I was thinking about the latest news from Apple, that they were partnering with textbook publishers to bring cheaper textbooks directly to the iPad while at the same time releasing an application for anyone to publish iBooks for the Apple Bookstore.

Perhaps I am being cynical, but it’s always appeared to me that the main business model of a textbook publisher is to slightly tweak versions of a textbook, altering page numbers and quiz questions in order to force students to buy newer editions instead of used ones. Perhaps the industry is thinking that iBooks will eliminate the used book market, and they’re probably right. But this could also have some negative (for publishers) side effects as well.

Apple is lowering the distribution costs of textbooks dramatically. Assuming that schools actually pay for a set of iPads for each student, it becomes trivially easy (with the iBook publishing software) to create free textbooks for schools. Who would want to give textbooks away for free? Teachers. There are cases of teachers self-publishing for their own schools, but for this idea to really work, I think teachers would need to collaboratively create a textbook that meets either regional or national standards and release it for free on iBooks. If you don’t believe this will happen, take a look at Khan Academy.

Previous attempts to create free textbooks have been hit or miss. I am not quite sure how popular Wikibooks are in the classroom. The problem is probably that of traction and scale. Previously, no one has created a standard for e-textbook distribution. Apple is doing that with iBooks. The beautiful part is that they’re bootstrapping it with traditional publishers who are probably digging their own grave.

Of course, this could play out in a number of ways. Maybe iBooks will prove to be too costly for most public schools to adopt (I’m guessing this is very likely). If only private schools or schools with a lot of funding can support them, it may not become worthwhile to create free textbooks for all.

What I’d hope to see is a slow adoption of iPads in the classroom using iBooks as textbooks. Once a critical mass of schools is using iBooks, free textbooks will be developed and adopted by certain school districts and spread to others.

I’m glad to see that Apple is trying to “disrupt” (I lose some points here by using a word I hate) the textbook industry, and it’s awesome that they’re partnering with that industry to do it. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this plays out, hopefully for the benefit of our education system.

I sat down at a table whose occupants were librarians. Pretty much everyone there was an LIS (library and information services) specialist. This wasn’t really a great first impression, since I applied under the HCI (human-computer interaction) specialization, and to be honest, libraries aren’t really my thing.

What, exactly, did I have against librarians and libraries? I think I mostly felt that, from the school’s website (or the parts of the website that I studied), the program was more for people who were generally interested in information from a more technology-oriented viewpoint. So I was hoping to see more technological-minded folks at my table.

I still, however, decided to enroll. And I’m glad I did. Slowly, I think I started to understand what libraries are all about. I started using the local library. A lot. It probably also helped that I worked at a library my entire time at the school. I wasn’t studying to be a librarian, but I was exposed to the culture. Computer nerds and librarians make a good team.

So did library school actually change me? Or was I somehow intrinsically drawn to the program where computer nerds and book nerds collide? Maybe a little of both. I’ve always had a secret love for organizing and archiving things.

For example, pretty much no one in my family seems to care much about backing up files. I, on the hand, am a bit obsessed about it. I still have files from middle school preserved in their original file formats and directory structure in place. Who knows, some day I might want to look back on that stuff. I’m also kind of a nut when it comes to properly organizing and applying metadata (and preserving said metadata) from photos. Oh, and also backing everything up, both on-site and off-site (using multiple online services).

I also get really irritated when I go to the library and see something like this:

Is that a Drama and Horror blu-ray disc I see mixed in with the Action ones!? Usually I will take the offending discs and put them in the right place. There was also that one time I saw Harry Potter in Comedy when it should have gone in Fantasy. The worst is when a DVD gets mixed in with blu-ray. That’s like the same as a book being in the CD section! Oh man, now I’m rambling.

The point is, I think I already had some Librarian/Archivist in me before coming to library school. Hanging out with like-minded people probably reinforced the behavior mentioned above. And probably for the better. If you’re a computer nerd, I suggest you check out libraries (and librarians!). If you’re a library nerd, I suggest you check out computer nerd stuff (and computer nerds!). Together, we can make the world a more information-y place.

