SNAPMapper Takes Third Place at Alameda County Hackathon
SNAPMapper, our mobile "Yelp for food stamp users" app, took third (out of 24) at the Alameda County hackathon last weekend. There was a fantastic amount of creativity and great ideas, all geared towards improving services and access to services for the residents of this huge urban and suburban area.
Currently, people on the state CalFresh and Federal SNAP food assistance programs can find only the location of stores that accept this payment service; the data says nothing about quality, service, availability of fresh food, etc. (that is, the nearest three places may be liquor stores and gas stations). SNAPMapper allows users to locate, rate, and give other feedback about these stores, helping all users learn where they can find healthy, fresh, and inexpensive food for their families. We also hope that this would provide incentive for stores to stock healthier food.
(Our research confirms that a majority of the population in question has access to a smart phone; these phones may, in fact, be their only source of internet access.)
Our data can easily be scraped for the county to match against its own demographic data about CalFresh and SNAP users, to track the efficiency and availability of services.
Since the data we used is nationwide, SNAPMapper could easily be adopted by every county across the United States.
We look forward to working with the county to make SNAPMapper a fully functional web and native app.
Partial Victory in Public Interest Project
There's still a lot to do on just this desktop web app (adding a slider for number of months of interest computed, labels, cleaning up CSS, responsive), but broke through some JavaScript/JQuery issues and it's functional so far. [caption id="attachment_823" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Basic credit card interest calculator -- part of a larger project[/caption]
The live version of this is here.
Once I add the slider (and get it working), then comes: changing it all to JQuery Mobile, customizing the styling and theme (are those substantially different terms?), and starting to learn Phone Gap.
The ultimate goal: This will be part of a public-good project that offers mobile phone users easy tools for visualizing how much each purchase will cost when credit card interest is factored in, for helping users learn how to pay down credit card debt, and about credit card terms and conditions.
New Article at UXMag.com
Belated notice on this, but go read my new(ish) article about the design challenges facing the iPad as an e-reader. It's up at UXMag.com.
Shoutify Alpha
A learning experiment. Basic JavaScript, and learning some CSS tricks such as embedding a custom font and logo scaling for responsive web design. Still to do: full-page responsive design, "SHOUT TO:" buttons, resolving cross-browser incompatibilities, typographic background pattern.
Going Responsive
After Marcotte and Grigsby (two convincing speakers), I found and am adapting a responsive theme to this WordPress site. Now I just need to figure out what happened with the the blog! #unintendedconsequences
Best Way to Address Alerts?
So far, the only way I've found to get the podcast lists to update after the "!" appears is to delete, go to the iTunes Store, resubscribe, download the old podcasts all over again.[/caption]
My First JavaScript Web App
Shoutify is a web-based application to help users who want to express outrage or certainty in comment threads or instant messages. (And yes, I'm aware of the Caps Lock key. This was really just a learning experience in working with JavaScript.)
For Graeme
There's been a lot of data on this problem and various filtering/registration schemes that have been tried since this paper was written; I recommend searching through Poynter.org's MediaWire (I read it every day). i203_finalpaper_ddt
What I Did Last Weekend (Hackathon Judging Edition)
I was honored to be a judge at the 2012 Code for Oakland Hackathon in downtown Oakland, along with City Council members, local businesspeople, and technology developers. There were some amazing projects for a one-day event! See the Storify story here.
Launchpad, Reminders, Notes and the Dock in Mountain Lion
By now I'm used to new versions of OS X inserting the latest and greatest into the Dock. This time, the first boot of Mountain Lion populated my Dock (which is pinned to the side in its 2D glory, as it should be) with icons for Launchpad, Notes, and Reminders. As a result, there are more shiny objects, making the Dock objects I use for launching or switching apps even tinier and smaller to hit. So I tried dragging Launchpad out of the Dock, expecting it to vanish in a puff of virtual smoke. (I should note that this is an expectation that Mac OS X has taught me.) But no go. The Launchpad icon just rubber-banded back to the Dock. Same with Notes and Reminders.
Are we stuck with Dock spam? Well, no.
You can still click-and-hold (or right-click) on these Dock icons, navigate Options->Remove from Dock and there you go.
But... why is this the case? Why is Apple breaking behaviors they taught us? Is this a subtle signal that Launchpad will be the way of the future, and Apple is training us to rely on Launchpad? Is this another hint for iOS-ification conspiracy theorists?
What I Did Last Weekend (Datafest Late Edition)
Award winner at Stanford Datafest! Is the influx of millions of dollars to Wisconsin both for and against Scott Walker an aberration, or have state political races always been powered by "outside" influences? Our project collates and visualizes the amount and proportion of out-of-state money contributed to gubernatorial races in all 50 states and tracks from where this money came (which states, largest individual donors).
Our raw data was scraped from the Sunlight Foundation's and other sources, and cleaned so that it could serve to power our interactive heat map (more to come on how that was made). Original investigative reporting on some of the top donors was added to illustrate how our tool can serve as a springboard for deep, data-driven journalism.
Team Members: Gershon Bialer, Jake Bialer, Vamshidar Reddy Boda,Beth Morrissey, Laura Rena Murray, Bill Tang, Dan Turner
(Note: Yes, the map needs to be resized, and the popups need to be cleaned.)
