Is any impression a good impression?

I've been debating writing about an incident that happened last week. I worry about writing something negative about someone who could potentially read what I wrote about them. In this case, I'll just have to hope that either the guy doesn't find my blog or that if he does, he finds some constructive criticism that can help him out. His honesty is refreshing but also a dealbreaker.

Like anyone, I try to hire good people. It's hard to do, though. Some hires don't turn out as well as their resume and interview indicated. Other times, I'm sure I've passed on people who would have been amazing employees because of a typo in their resume.

In this case, I pretty sure I'm doing the right thing by not hiring the guy I talked to last week, in spite of how memorable he was. I really don't see many resumes that are very memorable, like resumes on t-shirts or CDs or with an ice cream coupon attached. There is one guy I remember, because he gave me his resume in a manila folder with his name on the tab. There was nothing special about him or his resume, but I use that folder to hold all the other resumes I get.

So the guy that came in last week (I'll call him Charles), came into my office unannounced when I didn't have any jobs posted and greeted me in Spanish. I returned the greeting, since I speak Spanish. He made a little joke in Spanish and introduced himself. He sounded very fluent, although I could tell it wasn't his native language. He then proceeded to tell me in Spanish that he wanted to switch the conversation to English, and I obliged. I mean, he was the one who started in another language, not me.

Charles then began to tell me about himself. He told me that he was working in another office on campus but that they didn't have money to pay him. He had supposedly created some new invention but couldn't afford to have it patented. So he's looking for a new job to get him through his last year of school. I asked if he wanted to work doing teaching and customer service in our testing center or if he wanted to work as a programmer. He said he'd like to be a programmer but that he didn't know Java, which is what we use in our office.

I told Charles that we had plenty of programmers at the moment but that we might be hiring in the testing center. I asked if he had passed the CIL tests. He hadn't. He claimed he didn't need to, since he had done his general education at another school but that he had taken a few of the tests anyway. He told me that he noticed a bunch of mistakes in our tests, and I wasn't surprised in the least when I checked after he left and found that he'd failed the tests he had taken. It always seems that it's the students who complain the most about how bad the tests are that most often fail them.

Charles proceeded to tell me how he could work in the lab but that it wasn't really something he wanted to do. He was willing to do something that wasn't related to his career goals, just to pay the bills until he's done with school. He's just not motivated to do anything for his other job since they can't pay him, so he just sits in his office and doesn't do anything. Oh, well this is getting better and better. I'm not sure, however, if it's worse than the time one of my former employees told me she was torn between an internship that was directly related to her major and continuing to work for me. It would be good experience at the other job, but she really liked that she didn't have to do anything at her current job. I strongly encouraged her to take the other job.

I decided that I'd probably heard enough, so I asked Charles to email me a copy of his resume and gave him some "we're done here" body language. He continued to lay there, flopped back on the little couch in my office, except to lean forward momentarily and hand me a copy of his resume that he had brought with him. Well, actually, he gave me two copies. One was in Russian and the other in English. I think he was trying to flaunt his language skills, in that he could make a Russian resume, in addition to knowing some Spanish greetings. The two resumes didn't look at all alike but I was worried more about getting Charles out of my office than I was about critiquing his resumes.

I started leaning back and turning to look at my computer like I had something else to do and told him that I'd look over his paperwork and email him if we had something open up. He continued to lean back on the couch and tell me again how he needed something to pay the bills. He then started talking about how he had all these ideas and that he was going to hire all these Indian programmers to implement his ideas and start a bunch of businesses. This went on a little until he finally started to lean forward a little and I quickly stood up and offered him a handshake and a "good to meet you; thanks for stopping by".

After he left, I called a former employee of mine who knows Russian and asked him to stop by for a second on his way home. My OCD about the two resumes looking completely different was on the mark, and we were able to deduce that his Russian resume hadn't been updated for two years. Sure, I don't know what it says, but I know that you gave me a two year old resume. It's not looking good.