I attended a sorta all day symposium last Friday at the University of Michigan titled “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age.” While a lot went over my head (I am not as prolific a reader as many of the presenters), I think I still got some cool ideas from it.

Leah Price spoke about book fetishism. How, as the book is considered less and less the de facto vehicle by which its contents are delivered, it becomes more of a fetishized object than just a “book.” In other words, there are computer screens, Kindles, audio books and other ways for us to digest fiction and non-fiction works. Because of this, books become special objects. The act of reading a book instead of a screen or anything else becomes something special and deliberate.

I tend to agree a lot. Just as part of me enjoys wearing glasses because many people do not, and the act of wearing glasses sort of differentiates me from other people, so does reading a physical book. On top of the fact that leisure reading of books seems to denote socioeconomic status (and the kind of company you keep), I guess I also just like reading. Besides, I don’t have a TV, so what else am I supposed to do with my free time?

Paul Courant brought up a lot of issues with digital vs. physical intellectual property that has a lot to do with other mediums as well (and not just books). He pointed out that digital copies of things do not currently afford the kinds of things that physical copies do by virtue of simply existing in real life. He argued that there’s a lot of information contained in physical artifacts. When you walk into someone’s house, you see the books on their shelf and can make an estimate of who they are by what books they’ve read. Someone later pointed out that it isn’t necessarily which books they’ve read but which books they’ve bought! Another point is the legal ramifications of DRM of digital goods versus the common sense physical item. Courant asked hypothetically if he’d be able to leave his Kindle (and the books on it) to his kids when he dies. He has a number of books passed down from generation to generation. Will that stop with digital distribution?

I tend to like the romanticized notion that physical items have a particular charm and historical value. I also think that digital information can also have some valuable information, especially in the form of metadata. The digital photo from your Canon SLR may not have the same qualities as film, but it could also contain metadata like where the photo was taken, when it was taken, camera settings and other stuff that’s very valuable. We might not be able to put things like Bill Gate’s computer into a museum like we do Galileo’s sketches, but think how cool it would be to have the revision history of a future great novel (assuming novelists keep their documents in a version control system…)! You could see all of the steps that the writer took, things they wrote and erased, and the order in which they produced a work. Now that I think of it, WordPress keeps a revision history of sorts, so I guess we’re not too far off that idea.

It’s interesting to see how the “death of the book” is being described. It seems as though the general message of the day was that books were already dead (and long live the book). The decoupling of the book and its contents happened a long time ago. But for now, I think as long as people continue appreciating them (and I think enough do), the book will still exist as one of many vectors for the dissemination of information.

At some point in the last week or two, I graduated from the University of Michigan School of Information with a Master’s of Science in Information. Yes, that last sentence was totally for SEO purposes.

I figured I should write a blog post about it since I made a big deal about grad school in the past. So much so that I even made a blog for it. Maybe I should cross-post there. Nah, that blog is long-dead. In fact, it was totally dead until I just checked it and fixed a php bug that’s probably been there for two months… Oops!

It’s fun to look back at my old posts and see what I was thinking (or attempting to portray what I was thinking) at the time. I went through a bunch of my posts when I was writing this post up, so I guess I can skip a lot and focus on the University experience.

When I went to visiting days, I just coming from an interview with Google that I thought I had aced. Apparently I was wrong about that. I came in with a sort of nonchalant attitude. I think this was kinda good (being too serious is never a good thing) but also kinda bad (I might have not taken the visit as seriously as I should’ve). At the time I thought there were a pretty large number of non-technical peers for an HCI program, regardless of how interdisciplinary it was supposed to be. In hindsight I think this concern was reasonable for a CS person. I guess I don’t think of myself as a CS person anymore, though.

