This semester I am TAing Privacy Policy, Law & Technology taught by Lorrie Cranor (my advisor). If you have some free time or are looking for a class to take and you want to explore the depths of privacy law, the philosophical roots of privacy, and the way technology can and should shape privacy in the information age, then I expect to see you this afternoon.

Sidenote: I am really excited to be TAing, it has been a while (haven’t done this since City as Text with Jessica) and since I basically love teaching, it has been way too long. I will likely post more about this as interesting things come up, the semester progresses, and the students start working on – hopefully impressive – projects.

The Symposium on Usable Privacy & Security which is hosted by the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy & Security Lab, which I am a member of and which my advisor Lorrie is the director of, is occurring right now.

This year we are also currently hosting our own blog, documenting the sessions, discussions, and events at the conference. It can be viewed here so you can go take a look at how I have been spending my week. Tomorrow I will put up the poster we presented, till then you will have to live with the blog and some photos here.

Each year the IEEE holds VisWeek 2008, a series of three co-located conferences: Visualization, InfoVis, and VAST (Visual Analytics in Science & Technology), this year in Columbus, Ohio; October 19th – 24th. Also each year all three of these conferences host visualization conferences, which I of course always think about entering but then never actually do.

Except this year. This past spring Peter Landwehr started up a reading group on Large Scale Visualizations, which slowly shifted – I expect mostly because of me, to a group more on information visualization generally, and at some point we decided to form a group to create an entry for the VAST contest (more on this later). And at the same time as that progressed I convinced Danny that he wanted to spend some time on the InfoVis contest.

The InfoVis contest this year (details here,) focused around over a year’s worth of data from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab. They released all this data to the public to allow them to mine and visualize whatever they so chose; and the dataset was also chosen for the 2008 contest.

Danny and I eventually got ourselves together and over the last few weeks put together the following poster. (For a higher resolution version, see my portfolio which has been updated additionally this exists on flickr. )

I expect this is a very different direction than most of the people who entered the contest went in, which may or may not be good, and I have no idea how it will be judged. Either way though, for the amount of time we had, I am quite satisfied with our solution. They contest pages infer they are looking for stories from the data and I think as an overall story, to someone who has never seen this dataset, or worked with sensor data before, it is a nice introduction.

The poster and all of its charts and tables were created in some combination of Apple’s iWork suite and Processing ( processing.org ), the data was mined and refined using some Python and mostly Java.

Now though, the information visualization time of the year is over and it is time to get back to real work. Cell phones and privacy and student organization websites and swappable policy interfaces and paper reading and user testing and rule specification interfaces and other secret and exciting things.

Yes, seriously – as I posted here just over a month ago, John McCain came to Carnegie Mellon to give some important speech on the economy and I was part of the student group that got to meet him. Here is an awkwardly fish-eyed picture which seems to be taken from ground level. From left to right:

• Adi – CMU (student) Vice President
• Eileen – AB Chair
• Sara – CMU Economics
• John McCain – Just a guy.
• Me – Grad Student President
• Ben – Token Republican
• Sean – CMU (student) President

So … enjoy that.

Update: Yes, I wear jeans to meet John McCain, it’s cool.

In 1961 the Buhl Foundation established by the power of money the Buhl Chair in Theoretical Physics at Carnegie Mellon. The Buhl Chair, Dr. Fred Gilman, likely does many interesting things, but the only one I know of, is his responsibility to invite a scientist to the Mellon Institute each year to talk about physics.

This generally highly publicized event is the single physics lecture I go to each year, and is always quite enjoyable. For information on the Buhl Chair, and past speakers you can check their website, here which hasn’t been updated since 2005.

This year’s Buhl lecture was extra-exciting (seriously) as earlier that afternoon the Bruce & Astrid McWilliams Center for Cosmology was announced at Carnegie Mellon. This new center, made possibly by the McWilliams, “will strive to unravel the mysteries of the universe.” While this sounds like quite a hard task, they are going to do it multidisciplinarily and so it is hot.

So in continuing the cosmological astro-physics trend, the Buhl Lecture for 2008 was given by Joel Primack and called “A Brief History of Dark Matter.”

