Mike Oren.com

After everything finished up with the class I was teaching, I took off for a week of "vacation" back home in Illinois. I kicked it off with three days at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago's Grant Park. I'll be the first to admit that loud, crowded concerts aren't really my scene, but it was a fun experience--I'll be back next year since I managed to snag one of the extremely limited $60 3-day passes (Golden Tickets). The highlight of this year's show for me were The Killers (I was about 20-50 feet from the stage--not sure exactly how far; too close for ear and physical comfort but an interesting experience anyway and The Killers are in my list of favorite bands). My biggest disappointment was missing Silversun Pickups (I was waiting for The Killers to start) and my second biggest disappointment was not being able to get closer to Arctic Monkeys (I could barely hear where I was). The best group I had never heard of before the show was Los Campesinos! (why a UK band chose that name, I don't know...) The group I heard more of then I ever cared to was Care Bears on Fire--little angsty pre(?)-teens (my older brother liked them--not sure why).

After Lollapalooza was over, I spent the week watching my nieces (age 2 and 4)--took them to the zoo (they love the penguins and we went for sushi after--the 4 year old loves sushi and can use chopsticks, but I bought yakatori for the 2 year old and got her a fork). I also took them with to my annual "take Brian to IHOP for his birthday--usually weeks late" thing--he was pretty good with the kids there (I guess that's good since he's a teacher; although he and Kaitlyn are, smartly, waiting a few years before hey have kids of their own). Friday I took my nieces to the park for a few hours then after the 2 year old had her nap, took them outside for water baloons (which were old and defective, so I sprayed them with the hose instead). Needless to say, I ended up as their favorite babysitter, much more than my younger brother (who has been watching them this summer due to an inability to find summer work--he didn't take them off the house property at all).

I did go out in the evenings after my sister got home but nothing much to repot there, most exciting things were an Ethiopian dinner Friday night and two nights at Dave and Busters (thanks to a $50 gift card I won--I still have ~170 credits left to play too; and I cashed in my tickets for an automatic ice cream maker--I'd never buy one but for free it's a nice little prize). Speaking of prizes, I also won (and just received today) a Flip MinoHD video recorder from gradshare.com (a web site where grad students can ask each other questions).

Things I didn't do that I would have liked to do: updating/redesigning my web site (including removing the photo gallery section in favor of information / papers I've written in Sociology), going to a beach, restarting (for the 4th time) mikeoren.blogspot.com (this time with an attempt to write my autobiography--primarily because I spent some time over break reflecting on the people and events that have shaped my course through life). sell my shares in FNM when it was over $1.20 (would have meant doubling my investment of $600 from 1 year ago--would have rebought after the drop I saw coming; this is a long term holding for me, but I'm not opposed to some short term profit when the opportunity appears but I missed the boat could still sell it for some profit but I'm not convinced it will drop low enough from the current price to make it worth the transaction fees, tax, effort, etc), and I didn't bake brownies to send to my friend as a thank you for a fun visit out to her in California.

Yesterday the REU program that I was serving as a "meta-mentor" for ended with the groups' final presentations of their research. All five of the groups ended up with strong projects, especially given that they only had ten weeks to work on them (and realistically less than that since the first 2 weeks were spent on programming, OpenGL, and other classes). I think the program made a video of all the research projects, so once that's up on YouTube I'll embed the video into a future post--you can also read overviews of their projects on the REU '09 web site. They were a good group of undergrads, although I'll admit that at times I was worried about some of the projects or some people not adjusting well, some of the project mentors overworking them too early (they all understood that there might be a crunch at some point, but week 3 was a little early for that), etc. But all (potential) fires were put out, all individuals in the program did great work, and all of the projects turned out well. I think they'll all make great grad students (when their time comes) and their time management was very impressive (none of the groups had a major crunch during the last week). One of them even came up with a series of "Chuck Norris" style jokes about me (but using usability/design), like this one: "Mike Oren is so good at networking because he is so user friendly." The rest can be found on the summer quotes page.

I also gave the final lecture for HCI 596 on Thursday night. There's still one class left, but that's just their final presentations (e.g. no work for me to prep). I definitely learned, the hard way, exactly how much time and effort it takes to teach a class from scratch, stressful at times (at one point finishing slides a minute before I had to go teach), but I think it went well overall. The projects I assigned to students were ambitious and (purposely) vague, but for the most parts the students rose to the challenge. It did, however, serve to me as a reminder of exactly how difficult it is for a single individual to be an 'expert' on all aspects of HCI--while several individuals did incredible work on individual sections (above and beyond my expecations--therefore earning them a perfect) none of them, at least on the first project (I'm still grading) were able to score above a high B (I added 5% to the overall score for everybody to reflect the challenge of having all three sections fully fleshed out within a mere 3 week time span--and many of the students are employed full time so time was limited). The group service design projects look fairly good, so far (another thing I need to grade...) and one group in particularly had a good, and somewhat innovative, report on their initial observations and interviews of the service site they looked at. Gradining was clearly my weak point teaching this class, coming up with the content, reading/reviewing the topic (for every reading I gave the class, I read about 3x as much or more), and then figuring out how to present it and also try to balance it between giving them the highlights from the reading, providing additional information, and putting active learning elements into the class (so it wasn't just me lecturing) took more time than I had originally estimated. Then each report was taking me about 5 hours per report to grade--getting the base grade only took about an hour to two, but then I wrote 1-4 (single-spaced) pages of feedback and also went back over the grades to compare what I had given other students to ensure I was being fair with the grades. Needless to say doing all of that while also mentoring the undergrads and doing my own research, I ended up putting grading as a lower priority (I didn't want to do that, but the other obligations were more immediate).

