Scarlet Hamster

Using Skype for long-distance romance

2011-01-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Really great article in today's paper about college students sustaining romantic relationships with video chat and technology. The implication is that the Turkey Drop (dumping boyfriend during Thanksgiving break at home) is no more with all this connectivity to keep the love alive while apart. That may be true, but I also suspect that the technology keeps some relationships on life support much longer than they should.

"Generations of high school sweethearts have stayed together into college, but the connection tends to unravel amid the charms of a new campus, often during the rite known as the Thanksgiving Break-up, or Turkey Drop.

"That tradition — and college dating over all — is being tweaked, thanks to today’s ability to communicate easily and variously across the miles. Relationships begun in high school and over summer vacations are continuing. Studying abroad isn’t a deal-breaker. As long as they can Skype, text, send a BlackBerry message, post on Facebook and call at will, distance is no obstacle to love, or to long-distance sexual play. "

A L♥ng-Distance Affair, NYTimes, 1/7/11, link via JOE.

Cute, Therapy Robots

2009-08-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

They've come up with cute therapeutic robots, one that looks like a baby seal and another that looks like a yellow chickie. The seal recharges with a pacifier in its mouth!

The yellow robot is controlled by researchers and can record video and sound, useful for the treatment of autistic children. I'm not quite sure of the unique purpose for the seal though. It was designed for use with dementia patients and is sensitive to sensory stimuli. But could its function not be filled more cheaply with a cat?

IEEE Spectrum: The Invasion of Cute, Therapeutic Robots

Baby coat dress being blocked

2009-08-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased with how the sweater blocked out. It's not quite dry yet so I haven't flipped the cuffs yet, but it should be quite nice. Luckily, I had four matching buttons, which I sewed on with red thread.

Peanut butter jar camping lamp

2009-08-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

I made this lamp based on instructions from Made by Cynthia Rae. I had all the materials and tools hanging around aside from the battery-operated candle light. Since peanut butter jars are rather difficult to come by, I've been experimenting with other containers. Plastic is key because broken glass is no fun. I got a square salsa jar that might work. hmm...

Baby coat dress

2009-07-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

I've made great progress on my baby coat dress. The alpaca is a beautiful pruney color. It's sheddy as alpaca is wont to be, but I think the softness and color make up for that. I need to sew on the arms and buttons and then wash and block the thing.

P.S. I decided to move all my blogs over to free blogspot hosting. So I have layers of broken links everywhere. bear with me please.

More goofing around

2009-07-27T00:49:00.000-07:00

As a good recessionista, I have decided to give up official web hosting and domain names. Blogspot serves my purposes, and it sure is easier to use the canned templates than for me to dredge up some HTML from the dark corners of my memory. Hence this new domain name.

I've also started a side blog about statistics for user experience researchers. I've had a few requests for information and resources about stats and short of actually creating a Stats 101 course, I thought a blog of whatever comes to mind might be fun and useful. "Fun" in the geek sense of the word of course, but I hope the site will be at least helpful.

Let's use this blog for good

2009-04-24T23:48:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been feeling a strong urge to return to activities that I love but haven't been doing enough of for whatever lame reason. These things include writing, pondering, traveling, knitting, beading, yoga-ing, hiking, and smelling the roses (literal and metaphorical).

As part of this exploration of My Favorite Things, I'm going to blog more. A researcher I met at CHI suggested I blog as a way to get back to thinking about topics I care about. I think that's a fine idea, and I'll be experimenting in this blog for the next few weeks.

And now on to today's topics.

Topic #1 Storytelling

This week was the STC Puget Sound meeting with Mary R. Wise presenting on the "Power of a Story." Her biography says she works at Fannie Mae, is a past STC president, and was previously a circus clown. It has been a long time since I last went to an STC meeting, but storytelling by a circus clown-turned-instructional designer was too intriguing to pass up. The talk turned out to be a pitch for stories rather than a how-to. We heard about how stories are everywhere in our lives, and they are already structuring our experiences. These stories could be used to make our writing grab the reader's attention. Mary played an interview clip of her and her mom for StoryCorps that was very touching and made me tear up. [Side note: If your parents or grandparents have stories that you'd like to hear or have your children hear, please take the time to tape record them. They will be wonderful memories.]

I've lately been exploring storytelling as a way to structure user experiences. For example, many, if not all, products could benefit from a story that tells the user (protagonist) how s/he should be interacting with the product features (characters and scenery). Much of my thinking has been informed by Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre, a great book about crafting dramatic actions for the user in the interface. Since then, I've learned of design techniques that envision the user as a hero in a story or set users on a trajectory (more on that in another post). Don Norman has also been writing on sociable design which considers technology in a group setting, not just from the perspective of a single user. My interpretation of sociable design is to think of it as considering the story or ecology of an interaction. Great design accounts for everybody in and around the computer.

Topic #2 The Seattle HCI community

And also this week, I attended the Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting with Jacob Burghardt presenting on "Mapping targeted opportunities to improve user experiences in knowledge work." His slides are available to look at. I ran into some old acquaintances at the meeting, and I was struck once again by how much I like the small HCI community in town. While I was at CHI, someone told me he didn't like how clique-y the community can be. I prefer to think of it as tight-knit but with many opportunities for newcomers to knit themselves in. One of my instructors told me something about the tech writing community that I think applies to HCI/UX in general: it is a small but penetrable community.

HOOT!

2009-03-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

Isn't my owl sweater so cute? I'm making a second one now in green. You too can make your own owl sweater!

Naeng Myun

2009-02-18T00:32:00.000-08:00

Yummy cold Korean soup noodles. Side dishes of kimchi, pickled ginger, and fried mushrooms. My first from-scratch attempt at this dish

Knit frenzy!

2009-02-08T23:45:00.000-08:00

I finished the Ripple Scarf a while ago. It is lovely and soft and just a tiny bit sheddy because of the alpaca. I am tempted to make another lacy scarf or smoke ring soon with qiviut (muskox down). But I am not sure I need to fork over $90 for a skein at this moment.

Today I finished the baby sweater. The model of this sweater is not the designated recipient of this sweater, but I think he has soulful eyes. This was a pattern from Elizabeth Zimmerman's A Knitter's Almanac. It is an easy lacy pattern with only two sleeve seams to deal with. I tried to make a nice neat edge by slipping the beginning of each row, but it got wonky with the stripes. But the chain stitch edging covers up any weirdness. The buttons were thrift store finds, so only two of them match.

Here's what the sweater looks like flat. (The bear has poor posture, and it is hard to see all the details.)

Revolution via Facebook in Egypt

2009-01-23T15:32:00.000-08:00

In response to the military action in Gaza, several Egyptians have been using Facebook for their social activism.

As the street protests went on, young Egyptians also were mobilizing and venting their anger over Gaza on what would, until recently, have seemed an unlikely venue: Facebook, the social-networking site. In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members. This month, hundreds of Egyptian Facebook members, in private homes and at Internet cafes, have set up Gaza-related “groups.” Most expressed hatred for Israel and the United States, but each one had its own focus. Some sought to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza, some criticized the Egyptian government, some criticized other Arab countries for blaming Egypt for the conflict and still others railed against Hamas. When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas and lamented the recent shooting of two Egyptian border guards, which had been attributed to Hamas fire. Another group implored God to “destroy and burn the hearts of the Zionists.” Some Egyptian Facebook users had joined all three groups.

Revolution, Facebook-Style, NYTimes.com

Cooking (A Soliloquy)

2009-01-18T23:04:00.000-08:00

I feel exhilarated from today's cooking efforts. I had a strong urge to cook, so I made:

Madhur Jaffrey's Chinese-style egg flower soup. This recipe is an old favorite of mine.
Also her "Delicious Stock" recipe with dried black mushrooms, carrot, lettuce, and bean sprouts. I anticipate making nyaeng myun with it.
Mulled red wine. Last time I used merlot, pomegranate juice, dried cherries, sliced satsuma, sugar, and mulling spices. This time I used cabernet sauvignon, orange juice, sliced satsuma, sugar, and a more orangey mix of mulling spices. This version is less tart.
Kimchi mandu filling. I used firm tofu, mild kimchi, some oyster mushroom, enoki mushroom, green onion, garlic, salt, pepper, sesame oil, and raw egg. I plan to stuff my dumplings tomorrow. I didn't have the energy to do it today.

I looked at a Vietnamese cookbook today. "Banh chung" is a special dish for Tet (Lunar New Year), just around the corner. It is basically a rice and meat "cake": a layer of rice, a layer of mung beans, a layer of pork, a layer of mung beans, and a layer of rice. The whole thing is parceled up in a rectangle--traditionally in banana leaves--but in this modern cookbook, foil and cling wrap. The packet is then simmered in a pot of water for 4 hours. The last step seems really intriguing to me: what is happening in that packet as it is being simmered? The ingredients are already cooked before they are assembled... do they get even more delicious?

Texting during US Airways Flight 1549 crash

2009-01-17T22:02:00.000-08:00

"I thought, 'OK, I’m not going to see my husband and three children again. And I just want them to know at this point, they were the No. 1 thought in my mind,'" she said. She sent them a text message: "My plane is crashing." There was no time for the final three words she wanted to include: "I love you."

At least two people texted to their loved ones before the plane landed in the Hudson River. Twittering and Flickring of witness reports happened as well.

PLANE SPASHDOWN: OMG!: Text messaging an important part of response

Ripple Scarf

2009-01-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

I started working on a scarf during the holidays with some stashed Classic Elite Inca Alpaca. As part of the new money-saving economy, I am going to dig through my extensive stash for my projects. I gave away a big paper bag of yarn for some homeless knitting ventures and still have a ton left.

This particular pattern is from Jean Moss' Couture Knits. I forget the name of the pattern (some lady's name), but I am calling it "Ripple Scarf" because of the dropped yarn over stitches.

Free knitting patterns

2009-01-13T21:09:00.000-08:00

I wrote these patterns to help me remember my designs. You are welcome to them for your personal use. All patterns are copyright Carolyn Wei, all rights reserved, for non-commercial use. Thanks and enjoy!