Short notes here (long notes, to come):

A Brief History of Dark Matter

Joel Primack, University of California at Santa Cruz

Part I – History.

Fritz Zwicky is the beginning. Described by Primack as “one of the most profound and annoying astronomers of the 20th century,” this man, while studying the Coma Cluster in 1933 realized something was erm… strange. Without getting too much into real physics, Zwicky calculated the mass of the whole Coma cluster, based on how fast the edge galaxies in the cluster were spinning. He also calculated how much mass should be in the cluster based on the number of galaxies and the amount of light reaching us here on Earth. The numbers didn’t match.

So, let’s say we are hanging out, adding up masses of galaxies 100 Mega-parsecs, which means the light we are looking at is 326 million years old, which is around the time the Appalachian Mountains were formed (i.e. no people hanging out). And as we are hanging out looking at this really old light we realize the masses of the Coma Cluster aren’t adding up. We need to brainstorm some solutions for why this could be the case.

Conveniently, Zwicky has done this in his paper. As summarized by Michael Richmond Zwicky discuss four possibilities:

1. Stars in the Coma Cluster are different from stars in the Milky Way (which is where we had nearly all our information about masses and light emitted back in 1933).
2. The Coma Cluster is not in equilibrium
3. The laws of physics are different in the Coma Cluster!
4. The Coma Cluster has lots of mass which is not part of the stars

And this is Dark Matter. Of course, Zwicky did not call it that, but that is what he is getting at, lots and lots of mass (more than ten times that which the stars account for) which we cannot see.

Alright, but as discussed Zwicky is sort of a hassle and this wasn’t much to go on, so we can basically leave his work as open question, and move on. Also, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find a digital version of Zwicky’s 1933 paper, which doesn’t seem to be online. Hint: it was published in 1933 in Helvetica Physica acta – if you do procure this, e-mail me.

So then, some 40 years later, Vera Rubin was also hanging out measuring masses and speeds of galaxies and stars. (This is what astronomers do, have you noticed?) Vera measured the speeds of stars near the center and also at the far reaches of spiral galaxies and found something very counterintuitive, which was the stars near the ends of the spiral arms were moving very fast. Just as fast as those closer to the center. However, the gravity out at the edges should have been much weaker than that near center, which means the galaxy should not have been able to hold in those fast moving edge stars and they should have been sped away from the spiral galaxies.

But if the gravity out at the edges was similar to the gravity much closer to the center of the galaxy then Vera decided their must be much more mass throughout the galaxy than could be seen. And by the early 80s the community was convinced, there was a lot of mass in the universe that we simply could not see.

So theoretical physicists jump in, to what is a new and interesting and open question. Questions like: What is dark matter made of (on a particle level)? How fast does it move? Where can it be found? How can we detect it?

Now unfortunately, I must be a bit critical here. Primack is one of the scientists behind the theory of Cold Dark Matter, so when discussing the other proposals for explaining this lack of mass he … brushes them aside faster than he possibly should. However at this point Cold Dark Matter (CDM) – and the Lambda-CDM model does seem to be the leading candidate for the explanation of dark matter.

Now, to explain the last thirty years of work in this field in a paragraph, physicists came up with possible explanations for the type of particles that could possibly make up the dark matter. CDM calls for matter that we can’t see, but isn’t much more specific than that. One possibility could be matter that does not interact with normal matter, except through gravity, possibly some sort of very heavy particle that is similar to a neutrino. Or there could be an abundance of large objects of normal matter that just emits very little (or no) radiation, however this seems unlikely. Simulations tend to favor the first idea, lots of heavy particles that we can’t see. Other proposals involve modifying newtonian dynamics to account for the mass, and revising our definitions of gravity but people don’t seem to like these.

Part II – Pretty.

Primack then moved on to lighter material. Explaining how as you travel further away from us you can see galaxies that look different, as they are younger, he showed images taken from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. He additionally showed a video of the Millennium Simulation by the Max-Planck Institute. This is a 10 billion particle simulation that attempts to show the possible dark matter distribution in the universe, and gives some sense of scale.

