
Summary: In Saul Greenberg's article Observing Collaboration: Group-Centered Design, he discusses the origin of Groupware, and online collaboration principals. He walks us through step by step, and illustrates clearly why having a shared "whiteboard" space online is simply not enough for good collaboration. Users need to be able to "point" and gesture, along with writing. Also, the real-time nature of the collaboration is vital to create a seamless experience. Messages delayed until only after the user has finished typing, or finished drawing, break up the flow and leave the users unsatisfied.

Discussion: I found this paper very interesting. It was highly detailed, but it lead the reader through all the steps required to reach it's conclusions. The later examples of collaboration software which included virtual arms and hands of it's users was very innovative, and I'm surprised we don't see more things like it today.

Chapter 20:
Summary: In Geraldine Fitzpatrick's article Taking Articulation Work Seriously, she constructs an argument about so called "Articulation Work" in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). She defines articulation work has the middle piece in collaboration software, required to insure that everyone comes together efficiently. Articulation work can have many forms, such as scheduling activities, distributing resources, and so on.

Discussion: This article seemed to focus on buzzwords a bit too heavily. It not only left me wondering why I should take articulation work seriously, but what articulation work was at all. It could have done a better job of clearly outlining it's main theme and purpose.

Chapter 23:
Summary: Brian Smith clearly lays out the differences between "Being There" and "Beyond Being There" in his article Video, Toys, and Beyond Being There. Being there enables users to have a "good enough" experience when communicating. His example was that of telecommunication between a grandmother and granddaughter. He likens "Being There" to a crutch, something you use when you need it, but you prefer to go without.

"Beyond Being There" involves face to face situations which are aided, not hampered by technology. As a student, his example of students instant messaging during a lecture hit home, and his example of a grandmother and granddaughter bonding over a toy presented a clear example of the variety of the types of "Beyond Being There" technologies. He likened "Beyond Being There" to a shoe, something you don't need, but you prefer to go with it whenever possible.

Discussion: Having spent more months than I'd like to count on crutches on more than one occasion, Brian's crutch-shoe metaphor certainly made an impact on me. This was my favorite article so far in HCI Remixed, and I definitely took a lot from it. I've always had an interest in project-management software such as Basecamp, so it's nice to see that this sort of software actually fits into a field of study somewhere.

Ethnography Ideas

Title: Ethnography Ideas

Comments: Cindy Skach, Jeremy Nelissen.

Here are a few ideas I've got for the upcoming Ethnography project in CSCE 436. 

  1. Study and observe people playing tabletop games such as Dungeons and Dragons. I personally do not do any tabletop gaming, but I know enough people where I'd have easy access to a game.
  2. Observe the habits of people in coffee shops. Do they come alone or go with a friend, do they do school work or simply relax? Etc.
  3. Observe the food choices made by students on campus.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Reading #2: On Computers

Discussion: Jimmy Ho Alex Cardenas
Reference Information: Aristotle, On Plants. Editor: Jonathan Barnes. Most likely actual author: Nicolaus of Damascus.


Summary: Aristotle's "On Plants", discusses the implications of if plants have souls or not. His theorizes on this topic by comparing plants to humans and animals. Their "soul" is defined by whether or not it shows any characteristics we relate with living creatures. For example, the fact that plants seek out nutrients by growing out expansive root systems shows that they have similar motivations as humans and animals. The plant's reproductive desires are also a sign of a soul. However, the fact that plants do not sleep is a mark against them having souls.

Dicussion: I found Aristotle's observational very interesting. The soul is inherently a un-provable belief, so using primitive observational science techniques is a very unique approach. I'm not convinced if plants do have souls or not, but if they did have souls, the plant's natural survival instincts would most likely be a good indicator.

If one were to try extrapolate this form of analysis to computers, it would be much more difficult to determine if they have souls. My Macbook doesn't have any natural preservation instincts, so one could easily dismiss computers as not having souls. However, one could easily build, say, a solar powered robot, which would disobey and order to walk into the shade if it knew that leaving sunlight would shut it down. Would this robot have a soul? Much like plants, it is hard to determine where one draws the line between soul and souless.

Reading #1: The Chinese Room

Discussion: Adam Friedli Alex Cardenas
Reference Information:
Searle, John. Minds, Brains, and Programs.
Wikipedia


Summary: The Chinese Room is a thought experiment revolving around whether or not so called "strong" artificial intelligence is actually capable of understanding things, or if it simply *appears* to be understanding things. The thought experiment is relatively simple: If you write a program to "talk" to someone in Chinese, but rather than running it on a computer, you follow through the instructions yourself. The "program" you're running passes the Turing test, so the Chinese person you're talking to believes you're fluent in the language. However, in reality, you have no idea what's going on. It's this basic premise that Searle uses to argue that "strong" AI can never truly understand things, it can simply give the appearance that it knows what is going on.