I looked over Charles' English resume a little and was aghast at what I saw. He had mismatched fonts, underlined hyperlinks (as if I could click on the piece of paper he gave me), a particular item that he listed under both work experience and volunteer service, and it went three lines onto the second page. As I looked it over, thinking how I would have adjusted the spacing slightly to get everything to fit on one page, it all came together. The most recent job was the part in the different font, so I could tell that it probably used to fit on one page. When he inserted a few lines for his current employment (that didn't pay him anything), that knocked things down a little onto the second page. That all doesn't bode well for someone who, if hired, would be teaching people how to use Microsoft Word.

Charles, if you're reading this, you'll probably make a great cell phone salesman, but don't be surprised when I don't hire you.

Photo by SOCIALisBETTER

Twitter

I recently mentioned in a post about Facebook that I rarely see the benefit of certain Web 2.0 technologies until I actually get in and use them. I've experienced the same thing with Twitter to a certain degree.

I haven't really started following a ton of people. I only have a small handful that I follow and a small handful who follow me. I have created several accounts. One is for work to send updates to our department website. Another one is a personal account, which updates my Facebook status. You'll also see a few of my latest tweets on my blog. It's really no big deal. Except...

The coolest thing that I've been involved with when it comes to Twitter is twhistory.com. The current project is following several people who were involved in the Civil War, leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg in real time over several months' time. I've been tweeting two Confederate soldiers and a Yankee newspaper.

Louis Leon is hilarious. I seriously laugh all the time reading his journal. You can find his journal online or take a look at his Twitter posts. He carries the flag for his regiment and provides such interesting daily insights as to how the soldiers really lived. I find myself pulling for him and his regiment to beat the Yankees, even though I know that's the final result of the war. I hope that's not a spoiler for anyone.

Future potential projects include the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK Assasination, and really anything else that people are interested in. The main thing that will really facilitate this project exploding is software, which we've got someone working on, to allow volunteers to put together the tweets for people and load them into a database so the system can automatically post everything at the appropriate times. I have a hard time keeping up with just three accounts. I don't know how Marion Jensen, the mastermind of the whole thing keeps up with the dozen accounts he's tweeting.

There are two main points that make Twitter such a great platform: the power of the masses and the API. Of course, that's the same for any Web 2.0 application, so it's not a huge surprise. But some of Twitter's detractors are still talking about how much of a time waster it is without paying attention to the power that Twitter holds. Hopefully the team that runs Twitter will be able to figure out how to make Twitter sustainable, since they're running on venture capital now. When they accomplish that, some of the limits they have had to put on the number of API calls that can be made for performance reasons should go away.

Assuming the API issues will go away and the timed tweet application ends up being as sweet as I hope it will be, piles of twhistory volunteers will really be able to put together some awesome projects.

As cool as this project is turning out to be, hopefully others in the Twitter community can come up with even more applications of the Twitter platform.

Facebook

I gave in and joined Facebook a few months ago. As with most other social networking tools, I had been avoiding it. It seems that with most new technologies, once I get in and learn how it works, I wonder how I ever lived without it (blogging being the prime example of this). I am glad I never joined MySpace, but while I appreciate some things about Facebook and generally support it, I do have a few issues with it. I don't know if I could say that it's something I couldn't live without.

To start off my experiment, when I joined, I decided I wouldn't invite anyone to be my friend. Now, I actually did invite two people, but these were people who had previously invited me before I joined, so in effect I was just accepting their previous invitations. I'm not 100% sure how the friend recommender works, but I may have also invited someone to be my friend after an existing friend recommended them to me. What I've ended up with, after little or no inviting of my own, is a mass of family members, employees, former coworkers, former roommates, high school friends, a high school barely acquaintance, PhD classmates, professors, old neighbors, junior high friends, people I've served in Scouting with, and people that go to the same church as I do.

There are people from almost every phase of my life all lumped together, and that's where it starts getting strange. I've ignored a few people whose updates I don't care to see. I've deleted a comment or two of people who don't think before they post on something I've shared. But for the most part, all these people who have never met each other and have no connection other than at some point they met me, are having this mass, public, unfettered conversation with me and showing each other pictures they have of me from a long time ago. I don't necessarily have anything to hide, but in real life I'm not going to invite a couple of my employees over to my house to hang out with me and a couple people I knew when I lived in New Jersey 20 years ago, yet that's what's virtually happening. I'd like to see some of my friends from New Jersey again. I'd have nothing against having a barbecue for my employees at my house (we'll see if any of them are reading this and take me up on it). I just wouldn't do them both at the same time. There's something strange about it.