Wrist Warmers - Flashdance version

Wrist Warmers - short version

Wrist Warmers pattern - short version

2009-01-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

On the left: wrist warmers as described in pattern below.
On the right: all ribbed version of the wrist warmers.

Nashua Handknits Painted Forest version of this pattern.

After making the "Flashdance" version of the wrist warmers, I decided they were too loose for wearing while doing active stuff. I designed these shorter, tighter wrist warmers to accommodate more active behaviors such as knitting or wrapping presents. This pattern is for Lamb's Pride Bulky, but it can be modified for other yarns such as the Nashua Handknits Painted Forest. I also changed the pattern to make an all ribbed version. Completed December 2005.

Yarn Brand: Lamb's Pride Bulky in M-181 Prairie Fire (85% wool, 15% mohair)

Quantity: 1 skein. 2 skeins will yield 3 pairs of wrist warmers.

Needles: Size 8 double-pointed needles

Gauge: 14 st = 4" stocking stitch

Finished Dimensions: 3.5" across wrist, 8" long.

Pattern

Cast on 28 stitches. Divide evenly over three dpns.

Knit ribbed cuff:
Rounds 1-15: *k3, p1, repeat from *. The piece is now about 3" long.
Round 16: Knit.
Start decreasing for the wrist.
Round 17: k1, k2tog, k until last three stitches, ssk, k1. 26 stitches remain.
Rounds 18: Knit.
Repeat Rounds 17-18. 24 stitches remain.
Round 21-23: Knit.

Start increasing for width of the hand:
Round 24: k1, m1, k until last stitch, m1, k1. 26 stitches.
Rounds 25: Knit.
Repeat Rounds 24-25 one more time. 28 stitches. The piece is now about 5" long.

Now divide for thumb hole. Turn work, and knitting flat (i.e., do not knit in rounds for the next few rows).
First row: Purl.
Second row: Knit.
Repeat these two rows twice more or until the thumb hole is about 2" long. Now rejoin into rounds.

Knit 6 rounds, or until there is about 1" above the thumb hole. Cast off.
Make two wrist warmers.

Wrist Warmers pattern - Flashdance version

2009-01-13T20:59:00.000-08:00

A nice, thick wrist warmer. This is good for working at the computer or for reading. This wrist warmer is rather loose but comfy so it's good for not so active behavior. I call it "Flashdance" because it fits a little like a legwarmer. Completed December 2005.

Yarn Brand: Nashua Handknits Painted Forest in 208 Embers

Quantity: 2 skeins. Each skein is 50 grams, 55 yds.

Needles: Size 8 double-pointed needles

Gauge: 13.5 st = 4" stocking stitch

Finished Dimensions: 4" across wrist, 10" long.

Pattern

Cast on 28 stitches. Divide evenly over three dpns.

Knit ribbed cuff:
Rounds 1-16: *k3, p1, repeat from *. The piece is now about 3" long.
Round 17: Knit.
Start decreasing for the wrist.
Round 18: k1, k2tog, k until last three stitches, ssk, k1. 26 stitches remain.
Rounds 19-21: Knit.
Repeat Rounds 18-21. 24 stitches remain.

Start increasing for width of the hand:
Round 26: k1, m1, k until last stitch, m1, k1. 26 stitches.
Rounds 27-29: Knit.
Repeat Rounds 26-29 one more time, and then repeat Round 26 one more time. 30 stitches.
Round 38: Knit. The piece is now about 7" long.

Now divide for thumb hole. Turn work, and knitting flat (i.e., do not knit in rounds for the next few rows).
First row: Purl.
Second row: Knit.
Repeat these two rows once more. The thumb hole is about 1.25" long. Now rejoin into rounds.

Knit two rounds.
Next round: k1, k2tog, k until last three stitches, ssk, k1. 28 stitches remain
Next round: Knit.
Repeat these two rounds once more. 26 stitches. Cast off.

Make two wrist warmers.

Twist hat pattern

2009-01-13T20:55:00.000-08:00

This hat I made up. It was an experiment, the result of trying to do a hat in Bavarian Twisted Stitch. The diamond pattern and the divider knits/purls are made of twisted knit stitches. The spiral rib is a flat knit. I would knit this next time in a worsted weight yarn to get in some more diamond repeats. This is a very loose fitting hat. Completed May 2005.

Yarn Brand: Rowan Cork 035 Plush (95% merino, 5% nylon)

Quantity: 2 skeins. Each skein is 50 grams, approx. 120 yds.

Needles: Size 10.5 circular needles.

Gauge: 15 st = 4" stocking stitch

Finished Dimensions: 20" around the brim, and 8.5" tall with brim folded up.

Pattern

The diamond and spiral rib patterns were modified from Nicky Epstein's Knitted Embellishments. I have modified them to be knit in the round and also corrected some typos in the diamond pattern.

1 X 1 Woven Diamond Pattern converted for the round knit over 14 stitches

Rounds 1, 3, 5: [p1, k1b] 2 times, p2, k2tog then before taking the stitch off the left needle, knit the first st again through back loop, p2, [k1b, p1] 2 times
Rounds 2, 4, 6, 18: K1b the knits, p1 the purls
Round 7: p1, k1b, p1, [1/1LCP, 1/1RCP] 2 times, p1, k1b, p1
Round 8: p1, k1b, p2, [1/1LC, p2] 2 times, k1b, p1
Rounds 9 and 13: p1, [1/1LCP, 1/1RCP] 3 times, p1
Rounds 10 and 14: [p2, 1/1RC] 3 times, p2
Rounds 11 and 15: p1, [1/1RCP, 1/1LCP] 3 times, p1
Rounds 12 and 16: p1, k1b, [p2, 1/1LC] 2 times, p2, k1b, p1
Round 17: p1, k1b, p1, [1/1RCP, 1/1LCP] 2 times, p1, k1b, p1
where LC = left cross (left leaning twisted knit over right leaning twisted knit), LCP = left cross over purl (left leaning twisted knit over right leaning purl), RC = right cross (right leaning twisted knit over left leaning twisted knit), RCP = right cross over purl (right leaning twisted knit over left leaning purl)

Spiral Rib panel converted for the round knit over 14 stitches.

Round 1: [k1b, p1] 2 times, [k2tog then before taking the stitch off the left needle knit the first st again] 3 times, [p1, k1b] 2 times
Rounds 2, 4: [k1b, p1] 2 times, k6, [p1, k1b] 2 times
Round 3: [k1b, p1] 2 times, k1, [k2tog then before taking the stitch off the left needle knit the first st again] 2 times, k1, [p1, k1b] 2 times

CO 84 st and join together into a round. Use a ring to mark the start of the round. Now *p2, k1b, repeat from *. Repeat this round about 10 times or until work is about 2" long. Knit 1 round -- this creates the crease for the brim fold.

Now work the diamond and spiral rib patterns. Alternate diamond and spiral rib so you knit three of each. Use rings to mark off each pattern. Knit equivalent to two diamond repeats or about 6".

Now start decreasing 1 stitch at the end of each diamond/spiral rib pattern panel while continuing the pattern stitches. (I chose not to do the diamonds anymore at this point and just repeated the diamond's rounds 1 & 2.) Decrease these 6 stitches every other round. When 42 stitches remain on the needle, decrease these 6 stitches every round until 6 stitches remain. Cut yarn short and then run the end of the yarn through the 6 remaining stitches. Tuck in loose threads. Block hat.

You can alter this pattern by knitting with smaller needles for a tighter fit. You can also experiment with different lengths before you start the decreases.

Hat schematic: A = brim, B = main body pattern, C = decreasing patterns

Laptop case pattern

2009-01-13T20:51:00.000-08:00

A laptop case of my own design. It looks a bit like a pillow. Completed February 2003. Update: As of January 13, 2009, I am still using this laptop case and get compliments on it. I had to mend a hole in the corner which may have been a moth bite or wear.

Yarn Brand: Lion Brand Yarn Fisherman's Wool
Quantity: 1 skein
Needles: Size 6 circular needles
Gauge: 5 st = 1" over stocking stitch. 14 st = 2" over woven diamond
Finished Dimensions: about 25" circumference and 10.75" high.

Pattern

The diamond pattern was modified from Nicky Epstein's Knitted Embellishments. I have modified it to be knit in the round and also corrected some typos.

1 X 1 Woven Diamond Pattern converted for the round knit over 14 stitches

Rounds 1, 3, 5: [p1, k1b] 2 times, p2, k2tog then before taking the stitch off the left needle, knit the first st again through back loop, p2, [k1b, p1] 2 times
Rounds 2, 4, 6, 18: K1b the knits, p1 the purls
Round 7: p1, k1b, p1, [1/1LCP, 1/1RCP] 2 times, p1, k1b, p1
Round 8: p1, k1b, p2, [1/1LC, p2] 2 times, k1b, p1
Rounds 9 and 13: p1, [1/1LCP, 1/1RCP] 3 times, p1
Rounds 10 and 14: [p2, 1/1RC] 3 times, p2
Rounds 11 and 15: p1, [1/1RCP, 1/1LCP] 3 times, p1
Rounds 12 and 16: p1, k1b, [p2, 1/1LC] 2 times, p2, k1b, p1
Round 17: p1, k1b, p1, [1/1RCP, 1/1LCP] 2 times, p1, k1b, p1
where LC = left cross (left leaning twisted knit over right leaning twisted knit), LCP = left cross over purl (left leaning twisted knit over right leaning purl), RC = right cross (right leaning twisted knit over left leaning twisted knit), RCP = right cross over purl (right leaning twisted knit over left leaning purl)

CO 135 stitches and join together into a round. Use a ring to mark the start of the round. Now knit one round. Knit remaining rounds like so: k5, p1, [k5, round 1 of diamond pattern] 3 times, [k5, p1] 12 times. Repeat this round until the laptop case reaches the desired length minus 0.5". Now knit the border: *k2, p1, repeat from * until the case reaches the desired length. Close off the bottom seam with a crochet chain. Tuck in loose ends.