Primack also gave the quick numbers that everyone wants to hear. How much of the universe is dark matter? His current estimates put Cold Dark Matter at 25% and Dark Energy at 70% (note again bias towards the CDM model). He also has an interesting representation of that, which I will re-post here:

© Joel Primack & Nancy Ellen Abrams

(And further I will ignore any sort of distortion given to the percentages by the choice of visualization by cartoon pyramid.)

Videos shown:

• Hubble Ultra Deep Zoom-In (credit – Hubble) – quicktime – 29MB
• Millenium Simulation – Long Version (which is pretty boring) – youtube

Part III – What’s Next.

As Primack believes CDM has nailed it, what is left is actually finding experimental evidence of dark matter – and he thinks this will be done by 2010. He suggests ways this might occur.

• We could produce dark matter. The Large Hadron Collider could possibly produce micro black holes, super symmetric particles, or other particles which could be candidates for dark matter particles. Experiments should begin at the LHC in June 2008.
• We could infer dark matter’s existence through the use of the Planck Surveyor, a cute little satellite, who among other things plans to go find lots of gravitational lensing. It should launch on Halloween this year. (it is really a cat dressed up as a satellite)
• According to NASA’s description of GLAST, The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope – it will: “Search for signs of new laws of physics and what composes the mysterious Dark Matter.” Yes that is right we will determine dark matter with “new laws of physics.” Look forward to that on May 16th, 2008.
• We could also directly detect dark matter using my third favorite noble gas, Xenon! Yes the Large Underground Xenon Detector is an experiment where you put a bunch of Xenon in a cave deep underground and then wait. and hope. and maybe they even pray, for some dark matter particle to crash into the Xenon. So far, nothing, but they keep using more Xenon, so maybe they will get there soon. New results coming this fall.

Conclusion

Within the next two years we might find evidence of dark matter, any sort of material that is invisible on the electromagnetic spectrum, or we may not. Each of the experiments above may turn up nothing and we may be left having to admit that it is possible we have framed the problem incorrectly. As this New York Times article explains dark matter is a practical necessity to make the current theories work.

To give a single example, our understanding (or lack thereof) of gravity has always been a bit of a problem for physicists, it doesn’t quite mesh with quantum mechanics and relativity, and it may not work as we expect when we begin to probe the depths of our universe – and thus may have introduced such a concept as dark matter/energy to fill a void that was only imagined.

But this is how science works, we design tests for the hypotheses that we have, and if these fail we create new hypotheses and new tests. So, now we non-physicists wait for one of these experiments to result in actual experimental evidence for dark matter. Remember to check back in two years to see if Primack was on his game and we are a few steps closer to figuring out what roughly 22% (and more likely 96%) of the universe actually is composed of.

If in the meantime you need some light and physicsy reading material you can check out Primack’s book (co-written with Nancy Ellen Abrams), The View from the Center of the Universe which I have not read and therefore will not comment on the quality of the writing or science within.

So. Happy Spring Carnival. The Roots played today on campus and I don’t really listen to that kind of music. But i spent hours and hours outside today, talking with Aaron (happy birthday!) and watching people with Marissa, and then enjoying the concert atmosphere with Kristen & Liz so that was cool. It is just a great time of year. I posted photos from random things this spring that had not yet been posted yet here and the ones from today are all taken with my new lens – just a cheap little Canon 50mm, which I keep trying to zoom, but there is no zoom, so my fingers just spin around the lens with nothing to do but fail.

Today John McCain gave what I am told is a very important speech laying out his full economic policy with details that I guess up until this point he neglected to mention. At least the New York Times and a bunch of other media outlets seem to think so.

Interestingly this talk was at Carnegie Mellon, which means I was sitting in the third row (see picture taken by my iPhone – it was a mistake not to take a real camera) and I got pretty bored. It might be that I just can’t bring myself to care much about politics at the national level. It might be that as he spoke I could read ahead of him on the teleprompter.

It is likely the best part of the experience was being able to represent the Graduate Student Assembly at the greeting before he went on stage. He came in quickly, shook all our hands and seemed ready to move on before President Cohon slowed him down and brought him back around to introduce each of us. He seemed very lively, very human, and very much ready to get out there and speak. Also his mannerisms seem very similar to a certain president who is currently holding office, which I found a bit jarring.