A possible way to work around this would be to allow the user to put their friends in different groups so only people within the same group can see each other's conversations. I don't know, but there has to be a better way.

The thing I do like about Facebook is the open platform that it is. It can be extended to be anything you want it to be. The groups are obvious, as a way to communicate with large numbers of people quickly without having to be their friends. The applications are where it really gets good. Well, the potential is there anyway. I don't feel a need to fill out every 'what X are you?' quiz out there, and Mafia Wars appears to be a colossal waste of time (not as much as World of Warcraft of course). It's just this limitless platform that anyone can write a program for and throw it out to the world to share. We've obviously had that open platform for awhile called the internet, but now the social component is automated.

I asked some students in one of the classes I teach what they would think of having a Facebook group for our class. At first they thought it would be kind of weird but then admitted they would keep up on what was happening in the class better, since they would be in there all the time. However, when I asked some of the non-traditional students (read older, less tech-savvy) in another class of mine, they basically replied that there would be no way they would set up a Facebook account, even if that was where we were 'holding' class. CourseFeed is one app that has potential in this area. I need to set it up and try it out.

So I have mixed feelings when it comes to Facebook. It makes sense. I can see the good in it. Like anything else in life, there's waste in it. I look forward to seeing if some killer app shows up for it. Perhaps the next UI redesign will be much more successful than the last one and it will actually become easier for more people to use instead of more difficult so they can reach a new audience. Right now, I'm just watching and waiting.

KFC

KFC management apparently has worse powers of prediction than Jim Cramer.

Let's look at this for a moment. They offered coupons for free meals over a two week period with their new product, grilled chicken. Anyone ought to be able to see where this is going to end up. It gets picked up by Oprah and thousands of bloggers and twitterers, who slam their website so hard that it can't keep up with all the traffic.

The funniest part of the whole thing, I thought, was the website where the coupons were posted. It was unthinkfc.com. What happens if you split that out? You get Unthin KFC. Ooh, not exactly the point they were trying to get across by touting grilled chicken instead of fried. I should mention that unthinkkfc.com also worked, but the link from Oprah's page was to the unthin URL.

I assume they figured that by limiting the coupon to print four times on a computer, that people would only print a small number of coupons. I'm sure not everyone has access to a computer lab with 35 computers in it like I do (you do the math to figure out how many coupons my employees printed), but most people have access to a computer at home, one at work, plus a laptop, and maybe grandma's house. It adds up quickly.

So we go last night and get several free meals for our family and take it to a great U8 soccer game. Overall, it was a good experience. The wait was terrible, though. There was a line snaking through the whole restaurant, and when you got to the front you realized why. Even if the people scooping up the mashed potatoes were fast (which they were not), they had a hard time keeping the chicken stocked. One of my employees was a few people behind us in line. He and his wife got two meals inside and two through the drive-through. They ran out of grilled chicken and offered to let them take Original Recipe chicken instead. Really? Is that a good idea? People show up to try your new grilled chicken and you give them the fried stuff instead? So much for the whole point of the promotion, which was to try the new product.

I did actually get grilled chicken last night, but when we went for lunch today, they were out again, and they gave me Original Recipe. As good as the grilled chicken was, the fried chicken was still better. The biggest problem with the grilled chicken, I think, is that they leave the skin on. Why not cut it off and save that many more calories?

The other problem was one of sides. I don't know if other stores did the same thing, but where we went, they only allowed you to get mashed potatoes and cole slaw, even though the coupon infers that you can get any two sides you want. I suppose it's more efficient and probably cheaper to give everyone the same thing, but really, I heard a lot of people ask for something other than cole slaw only to be turned down. I guarantee a lot of cole slaw and the styrofoam bowls it comes in ended up just being tossed in the garbage. Part of the problem likely comes from the manager of the store not finding out about the coupons until just a couple days before the great giveaway was to start and being able to have enough of everything on hand to handle the increased traffic.