One shock of the program I had to overcome was that people outside of it don’t know what to think of it. In my numerous job fair experiences, I noticed that recruiters really didn’t know what to do with me. “You have a computer science background, but you don’t want to write software!?” Well, sort of but not really. I lucked out and talked to a recent graduate who worked for Google. He told me that the ideal position I was describing had a name: Product Manager. That exchange really helped me solidify my goals for what I wanted to do after I graduated and what I should accomplish before I graduated.

I should also note that I’m pretty lucky that I have a background in CS. Many of my classmates and peers in the program do not have a CS background, which makes finding an internship or job even harder for them. In a field that’s so new, we have a lot of explaining to do about why the skills we’re learning are valuable to employers. I’m able to explain it in relative terms (I’m like a software engineer + 1) whereas others have to define who they are from a blank slate, at least in terms the recruiters can understand.

I had some great opportunities to do academic-style research. I did two independent studies: one on an audience-aware public display (using bluetooth, facial detection and a large touch screen display) and another on the reputation system of a large social network, CouchSurfing! For the latter I co-authored a paper. We’ll see if it gets into the conference June 1st! I tried to make sure that I experienced a full range of academia including normal classes, research and being involved with a student org. I think I did a good job, though I feel I might have overextended myself a bit.

I sense this post is getting a bit tl;dr, as many of my posts tend to drift towards. So maybe I’ll just conclude. Back when I started thinking about applying to graduate schools, I did so because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. At this point, I think I have a better understanding of what I want to do, generally. I should probably try and escape the ivory tower of academia, at least for a while, and see if doing real industry stuff is a good idea. Then again, I have been doing my own thing for as long as I’ve been programming. I had thought of applying to PhD programs but that process was cut short when I remembered how much I hate applying to grad school and also after I got a job offer in November. I think that making the leap and attending school for another two years was definitely worth it in terms of professional and personal growth. I don’t know if I can say the same for spending ~$70 for a cap, gown and hood that I wore for one ceremony…

It’s been a while since I noticed this but I hadn’t written a blog post about it yet. All around Ann Arbor, you can find a distinctly unique signature of “Duck” written on stuff. From mailboxes to walls to whatever. I think I first noticed it on a paper towel dispenser at BTB Cantina. I thought it was some kind of trap where once I read it, I had a second to actually “duck” or be hit on the head by a log or something… That obviously wasn’t the case (I didn’t duck).

Does anyone know what the deal is? Is Duck a gang? Can I join? Do I want to join? Is Duck involved in illegal activities? Does Duck fight crime? I wanna know.

Anyway, it seems as though I’m the only person who ever wrote a blog about applying to grad schools. Because a lot of people who meet me at visiting days tell me they’ve read my blog. This is kind of weird and kind of flattering as it means my page rank for certain queries is high, and also that these people know stuff about me before even meeting me. One guy even knew about my side project, Anime Nano and listened to my podcast! I playfully referred to the people who knew me from the internet as my “stalkers.” Hopefully I won’t ever have real stalkers. The crazy kind. Anyway, it wasn’t weird hanging out with these people or anything. I was actually pretty stoked to meet a “user” of one of my sites in real life! Plus I’ll never actually see these peeps again since I’m graduating before they come here.

And yes, I intentionally titled this blog post to get another entry high in the Google query for “SI Visiting Days,” though it seems that one of my peers is beating me at the moment.

Today and Yesterday were fun days since the engineering career fair was going on at north campus. Having started my own company (I’m the President!), I might not need to be looking at jobs this very moment. But I’m also looking at PhD programs and other stuff to do after I graduate, so I figured I should scope out the job scene as well.

You’re already familiar with my past job hunting experiences, I wager. Or if you aren’t check out some posts here in the archives. I stuck to the engineering fair this time (there’s also a normal career fair going on at central campus). The experience seems to be more of the same for me this year.

The thing I noticed is that there’s a large number of smaller, lesser-known companies who don’t have many people talking to them. Then there’s the big guys: MSFT, Apple, Intel who get huge ass lines of people waiting to talk. I kinda feel bad for the smaller guys, but don’t talk to them anyway since they seem pathetic. I mean that in a sympathetic way. I’m sure they’re great companies though.