You can alter this pattern depending on the size of your laptop. Measure the circumference of your laptop and calculate against your gauge. You may need to add or decrease a rib or two. You may also need to adjust the width of your ribs (perhaps reducing to 4 X 1 or 3 X 1) to get a snug fit.

Fingerless Mittens pattern

2009-01-13T20:45:00.000-08:00

They are handy to wear in moderately cold weather because they allow you to dig around in your purse for keys or bus pass without having to remove your gloves. You can even dial on the mobile phone while wearing them! The Tencel Wool is very soft and warm. Completed February 2003.

Yarn Brand: Cleckheaton's Tencel Wool in light blue

Quantity: 2 skeins (2 skeins are just enough for fingerless mittens. A third skein would be needed if whole mittens or gloves were wanted.)

Needles: Size 8 double-pointed needles

Gauge: 4.5 st = 1" over stocking stitch

Finished Dimensions: about 7.75" long.

Pattern

My own design. Hold two strands of wool together throughout. Fits small ladies hands, particularly small wrists. To accommodate larger wrists, cast on 32 stitches and omit the increases. For larger wrists and larger hands, cast on 32 stitches and include the increases.

For the right hand
Cast on 28 stitches. Divide stitches evenly onto double-pointed needles. Join the stitches into a round.

Start knitting the wrist:
Rounds 1-10: *k2, p2, repeat from *. After Round 10, should be about 1.75" from beginning.
Rounds 11-21: Knit. After Round 21, should be about 3.25" from beginning.
Now increase number of stitches to accommodate the width of the hand.
Round 22: k1, m1, k12, m1, k2, m1, k12, m1, k1. There are now 32 st.
Rounds 23-30: Knit. After Round 30, should be about 5" from beginning.

Prepare the thumb hole:
Round 31: k1. Slip 6 st onto stitch holder. CO 6 st, join, and knit rest of round.
Knit the rest of the hand:
Rounds 32-40: Knit. After Round 39, should be about 6.5" from beginning.
Rounds 41-45: *k2, p2, repeat from *. Cast off in rib, should be about 7.75" from beginning.

For the thumb
Pick up 9 st around thumb opening. Divide those sts plus the 6 sts that are on the stitch holder onto the needles. Knit 8 rounds and cast off. (Tip: when picking up the stitches from the top of the thumb hole, pick up between the sts that were knit in the body of the mitten. That way the thumb looks seamless.)
Tuck in ends.

For the left hand
Everything the same as the right except for Round 31:
Round 31: k9. Slip 6 st onto stitch holder. CO 6 st, join, and knit rest of round.

Digital Camera Pouch pattern

2009-01-13T20:31:00.000-08:00

Front

Back with belt loop

Turned inside out to show battery pack pocket and to highlight closure
strap

This is a digital camera pouch with belt loop and internal pocket for extra battery pack. It is my own design. The 2 X 1 rib makes the pouch a snug fit. The monogram is just for fun. Completed September 2005.

Yarn Brand: Main body made from worsted wool (which I got from a big jumble bag, so no brand). Light blue trim is Dale of Norway Svale,a cotton/viscose/silk blend.

Quantity: Scraps

Needles: Size 8 double-pointed needles

Optional items: G crochet hook, button

Gauge: 4 st = 1" stocking stitch

Finished Dimensions: 3" X 4" overall. Closure strap: 1" X 1.75" including button loop. Belt loop: 1.5" X 2.5". Extra battery pack pocket: 2" X 2"

Pattern

The main pouch is knit in the round as a tube and then sewn at the bottom. The belt loop, battery pack, and closure strap are optional: they are knit separately and attached.

2 X 1 rib pattern: *k2, p1, repeat from *.

Main pouch
CO 30 stitches. Distribute evenly over 3 dpn, and join together in a round. If you have a different gauge or wish to make the pouch bigger or smaller, you can adjust the number of stitches you cast on by multiples of 3. Knit in 2 X 1 rib pattern. Knit in rounds until the pouch is 4" tall. For cast off round, attach contrast color yarn, and cast off. Sew the bottom of the tube shut for the main pouch.

Options

Closure strap
CO 5 st.

Row 1: k1, p1, k1, p1, k1.

Row 2: p1, k1, p1, k1, p1.

Repeat these two rows until strap is 1.5" long. Cast off, but don't cut off the tail. Pull the tail out as a "slip stitch," and with the crochet hook, chain 3 stitches. Cast off and attach the end of the chain to the other end of the strap to make a button closure loop. Attach strap to the top center of the back of the pouch. Sew a button to the front of the pouch.

Belt loop
CO 11 st.

Row 1: k2, *p1, k2, *repeat from *.

Row 2: p2, *k1, p2, *repeat from *.

Repeat these two rows until belt loop is 2.75" long. Cast off, and attach to back of camera pouch.

Extra battery pack pocket
CO 9 sts.

Knit in stocking stitch until 2" long. Cast off, and attach to back of the pouch on the inside. Attach on three sides to make a pocket.

Monogram
Use daisy chain stitch to embroider an initial on the front with contrast color yarn.

Changes to this blog

2009-01-12T02:28:00.000-08:00

Hi, after a couple years of sporadic knitting and blogging, I've decided to get back on the wagon. As part of the recovery, I put in a new template and updated my copyright date from 2007 to 2009. Wow, I fell behind. Next up: fixing broken links to all my blog images.

Happy new year

2009-01-12T02:17:00.000-08:00

I went all crazy and did what is turning out to be my biannual web site update. I may spruce it up again in the next year or two. ;)

New features:

Updated copyright dates
Two fewer pages than before
Updated personal information (so it no longer says that I just finished my dissertation)
Updated my publications list

Chinese court ruling against 'human flesh search engines'

2008-12-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

The court ruling, which was announced Friday, specifically mentioned “cyber-violence” and the possibilities for abuse by human flesh search engines, which the three-judge court called “an alarming phenomenon.” The term comes from a widely used compiler of blogs and search engines in China called Renrou, which in Mandarin means human flesh.

Renrou searches have been used by countless bloggers to hunt down otherwise-anonymous Chinese citizens in cases ranging from love triangles to political outrage to cold-case murder.

“For sure the court sees human flesh search engines as a problem and recognizes the need to do something about them,” said Anne Cheung, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. She said that the ruling directs the Ministry of Information Industry in Bejing to draw up specific guidelines that define personal data and privacy.

In the ruling announced Friday, after the wife killed herself in December 2007, her personal diary was posted on the Internet by her sister. The sorrow and despair of her final days, which she had recorded in a private blog-diary, set thousands of outraged human flesh searchers to work, tracking down the husband and his mistress for vengeance. It didn’t take long.

The husband, Wang Fei, 28, soon began receiving death threats, harassing calls at work and was vilified on the Internet. He and his girlfriend, a 23-year-old co-worker, were forced to leave their jobs at a prestigious advertising agency. And outraged “netizens” besieged his parents’ apartment with protests, threats and obscenities.

The persecution by the Internet vigilantes “seriously hampered my normal life,” said Mr. Wang, quoted by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. In April he sued for violation of privacy and defamation, seeking about $20,000 in damages. The People’s Court in Beijing fined the Web site, Daqi.com, the equivalent of $440, plus court fees. Zhang Leyi, a friend of the dead woman, also was fined. Mr. Zhang created a site, orionchris.cn, that included the so-called “death blog” and essentially led to the vigilantism. He was ordered to pay $734 and fees.

Chinese Court Acts Against ‘Cyber-Violence’ - NYTimes.com

Real life played out on the stage

2008-11-21T00:41:00.000-08:00

Fascinating performance art that blends reality with fictional characters. In this case, the actors ostensibly play characters, but they share real family information with pseudonyms. The performances focus on "emotional consequences of wired life. Call it hyperlinked expressionism."

“Continuous City,” which was developed over almost two years, tells a fairly linear story about families trying to stay in touch as they journey around the world. It also stages the internal experience of using social networks, video chats and blogs.
Throughout the show, for instance, a girl named Sam (played on alternate nights by Caroline O’Neill and Olivia Timothee) chats with her father via computer while he travels the globe. But only the child physically appears onstage. Her father, Mike (Harry Sinclair), is just a projection, and his image often distorts or gets split across several screens floating in space.
James Gibbs, the production’s dramaturge, said these technical flourishes were “both an element of how the story is told and the essence of what the story is about.” He added, “If we use them well, they have the potential to be a visceral experience of how we live our lives now: distracted and multitasking but trying to stay connected.”

In ‘Continuous City,’ the Builders Association Interfaces With the Online World Onstage - NYTimes.com

did they not check the FROM: address?

2008-11-20T23:56:00.000-08:00

New York City has agreed to pay just over $25,000 to a former private school employee who was arrested, interrogated and held by the police for more than 30 hours on a harassment charge after a bizarre e-mail mix-up last year, the man’s lawyer said on Thursday.
The man, William Hallowell, was working as a library assistant at the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx in April 2007 when he had an innocent exchange of e-mail messages with his boss, the library director.
But when the library director mistakenly sent a message meant for Mr. Hallowell to an e-mail address that was similar to his but did not belong to him, the recipient at that address replied with a crude and abusive response. The blame fell on Mr. Hallowell, who has left the school.
....
He said he hoped that his suit would lead to better training for the police in how e-mail technology works.

City to Pay $25,000 to Man Arrested in E-Mail Mix-Up - NYTimes.com

Teens strengthen their relationships online

2008-11-20T23:17:00.000-08:00

"Living and Learning With New Media" study on youth and technology just released from Berkeley.

"The study, part of a $50 million project on digital and media learning, used several teams of researchers to interview more than 800 young people and their parents and to observe teenagers online for more than 5,000 hours. Because of the adult sense that socializing on the Internet is a waste of time, the study said, teenagers reported many rules and restrictions on their electronic hanging out, but most found ways to work around such barriers that let them stay in touch with their friends steadily throughout the day.