So today, three days into the two week giveaway, KFC announced that they will temporarily stop honoring the coupons, since they have been inundated with people taking them up on their offer. Are you that surprised, KFC? Did you really not see that coming? So now, customers have to take their coupons into the store, get an extra form from the manager, which they mail in to KFC, who will mail back rain checks with staggered dates they can be used, in order to spread out the demand a bit. At least to make up for the extra effort, they are throwing in a drink with the rain check.

So thumbs up for going with the free offer that really is actually free, but thumbs down to whoever didn't predict this would be this huge. Seriously, how can they be surprised?

On a side note, what's with the fake "Buttery Spread" and "Honey Sauce" for the biscuits? We're supposed to unthink what we thought about KFC when you give out sauce that is 89% corn syrup and 11% honey instead of just pure honey?

Collaborative Filtering and Web 2.0 Technologies

Filtering Methods

Collaborative filtering systems connect a person's needs with content based on ratings by others with similar interests and needs. Depending on the system, filtering may be based on human or machine analysis of content or a hybrid approach (Herlocker, Konstan, & Riedl, 2000). An example of the hybrid approach is Google Images, which uses a machine analysis of file names and text content in the page around images in combination with its Image Labeler. The Image Labeler is a game of sorts where users accumulate points for matching key words with a randomly selected partner, with more points awarded for providing more specific terms. The two sets of data are combined and then used in searching (Google, 2009).

Doctorow (2001) claims that observational metadata by a machine is more reliable than that created by humans, listing several obstacles to dependable human-created metadata including people's inability to fully report their own behavior and the ambiguities and non-neutral nature of many measurement and reporting techniques. Avery & Zeckhauser (1997) suggest that some incentive to evaluate content is necessary to avoid issues where the majority of users wait for others to evaluate content for them.

Some of the problems with the lack of human-created metadata may be due to the types of tools available to catalog resources. As I've mentioned before, the complex metadata standards like LOM were designed by engineers and just take too much time to implement; however, with the advent of many Web 2.0 tools there is an abundance of tagged resources and RSS feeds that easily work together. However, an abundance of tags does not necessarily solve problems without causing new ones. Tagging with a common or ambiguous word may cause unrelated content to be displayed together, and spammers may mark their garbage such that it displays alongside legitimate content (Walker, 2005). A closed community might help keep these ambiguities under control, but restrictions would likely lead to lower participation.

Communities

Communities use social interaction to combine existing knowledge with new knowledge to meet their needs. One piece of content may mean different things, based on the context in which it is used (Burnett, Dickey, Kazmer, & Chudoba, 2003). The question is how to make open tools like Del.icio.us, Twitter, and Flickr work to facilitate individual communities without blending them all together or limiting access. It may be ideal to build or expand collaborative filtering capabilities that work in conjunction with manual tagging and machine analysis of content. In order to be successful, such a collaborative filter should filter out irrelevant information and provide a means for community members to access relevant information at the appropriate time, based on the behavior of others in the community (Walker, 2002).

De Souza & Preece (2004) point out two components by which an online community can be assessed: sociability and usability. The sociability component applies to any community, whether online or offline and includes the people, purposes, and policies involved. The usability component focuses on the technical and HCI issues of the software used. In their framework, these two components have to be aligned to produce success. Web 2.0 tools do well in terms of usability, based on the large numbers of people blogging, tagging, editing wikis, and otherwise collaborating. In terms of sociability, there is still work to do. It is easy to set up whitelists of content producers or tags once you know about them, but finding that content to begin with is difficult to do.

Web 2.0 Technologies

Walker (2005) lists Flickr tags that are related to the tag "bush" including: protest, election, politics, kerry, president, graffiti, snow, war, vote, iraq, tree, winter, cameraphone, cheney, and antibush. These associations among terms are then described as "sheep paths in the mountains" that have just formed over time, with no systematic approach. Over the past few years, clusters and pools of related content have made it a little easier to find what one is looking for. Now when searching for that same term, instead of just listing a few related tags, Flickr will prompt the user to see the clusters of related tags such as bush/green/nature/tree or bush/protest/war/iraq. These clusters help bring the sociability level of Flickr up towards its usability level which has been high for awhile now, however they are still based on manual tagging of content.