Live version: http://twoangstroms.com/datafest2/
What I Did Last Weekend (Music Video Edition)
Shot on an iPhone 4S using iSupr8. Music: "Big Sur" by The Thrills. Coasting1970s_cdrom
Is the Romney Campaign a Jobs Program for Bush Staffers?
Is the Romney campaign a jobs program for Bush staffers?"
Lion Hates Me
I saw some apps not responding, so I tried to sample the processes (so I could hand the data off to a more savvy friend). Note that in neither of these screen shots was the cursor over the highlighted Time Machine Menu Bar item; I'd clicked on it in an attempt to suspend backing up, in hopes that that would lessen the load on the poor laptop, but that just made things worse. The whole thing started when iTunes wouldn't launch, so after a few minutes of the icon bouncing in the Dock, I used Activity Monitor to get it to quit. The next dozen times I tried to relaunch it, there was that lovely error message.
The computer sat like this, with eventually the Finder being unresponsive, for 10-12 minutes before I forced a reboot.
[gallery]
What I Did Last Weekend (WSJ Data Transparency Edition)
I was lucky enough to attend the Wall Street Journal Data Transparency Weekend hosted at NYU and work with a fantastic team led by Prof. Ed Felten of Princeton (and the FTC). The project was very data-driven, so the UX work came at the very beginning and the very end: If our concern was surfacing privacy and surveillance issues to users, how can we build the needed database and then present the relevant information? Could we assign a letter grade to sites based on our desired criteria of third-party cookie use, adherence to Do Not Track requests, and allowing users to opt out? Looking at the user needs, we didn't want to provide a site or app that users had to visit separately, load a URL, see the results, and then decide whether to continue or not their everyday browsing and interactions. We realized we could build this as a browser extension; this would be unobtrusive but persistent, and could be hidden or exposed (we later added automated presentation of the site's "grade" in the extension icon, so users could immediately see the site's letter grade). This, we hypothesized, would more powerfully link the experience of visiting a site with knowledge of the site's privacy attitude. It was our hope that this would more likely spur user action based on a state of information, making our extension an effective sousveillance tool.
We crawled the top 500 Alexa sites on 4/14/12 and we logged all cookie downloads that resulted from those crawls. We performed three different crawls:
* first, with a clean-sate browser without any opt-out cookies or do not track requests * second, with the BeefTaco extension active (which downloads most opt-out cookies) * third, with the "Do Not Track" request option selected in the browser
We performed these different crawls to analyze if the sites honored opt out cookies and/or “Do Not Track” requests from the headers. Based on these crawls, we graded the top 500 Alexa sites and relevant third-party networks. Raw data from the crawls will be located at trackingcookie.info in the future for reference.
The resulting privacy grade (from A to F) for sites is based on what they do with their users' data. These grades reflect how well or how poorly that sites utilize their users' data. We give stellar grades to first-party sites that: • do not allow a large amount of third-party networks to be called on their site (and do not let a lot of third-party networks to download tracking cookies on the visitor's browser) • honor both “opt-out” cookies and “do not track” requests
We give poor grades to first-party sites that: • call a lot of third-party networks and then those third-party networks download multiple tracking cookies on the user's browser • call third-party networks which have poor quality scores themselves (because the third parties do not allow for cookie opt out or do not honor "Do Not Track" requests) • continue to track users online behavior even after the users opt-out of online tracking through the use of “opt-out” cookies • continue to track users online behavior if the user turns on the “Do Not Track” option in their browsers
The current iteration of the extension presents this data in a three-pane column view. The left column shows the first-party site name, favicon, Yes/No to the presence of third-party cookies, and a graphic summing up the grade for the first-party site. The center column lists the names and companies of the third-parties (if any): even if users aren't interested in seeing details, a quick glance gives visual indication whether there are any, a few, or many. More advances users can click on any name listed in the center column to progressively reveal more data about each third-party, including details how it scored on our grading criteria. And, as said above, non-technical users can still see, even with the extension hidden, the letter grade as highlighted in the extension icon in the browser's status bar.
More information and the download link for the current extension are available here and here.
We also sketched out future direction. We'd like to incorporate a subset of the Mozilla Collusion plug-in to replace the center column with a graphical representation of the discovered third parties that shows their scope and relationships. Users would still be able to progressively disclose or ignore details in the third column.
Worst Product Placement?
Vodka-brand vodka and tinned "Steak". In the same bin in, I assume, the freezer. Why would one put tins of meat in the freezer? Funny thing that negatively affected my enjoyment of "Fringe" in general -- for all the dialog notes that the world was falling apart, and things like water, clean air, and pens (?) were rare, almost every interior or exterior shot showed a world full of well-dressed and shod people in lovely houses. Apparently these hellish dystopias have higher living standards than 99% of our own world, which I don't think is all that bad.
(This is how I spent part of my injury recovery -- started watching before I remembered this was another *spitsonground*J.J. Abrams*spitsonground* show.)
From the Season 3 finale of "Fringe"
What I've Been Doing
Recovering from this. Props to Specialized helmets. They do their job, and give their lives in the process.