The first day, I went to talk to Microsoft, Apple, Expedia, Amazon and a few others. A brother of a friend did an internship at Microsoft, and so I have a higher opinion of them than I had before. They seem pretty into the whole student life thing. In the evening, they had this experimental tech fiesta thing. Basically a bunch of newer products with the people working on them, explaining how cool the stuff is. There was stuff like: Zune (the software, very cool), Startup Labs (which I am definitely applying to), Silverlight (which I’m still not convinced will be good) and a random dude playing Halo for what seemed like hours. Yeah, he basically just sat there the whole time. The startup labs thing seems to be a incubating thingy based in Cambridge. Way cool.

Apple was pretty standard. I talked to them, explained I made a company that did iPhone apps, etc. They seemed to just want me to do an online resume or something. And this time I didn’t get a free song or any shwag at all!

Amazon was probably the worst of them all. Every time I talk to people from Amazon, they just don’t get me. I wanted to talk about cool stuff, but they got wrapped up by testing my “engineerness.” Like, they asked me how I would sort a large array of numbers that wouldn’t fit into a single computer. “Well,” I said, “the answer you’re looking for is probably distributing the work to multiple computers and merging the lists back together after each computer is done with its share.” I seriously was just patronizing the person. Then they threw the “How do you find a loop in a linked list?” Actually, first they asked me if I knew what a linked list was. I wanted to say something like “DUDE, I HAVE A DEGREE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE! PLUS NO ONE USES LINKED LISTS IN REAL LIFE!” But basically I was happy to finally leave. Amazon might be a sweet company, but their recruiters blow hard.

I also talked to a dude from Expedia who worked in their labs. He was really funny and really cool. I think he enjoys his job a lot. He was trying hard to see if there was a spot I could fill in the org, but it looks like their labs department is too small right now to hire on a random generalist. Which is kind of what I love to do. He was super cool though, seemed kind of crazy in a good way.

I also noticed one of the most exorbitant career fair booths I have ever seen in my life. It’s the one in the picture at the top of this post. I should’ve taken more pics. I don’t know what ArcelorMittal does, but they can afford fucking plasmas in their brushed steel pagodas! It was like an experimental Ikea home or something, seriously!

The second day of the career fair (today) was much quieter. I talked to Yahoo, imo.im and Arbor Networks. A classmate of mine did an internship at Yahoo this summer and turned me onto their stuff. The guy I talked to happened to be working in the mobile dept at Yahoo and dug my iPhone app that I demo’ed for him. But I said that I wanted to do more project lead stuff like product management. Unfortunately, it seems like business people do the PMing at Yahoo, which is totally different from most orgs. I think Microsoft and Google both hire PMs with engineering backgrounds. Anyway, the dude said to apply anyway and my resume could find its way into the right hands somehow.

imo.im is the company I blogged about previously. They sent me a t-shirt! The recruiter, Marissa, remembered me and basically reiterated stuff from last time. I also did a raffle and ended up winning a shirt again. She’ll mail it to me. Honestly, imo.im seems like a pretty sweet startup gig, but the recruiter explained that they’re looking for extremely talented coders and algorithmers. I imagine the interview process would be grueling. It makes sense, though, since they’re a startup and need to have as much manpower for their size as possible.

Arbor Networks is a network security company here in town. I talked to the guy, thanking them for giving me a shirt the last time I talked to them. I didn’t think there’d be much overlap between my interests and theirs, but we started talking about network visualizations. I wonder if we were on the same page. Either way, I’ll check out their company again since their recruiters seem cool.

Finally, Facebook had an info session tonight. The dude who interviewed me last year was here again. This time the presentation seemed really too technical and boring versus the one last year which was more fun and about the company itself. They gave a lot of code examples, but I’ve developed FB apps before so it was old news to me. I’d be more interested in hearing about FB’s future plans, but I doubt they would reveal stuff like that.