So one tool has begun to work on becoming a little bit more community-friendly, but how are the rest doing? Digg does well at quickly floating news stories in and out of the spotlight, based on their popularity within certain categories, but it is done by manual voting and categorization. Youtube videos can be associated with channels, contests, groups, categories, and tags, in addition to being rated by viewers. Videos can also be prioritized based on the number of overall views, but not by views of those similar to the user, which would be ideal. Wikipedia allows users to collaborate on documents and hold behind-the-page discussions before doing so, but in order to find a page that might be interesting to the user, a text-based search engine is used. Wordpress and Blogspot seem to follow the same pattern as these other popular tools, using RSS and tagging and linking, but not following a truly dynamic model that builds rules based on behavior and interests rather than cataloging by humans. Much of the human-generated data is good data, but it is simply not enough to narrow down the results by removing false positives. Combining with observational data and machine-generated contextual data will help triangulate the most accurate results for each individual user. Twitter and third party tools built on its API may be the closest to success with its ability to bring together both spontaneous and organized groups of people in real time for any given event.

Good Examples

For an example of non Web 2.0 collaborative filtering, we can look to TiVo (Ali & van Stam, 2004). TiVo still depends on users give shows they watch a thumbs up or thumbs down rating, but it has a few additional features most current Web 2.0 tools do not. It recommends shows the user might like, based on other shows they have watched and rated using correlated pairs of shows. It can also predict a "thumbs level" for unrated shows based on other characteristics.

For another example, Google tracks the searches and site visits of users that are logged into Google while they surf. Users can view statistics on their surfing habits and receive recommendations from Google for searches, web pages, videos, and gadgets the user might like based on the user's searches.

What's Next?

So if Google and TiVo can utilize a combination of factors to pinpoint content that would be appropriate for a user's general searching or entertainment needs, how do we harness those algorithms to extend the widely available Web 2.0 tools so they are more effective in the classroom or in business environments? Setting up a closed system is an option, but as mentioned above, a more open system should encourage more participation. With several of the tools such as wikis and blogs designed for teamwork and collaboration, it seems that the most useful collaborative filters would be those that perform well with newly created, unrated content that is identified by RSS feeds and then quickly react to the actions of users.

I'm not really sure how all these pieces ultimately fit together, but I am interested in further study on the topic. As I have been reading about virtual communities and open content lately and using several of these Web 2.0 tools for various projects, I am drawn to the power that is given to the masses to create content and influence politics, education, and many more aspects of our lives that were not open before. Traditional newspapers have new competition. There are free alternatives to the content traditionally provided by textbook publishers.

With my background in business, I believe that a reasonable amount of competition can be a very good thing. Enabling teams to more efficiently communicate with each other prevents duplication of effort and miscommunications within the group, as well as allowing the group to meet synchronously or asynchronously as schedules allow. Collaborative filtering seems to be an important next step in enabling virtual communities to better utilize the resources currently available to them. The tools for generating new content within a well-known context seem to be well developed, but an essential component of successful teamwork is better organization and dissemination of content and culture that already exist in order to maintain order when certain dynamics of the group change.


REFERENCES

Ali, K., & van Stam, W. (2004) TiVo: Making show recommendations using a distributed collaborative filtering architecture. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data mining.

Avery, C. & Zeckhauser, R. (1997). Recommender systems for evaluating computer messages. Communications of the ACM, 40(3).

Burnett, G., Dickey, M.H., Kazmer, M.M. & Chudoba, K.M. (2003) Inscription and interpretation of text: A cultural hermeneutic examination of virtual community. Information Research, 9(4).

de Souza, C. S., & Preece, J. (2004). A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities. Interacting with Computers, 16(3), 579-610.

Doctorow, C. (2001) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. Retrieved from http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm.

Google (2009). Google Image Labeler. Retrieved from http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/.

Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., & Riedl, J. (2000). Explaining collaborative filtering recommendations. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Walker, A. (2002). An educational recommender system: New territory for collaborative filtering (Doctoral Dissertation, Utah State University).

