@mdekstrand@hci.social
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

mdekstrand

@mdekstrand@hci.social

Asst. Prof IS @ Drexel. Trying to make information access (RecSys, IR, etc.) useful and equitable.

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mdekstrand, to random
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

This is a really good write up of the impact of conferences in Hawai’i. Goes beyond CHI — any conference leadership considering a proposal for a Hawaii event should read it. https://www.chiinhawaii.info/

natematias, to random
@natematias@social.coop avatar

A huge amount of public interest research relies on data from the New York Times— which has just added restrictions against using their corpus to train machine learning systems.

Curious to hear how this might impact research.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831109/the-new-york-times-ai-web-scraping-rules-terms-of-service

mdekstrand,
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

@natematias it seems to mean any search research that includes NYT in its corpus needs written authorization, as well as a host of other things that aren't competitive in the generative AI sense. E.g. my work on helping teachers find news articles to use in their classrooms — limits use of that on NYT content. We can probably do a user study w/ existing search tech, but not train a model to identify how an article could support education.

mdekstrand, to random
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

Working w/ a student on prepping camera-ready for a new paper, so took the time to write down a checklist of a bunch of things to check in preparing a final manuscript: https://md.ekstrandom.net/blog/2023/08/final-paper-checklist

phire, to random
@phire@phire.place avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @phire it me and bicycle rides

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    A lot of attention is focused on the AI training aspect of Zoom, and it is indeed a problem, and they might have put a band-aid on it.

    But I don’t want them to have a license to use, say, my course materials or pre-publication research discussions for marketing or research purposes either.

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    Most virtual conferences use Zoom. That means all the conference presentations are subject to Zoom’s decision to help themselves to our creative work. This is not clearly delineated in permission forms — I sign up to give ACM permission to distribute the work, not Zoom (beyond what permissions are necessary to provide the service and appropriate fraud and safety services).

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    Is Zoom really going to turn me into a willing Teams or Jitsi user?

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    so ACM charges members $1300 for OA journal articles now?

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    I did successfully use Outlook for 2 years of my academic life + a bunch more personal… I should be able to do this again…

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @andresmh I've had both of those on Google at Boise State. I do like Outlook's calendaring better, though.

    The e-mail organization is just a mess, especially when my Gmail organization habits are deeply ingrained.

    philtor, to random
    @philtor@fosstodon.org avatar

    Pest control sales person at the door: "blah, blah... I see spiders under your eaves"

    me: I like spiders.

    him: "blah, blah, blah...plus we treat the whole yard"

    me: wait, why treat my whole yard?

    him: "to kill the spiders and ants living there too, the stuff we spray goes down 2 feet..."

    me: umm, ok, thanks for the info, bye.

    him: "Here let me show you a quote ($400)"

    me: thanks, but no thanks (closes door)

    (the guy wasn't getting the hint that I didn't want my yard chem bombed)

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @philtor yeah we had someone come by offering to take care of the ants (a nuisance but 🤷🏼), and the spiders and wasps while he was at it. Nope!

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    • Brazil
    • They Live

    What are other fascinating 1980s cinematic commentaries on the role of information in society?

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @andresmh tron is one of my faves.

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @andresmh Brazil features prominently the "Department of Information Retrieval", with a lot on the use of information (both collecting as surveillance and distributing as a tool of control), and information-centric bureaucracies and what goes wrong when said orgs have errors in their information or when paperwork interferes with home mechanical repairs. Orwell meets Kafka with an art-deco-and-CRTs aesthetic (and DeNiro as a guerilla HVAC repairman).

    scheidegger, to random
    @scheidegger@mastodon.social avatar

    House just hit 98F. 36 more hours...

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @scheidegger @regehr we were vv. glad to find a couple mini swamp coolers on amazon same-day delivery when our ac failed last summer.

    jbigham, to random
    @jbigham@hci.social avatar

    i think i've found peace with deleting twitter or whatever it's called now. those who have come before me, any advice, regrets, or otherwise?

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @jbigham no regrets, only sadness and anger.

    andrew, to random
    @andrew@fediscience.org avatar

    a few months ago i installed a new $30 towel rod in one of our bathrooms.

    a few weeks ago, our basement started mysteriously leaking.

    today a plumber discovered why: i screwed the towel rod into a pipe.

    $30 towel rod → $564 towel rod 😭😭

    (home ownership is a scam)

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @andrew “hey siri, show me an example of confounder bias”

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    On the enshittification of academic social media, by @thesiswhisperer — yeah. https://thesiswhisperer.com/2023/07/10/academicenshittification/

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    No, you're writing the phrase "applying editorial judgement and yeeting Chris Rufo into the flaming heart of the sun" in your extremely rough paper draft.

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    with the footnote that he may not be worth the delta-V.

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    Welp. After 14 years, I no longer have a personal Twitter account.

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    yeah, my web site is best viewed in firefox. should I add a banner image like it's 1997?

    Not because I use browser-specific things, just because Firefox's text rendering looks better. I added a browser-specific hack to work around the worst of Chrome's rendering differeneces (tweaking body text font weight), but it still doesn't look as good as it does in Firefox.

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    Safari looks just as good as FF 🙃. Guess I need to try to tweak the CSS hack to target Chrome instead of targeting !FF.

    mdekstrand,
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    @jbigham I did, just to be sure, but since it’s Chrome now it behaved like Chrome (and has Chrome in the user agent so my sniffing applies the fix).

    mdekstrand, to random
    @mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

    SMBC on metrics (and statistical tests). So so right. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/metrics

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