Kevin Schofield's WeblogMusings on life, kids, work, the Internet, Microsoft, politics, orcas, etc.Privacy- April 24, 2006 I'm in the first session on privacy issues. Clare-Marie Karat is presenting a paper on a system for how to express formal privacy rules in natural language. Here's a useful and simple definition of a privacy policy: Who has access to what personal information: for what purposes to carry out what actions under what conditions with what obligations Many of the question revolve around ways to handle exceptions -- which is the downfall of most data and workflow automation systems. Karen Tang...http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/24.html#a541 Blogging CHI and the Opening Plenary- April 24, 2006 I'm going to try to blog at regular intervals this week while I'm at CHI in Montreal. They have the student volunteers organized to do this too, so it should be an interesting collection of entries on the official CHI blog site by the end of the conference. The opening plenary this morning, by Scott Cook of Intuit, was great. Scott is a very genial, affable guy who quickly builds a cnnection with the audience. The official topic for his talk, which he generally stuck to, was "Creating...http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/categories/chi2006/rss.xml#a540 Air Travel Sucks- April 23, 2006 In the summer of 2001, commercial air travel was incredibly painful. Lots of delays, passengers were treated like cattle, every plane was packed, schedules sucked -- it was just plain a rotten way to spend any significant amount of time at all. Then 911 happened and lots of people stopped flying. Well, we're back to the way things were pre- 911. Air travel is just miserable. All the old complaints are once again true, with new additions. 1. Food, or lack thereof. A bag of peanuts is a luxury....http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/23.html#a539 Last Trip of the Month, Starting Badly- April 23, 2006 I'm in Montreal for CHI 2006, then on to Princeton for an advisory board meeting for their engineering school next week. I'm working up a really good rant about air travel, snce my flight out here very nearly went wrong on Friday. But I'll save that for another post. Friday morning I dropped my kids off at school, and headed for the airport. On my way in the car I was listening to Marc Broussard, and the untitleduncredited song at the end of the CD came on. I wish you freedom I wish you peace..http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/23.html#a538 Cool Video Content- April 19, 2006 Microsoft Research recently partnered with the Research Channel to host a collection of research lectures and Visiting Speakers Series talks for public consumption. You can find the collection here. There is tons of great stuff here -- hours and hours of compelling talks. Enjoy.http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/18.html#a537 What is Wikipedia, Really- April 16, 2006 Danah Boyd wrote a thought-provoking piece on the trials and tribulations of having a Wikipedia entry -- or really more to the point, the ongoing identity crisis of Wikipedia. If you put all of the pretensions aside, I really like Wikipedia. There's lots of thoughtful, well-researched content in there, and it makes for interesting reading and in some cases a really good complement for more authoritative information resources. There's also some crap in there, and the David-slaying-Goliath talk...http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/16.html#a536 A Very Political Easter Egg Roll- April 16, 2006 The White House Easter Egg Roll has become a major political event this year. Gay and lesbian families are organizing to participate this year, including wearing rainbow-colored leis so that they can be easily identified. In turn, the White House has changed the time-honored process of handing out tickets to make sure that none of them are at the opening ceremonies -- and will thereby be excluded from most of the press coverage and anything resembling a formal interaction with the White...http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/16.html#a535 The Best Job in America is...- April 13, 2006 According to CNNMoney, the best job in America is Software Engineer.http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/12.html#a534 What Just Happened- April 7, 2006 OK, here's the deal. Last Friday, I flew down to Northern California to visit with my family and participate in my fantasy baseball league's auction draft on Saturday. Sunday I flew to DC. OK, that part's theory. In practice, I got as far east as Phoenix, missed my connection by 10 minutes, got rerouted to Las Vegas then on to a red-eye to Newark, then Monday morning caught a shuttle flight to DC. Why, you may ask, did I put myself through that kind of hell to get to DC Because I testified in..http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/06.html#a533 |