Searle spends the majority of his article refuting arguments to his claims. The reply he spends the majority of the time refuting is the "System" argument. It states that while the person running the "program" would be clueless to what the conversation was about, the system as a whole could have an understanding of what was going on. Searle refutes this, saying that all the processes of the system could be internalized, making the person and the system the same entity.

The rest of the arguments are some form of, "What if the computer mimicked the human mind?" Searle also refutes these claims, saying that once you've reached the point that you've completely and fully mimicked the human brain, you're no longer talking about an artificial computer system, you're just discussing another form of the mind.

Discussion: I'm not sure if I completely agree with Searle's claim. While it has a nice simplicity to it that makes sense at first, it seems a bit short sighted, considering how fast the pace of innovation in technology is. It's not exactly fair to say that thermostats don't have beliefs, therefore they can't be a "strong" AI.

I think that the "system" rebuttal to his argument is the one that makes the most sense. It points out the flaws in his theory without having to rely on the assumption that some day we'll be able to recreate the human mind in software.

Paper Reading #1: Only One Fitts’ Law Formula – Please! (17)

Comments: Chris Kam Wesley Konderla
Reference Information: Only One Fitts’ Law Formula – Please!, Drewes, Heiko. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Summary: Fitts' law describes the mean time it takes to move a pointing device into a specific region. In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, it is one of the view formulas which is based in hard science. However, since it's inception, the exact formula for Fitts' law has been heavily debated, even fit Fitts himself.

The problem with having multiple formulas is that a paper's author can pick whichever formula makes his or her hypothesis work. Drewes also points out that, "At the moment, referring to Fitts’ law pro- vokes a long discussion and shifts the focus away from the original research question."

For such a pivotal formula in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, no consensus has yet been made on which formula represents Fitts' law the best. Unlike other fields, the controversy over Fitts' law doesn't stem from people using different assumptions to define the same concept. Instead, all of the current formulas work from the same premise but represent it differently. Some use different sets of variables, while others simply add onto Fitts' original law, adding in variables which they consider important enough to be included. Over the course of the paper, Drewes presents his argument for why there should be one standardized formula representing Fitts' law.

Discussion: Whenever I've heard of Fitts' law in the past, I always heard people mention it in the context of Window's Start Menu, or OS X's menubar, citing "The easiest thing to hit with your mouse cursor is a corner." I never realized that Fitts' law described hitting any arbitrary point with a pointing device.

Some of the math toward the end of this article was a little hard to follow, since everything's been abstracted away. However, the diagrams included, such as the one above, aided greatly in my understanding of the topic.

Drewes article is well laid out, and doesn't assume any previous knowledge on the topic. Over the course of ten pages, Drewes is able to establish what Fitts' law is, why it's important, the various ways it's represented, and finally, why you should believe is stance that there needs to be one agreed upon formula  to represent Fitts' law.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Book Reading #2: Coming of Age in Samoa

Book Reading #2 
Title: Coming of Age in Samoa
Reference Information: Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa.



Summary: In the introductory chapter if Coming Of Age in Samoa, the author gives the traditional viewpoint of several different groups views on the period of Adolescence. The Experimentalist traditionally have had little to no data to work off of, which leaves theorists to make assumptions with are based upon random assumptions, instead of known trends of generalities. Finally, the author builds up a case for why the Anthropological viewpoint is the proper one to study human cultures. Since we cannot create any sort of "control group" with humans, we must rely on observational sciences.


Discussion: The introduction of Coming of Age in Samoa was a very interesting read. It's language and sentence structure shows off the age of the work, as well as it referring to several now well established anthropological fields as young or emerging. Despite all this however, the book sets out a very good argument for why it's approach was the proper one to take while attempting to study adolescence.

Book Reading #1: The Design of Everyday Things Microblog

Book Reading #1:
Title: The Design Of Everyday Things
Reference Information: Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things.


Summary: In the opening chapter of The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman establishes just how important the design of objects plays in our lives. He spends the majority of this chapter talking about the Principals of Design for Understandability and Usability (Provide a concept model, and make things visible), along with the paradox of technology. To sum up his argument in a nutshell: Advanced technology breeds complexity, so it's not your fault when you cannot figure out how to use something, it's the designer's fault.


