Having seen the recent news of gun-toting protesters at health reform meetings, I got into a discussion with my wife about gun control, and you know where that can lead. Yes, that’s right, to exploratory search. I had some hypotheses about the relationship between gun control and crime, and wanted to find some data to test them. I needed to find some crime statistics by state, and to cross-reference it with some aspects of states, including the degree of urbanization, population density, laws, etc. While I thought the odds of finding a canned analysis of my hypotheses was small given the amount of time I was willing to devote to the problem, I did try a few obvious queries. No luck.

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Recently, we presented our work on WebNC at several venues, including WWW 2009 in Madrid, Hypertext 2009 in Turin, Italy, and at a very interesting SF Bay Area Google App Engine Developers meetup in Palo Alto, CA.

WebNC is a tool for sharing your browser window in real-time with someone else. It’s similar to screen sharing tools like VNC or WebEx, except it’s built for sharing only web pages. This sounds limiting, but since a lot of work is done inside web browsers these days (browsing, editing documents, watching videos, booking reservations, vacations, reading email), we thought it would be useful. For example, my wife always calls me when she rents a car online: what car model should she pick? With WebNC, she can easily show me her browser window and we can talk more efficiently as I can see what she sees on her screen.

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I get a fair bit of spam. Every day I delete about 400 messages that my spam filter catches; this blog has amassed over 7,000 spam comments in six months or so; and now, Twitter is getting spammy too. I’ve noticed a rash of twitter-spam-bot followers recently, and am quite confused as to what they are trying to achieve.

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The SDForum Virtual World SIG (which I co-chair with Bob Ketner of The Tech and Eilif Trondsen of SRI-BI) will feature a look at Nokia’s augmented reality work next Monday, August 24, in Palo Alto. Details and directions are here.

Kari Pulli, Research Fellow and Radek Grzeszczuk, Principal Scientist at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, will present an inside look at some of their augmented reality work and speculate on possibilities for both near- and long-term.

Location
Pillsbury Winthrop Office Silicon Valley
2475 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1114
(http://www.pillsburylaw.com)

Online
Online media to be linked from
http://www.virtualworldsig.com at time of event.

Agenda
6:30 PM Registration and Networking
7:00 PM -8:40 PM Presentations

My declaration of the difficulty of the solution to a challenge posed by Eleanor was premature. The problem was difficult, but apparently not impossible to solve. I wrote the previous post before Francine found a solution using classic berrypicking techniques, further confirming the utility of using more search engines than just Google to increase the diversity of results. Of course now that she has linked to that page (particularly in such a prominent blog :-) )  Google may promote it in its ranking and make that result more findable. (I am not sure about the no-follow restriction on comment links, but none the less the likelihood of someone else linking or bookmarking that page has just increased.) Francine’s discovery through exploratory search thereby increases the odds that others will now find that document through Social Search.

Yesterday Eleanor posted a great example of a difficult exploratory search. The goal was to answer a question, but not only was it difficult to figure out how to articulate the search effectively, but also it was not clear whether the answer even exists. The difficulty of articulation stems from the fact that even in combination, the terms that Eleanor used to characterize the information need retrieved documents that were similar to the desired information, but were lacking some key aspect.

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Some friends of mine believe that “search” has been solved. They explain that they can almost always find what they are looking for, and quickly, using keyword search. My life is much more frustrating! There are all sorts of things I look for and can’t find. An additional source of frustration is that I don’t know when to give up, when to conclude that what I’m looking for isn’t there.

Recently I had this experience with a question I thought would make a good blog challenge:

Does there exist a polyhedron such that all of its faces are nonconvex?

If you can think up a proof or example, please post your answer in the comments section, but with “Spoiler alert:” at its start. If you find an answer through a web search, give us the URL and tell us your search strategy. A URL pointing to discussion of this exact question would also be acceptable, even if the discussion doesn’t provide an answer.

I’d like to give a prize, and thought about various prizes (a Tcho chocolate bar? treating the winner to coffee? …) but decided in true blog spirit to ask for suggestions for an appropriate prize.

P.S. I thought about defining  terms such as “polyhedron” and “nonconvex” here.  But since this is a search and/or geometry challenge, any readers who do not know the meaning of these 3D geometry terms can still participate. I would be particularly delighted if someone who did not understand the question initially was able to find a solution.

Update: An answer has been found. Congratulations, Francine. However I realize I mixed up two searches, and this one isn’t as hard as I thought I remembered.

This has been a busy summer for the ReBoard project: Scott Carter, Jake Biehl and I spent a bunch of time building and debugging our code, and  Wunder-intern Stacy ran a great study for us, looking at how people use their office whiteboards before and after we deployed our system. We’ll be blogging more about some of the interesting details in the coming months, but I wanted to touch on a topic that occurred to me as we’re working on the CHI 2010 submission.

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Lucky me. I a few months ago I won a ticket to Google I/O by posting a comment on Techcrunch.

Google gave each attendee an Android phone; the new ones are due out this August. The phone came with a one-month SIM card from T-Mobile, including 3G connectivity. It initially looked like a cheap iPhone: the touchscreen doesn’t respond well while scrolling web pages (I still don’t know if it’s a bad hardware or slow software, or a combination), the soft-keyboard is slightly too small and suffers from the same problem as scrolling pages.

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One effective way to understand where to put paved paths is to look at places where the grass has been trodden. Twitter has adopted this approach by offering a minimal interface and looking at how people use it.The idea was to allow basic messaging, and not to worry too much about fancy functionality. The tweeters responded by overlaying a number of conventions onto the simple message body. RT, the equivalent of forwarding in e-mail, is a popular convention for cascading news along the social graph, and is one of the central mechanisms responsible for the effectiveness of Twitter as a news dissemination channel.

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