Soon (once I get a copy of it) I will post the picture of the students posing with him from whoever all those people were with the cameras, but for now I can hold on, excited for an even more spectacular person who will be speaking at Carnegie Mellon: Al Gore (at commencement, May 18th).

Yes. Seriously.

So many things are going to happen. It might be the busiest month ever. I might actually get caught up to date on movies. The site is probably going to switch to black on white. It might even switch over to Wordpress, alright, I won’t go that far, but I do really like the re-designed admin. I might get a lot of really good work & research & projects & art & reading done. I will post everyday.

And with that, I leave you tonight with patrickgage.com/o/ or oh-slash, as it were.

Oh Time. Oh Website.
The end of February fell apart and then March rushed in and we are a third of the way done before I notice we have started. Where is the time for us to slow down and reflect? I am asked questions I cannot answer, given problems I cannot solve, playing games that I cannot win. And I am reading so little.

I now resolve to you that the rest of February March will be filled with films, as I am eight films behind in my posting and you should expect one everyday until I am caught up (even later today!) Since it is spring break and that gives me a few extra moments to write pithy reviews of the moving pictures that have graced my eyes over the last three weeks. I will also venture to Buffalo from something like Wednesday to Sunday and so if you are there you should send some smoke signals my way.

I leave you with this, of which I can offer no explanations save that the internet is dementing our minds.

Selling a product is hard. Selling a product that is only half finished and doesn’t really work and is of marginal utility anyway is hard. Even if it is free.

I mean, lets say we have a class of students and wanted to convince them to do some user testing on our half-finished product. Now we sort of want the user test to have results that are publishable or at least interesting. But we only realize this a week before we need to start the test, so we throw together some instructions around a study that we are already concerned about getting good results for. Then we justify it by saying it is a “zero-effort” study.

There is no such thing as a Zero-Effort Study.

The ZES is a myth and a lie. Any technology someone just has laying around cannot be tested for free (even if it works well). Study design is a bit of an art and a bit of a science and it needs to be developed and iterated on. Especially in a case where you have seen in the past (three times!!) that even people you pay to use your product stop using your product.

This is when it is time to step back and re-think where you are putting your effort. What are your goals? What are the barriers to entry? Where is the wow factor? What is the benefit of the product?

So are the technological issues related to my current work really so large that they cannot be remedied? No. They just haven’t been, we don’t have the resources and we don’t have the expertise. But this doesn’t mean we can pretend they are solved.

We started the ZES today. After twenty minutes of introduction and signing the consent form, we began install. Of the eighteen students, install went perfectly for zero of them. Four had Vista and we seem to have never tested on Vista. The other fourteen each had the same problem, they were not able to self-locate. A configuration bug. Another twenty minutes answering questions and trying to explain why to use the product, followed by the server being brought to its metaphorical knees.

False explanations were offered:

• We are currently running another study and that seems to be negatively impacting the server. (Except, that one is actually working)
• We have never seen issues like this before. (Except for everytime)
• We have some really great technology which is current set to “off,” maybe later in the semester we will turn it on. (Except it is only in our heads right now)

And after a total of seventy minutes, the students were told they could go, and updated instructions would be emailed to them. Seventy minutes to explain to them how to use a website (has any website ever taken you that long to learn?). Seventy minutes trying to fix the problems they were having setting up our ZES. Seventy minutes to trick them into using a product that they will likely stop using within a week, because it is hard to use, buggy, low on features, ugly, and doesn’t improve their life at all.

We have recently updated the Dossier website with our two latest issues (Spring & Fall 2007, since we switched over to magazine format), so you can go download and read them. Those are the two issues that I led (along with much help from Kristen, Ceci, and staff), but with GSA stuff now as my focus, we have a new staff taking over, and I will only be helping them out – like making the above site design – feedback, love, hate?

Submissions close February 29th, 2008.

Dossier came out today and we had our release party (which was meant to be a pre-release party) / open-mic reading with the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center people who I still at some point should become better friends with (probably).