Discussion: Norman's opening immediately capture's the reader's attention. His ability to simplify complex theories into simple examples such as a door, or a slide reel advance button, greatly help to convey his points. If the first chapter in this book had any faults, it would be that it focuses too much on his dislike for complex phone systems.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Entry #0: Introduction Post

Hi there. If you're reading this, you're most likely in Dr. Hammond's Spring Computer Human Interaction (CHI) class. Like many of you, I'm in the Fighting Texas Aggie Class of 2011. If you need to reach me, you can email me at sjones411 (a t) tamu ( dot) edu. I signed up to take this course because-

Woah woah woah, wait a second. This list of questions includes "What is your favorite style of mustache and why?"!? Oh dear, I'm not going to be able to answer all these in a casual-style blog post. I better just list them out.



  1. Photo of yourself.

  2. E-mail address.
    • sjones411 (a t) tamu ( dot) edu
  3. Class standing (e.g., 3rd year Junior, 7th year Senior)
    • Fourth year senior. Fighting Texas Aggie Class of 2011.
  4. Why are you taking this class?
    • For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in the design and interaction aspect of computers. I've loved experimenting with different styles of input, ranging from trackballs to touch screens and digital pens. I've also always been interested in user interface design, and hope to learn some skills that allow me to make easier to use applications.
  5. What experience do you bring to this class?
    • I've got the standard Texas A&M background in Computer Science. Some C++ here, a bit of Java there, and even a little Haskell. As far as personal experience, I try to stay platform agnostic. I'm typing this up on a Mac currently, but I've got a machine running Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) within arms reach, and there's an aging Windows 7 machine humming quietly in the corner. As far as personal coding projects, I've tried to get my feet wet with a few different programming languages. Most recently I spent the Winter break studying Objective-C / Cocoa, and improving my web design background. On a personal level, I've always enjoyed doing graphic design projects in my spare time. I recently had a T-Shirt design chosen for use by Cepheid Variable, A&M's Sci-Fi & Fantasy organization.
  6. What do you expect to be doing in 10 years?
    • I expect to be preparing for my 33rd birthday. Beyond that, I'm not the kind of person to pin any details down. My parents were in the military, so I've lived in ten different houses in the last decade. As long as I've got a job in the field of computer science, (and enough money to buy the latest gadget), I have a feeling I'll be happy with whatever cards life deals me.
    • That's dodging the question though, isn't it? I'm not sure if I can truly expect this is where I'll end up, but if I had to choose my future, I'd be working at some small company, writing software people are excited to use. I'd love to be leading the team making the software that Apple, Microsoft, or Canonical never thought to make, the kind of software that has everyone in the tech world talking.
  7. What do you think will be the next biggest technological advancement in computer science?
    • The next big advancement in technology isn't going to involve clock speeds, or have to do with the thinness of a particular device. Today's battery technology is quickly approaching a wall. Moore's Law states that the amount of transistors we can cram onto a chip doubles roughly every two years... but that's not exactly helpful in today's mobile world. The faster you make your chips, the more power hungry they become. You can work to make them power efficient, but baring any major advances in today's battery technology, our devices are quickly going to reach a point that they're "good enough" for the every day consumer.
    • However, just as hardware advancement is slowing down, the software side of things is ready to completely revolutionize how people use computers. Apple's iPad has shown the world that people don't need a command prompt, file system, or even a windowed operating system to get things done. For a technology neophyte, a simplified, easy to approach device is infinitely more useful than a powerful but complex machine. While the keyboard and mouse will most likely always be with us, we're quickly approaching a day where all someone needs to compute on the go is the end of their index finger. Between the iPad (and Google's belated Android offerings), and motion tracking technologies like Microsoft's Kinect, the next technology revolution isn't going to be what we do with computers, but how we do it.
  8. If you could travel back in time, who would you like to meet and why?
    • I wish I could go back and hear Carl Sagan speak. Few people have been able to explain why the pursuits of science are so important in such simple words.
  9. What is your favorite style of mustache and why?
    • Something small and simple, paired with a beard/goatee. Enough where you know the person's trying to grow it for sure, but not too scruffy.
  10. If you could be fluent in any foreign language that you're not already fluent in, which one would it be and why?
    • Living in Texas, Spanish is an obvious first choice. However, Japanese would be fun to know, if only so I could watch anime as it was originally made.
  11. Give some interesting fact about yourself.
    • When I was a kid, I thought "Getting your tires rotated" involved putting your car up onto the lift and spinning the tires around.