“Teens usually have a ‘full-time intimate community’ with whom they communicate in an always-on mode via mobile phones and instant messaging,” the study said."

Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing - NYTimes.com

Suicide induced by harassment by mean mom on MySpace

2008-11-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

This story has classic computer-mediated communication concepts:
(1) vivid emotions in an online-only relationship
(2) creating a character online
(3) consequences of online behavior in real life
Arguments in Case Involving Net and Suicide - NYTimes.com

Inter-caste love letter kills teenager

2008-11-20T22:49:00.000-08:00

India: Teenager Is Killed Over Love Letter
A teenage boy who wrote a love letter to a girl from a different caste was thrashed, paraded through the streets with his head shaved, then thrown under a train, the police in the eastern state of Bihar said Thursday. Manish Kumar, 15, was kidnapped by members of the rival caste on his way to school, the police said. One man has been arrested and a policeman suspended.

Teenager Is Killed Over Love Letter - NYTimes.com

What is Steampunk?

2008-11-03T06:17:00.000-08:00

"Steampunk is a burgeoning subculture that draws on the elaborate aesthetics and romantic worldview of 19th‑century England to envision how things might have looked had a few key technologies been developed further. It conjures a gaslit cityscape filled with steam-powered robots, mechanical computers, ray-gun-toting aeronauts, and monocled mad scientists."

IEEE Spectrum: The Steampunk Contraptors

Generation Faithful

2008-09-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

Interesting article about young Muslims living in culturally hybrid Dubai. Muslim identity is changing in the socially mixed state.

In Egypt, and across much of the Arab world, there is an Islamic revival being driven by young people, where faith and ritual are increasingly the cornerstone of identity. But that is not true amid the ethnic mix that is Dubai, where 80 percent of the people are expatriates, with 200 nationalities.
This economically vital, socially freewheeling yet unmistakably Muslim state has had a transforming effect on young men. Religion has become more of a personal choice and Islam less of a common bond than national identity.

Generation Faithful - Young and Arab in Land of Mosques and Bars - Series - NYTimes.com

Several other good articles on Arab youth are also available from the NYTimes.com

Oprah is a hit with Saudi women

2008-09-18T22:42:00.000-07:00

"When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.

In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai’a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.

Some women here say Ms. Winfrey’s assurances to her viewers — that no matter how restricted or even abusive their circumstances may be, they can take control in small ways and create lives of value — help them find meaning in their cramped, veiled existence."

Saudi Women Find Unlikely Role Model - Oprah on NYTimes.com

Sergey Brin's blog

2008-09-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

too

Looks like he just started posting to it this month.

Machinima Moguls

2008-08-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

Interesting article profiling creators of Machinima (movies made with video games)

It's a new genre of filmmaking called machinima, and it's one of the brashest DIY developments to hit moviemaking since Roger Corman pointed a camera at a guy in a rubber monster suit and catapulted himself into B-movie history. What's making it possible is the latest crop of popular video games and Internet environments, like Halo 3, the human-simulation game The Sims, and the virtual world Second Life. These products all have deeply immersive environments powered by sophisticated real-time three-dimensional graphics engines, and they usually come with free video-editing software and other tools that let players modify the games' characters, environments, and sound and then create and record their own scenarios. Machinimators exploit those free tools to produce animations that span the gamut of film types, including short comedic riffs, serial sitcoms, and even 2-hour feature-length films.

Machinima (a mashup of “machine” and “cinema,” pronounced muh-SHIN-ah-muh or mah-SHEEN-ah-muh) isn't intended for the silver screen; most of the films get downloaded or streamed via the Internet and watched on a computer monitor. And they're cheap to make: instead of pouring millions of dollars and many months into a film, Rooster Teeth may spend US $5000 and a week's time on a 5-minute video—and that covers everything from the first-draft script to the final formatting and uploading of the finished film to the Web.

IEEE Spectrum: Machinima's Movie Moguls

India Adds 9 Million Mobile Users in July

2008-08-26T17:41:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian mobile telecoms firms added 9.2 million users in July, taking subscribers in the world's fastest growing wireless market to nearly 300 million, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said on Monday.
Leading mobile firm Bharti Airtel signed up 2.7 million customers, enough for it to overtake state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd as India's largest telecom firm by total subscribers, including fixed-line subscribers.
Second-ranked mobile firm Reliance Communications added 1.75 million customers, and No. 3 Vodafone Essar, controlled by Britain's Vodafone Plc , added 1.76 million.
India is the world's fastest-growing market for wireless services and the second-largest market for such services after China, with growth fuelled by cheap handsets and call rates as low as 1 U.S. cent a minute.
The regulator's data showed Indian wireless phone users rose to 296.1 million in July, while fixed-line line subscriptions fell by around 160,000 to 38.8 million.

India Adds 9 Million Mobile Users in July - NYTimes.com

SMS as election tool

2008-08-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

Cell phone political marketing campaign:

"R U curious to know Obama’s VP? The names of vice-presidential candidates are typically announced at news conferences or political conventions. But sometime before the opening gavel of the Democratic National Convention next Monday, Senator Barack Obama plans to break the mold by doing it with a text message.
"Last week, the Obama campaign said that anyone who sent a text message of “VP” to a dedicated phone number would be among the first to learn the identity of his running mate. The campaign has also run a television commercial that offers a campaign sticker to any person who sends the word “Barack” to the same number.
"The efforts spotlight Mr. Obama’s push to harvest millions of cellphone numbers of potential voters through text messaging, a technology that is increasingly moving into the mainstream. And it could have a significant effect in November, when the campaign plans to use the technology to get out the vote."

Enticing Text Messagers in a Get-Out-the-Vote Push - NYTimes.com

Call Cutta interactive theater

2008-07-28T23:53:00.000-07:00

Talk with an Indian call center worker as part of a theater/performance art project. You visit the project by appointment where you get immersed in a faux call center environment. Call Cutta In A Box review, Call Cutta In A Box project page, Call Cutta blog.

"Call Cutta In A Box is a strange interactive theater installation where the audience, one at a time, converses with an employee of an Indian call center. Indeed, the production was created by art group Rimini Protokoll in collaboration with the Callcenter Descon Limited in Calcutta. The installation is currently on tour, traveling next to Gronigen, Copenhagen, and Paris."

Call Cutta interactive theater - Boing Boing

Found object: diary

2008-07-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

Although having your diary published for the world to see seems like a nightmare, in the age of blogs it's cool! Florence Wolfson's "red leather diary" was discovered in a dumpster, revealing a slice of life from the life of a teenager in the 1930s.

"The diary was a gift for her 14th birthday, on Aug. 11, 1929, and she wrote a few lines faithfully, every day, until she turned 19. Then, like so many relics of time past, it was forgotten.

With its tarnished latch unlocked, the diary lay silent for more than half a century inside an old steamer trunk, plastered with vintage travel stickers that evoke the glamorous golden age of ocean liner voyages. The trunk in turn languished in the basement of 98 Riverside Drive, an orange brick apartment house at 82nd Street, until October 2003, when the management decided it was time to clear out the storage area.
The trunk and its sisters were carted to a waiting Dumpster, and as is often the case in New York, trash and treasure were bedfellows. Some passers-by jimmied open the locks of the trunks and pried apart their sides, in search of old money. Others stared transfixed at the treasures spilling from the warped cedar drawers: a red kimono; a beaded rose flapper dress; a cloth-bound volume of Tennyson’s poems; the top half of a baby’s red sweater still hanging from its knitting needles. A single limp silk glove fluttered like a small flag."

Speak, Memory - New York Times

Lesbian = gay woman, not Greek islander

2008-07-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

Greece: Suit to Prohibit Use of ‘Lesbian’ Dismissed

By REUTERS
Published: July 23, 2008
"A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the island of Lesbos to prohibit the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women, a ruling released Tuesday said. Three residents of Lesbos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, whose love poems inspired the term lesbian, filed suit last month, contending that their identity was insulted by the use of the word in reference to gay women. The court said that the word did not define the identity of Lesbos residents, and so could be used legitimately by gay groups in Greece and abroad."

Suit to Prohibit Use of ‘Lesbian’ Dismissed - NYTimes.com

Seniors finding love but not getting married

2008-07-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Light article about senior romance. The hallmarks of this trend are seniors who want companionship but do not want to mess up their pensions or scare their kids about inheritances.

More seniors finding love online, but skipping remarriage | Seattle Times Newspaper

Social class and murders in India

2008-07-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article about class in India. In the "twin Noida murders" in New Delhi, a Nepali servant was immediately the suspect in the death of a well-to-do teenager. The servant was later discovered dead as well. The police then accused the father, allegedly because he was having an affair with a co-worker that was found out by his daughter and then the servant. The police have since let him go due to lack of evidence. Technology has played a role in this case:

Talwar was allegedly having an affair with a co-worker, the media reported. His daughter, 14, was said to have found out — police discovered that 50 calls had been placed to the co-worker from her cellphone. There was also speculation that Hemraj had discovered the affair.

But police now say there's no evidence against Talwar — he's been freed. And the attention paid to Aarushi's death — candlelight ceremonies and Facebook pages — has become cause for question, too.
Wrote Udayvir Singh Yadav wrote on an online youth publication called the Viewspaper: "Hemraj's murder seems so insignificant even though it is part of the same case. No one did a candlelight vigil. No one cared to go meet his family. Do we not care about him? We just presented a perfect model of the rich-poor divide."

India murders amplify social division | Seattle Times Newspaper

Phones’ Texting Feature Often Unused

2008-07-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

Interesting, in S. Korea, texting and mobile emails are seldom used.

DRILLING DOWN; Phones’ Texting Feature Often Unused - NYTimes.com

Genevieve Bell talk (in bed)

2008-06-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

I just discovered this video from 2006 today. I haven't watched it, but the title sounds intriguing. Sounds like that British talk show with the lady who interviews people in bed.