Immediately after which we had our pre-elections for The Tartan, where we just all talk about our positions and things. And I am not running, which sounds like a good idea. Now off to go finish a paper before I sleep, which needs to get done and needs to be good.

(p.s. one more day)

My sleep schedule, basically, non-existent right now. Really just so much stuff going on today/tomorrow. Actually, I am pretty sure the busy-ness of this week is going to carry into next week. But at least after that a week to hang out here with classes over, catching up on everything, relaxing, buying/making christmas presents, and then home for the holidays. This is life.

Posting, tomorrow.

(end of the semester, alright?)

Yet in opposition to the above, BookGroup continues. One of the projects that has gotten going and really gone quite well for me here at Carnegie Mellon was getting my little book group going. Last week we met to discuss our “October” book Baudolino (my review and elliot’s review ).

(image by phoosh via flickr)

Next month we should also have a great meeting, down at the waterfront, to discuss Sirens of Titan and also The Golden Compass (Northern Lights), and then see the movie of the latter (which I am quite excited about). And then soon the year will be over so I need to finish up all the books I have laying aorund here half started, as I am behind for the year. Maybe December will be a little lighter on the work, and a little heavier on the reading (somehow I doubt it).

Sidenote: doesn’t everyone wish reading to the rain was still called booknest? Yeah, me too.

Also, look for a post coming up about Libraries (Seattle is pretty, and Koolhaas is way better than Gehry, kthx), Anti-Libraries, and more Umberto Eco.

Now, I am off to read (cheating by finishing up The Prophet of Yonwood, yay for children’s books).

I offer you only a few thoughts as my evening tonight is filled with privacy homework and a statistics project. Only two more days of school and then I can escape to Buffalo for a bit of relaxation and reading before concluding the semester.

Thus this is very short as I am about to return to writing summaries of court cases related to privacy (which there are an awful lot of). But before I go, I leave you with this question:

Let us say I send an email to you. Now before you have read the email it exists, somewhere, on some server, in storage. However you have not yet received it so you could also say it is in transmission. Yet, there are two laws that apply here, one to stored communications, one to communications in transmission.

So is the email stored or in transmission?
I believe the answer is Heisenbergian.

Liar! Liar! Liar! And seriously could you stop getting aggregated?

Semi-famous quasi-geek Randall Munroe creator of the webcomic xkcd came to Carnegie Mellon this past Friday drawing most of the people who can’t remember the last time they have left Wean Hall (the computer science building that looks like a mashup between a bunker and a turtle) out into the sunlight. And while the gym was pretty full (though there were empty seats) it was certainly not the largest lecture on campus this semester (Randy Pausch, wins that one). It was also not fantastic. It turns out creating a successful webcomic is not enough to carry a one hour presentation.

It is more likely true that I would describe it as boring or possibly inundated with erroneous facts. Some favorites include when he incorrectly described the rules that question marks follow in quotations or when he either claiming a non-existant office of french standardization existed (which sets rules and governs all French speakers) or greatly extending the powers of the Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française, which as far as I know no longer exists (and either way they set forth no recommendations on the syntax of quotations nor did they ever claim to govern all French speakers). Or possibly we should stick to him simply saying what a great time he was having here in Philadelphia.

Anyway we had to occupy our time wikipedia chaining (Jesus -> Vagina, 6; Pomegranate -> Hamiltonian (QM), 11; HIPPA -> Trebuchet, also 11) since it was decided that that was more fun than listening to him talk, especially when he got sappy.

For his only defense, I will give him the fact that his comic convinces people to do things, some pretty weird things, giving Stallman the katana, chess on the rollercoaster, meeting up at the playground, etc. And the idea that he can impact reality is cool, my advice for him is to stick to what he knows best though (the dorkier the better).

(image by Danny Rashid more images)

Saturday night back at Weigand Gym was Arthur & Yu, followed by Broken Social Scene (or like 5/19ths of BSS, plus Andrew Kenny of American Analog Set, or maybe he counts now and then it is 6/20). And basically they were really good, and I really enjoyed it, though the crowd I would probably most accurately describe as “limp.” They did look really good though, and as Weigand isn’t that big Danny got some shots that are better than I have ever taken at a concert and you can go look through those (more like the one above).

