The 5 (now 6) C's

As usual, AAAI 2012 had a number of interesting, useful, and thought-provoking talks. (Unfortunately, this year the entire conference was so badly organized that they weren't always easy to find, but anyway.)

One that stood out as both atypical and useful was a talk in the EAAI track from an NSF funding agent. Without going into too much detail, here's the core slide about how to distinguish your grant applications; make them:

The  5  6 C's:

• Clear	• Concise	• Correct
• Compelling	• Complete	• Concrete

(Yeahyeahyeah. Lists. Alliterative ones, with bullets. Looks... unpleasantly DARPA-y. But bear with me here...)

Concreteness, he says, is where a lot of otherwise excellent proposals fall down.

It's not that hard to see why. As a group, researchers are selected for "vision" more than "management skills" – and such minor* details as breaking a Vision down into tasks and goals is definitely in the latter category. But! Vision and management skills can co-exist. Some of the best researchers are excellent managers. Some aren't, leading to disorganized proposals and conferences. It's possible (albeit harder) to become a well-known researcher with Vision alone, although not Management alone.

Formal schooling could help, but making a computer science or EE degree contingent on taking a one-quarter class on basic project planning is a pipe dream. CS faculty (you know, the people who define curricula) would at best call it a waste of time, and at worst scream bloody murder. It's a cultural trope that Real Geeks shun (shudder) management.**

But that's a silly reason. Wanting more information and better tools is the pure, delicious heart of being a geek. This is true even if the tools come from the business school.

...whoah. That was kind of a digression. Sorry. Ahem.

In conclusion: concreteness! Goals and tasks and timelines! Or, to summarize:
Concreteness→$$$→research→happyface.

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* Let's be clear about the sarcasm here. This is pure sarcasm, okay?  Really it's not minor. If it sounds minor, you probably have plenty of Vision. (That last sentence is also not 100% sarcasm-free.)

** Also silly. A good geek should only shun bad management. That's a pretty high percentage of the management out there, but that fact is also partly a result of not training proto-geeks up on basic management tasks.

The Future of Poster Sessions

At RSS this year, the "poster" session consisted of forty or fifty 40-inch monitors mounted at poster height; each presenter hooked his or her laptop up to a screen, and attendees wandered among the posters as usual. It's a pretty different modality! Anyone who's been to an "expo" (where exhibitors bring whatever they can afford to get people's attention) has seen big screens used for demos, but this is quite different. Over lunch, we talked about how that would change the poster session, and the best way to use a medium-size screen when people are wandering past and you want them to know about your research. After lunch, I attended the session – which, not too surprisingly, consisted of a lot of people trying different things, many of which were terrible ideas.*

So WTF is a poster session?

At a conference for some field – like robotics – people submit papers about their recent work, which are either accepted or rejected. Some of the papers are accepted as posters, which the authors print out beforehand. All the posters go up on walls and rolling corkboards in a big room, and instead of giving a talk, the poster authors stand by their poster for a session, usually ~4 hours. Everyone else wanders from poster to poster, asking questions, getting the 30-second spiel, and hopefully absorbing the research.

The goal of a poster session is to convey your research to as many people as possible. People need to come up to your poster and listen to what you have to say. If people are stacked three-deep around you, they need to be able to get something from what you're saying. So with that in mind, the Pangeek saw and will comment on the following:

  • Using the monitor as a static poster. Displaying and talking about a single image for four hours. Basically an electronic version of what you'd do anyway. It's fine, but misses a chance to do things better.

  • Making changes during the session. People moving windows around, fixing typos, adjusting image sizes... while people were standing there waiting to hear about their work. Guys! Wait until there aren't people watching the back of your head while you type!

  • Having a looping lecture. This shuts out people who wander in halfway through, as people always do, Murphy's Law being the fickle bastard it is. Someone said to me at one point, "Well, it's... hang on, when it comes back around, I can explain." Posters aren't talks. People come and go, people ask questions mid-stream. Flexibility is key.

  • Having a fixed title across the top. People wandering past know what a poster is about and whether to stop. People looking for specific work can find it. This is Good.

  • Having some large-font, unchanging text giving an overview of the work – the most important high-level points, motivation, etc. Same reasoning as above: casual drive-bys can get something from it.