Mobile computing is literally going to bed with users, so at the cool BED club in New York, PodTech's Michael Johnson literally hopped into bed with Genevieve Bell, a senior researcher and anthropologist for Intel. She's the director of Intel's user experience group for Digital Home. Bell and a team of anthropologists traveled the world in a 36 country study of how technology is used on an everyday and personal level.

PCs in Bed & Beyond: Genevieve Bell, Intel's Top Anthropologist | PodTech.net

Japan's Booming Sex Niche: Elder Porn

2008-06-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

Diversity in porn! Rather fascinating: the growth of elder porn parallels the aging Japanese population. We are our porn?

Besides his glowing complexion, Shigeo Tokuda looks like any other 74-year-old man in Japan. Despite suffering a heart attack three years ago, the lifelong salaryman now feels healthier, and lives happily with his wife and a daughter in downtown Tokyo. He is, of course, more physically active than most retirees, but that's because he's kept his part-time job — as a porn star.
...
But Tokuda stresses the appeal of his work to an audience of his peers: "Elderly people don't identify with school dramas," he says. "It's easier for them to relate to older-men-and-daughters-in-law series, so they tend to watch adult videos with older people in them."

Japan's Booming Sex Niche: Elder Porn - TIME

The Richest Man in India

2008-06-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

Mukesh Ambani (older brother of Anil Ambani who controls Reliance telecomm) is an exemplar of the Indian middle class. This New York Times story describes him as a man with Indian tastes and values, in contrast with other elite business families in India.

Such changes accompanied the rise to power of a new class of Indians who want to live and work and raise their children in India, who are tethered to Indian values, food and popular culture and who are unapologetic about their indigenous tastes. The Ambanis are this class’s first family.
MANY other Indian business families have been rich for generations, and their scions don finely cut suits and flaunt fussy tastes. Ratan Tata cruises down Marine Drive on Sundays in fast cars and favors Hermès ties with matching handkerchiefs. Vijay Mallya is said to be trailed in his home by a butler holding a silver tray with a cigar and a Scotch. Adi and Parmeshwar Godrej are famous for soirées that attract Hollywood stars.
Mr. Ambani comports himself quite differently. Among family members, he prefers speaking Gujarati to English, friends say. He may ask colleagues to stop at the temple with him during business trips to partake in a ritual Hindu prayer. He loathes Western suits, preferring a white short-sleeved shirt, black trousers and black shoes that resemble sneakers cross-bred with office wingtips.
His idea of entertainment is not ballet but Bollywood; he watches as many as three films a week at home in a private theater. “You need some amount of escapism in life,” he says. “Those two or three hours give you relief.”
He has a legendary appetite, but mostly for the food of the bustling Mumbai streets. He has been known to walk out of fancy restaurants in search of dosas, south Indian crepes sold by the roadside. And he carries those preferences with him when he travels.

Meet Mukesh Ambani - India’s Richest Man - Biography - NYTimes.com

Heartwarming spam

2008-06-07T09:25:00.001-07:00

Love me tender, love me true. I give my heart to you

Inspirational spam

2008-06-06T10:20:00.001-07:00

You make my world beautiful

Handbook of Mobile Communications Studies

2008-05-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

At last! Handbook of Mobile Communications Studies has been published!

From Putting people first: "The book contains more than 30 contributions, including chapters written by Jan Chipchase (Nokia Research), Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India), Howard Rheingold, and Carolyn Wei (Google)."

Wow, worthy of a mention. aw shucks.

The Telectroscope

2008-05-20T23:47:00.000-07:00

Really cool art installation. A "tunnel" between New York and London allow people at both ends to see each other 24/7. Check out the Telectroscope web site

Before sunrise on Tuesday morning, a strange sight began to appear on Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn: a six-foot-tall metal drill bit seemed to emerge from the wooden pier, covered in genuine East River mud and revolving slowly beneath the glow of the Manhattan skyline. On Wednesday it will grow into a 12-foot-tall industrial-looking behemoth erupting just in front of the quaint Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory. And on Thursday? Imagine an enormous brass and wood telescope, 37 feet long by 11 feet tall, connected to a mirrored dome, like a child’s drawing of something that will see into the future. Voilà: the Telectroscope will have materialized.

A fanciful device born equally of history and imagination, it will visually connect New Yorkers to people in London, where an identical scope will sit on the banks of the Thames in the shadow of Tower Bridge. Spectators who step right up will have a real-time, life-size view across the pond 24 hours a day, until June 15, thanks to ... no spoilers, yet. (The queue will generally be first come first served, but to make an appointment to connect with a friend in London, visit telectroscope.net.)
The Victorian-looking contraption is the invention of Paul St George, a 53-year-old artist based in London — or, if you believe the gadget’s supposed history, of his great-grandfather Alexander Stanhope St George. According to his very own fake Wikipedia entry, Alexander (born July 8, 1848; died Oct. 12, 1917) was “a British inventor and researcher” who came up with a feasible design for a device to connect places on opposite sides of the world visually through a very long tunnel, and even began digging under the Atlantic to make his creation work. According to Paul St George — well, all of this is according to Paul St George.

A Telescope Stretches From Brooklyn to London - New York Times

Saudi girls and technology-facilitated romance

2008-05-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

An article about technology and romantic rituals in Saudi Arabia.

"A cellphone picture of Alia's fiancé — a 25-year-old military man named Badr — was passed around, and the girls began pestering Alia for the details of her showfa. A showfa — literally, a 'viewing' — usually occurs on the day that a Saudi girl is engaged. A girl's suitor, when he comes to ask her father for her hand in marriage, has the right to see her dressed without her abaya. In some families, he may have a supervised conversation with her. Ideally, many Saudis say, her showfa will be the only time in a girl's life that she is seen this way by a man outside her family."
....
"Later that evening, over fava bean stew, salad, and meat-filled pastries, Alia revealed that she was to be allowed to speak to her fiancé on the phone. Their first phone conversation was scheduled for the following day, she said, and she was so worried about what to say to Badr that she was compiling a list of questions..... 'Ask him what kind of cellphone he has, and what kind of car,' suggested another. 'That way you'll be able to find out how he spends his money, whether he's free with it or whether he's stingy.'"
....
"According to about 30 Saudi girls and women between ages 15 and 25, all interviewed during December, January and February, it is becoming more and more socially acceptable for young engaged women to speak to their fiancés on the phone, though more conservative families still forbid all contact between engaged couples."
....
"And certainly, practices like 'numbering' — where a group of young men in a car chase another car they believe to contain young women, and try to give the women their phone number via Bluetooth, or by holding a written number up to the window — have become a very visible part of Saudi urban life."

"A woman can't switch her phone's Bluetooth feature on in a public place without receiving a barrage of the love poems and photos of flowers and small children which many Saudi men keep stored on their phones for purposes of flirtation. And last year, Al Arabiya television reported that some young Saudis have started buying special 'electronic belts,' which use Bluetooth technology to discreetly beam the wearer's cellphone number and e-mail address at passing members of the opposite sex."
....
"'If your family found out you were talking to a man online, that's not quite as bad as talking to him on the phone,' Ms. Tukhaifi explained. 'With the phone, everyone can agree that is forbidden, because Islam forbids a stranger to hear your voice. Online he only sees your writing, so that's slightly more open to interpretation. 'One test is that if you're ashamed to tell your family something, then you know for sure it's wrong,' Ms. Tukhaifi continued. 'For a while I had Facebook friends who were boys — I didn't e-mail with them or anything, but they asked me to 'friend' them and so I did. But then I thought about my family and I took them off the list.'"

Love on Girls’ Side of the Saudi Divide - New York Times via miss elisa

Telephone service as military tool for Hizballah

2008-05-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

"Although Hizballah is known for its massive Iran-funded social welfare system that provides everything from soup to education, construction materials and matchmaking services for Lebanon's Shi'ite underclass, cell-phone service is not part of the package — except for those who join its guerrilla army. One of the world's most technically advanced and resourceful guerrilla organizations, Hizballah had some time ago installed its own, in-house dedicated fiber-optic telephone network, connecting its headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut to its offices, military posts and cadres as far south as the Israeli border. During the summer 2006 war, Israel had jammed cellphone signals throughout south Lebanon and monitored the Lebanese telephone system, but Hizballah's internal communications channels had survived thanks to its private fiber-optic system. Since the war, however, Hizballah has expanded the network to cover its new military frontline north of the United Nations–patrolled southern border district, and into the Bekaa Valley to the east. Part of the system incorporates a WiMAX network allowing long-distance wireless access for the Internet and cell phones."

A Cell Phone Civil War in Lebanon - TIME via UNDP Observatory

Hey! I was obliquely cited on CNN.com!

2008-04-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

Arranged marriage gets high-tech twist - CNN.com: "The rise of cell phones has made long-distance courtships easier. A small 2006 study from a University of Washington researcher found that young Indians living in Bangalore used cell phones to get to know partners introduced to them by their parents."

yeah, that's my research!

A bad romance gets worse over mobile phone

2008-04-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

The non-Latin letters that are in some languages have much significance. In this case, a substitution of a closed Turkish i with Latin i in an SMS was deadly. Who would have thought that a misspelled text message could cause such harm?

"The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan's sent a message and Emine's cellphone didn't have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter "ı" or closed i. While "i" is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn't exist in most of the terminals in that country.

"The use of "i" resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word "sıkısınca" it looked like he wrote "sikisince." Ramazan wanted to write "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments" (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you" (sounds familiar too.)"

From an email list at work: Localization Problems: A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

When the Ex Writes a Blog, Dirty Laundry Is Aired - New York Times

2008-04-17T21:44:00.000-07:00

People who fight back in a divorce over the internet. Tricia Walsh Smith makes a YouTube video; others blog.

When the Ex Writes a Blog, Dirty Laundry Is Aired - New York Times

Happiness is a clean inbox

2008-04-04T03:42:00.000-07:00

I read my email today! happiness is...