They mostly played Spirit If… (I think they seriously played all of it), but they did have a few off their self titled album which is easily my favorite, including “It’s All Gonna Break” which is actually my favorite song of theirs (totally reinforced by their live performance of it) as their last song, not counting a singalong to close their just over 2 hour set. Sure it would have been better if Emily Haines or Feist had been present (or for that matter any female vocalist would have helped out) but it was still a really good time.

Alright, so I am a little behind and you are gonna have to wait for me to catch up with my life. Expect more soon, Broken Social Scene was great. Really great. And my computer is only sort of broken but more functioning again. I have to go write a board editorial kthxbye.

Today I announced that I am officially a candidate for the Graduate Student Association Presidency, at Carnegie Mellon. GSA does have a website which can be accessed here though it is presently down, which is fine since it is really bad (and thus one of the first things that needs to get fixed).

But then an announcement is nothing.

This week Google announced Android, “a Linux-based mobile software stack,” read: phone software that is open and anyone can build stuff for. Now if this is the GooglePhone that everyone has been hoping for to come dominate the cell phone market (and kill the iPhone) I think it is a failure, but if this is some long-term plan to make cellphones better devices for software developers maybe it will work.

Sure they have said they will have a development kit for programmers to hack at out within the week, but people say it is unlikely we will see any phones that will run this until late next year.

I think the most interesting thing we can learn from this is if a truly “open” platform can really take over a market. Everyone admits that cell phones suck, that is the reason the iPhone is doing well, the market was full of products so repulsively bad that anything looks comparitively amazing, but this is a real chance for open source to fight and secure a lot of ground (faster than in the OS world anyway).

And while some say that Google will teach Apple the lesson they should have learned from Microsoft about being too closed (aren’t they already opening up…) I am currently much more inclined to agree with those who think Google is suddenly in the vaporware business (even though i am not a powazek fan these days after the whole jpg thing). I am even about ready to think this is a giant mistake and the market doesn’t want tons of open software on their phone, “they want a phone that just works,” and Google and its 33 friends can go startup a poorly run deli

Maybe I have just been reading too much 37signals but it seems like this small team, get it done mentality is even more powerful than a giant company and likely more powerful than a completely collaborative environment. Or maybe I just refuse to admit that the author is dead.

In a month I will hopefully be at the helm of a reasonably large student populous (approximately 4500 graduate students) and there are a number of projects I would like to get done. Politics at this level is largely a mangement and organization task and I think it is important I have more actual progress than announcements. I am excited.

My friend and fellow Computation, Organization & Society-ier Peter worked/helped/coordinated bringing the Neo-Futurists to Carnegie Mellon.

They performed the first of two shows tonight; the second is tomorrow at 9PM in Porter Hall. They performed Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind (doesn’t too much light make anyone go blind?), a collection of thirty ever-changing plays performed in exactly sixty minutes–yes they have a timer on stage.

This works by providing each member of the audience with a “menu” with a list of the thirty titles, and they string across the stage a clothesline with thirty pieces of paper pinned to it, each with a play number on the front (and the title on the back for their own reference) which they pull down as the audience calls out the order of the pieces.

They are all written by members of the Neo-Futurists, and people seem to have designated plays that they perform thus the playbill is dependent on the present members. TMLMTBGB has been continuously performed for the last nineteen years with two to twelve plays being swapped in and out each week, they tell us.

The pieces range from hilarious to existential and personal to profound. I believe my favorite was “A Green That’s Hard to Describe,” a paint-swatch dance that defines the only two shades of green that are hard to describe are: the sea under a crimson sky and vomit; while recalling issues of sexuality and self-image.

Anyway, if you are in Pittsburgh, go to their show tomorrow, if you are in Chicago they do this thrice weekly (I think) and enjoy having bubblegum thrown at you by someone dancing the entire Madonna Confessions step (while the other members play jenga on stage); learning what the coupon kimono is; defining raisins; and witnessing stereotyped gypsies steal from you.