  • Having a video or animated image on loop. This has three advantages. First, it can really help. If pictures are worth a thousand words, good animations are worth** a thousand pictures. Second, people are barely removed from birds. Attention is easily caught and held by shiny moving pictures of robots or whatever. Third, you can make things like result graphs bigger by cycling them, instead of cramming them all in. (But beware conflict with item 3!)

  • Using single-click interactions. Some presenters made visual changes as needed (like bringing up a video to show a particular capability and then closing it again) without being infuriating. How? By switching back and forth with a single mouse click, rather than closing things, typing something, enlarging a window, etc. Good job.

Overall? It was cool. It's blindingly obvious (in retrospect) that this is The Future; we need to figure out how to make it work for us. Also, woo! The Future! (Also also: the Pangeek wants the future to be higher resolution.)

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* It should be noted that this was completely new for most of us; the people who (arguably) mis-used the technology were the people who were trying to use the technology. Good for them.
** well, composed of

Firefox safety that doesn't suck

If you care to look, there are approximately 72,983 things you are supposed to do to make yourself safe while browsing. Most of them start with, "Item one: never launch any browser ever again."

I exaggerate, of course. ...some. But, well, most security is a tradeoff between safety and convenience. For example, Tor's download page starts thusly:

Want Tor to really work? ...then please don't just install it and go on. You need to change some of your habits and reconfigure your software! ...

Dear All Security People Ever: I do not want to change my habits. They are nice habits and I have them for a reason. Convenience is more important to me than it is to you. Also, okay, it's becoming clear that some caution is called for, but I am not willing to give up functional browsing. I'm not even willing to give up playing dumb Flash games.

So, taking those constraints into account, may I present you with...

A list of good-idea addons that don't make everything stop working

(promise!)

1. What: Beef Taco. → Click to install ←
   Ad networks (Google, Yahoo, etc.) can track what site you're seeing their ads from. Most allow you to opt out, but you have to know how, which is a pain, and there are many. Beef Taco adds those opt-out cookies.
   Side effects: It may speed up your browsing. You will see more randomly-selected ads, lessening the likelihood that you may see something you're actually interested in.
   
   
2. What: BetterPrivacy. → Click to install ←
   You know how you can decide whether to allow web sites to set cookies? Probably you do allow it? Well, many web sites use small files called LSOs to sidestep those preferences. BetterPrivacy nukes those files each time you quit your browser.
   Side effects: Some sites use LSOs to track that you're logged into something, like Pandora, in which case you have to log in every time you restart your browser. To get around this, go to the BetterPrivacy Preferences, select the site you want to stay logged into, and click the "Prevent automatic LSO Deletion" button. You shouldn't need to do much, honest.
   
   
3. What: Ghostery. → Click to install ←
   Many web sites use a variety of little trackers called web bugs – invisible one-pixel images, etc. – to tell where you go as you hop from site to site. Ghostery blocks many of them. Also, it has a cute ghost! (His name is "Ghosty.")
   Side effects: By default, Ghostery adds a box for a few seconds showing what it's blocking. If you don't like it, you can turn it off. Also, you may want to UN-block Google widgets if your iGoogle widgets misbehave. (It's easy, just click on the little Ghosty in the bottom right of your Firefox window.)
   
   
4. What: Adblock Plus. → Click to install ←
   You often see ads when you're browsing, such as banner ads across the top of pages. They blink, make noise, and generally do their level best to be a pain in the rear. Adblock Plus does a pretty good job of – er – blocking them.
   Side effects: No ads. Also you will have to choose a filter in the config file right after you restart; go with the default.
   Sadly, this makes things suck after all. :-(
   
   
5. What: Flashblock. → Click to install ←
   Instead of Flash playing when you open a page, you click a little "F" button to load video. Flash-based adverts won't play, Flash-based web-tracking techniques won't track you (unless you click on them), you can open YouTube pages in tabs without them all loading at once, etc.
   Side effects: If you like the default behavior, it could be annoying to have to click. Your browser won't crash nearly as often.
   

For each of these, you'll have to go through a dialog box to install, then restart your browser. You can install several and then restart only after they're all in. To mess with preferences or disable/uninstall anything that doesn't work for you, go to the Firefox Tools menu, and go down to Add-ons.

So hey, try clicking on the clicky-things! And if you have problems with some site afterwards, leave a comment. (My beloved adblock failed this test.) Inquiring minds want to know!