Tomorrow morning the kids and I will head east to Rochester, where we’ll be spending a week in our old stomping grounds. It will be odd to be home but not home—someone else is living in our house, so we’ll be staying with my mom while we’re there.
The boys are pretty excited about seeing their friends. Me too.
I’ll still be accessible via the usual email, IM, and phone contacts. Wifi in my mom’s house, wifi on campus, wifi in most of the coffeeshops I frequent there…
While there I’m hoping to reinvigorate my lab at RIT—in my absence, its been dormant, and I have some ideas for things the folks I left behind could be working on. I’m also hoping to foster more interaction between the RIT social computing club and the lab, as well as perhaps getting our public workshop plans back on track.
I’ve also printed out a substantial stack of research papers that I’m hoping to get through on the airplane—in hopes that the kids will be able to amuse themselves reasonably well with books and gameboys while I read (I hope, I hope, I hope….).
I’m planning to be around the RIT campus on Thursday and Friday, exact times to be determined (I have to work around the array of doctor’s appointments that the boys and I have while home…nothing serious, but we’ve waited to deal with myriad small problems until we were back with our regular health care providers). If you want to get together, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can work out.
My father just sent me a link to a NYTimes piece called “What’s the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don’t Want to Hear It” that totally cracked me up. Here’s the key concept:
Mr. Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day - that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can - to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble. The device, called the Mosquito (“It’s small and annoying,” Mr. Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.
Oh, I so want a room-sized version of this. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a room that kids couldn’t stand to go into, but grownups could sit in and relax? Or to turn this on in my office at RIT when I’m willing to talk to colleagues but not students? The possibilities are endless…
I just got an IM ping from someone who was curious as to what was in the pile of articles I’ve decided to bring with me on my trip.
Right now my mind is buzzing with questions and ideas related to social bookmarking systems (like del.icio.us or Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0), information-seeking behavior, and information network formation, so most of my reading has at least a tangential connection with those topics. In no particular order, here’s what I’m planning to dig into tomorrow:
I’m also listening to Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked on my iPod this week, and have ordered the book to be delivered to me in Rochester (I pay sales tax to Amazon if I have it delivered to me in Seattle, so it’s worth getting it while in Rochester and lugging it back!)
Y’know, I’d really like a tool to allow a select group of people to build a collaborative bibliography. Something like CiteULike, but with the ability to create a specific set beyond simple tagging, and allow it to be added to by specific people. Is there any such collaborative bibliographic tool out there? (Maybe I should poke around and see if CiteULike or Connotea provide that capability…)
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