Sex workers go Web 2.0

2008-04-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

In response to the Spitzer sex scandal, sex workers "organized a media blitz through blogs, Tumblr, Twitter and shared Google Docs. They kept tabs on which reporters approached the topic with respect and which didn't. And perhaps for the first time, they made their voices heard in mainstream venues like Fox News and CNN -- organizations that cannot be dismissed as fringe or adults-only media."

Sex Drive: IPhones, Twitter Let Sex Workers Spread Their Gospel

Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020

2008-04-03T18:02:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Research thinks that we'll be closely integrated with machines in the future (= cyborg!).

From BBC News:
"A Microsoft-backed report that draws from discussions with 45 academics from computing, science, sociology, and psychology predicts that by 2020 fundamental changes in the field of human-computer interaction will increasingly integrate humans with machines, and machines will be able to anticipate what we want from them. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor will be replaced by more intuitive forms of interaction and display such as tablet computers, speech recognition, and touch-operated surfaces. Devices will be embedded in everyday objects, clothing, and our bodies. Our digital footprint will increase as we share more and more aspects of our lives through digital photography, podcasting, blogging, and video, raising questions about how much information we should share and store about ourselves. An always-on network will channel mass-market information directly to us while analyzing our personal information. The report calls this the era of hyper-connectivity and predicts that it will lead to a growth in "techno-dependency." The report compares the widespread introduction of the calculator, widely blamed for a fall in mental arithmetic abilities, with what may happen as computers become more intelligent and take on new responsibilities. "Without proper consideration and control it is possible that we---both individually and collectively--may no longer be in control of ourselves or the world around us," the report warns. The report, "Being Human: Human Computer Interaction in the Year 2020," is available at http://research.microsoft.com/hci2020/download.html."

Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)

2008-03-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK) - New York Times: "Savannah said she sends a text message to her father at least two or three times a day. “I can’t ask him questions because he is too slow,” she said. “He uses simple words.”"

Interesting article about the social world that teens and young people craft for themselves through personal technology, especially mobile texting.

Valentine's Day news roundup

2008-02-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

Lots of good news articles about LUV this time of the year.

Time, January 28, 2008, is devoted to the Science of Romance. Several good articles including Why We Love (biological reasons for romance), We Just Clicked (online dating), Crazy Love (being in love with someone with mental issues), and Wildly in Love (pictures of romantic animals).

The Dating Detectives -- verifying claims on Indian matrimonial sites.

Cobblestone pullover

2007-11-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

I finished the cobblestone sweater from IK. It was pure comfort knitting -- no seams, only stocking and garter stitches. I did not use the tweedy yarn called for in the pattern because it was rough and scratchy. Instead, I used Stacey Charles Tahki's Savoy yarn which is a soft merino and silk blend. yummy to knit and to wear.

What do you think?

2007-11-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

Cell phone transforms into deadly robot

Autobot or Decepticon?

Update on Knitting

2007-11-09T06:43:00.000-08:00

I started knitting again about a month ago. I've lately been working on Arisaig and have worked up to the arm pit area on the back piece. However, I have since been diverted to working on another sweater. This one is the Cobblestone pullover from the previous IK that is knit in one piece. It's very soothing stocking stitch knitting, and it makes me extra happy that there will be virtually no seaming at the end.

McCaw performance hall

2007-08-05T20:29:00.001-07:00

Opera night

Technology is invisible to youth

2007-08-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Youth don't like technology, but I bet that they like the social connections it affords.

While young people embrace the Web with real or virtual friends and their cell phone is never far away, relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.

Only a handful think of technology as a concept, and just 16 percent use terms like "social networking", said two combined surveys covering 8- to 24-year-olds published on Tuesday by Microsoft and Viacom units MTV Networks and Nickelodeon.

"Young people don't see "tech" as a separate entity - it's an organic part of their lives," said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV's VBS International Insight unit.

"Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives -- it's invisible."

The surveys involved 18,000 young people in 16 countries including the UK, U.S., China, Japan, Canada and Mexico.

via Usability News, July 28, 2007

route 66 performing a standard

2007-07-07T13:57:00.001-07:00

Mortimer of Ballard

2007-07-07T08:00:00.001-07:00

Fig tree?

2007-07-07T07:59:00.001-07:00

Sunset hill later

2007-07-07T07:18:00.001-07:00

Sunset hill

2007-07-07T07:13:00.001-07:00

Widows are still shunned in India

2007-07-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

Shunned from society, widows flock to city to die. Whatever the cultural reasons for the abandonment and shunning of widows, I still find it a disturbing practice. It's not clear how widespread this custom is, or whether it is restricted to certain segments of society.

See also Deepa Mehta's movie Water for an artistic treatment of the subject.

Dabbawalla = Fed Ex for food?

2007-05-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

A great NYTimes article about the dabbawallas of Mumbai who zip around the cities delivering hot, home-cooked lunches to hungry workers. A favorite quote of mine:

"There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours--but they don't deliver lunch," said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.

In India, Grandma Cooks, They Deliver

ElHood: social networking for Hispanics

2007-04-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

Social networking for Hispanic audience. Social-networking sites link Hispanic youth

Indie rocker Eric Monterrosa checks his ElHood.com Web page at least three times a day, answering fans, surfing for other new Latin artists and keeping in touch with friends from his native Colombia.
ElHood is sort of a bilingual MySpace promoting the latest in Latin music, and for Miami-based Monterrosa, it has become a personal and professional lifeline. It is also the latest in a wave of Hispanic social-networking sites building links across the U.S., Latin America and Spain, all hoping to capture coveted advertising dollars.

Chinese MySpace

2007-04-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

News Corp.'s popular social networking site MySpace launched a test version of its new China service on Friday, making a late entry into the intensely competitive Chinese Internet market.
MySpace China will be a Chinese-owned company with backing from MySpace Inc., the IDG venture capital firm and a Chinese investment fund, the company said. Spokespeople for the company refused to give an ownership breakdown or say which investor would control it.

What other social networking sites are available in China? MySpace makes belated entry into China

Egypt's Dr. Ruth

2007-04-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

A radio talk show about sex broadcast through out the Middle East:

Dr. Heba Kotb is tackling a taboo in the Arab world unlike anyone else: She's talking about sex openly on a show broadcast all over the Middle East.
It's a big first in these parts of the world, and Kotb leaves little uncovered.
"We talk about masturbation ... sex over the Internet. We talk about sex and Ramadan. We talk about the wedding night," said Kotb. Entitled "The Big Talk," the show is broadcast once a week over a satellite channel from Cairo, Egypt.
It took the 39-year-old mother three years of negotiations to get her show on the air. And a main reason she succeeded is that she talks only about sex allowed in the Quran -- sex between husband and wife.

Egypt's 'Dr. Ruth': Muslims need better sex

Use of Google Ads in corporate PR plan

2007-04-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

Kaiser Permanente has been battling a former employee/whistleblower, Justen Deal, who brought up complaints about their HealthConnect patient database. Deal had blasted an email to all employees, and it eventually was leaked. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google Ads are part of Kaiser's surprisingly high tech, agile response system to the blogs and media who have been taking up the story.

"To disseminate its side of the story on the Web, the company paid Google to place a special Kaiser link at the top of any page returning search results for "Justen Deal.""

Critical Case: How an Email Rant Jolted a Big HMO

High tech worker

2007-04-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

I have been gainfully employed now for 2.5 weeks. It is good to be back within the capitalist economy.

what to knit?

2007-04-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

I am working on the interminable red scarf.

Miss Roxane gave me several skeins of Irish wool. I am thinking of what to make with it.

One project I have been thinking of is Alice Starmore's Kilronan pullover from the Celtic Collection. The pattern is from the 90s and it is by Starmore, so it is ginormous. I have to scale the pattern down -- not sure where to nip from without spoiling the pattern. My gauge may end up being small enough to fudge the width.

wanted

2007-04-08T11:39:00.000-07:00

About My Research

2007-04-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

hi. I'm Carolyn Wei. I am interested in:

use of technology by young people
unobtrusive field research methods for Web sites and mobile phones
technology adoption and adaptation in digitally emergent cultures
technology that supports romantic relationships

Publications

Mobile phones
Remote experiments and user studies
ICT in Central Asia
Blogs and wikis

Mobile Phones

Wei, C. (2008). “It’s our only connection”: Mobile phones and romantic relationships in India. Design and Emotion Conference, Hong Kong, Oct. 6-9, 2008.
Donner, J., Rangaswamy, N., Steenson, M.W., & Wei, C. (2008). “Express yourself” / “Stay together”: The middle-class Indian family. In J.E. Katz (Ed.), Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (pp. 325-38). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wei, C.Y. (2007). Capturing mobile phone usage: Research methods for mobile studies. In Proceedings of the 2007 International Professional Communication Conference, Seattle, WA, Oct. 1-3, 2007. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.
Schusteritsch, R., Wei, C. Y., & LaRosa, M. (2007). Towards the perfect infrastructure for usability testing on mobile devices. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, San Jose, CA, Apr. 28–May 3, 2007 (pp. 1839-1844). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240866.1240908
Wei, C. Y. (2007). Mobile Hybridity: Supporting Personal and Romantic Relationships with Mobile Phones in Digitally Emergent Spaces. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
Wei, C. Y. (2006). Not crazy, just talking on the mobile phone: Gestures and mobile phone conversations. In Proceedings of the 2006 International Professional Communication Conference, Saratoga Springs, NY, October 23-25, 2006 (pp. 299-307). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. slide deck
Wei, C., and Kolko, B. (2005). Studying mobile phone use in context: Cultural, political, and economic dimensions of mobile phone use. In Proceedings of the 2005 International Professional Communication Conference, Limerick, Ireland, July 10-13, 2005 (pp. 205-212). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.