Last year I had interviewed for an engineering gig. I think I was a bit too rusty for that. This time, I hope I can prove my worth in more than just coding, but in analysis, business stuff, and creativity too.

Overall, the career fair was pretty fun. It’s too bad that some recruiters are completely clueless, but the good ones are really good. It seems a bit silly sometimes for recruiters to show up all the way in Ann Arbor just to say “email us your resume,” but I guess the impression is what counts.

Student: How do you spell that?

Me: *Facepalm*

The growth of Notecentric isn’t what I had hoped it would be. Not too many people use it, probably due to network effects of Facebook promoting a competing app (note to Facebook: if you want to promote a level playing field, don’t play favorites!) and other general performance issues (the application is pretty barebones and the RFacebook library I used to write it is pretty damn slow. It times out a lot!).

Anyway, I got some neat network data from it, which made the whole thing worthwhile. You can check out the original paper I wrote last semester here.

I’m going to be presenting my analysis during the School of Information’s annual expoSItion. It’s like a science fair except without the exploding volcanoes. During my Winter break, I developed another app, mainly for fun. It’s called Musical Instruments. Basically it lets you list which instruments you play and see which instruments your friends play. I had somewhat higher hopes for this application as a data gathering tool, and sure enough, it seems to be doing some cool stuff on first analysis. For expoSItion I figured I’d grab some data from this new app and compare the two.

I ran some initial analysis on the Musical Instruments app. I won’t go over a lot of the original metrics I used (number of peers with app installed, percentage of peers with app installed, etc) and I’ll just skip to the pictures.

This is an initial view of the Notecentric network:

It’s pretty interesting because the application has two large strongly connected components. One includes me and the many others I influenced to add the application and the other is a bunch of people from the Philippines (I think) who decided to add and invite their friends to add the application. Pretty neat stuff. But the majority of the users lie outside of the two large components.

The singleton users make up about 60% of the total users, more or less, during the evolution of the application. This signals to me that Notecentric was never really that “viral” in nature. People didn’t think the application was cool enough to invite their friends and people who saw their friends add the app didn’t feel compelled to add it themselves. Fair enough; it’s a pretty nerdy app. I mean, who wants to take notes on Facebook!?

Here’s a picture of the Musical Instruments application network:

It’s pretty small, so click on the image for a bigger one. This one is pretty neat. Instead of just two large strongly connected components, there’s a whole bunch! One is obviously bigger than the others, though there are quite a few clusters of users. It’s a little unrealistic to assume that this network would form into just one strongly connected component since Facebook users are generally decentralized and musicians can come from anywhere. If I did more analysis, I’d imagine that these components correspond to physical regions. Sure, there’s that “join this group if you’ve played music with someone in it” group, but I’m sure that’s not even a strongly connected graph!

The growth of the Musical Instruments application is interesting. It follows the same sort of domination of large components (possibly due to me inviting all of my friends) but instead of letting smaller components take over, the large (size 5 or bigger) components eventually stabilize at somewhere like 55% or so. This indicates to me that the Musical Instruments application is actually better at viral growth. People seem to invite their musical friends and others want to add the app if they see it on a friend’s profile. This is also the impression I’ve gotten from the add statistics available from Facebook.

Overall, it’s fun to see how the differences in application usage contribute to the kind of growth that each application sees. Notecentric has been stuck at around 670 active installs for a few months now. Compare that to Musical Instruments, which has been growing by around 20 users a day, and has around 2,700 so far. The growth of Musical Instruments is by no means monumental, but it is seeing some success due to its sharable nature.

I’m planning on showing the images that I’ve posted and perhaps some fun statistics that show the differences in the growth of the two apps. I think I’ll also load up GUESS on my laptop so people can check out the two networks in a more interactive setting. There’s prizes for the expoSItion of $750, $500 and $200 for first, second and third place, respectively. There’s also a $500 and $250 prize from Microsoft for entries specifically in Social Computing (which my project should qualify for). So hopefully I’ll make a few Benjamins for my work!

Me: *headdesk*