With my research, I have gotten enough groups coded now that I was able to run ttests to check for statistical significance, and I have found it overall for conversational, behavioral, and overall affinity. Particularly impressive was the difference in behavioral affinity for the freeform task, where the ConvoCon group had 80% of their work showing signs of affinity vs. about 30% for the control group (this was statistically significant). Also interesting, although not all that surprising (given that we turned ConvoCons off halfway through the trials) was that conversational affinity starts out significantly higher but ends up roughly at the same percentage for the final task. I'm hoping to get the full results ready for CHI, although I still have a decent number of dyads to go through and tag up. I presented some of these initial results recently at HCII 2009 that presentation seemed to go well, no criticism and a few people seemed interested in it--so not bad considering the research is at an early stage.

The weekend before HCII began, my friend Mariya flew down from the Bay Area to San Diego--it was the first time I had seen her in 2 years (we had interned together at Google in '07--she's a full time employee there now). After she came in we pretty much went straight to see Harry Potter (the 2 year gap means we saw the last one together, so it was nice that premier weekend for the new one was the next time we saw each other), Saturday was spent at the world famous San Diego zoo (it's a good zoo with some animals I had never seen before, but the layout is such that there's no way to see all of the animals without backtracking--unlike most zoos there's no clear path through it all). The day after, we were going to hit one of the beaches there but I was warned through Twitter of the squids swarming the San Diego Bay beaches and changed our plans--walking around the gas lamp district instead. After that, Mariya left, and I went for dinner with a former student from HCI 521 (he's a full time employee with the air force) and went out to a nice international-blend restaurant, Vagabond. The day after I went to a fantastic Moroccan restaurant, Kous Kous, with a group of conference goers I had met (including two fellow Tweeters). The conference was tiring with the networking, preparing and giving my presentation (and helping with other presentation--on a cultural redesign of the iPhone), and my student volunteering duties. At the end of the week though I flew up to the Bay Area to visit my favorite Bay Arean, Mariya, to return her visit. We went out for Korean with her roommate then tried to hurry to make it to a play we had gotten tickets for but were a bit too late (and the doors were locked). In place of the play, we went to Blockbuster and rented Love in the Time of Cholera and When Nietzsche Wept. We watched the first of those with very liberal commentary from both of us (helped by a little bit of rum and coke--now that she's 21, I felt the need to have a drink with her) and that ended up being a really fun time (that's a great movie to add commentary to). After that we watched part of When Nietzsche Wept but then put it on hold to play some online trivia, until I started nodding off (it was past 3 in the morning) so we decided to call it a night. The next day, we bought some cheese, strawberries, water, and a loaf of french bread and took a ferry out to Angel Island for a picnic and just enjoying the sights (on the drive out to the ferry, I called the theatre and asked if we could have our tickets from the night before transferred to Saturday--they were able to do it, which was awesome of them). After getting back to the "mainland" we headed out to the playhouse, Dragon Productions, and saw A Girl's Guide to Chaos. The playhouse was one of those fantastically small places (maybe 50 seats) where the play depends almost entirely on the strengths of the actors (not enough of a stage to do any production tricks), and it was a good show--entertaining, strong acting, etc. At that point it was 10 PM and we hadn't eaten dinner, so we found a Pizza Hut and ordered a pizza and wings, went back to her apartment and finished watching When Nietzsche Wept then, inspired by A Girl's Guide to Chaos, watched Bridget Jones Diary 1 & 2. We still had an hour before my flight, so we played some Fluxx (great game if you've never played). So it was a great visit :) And the relaxed nature of my Bay Area trip was great after the higher stress of juggling my multiple hats during the summer and the conference.

Next weekend is Lollapalooza in Chicago, and I'm looking forward to that. I'm going to that with my older brother (which is great, since he and I never do much), Danielle, and Jamie, her cousin, and a friend of hers from Kansas City.

I'll end this post with the pictures from the wedding I attended this summer as a groomsman: http://picasaweb.google.com/mikeoren/BrianSWedding