Remote Experiments and User Studies

Cuddihy, E., Wei, C., Bartell, A.L., Barrick, J., Maust, B., Leopold, S.S., & Spyridakis, J.H. (2007). Conducting remote, internet-based experiments on Web design. In G. Hayhoe & H. Grady (Eds.), Connecting People with Technology: Issues in Professional Communication (pp. 31-41). Farmingdale, NY: Baywood.
Spyridakis, J.H., Mobrand, K.A., Cuddihy, E., & Wei, C.Y. (2007). Using structural cues to guide readers on the internet. Information Design Journal, 15 (3), 242-259.
Wei, C.Y., Evans, M.B., Eliot, M., Barrick, J., Maust, B, and Spyridakis, J.H. (2005). Influencing web-browsing behavior with intriguing and informative hyperlink wording. Journal of Information Science 31 (5), 433-445.
Spyridakis, J.H., Wei, C., Barrick, J., Cuddihy, E., and Maust, B. (2005). Internet-based research: Providing a foundation for Web design guidelines. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 48 (3), 242-260.
Cuddihy, E., Wei, C., Bartell, A., Barrick, J., Maust, B., and Spyridakis, J. (2005). Conducting remote, Internet-based experiments on Web design. In Proceedings of the 2005 International Professional Communication Conference, Limerick, Ireland, July 10-13, 2005 (pp. 554-561). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.
Wei, C., Barrick, J., Cuddihy, E., and Spyridakis, J. (2005). Conducting usability research through the Internet. In Proceedings of the 2005 Usability Professionals Association Conference, Montreal, Canada, June 27-July 1, 2005.
Cuddihy, E., Wei, C., Barrick, J., Maust, B., Bartell, A.L., and Spyridakis, J.H. (2005). Methods for assessing Web design through the Internet. In CHI '05 Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, OR, April 2-7, 2005.
Barrick, J., Maust, B., Spyridakis, J.H., Eliot, M., Wei, C., Evans, M., and Mobrand, K. (2004). A tool for supporting Web-based empirical research: Providing a basis for Web design guidelines. In Proceedings of the 2004 International Professional Communication Conference, Minneapolis, MN, September 29-October 2, 2004 (pp. 189-194). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.
Evans, M., Wei, C., and Spyridakis, J.H. (2004). Using statistical power analysis to tune-up a research experiment: A case study. In Proceedings of the 2004 International Professional Communication Conference, Minneapolis, MN, September 29-October 2, 2004 (pp. 14-18). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.
Evans, M., Wei, C., Eliot, M., Barrick, J., Maust, B., and Spyridakis, J.H. (2004). The effect of informative, intriguing, and generic hyperlink wording on Web browsing behavior. In Proceedings of the 51st Conference of the Society for Technical Communication, Baltimore, MD, May 9-12, 2004 (pp. 313-317). Arlington, VA: STC.

ICT in Central Asia

Wei, C.Y., and Kolko, B.E. (2005). Resistance to globalization: Language and Internet diffusion patterns in Uzbekistan. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 11(2): 205-220.
Wei, C. (2004). Language and the Internet in Uzbekistan. In F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication, Karlstad, Sweden, June 27-July 1, 2004 (pp. 393-396). Murdoch, Australia: Murdoch University Press.
Kolko, B.E., Wei, C., and Spyridakis, J.H. (2003). Internet Use in Uzbekistan: Developing a methodology for tracking IT implementation success. Information Technologies and International Development 1 (2), 1-19.
Spyridakis, J.H., Wei, C., and Kolko, B.E. (2003). The relationship of culture and information-seeking behaviour: A case study in Central Asia. In Adjunct Proceedings of HCI International 2003, Crete, Greece, June 22-27, 2003 (pp. 167-168). Crete, Greece: Crete University Press.

Blogs and Wikis

Wei, C., Maust, B., Barrick, J., Cuddihy, E., and Spyridakis, J.H. (2005). Wikis for supporting distributed collaborative writing. In Proceedings of the 52nd Conference of the Society for Technical Communication, Seattle, WA, May 8-11, 2005 (pp. 204-209). Arlington, VA: STC.
Wei, C. (2004). Formation of norms in a blog community. In L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, and J. Reyman (Eds.),
Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs.

Research experience

User experience researcher at Google doing usability testing and early-stage research.
Research internship at Microsoft Research India with the Technology in Emerging Markets group studying how young people use mobile phones to support their personal and romantic relationships.
Research assistant on a joint project between Technical Communication and Microsoft studying use of MSN Messenger on PC and mobiles.
Research internship at Sandia National Labs studying group communication and collaboration.
Member of the Internet-Based Research Group focusing on unobtrusive methods for studying users and conducting remote experiments.
Research assistant on a project studying information and communication technologies in Central Asia.

Mobile Hybridity: Supporting Personal and Romantic Relationships with Mobile Phones in Digitally Emergent Spaces

2007-04-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

Here's information about my Ph.D. dissertation:

Wei, C. Y. (2007). Mobile Hybridity: Supporting Personal and Romantic Relationships with Mobile Phones in Digitally Emergent Spaces. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

Abstract
Mobile phones are a global phenomenon and can be readily found in places as technologically disparate as Japan and sub-Saharan Africa. Their sociological impact in these diverse cultural and technological contexts is rich because, on top of serving practical functions related to communication, information exchange, and entertainment, the device holds complex symbolic meanings.

This dissertation examines how mobile phones support intimate personal and romantic relationships in digitally emergent places, i.e., locations that are developing pervasive digital telecommunication and media infrastructure. Two field studies are reported here from post-colonial, digitally emergent settings. The first study in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is a prelude to the main study in Bangalore, India. The Tashkent study provided a snapshot of mobile phone use that supports personal relationships. This study used interviews of mobile service providers, interviews of users and nonusers, and participant observation to describe the cultural, political, economic, and technological contexts that shape mobile phone use. The study revealed several social uses and symbolic meanings of mobile phones.

The main study reported in this dissertation focuses on fieldwork with young people who work in the global 24/7 environment of Bangalore. This study used surveys, interviews, participant observation, and mobile diaries to document attitudes and behaviors surrounding mobile phone communication with family members and romantic partners. The study revealed that besides cultural influences, the participants’ unique circumstances as people who have migrated to a new city and often work the graveyard shift affect their use of the mobile.

This dissertation constructs a new theory of “mobile hybridity” that is framed by hybridity theory, or the evolution of new behaviors and spaces from the contact and fusion of multiple influences. The culturally shifting and blending landscape occupied by users often fractures their intimate relationships with physical distance or cultural differences. Cyborg, or seamlessly integrated, use of mobile phones helps users negotiate these relationships and the liminal spaces created by the close coupling of modern urban life with conservative social values, the co-existence of the global and the local, and the tension experienced by young people who want to be independent but also connected with loved ones.

Supervisory Committee: Beth Kolko, Judy Ramey, Jan Spyridakis, and Jennifer Turns

read me!

Entire dissertation in one file

Experimenting

2007-03-29T02:18:00.000-07:00

I am porting my stuff over to a new domain, scarlethamster. There will be some redundancies during this process.

In the meantime, please enjoy the loveliness of the CSS-based layout. Using div tags and floats and margins, I have set up five main regions on my page. There is

a header that sits on top,
floating fixed-width columns on the left and right,
a main column of text sitting behind the floating columns with giant margins (to clear the floating side columns, and
a footer sitting below it all.

One of these days, I will sneak a peek at John's CSS Cookbook. Coding by trial and error is strangely inefficient.

baby booties!

2007-03-29T00:30:00.000-07:00

cute! these little guys were made from Classic Elite's Inca Alpaca. The pattern was from Debbie Bliss' Baby Style. I finished most of this project while watching Lars von Triers' Kingdom mini-series about the spooky hospital.

Red Scarf

2007-03-29T00:23:00.000-07:00

This is the endless scarf that I have been working on since last March. I got the yarn from Knit/Purl in Portland. I was originally going to get creative and make the thing look like a dragon. but I will be lucky to eke out a rectangle of any kind.

Twitter

2007-03-28T23:57:00.000-07:00

Twitter is the new "moblogging" tool. It lets you send text messages to groups of friends and to an online page. The purpose is to report on "what you are doing." I am fascinated by the use of mobile phones as a pseudo-blog platform. In this case, it's really just a matter of souped-up text messaging. See the Time article about Why Everyone's Talking about Twitter.

Good things

2007-03-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

A couple things came to my attention today in the mobile-society list.

First, M/C Journal just released a themed issue on mobility. Some articles caught my eye, and I look forward to reading them including Raiti's Mobile Intimacy: Theories on the Economics of Emotion with Examples from Asia, Solis' Texting Love: An Exploration of Text Messaging as a Medium for Romance in the Philippines, and Humphreys and Barker's Modernity and the Mobile Phone: Exploring Tensions about Dating and Sex in Indonesia. Several of the other articles also have catchy titles, but these are the ones that jumped out at me.

Second, an article was highlighted about the Top 10 Emerging Mobile Markets. India exhibited a lot of raw growth last year.

Dissertation statistics -- before handing off to grad school

2007-03-15T00:16:00.000-07:00

Counts
83,193 words
456,047 characters
2,232 paragraphs
4,418 sentences

Averages
4.3 sentences per paragraph
17.8 words per sentence
5.2 characters per word

Readability
Passive sentences: 13%
Flesch reading ease: 36.7
Flesch-Kinkaid grade level: 12.4

309 references
343 pages (264 are content pages)
23 figures
8 appendices

Elizabeth Hurley's Indian Wedding

2007-03-08T14:54:00.000-08:00

Local reactions to the Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar wedding this week in Jodhpur.

"Is it this old woman who's getting married?" asked Kastury Ghosh, a bridal shop manager in the west Indian city of Jodhpur, as she peered over her glasses at a picture of Elizabeth Hurley.
...
But even if India is only just getting to know Hurley, she may endear herself with locals who understand the need for lavish, attention-grabbing wedding celebrations.

Marriage remains a fundamental rite of passage and symbol of a family's status in India. Even the humblest family will save up to make sure their children are paraded regally around the neighborhood by lantern-bearers and a brass band.

In India's fiercely hierarchical society, most people are expected to marry a partner from the same background, caste and religion, so Nayar's marriage to a white, non-Indian and non-Hindu woman has also attracted curious comment.
"An Anglo-Indian wedding has never happened here before," said Durgsingh Rathort, another bridal shop worker.
But no one thought to criticize the arrangement - in India, the rich can make their own rules.