Walker, J. (2005). Feral hypertext: When hypertext literature escapes control. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 46-53.

Wilt Thou Pass or Flunk?

And it came to pass, early in the morning of the last day of the semester, there arose a multitude smiting their books and wailing. And there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, for the day of judgment was at hand and they were sore afraid. For they had left undone those things which they ought to have done, and there was no help for them.

And there were many abiding in their rooms, who had kept watch over their books all night, but it naught availeth. But some there were who arose peacefully, for they had prepared for themselves the way, and made straight the path of knowledge. And those wise ones were known to some as the burners of the midnight oil, but by others they were called curve-spoilers.

And the multitudes arose, and ate a hearty breakfast, and they came to the appointed place, and their hearts were heavy within them. And they had come to pass, though not all would.

And some of them repented of their riotous living and bemoaned their fate, but they had not a prayer. And as the final hour approached there came among them one known as the professor, he of the diabolical smile, and passed paper among them, and went upon his way.

And many and varied were the answers which were given, for some of his teachings had fallen among the fallows. Many who had not a prayer in their hearts had nothing but BS to offer up in hopes of pacifying this professor.

And when they had finished, they gathered up their belongings, and went away quietly, each in his own direction, vowing to themselves in this manner, "I shall not pass this way again. It is a long road that has no turning."

Funny?

Am I the only one who thinks this sign is funny?

Huge Ratios

I work in one of the nicest buildings on campus, so I often see campus tours of future students and their families come through. Student-teacher ratio is a big thing to a lot of people, so it always surprises me when I see the ambassadors (tour guides) showing off the 500-seat auditorium. Shouldn't they avoid that room?

Second Grade Economy

I was talking with two second graders on the way to school this morning. One mentioned a few people he knows that have to work two jobs, and the following exchange took place:

Me: It's just a hard time for people right now.

D: It started right when Barack Obama became president. It must have been something he did.

A: Maybe Obama will make the bosses of companies pay less so they'll have more money to pay their employees.

Obviously the economy didn't start going down right when Obama came into office like D said. I wonder where kids get that stuff, though. Is it like a game of Operator, with news agencies not quite reporting everything properly, then parents not quite understanding what is reported on the news (or maybe they listen to Rush), then the kids don't quite understand what their parents say, and then other kids at recess don't quite understand what the other kids say, and then one of them talking to me blames the entire recession on Obama?

If only the fix could be as elegantly simple as proposed by A. Just lower taxes so everyone will have more. In theory it's a great idea. The problem is that the bigger government gets, the more we depend on it. Private enterprises can't compete with government subsidized programs, so they fail. Then when tax revenues dip, the government programs fail. So do we raise taxes to prop up government programs and further reduce the amount available for private spending? The opposite effect, at least in the short term, of lowering taxes means government programs will be cut, and although that leaves people with more of their own money, it takes time for private enterprises to grow back, and the poor who rely on government programs while not paying any taxes themselves simply see a cut in services with no more money to make up the difference.

There are no easy answers.

Feel the Chemistry

My office is in the same building as the Chemistry Department. It's in a renovated portion of a storage room in the basement, but it's nicely done, so it's not as bad as it sounds besides the poor cell phone reception.

In the classroom right next to my office, Chemistry holds weekly departmental seminars, where they bring in experts from around the world to hold lectures. The following are some of the exciting topics recently:

• Tuning Photophysical Properties with ancillary Ligands in Ru(II) Mono-Diimine Complexes
  
  
• Meso-Tetraarylporphyrins - Synthesis of, Selective Derivatization, and Possibilities of Application
  
  
• Catalytic and Regulatory Mechanisms of Tyrosine Hydroxylase
  
  ...and everyone's favorite...
  
  
• Nanomolecular Architectures: The Application of Crystal Engineering to Metallodendritic Assembly

Mixed in with all these loquaciously incomprehensible seminar sessions is this presentation coming up in a couple weeks:

• How To Make Your Students Hate You Less If Not Necessarily Love You More

I might just attend that session instead of only eating their treats and going back to my office.