"Liz who?" ask locals in Indian city

Confusion of Rural and Urban

2007-03-01T08:14:00.000-08:00

The poor are disenfranchised in Cairo.

Cairo is home to 15 million and often described as the center of the Arab world, an incubator of culture and ideas. But it is also a collection of villages, a ruralized metropolis where people live by their wits and devices, cut off from the authorities, the law and often each other.
That social reality does not just speak to the quality and style of life for millions of Egyptians. It also plays a role in the nation’s style of governance.
The fisherman on the Nile, the shepherd in the road and residents of so-called informal communities say their experiences navigating city life have taught them the same lessons: the government is not there to better their lives; advancement is based on connections and bribes; the central authority is at best a benign force to be avoided.
“Everything is from God,” said Mr. Mezar, the fisherman, who was speaking practically, not theologically. “There is no such thing as government. The government is one thing, and we are something else. What am I going to get from the government?”

Two things caught my eye about this NYTimes article. First, the poor feel like they are totally on their own with no government service able to help them. To get ahead, they feel they need social connections or bribes. Second, although Cairo is a huge urban metropolis, it has many rural elements seamlessly woven in, like the sheep wandering the streets or fishermen actively catching fish for sale.

In Mighty Arab Hub, the Poor Are Left to Their Fate

Transnational love: transforming society?

2007-03-01T08:04:00.000-08:00

Korean men are looking overseas for brides because of gender disparities at home.

Now, that industry is seizing on an increasingly globalized marriage market and sending comparatively affluent Korean bachelors searching for brides in the poorer corners of China and Southeast and Central Asia. The marriage tours are fueling an explosive growth in marriages to foreigners in South Korea, a country whose ethnic homogeneity lies at the core of its self-identity.
In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14 percent of all marriages in South Korea, up from 4 percent in 2000.
...
The business began in the late 1990s by matching South Korean farmers or the physically disabled mostly to ethnic Koreans in China, according to brokers and the Consumer Protection Board. But by 2003, the majority of customers were urban bachelors, and the foreign brides came from a host of countries.

Most of the Vietnamese brides come from rural areas. Part of the attraction for them is that Korea is very fashionable right now in the pop media -- and that glamour influences much of their conceptualization of their future life.

Some potential social impacts as a result of these transnational marriages: (1) Koreans re-evaluate what it means to be Korean because ethnicities are evolving. (2) Entrenchment of core-periphery as Koreans become the "power" country that draws from "poor" Vietnam for brides. (3) Rural areas where the brides end up become more like urban sites of cosmopolitanism with cultural and ethnic mixing.

Korean Men Use Brokers to Find Brides in Vietnam

STDs and online dating

2007-03-01T07:57:00.000-08:00

Online dating sites overcome social stigma. Whereas in real life, these users would not be so open about their herpes, in the online space, they have found an affinity group that maintains their privacy:

Pam says at first, people are very nervous about joining, because it may be the first time they identify themselves as having herpes.
"People show up for their first support group meeting and sometimes they turn right around at the door because they don't have the courage to come in," said Pam. But then later, "I have people sending me thank you e-mails all the time. A guy came to a support group meeting and sent me flowers."
Since many of the members have not come out to family and friends, a password is needed to get into the photo gallery showing pictures of social events and to receive any specific information about members.
...
"When we go on outings, we don't put a sign up in the hallway saying, 'Meeting of the Charlotte herpes club,'" Pam said, "Once we went to dinner and there were 30 of us and the hostess asked, 'What's the special occasion?' My friend said, 'We're the Charlotte pottery club!'"

Rising STD rate sparks online dating sites

Dissertation statistics (post-revision)

2007-02-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

I have finished v2.0 of my dissertation. It is now shorter and more deductively organized.

Counts
82,138 words
449,442 characters
2,221 paragraphs
4,372 sentences

Averages
4.4 sentences per paragraph
17.8 words per sentence
5.2 characters per word

Readability
Passive sentences: 13%
Flesch reading ease: 37.1
Flesch-Kinkaid grade level: 12.3

308 references
341 pages (260 are content pages)
23 figures
8 appendices

Dissertation statistics (mid-revision)

2007-02-21T16:02:00.000-08:00

Here is an update on my revision. I still need to revise two chapters. This count now includes my conclusions.

Counts
85,062 words
461,679 characters
2,227 paragraphs
4,504 sentences

Averages
4.6 sentences per paragraph
17.9 words per sentence
5.2 characters per word

Readability
Passive sentences: 13%
Flesch reading ease: 38.4
Flesch-Kinkaid grade level: 12.2

322 references
357 pages (275 are content pages)
33 figures
8 appendices

Comparing with what I started with, my writing (from a Flesch-Kinkaid perspective) seems to have become more difficult to read. However, it is still easier to read than the Harvard Law Review, though less easy to read than an insurance form. The dissertation has grown in size, but it has also shed some references suggesting that more interpretative or bracketing sentences have been put in. More paragraph breaks have been inserted, and each word has gotten beefier.

The internet comes to Turkmenistan

2007-02-16T16:17:00.000-08:00

In post-Turkmenbashi Turkmenistan, freely accessible internet cafes opened today. They promise not to register visitors or to log Web visits or to block sites. The cafes were sparsely populated on Friday because most people had not heard about them. Also they are expensive:

It was unclear exactly how popular the cafes will be -- or how accessible, given that one hour of computer time cost about $4 (euro3) -- an equivalent of five pounds of fresh beef in a country where two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line and the average monthly income is less than $100 (euro76).

Internet cafes open in Turkmenistan

Mobile phones and romance

2007-02-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

Ah, Valentine's Day. My favorite holiday research-wise because stories about romance pop up everywhere.

1) Valentine's Day wins Indian hearts

India's largest chain of card shops, Archie's, is producing more than 300 different types of Valentine's Day cards this year.
Some of them come with detachable love hearts which can then be used as mobile telephone accessories. There is also money to be made from people who do not have a sweetheart but want one. Internet dating sites have grown in popularity in India.
One of the most successful, Fropper.com has two million members and says February is the most popular month in which to join.

2) India: political, religious hardliner groups protest Valentine's Day (thanks to Jonathan for these two links)

3) and here's a potentially interesting story, except it's published in The Conservative Voice, which suggests there might be a political agenda. But it has a mobile phone angle, so I can't resist: Extremist Muslims Vs. Valentines, Except Rebels

Kuwait: "Tactics are evolving. In this oil-rich state, young Arabs buy two cell phones, and as they see the beloved driving by, they throw one of the mobiles in her car; then the telephonic romance can begin."

I don't know how to verify this tidbit, but it's such a good story.

4) and forbidden love via mobile! Romance nipped on train
This is an excellent story about two kids who become connected because of the mobile phone. The boy was randomly dialing numbers and reached her. They nurtured their romance by mobile, and then by landline, before they tried to meet in person, and were thwarted.

Laltu came to know his beloved by chance. He was dialling numbers at random from his new cellphone when she said hello. Long conversations and endless SMSes followed. The bills were long, too, and the phones were confiscated. But that only made the young lovers use landlines, instead.

In time for Valentine's Day...

2007-02-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

The University of Washington made a press release about my research.

Mobile phones facilitate romance in modern India

And it is featured on the University of Washington home page, the second story following the one about negative employees who are like bad apples in the corporate barrel.

Dissertation statistics (pre-revision)

2007-02-07T14:45:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to launch into deep revision for my dissertation draft.

Here are statistics for my dissertation pre-revision. This information includes my appendices, title page, bibliography, and graphics. It does not include my Conclusions chapter which would have been slightly bogus without going back and re-reading and re-thinking previous chapters.

[UPDATE: using Word's spell-check function to get additional information about readability.

Counts
82,561 words
444,473 characters
2,196 paragraphs
4,367 sentences

Averages
4.7 sentences per paragraph
17.9 words per sentence
5.1 characters per word

Readability
Passive sentences: 13%
Flesch reading ease: 39.8
Flesch-Kinkaid grade level: 12.0]

336 references
345 pages (262 are content pages)
83,396 words
448,146 characters (no spaces) implying my words are on average 5.37 letters long
2,279 paragraphs
33 figures
8 appendices

Pleasures of the Text

2007-02-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

An article in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago about the curious phenomenon that is text messaging. The Pleasures of the Text (link via Jan)

One pithy observation in the article:

This may be the universal attraction of text-messaging, in fact: it's a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication - the immediacy - without, for the most part, the burden of actual intimacy or substance. The great majority of text messages are of the "Hey, how are you, whassup?" variety, and they're sent sometimes when messenger and recipient are within speaking distance of each other - across classrooms, say, or from one row of a stadium to another. They're little electronic waves and nods that, just like real waves and nods, aren't meant to do much more than establish a connection - or disconnection, as the case may be - without getting into specifics.

Alas, poor arm warmers...

2007-02-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

I nearly finished the arm warmers, but discovered that I was going to be a tiny bit short of yarn. And in thinking about where I was going to sneak out some more yarn, I realized that I was not happy with the shape of the arm warmers -- too wide. So I will rip them out and redo them at some point. But since I can't stand doing anymore circular stocking stitch, I'm going to give it a break.

In the meantime, I started on some moss stitch baby booties from Debbie Bliss' Baby Style book. The more I knit from that book, the more I realize how disturbing I find her patterns: no schematics, no final measurements, and very linear patterns that assume that exact gauge will be made. I'm sure a cultural psychological critique could be made.

CNN story on mobiles in the developing world

2007-01-29T15:47:00.000-08:00

CNN published a story about mobile phone success stories in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. It's a nice contextualization of what mobile phone use is like in digitally emergent places. Cell phones play vital role in developing world

Dating service via milk cartons

2007-01-29T13:10:00.000-08:00

Welsh farmers look for romance by putting stickers with their pictures on milk cartons. Any kind of medium can be adopted for dating! Must love cows: In Wales, lonely farmers seek suitors