Author Archives: Matt Stempeck

Clay Shirky: Planning Shan’t Trump Reality

Clay Shirky‘s on stage with Ginny Hunt at Harvard’s Institute of Politics discussing the lessons we can take away from the Healthcare.gov boondoggle (#netrevolution).

Clay’s first point is that of all the criticism of Healthcare.gov and the Affordable Care Act, no one has argued that it’s a bad idea to rely on the web as the central component of citizen interaction with a government program. All of the other communications options, from phone to fax, have been considered second-rate fallback options. Continue reading

Comedy Hack Day Demos at MIT Media Lab

Cultivated Wit Comedy Hack DayComedy Hack Day began when Craig realized he had two independent groups of nerdy friends: comedy nerds and computer nerds. Comedy Hack Day brings these two groups together.

The first event was held in NYC September 2012. The second was held at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco in April 2013 (watch highlight reel). This weekend, we infested the MIT Media Lab.

group shot

Here are the final demos:

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Beauty vs. Usability = Both

Like many users before me, I stared at my rat’s nest of Delicious bookmark tags one day and realized the futility of tagging all these links with words and phrases I’d never actually recall. At that point, I gave up on taxonomy and tried a new tactic: filing bookmarks into only two folders: Beautiful and Useful.

The beautiful examples were inspiring, artistic, and aesthetically gorgeous. The useful examples offered new functionalities, potential savings of time, and clever solutions.

 

Beauty vs. Utility
Beauty vs. Utility

This dichotomy approach failed, too, as I realized that there’s a sometimes complicated interplay between beauty and utility.

Javier Bargas-Avila, user experience researcher at Google and YouTube, is at the Harvard Berkman Center today (video) to share his psychological research on this interplay in user experience. Continue reading

How do you make research more accessible?

One of my pet peeves in life is how rarely serious research is shared with lay audiences. There are many reasons for this, like overbearing publisher copyright policies and overburdened researcher duties, but I’m curious about creative solutions. What ideas do you have?

the YPP logoThis month, I’ve had the ridiculous opportunity to sit and read through the Youth & Participatory Politics corpus of research. YPP is part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. They study how young people use new media to become more civically and politically engaged people, and how online expression can become structural political impact. There are other deliverables, but I also want to use this opportunity to distribute and prepare this work for a broader audience.

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“This Is Not Spam” reports

Not spam button in Gmail

Gmail routinely sends email updates from social organizations to the spam folder. For the organizations I like, I’ll occasionally go in and rescue them by pressing the “Not spam” button. It turns out that this user feedback does actually help improve that organization’s overall deliverability. I wrote up some tips on staying out of the spam folder for an NOI Tip of the Day.

Characterizing the Life Cycle of Online News Stories Using Social Media Reactions

I’ve graduated, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to see my first academic paper accepted for publication. Thanks to Carlos CastilloMohammed El-Haddad, and Jürgen Pfeffer for driving this paper, and for inviting me to collaborate. Take a look. Al Jazeera English provided us with some great data.

To appear in Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Baltimore, USA. February 2014.

[Download PDF]

The shelf-life of hard news vs feature pieces
The shelf-life of hard news vs feature pieces on Al Jazeera English

Abstract:
This paper presents a study of the life cycle of news articles posted online. We describe the interplay between website visitation patterns and social media reactions to the news content. We show that we can use this hybrid observation method to characterize distinct classes of articles. We also find that social media reactions can be used to predict future visitation patterns early and accurately.

We validate our methods using qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis on data from a large international news network, for a set of articles generating more than 3,000,000 visits and 200,000 social media reactions. We show that it is possible to model accurately the overall traffic articles will ultimately receive by observing the first ten to twenty minutes of social media reactions. Achieving the same prediction accuracy with visits alone would require to wait for three hours of data. We also describe significant improvements on the accuracy of the early prediction of shelf-life for news stories.

Killing People Still Morally Wrong

My late night reaction to the Trayvon Martin judgement, cross-posted from Civic.

These are the moments that make the other moments of attempted unity more difficult, more hollow, for many among us. Before giving into the polarized reactions that the Trayvon Martin story has elicited from its onset, we might practice a little empathy for those for whom the case represented a great deal more than George Zimmerman’s fate.

My thoughts race tonight to the family of Trayvon Martin, who fought so hard through personal emotions and the initially indifferent public reaction to deliver attention (and by extension, they hoped, justice) to their loss. But tonight especially, my feelings go out to everyone for whom this judgement is just vindication of the existing fear and trepidation we force them to feel for simply existing as they were born.

The spotlight cast onto Trayvon’s story has provided brief illumination to the countless similar stories of innocent people gunned down by other people whose brains boiled over in a combustion of long-brewing bias and all-too-ready access to a trigger. And that’s what guns remain to some unacceptably high percentage of Americans: a mechanism of protection against our fellow citizens, particularly those who for some time, weren’t fellow citizens at all. Stand Your Ground laws, backed by the most reactionary elements of our society, have rewritten our most basic and longstanding rule — murder is wrong — to protect those who murder as a result of their own fear.

Make an Internet Time Capsule with Google Chrome

If you use the Chrome browser, you may have noticed that when you begin typing in the address bar, Google’s Autocomplete prediction service guesses where you might be heading to save you keystrokes. If you have Web History enabled, those guesses aren’t just popular websites, but rather the sites you’re historically most likely to visit.

I realized that this list of sites actually end up serving as a sort of internet time capsule of the last ten weeks (the amount of time the browser history spans). So, here are my Internet ABCs of my last three months of grad school at the Media Lab. Click any of the images to go to the site.

A is for Analytics
is for Analytics. I maintain a lot of websites

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Participatory Aid Marketplace: Designing Online Channels for Digital Humanitarians

(a summary of my MIT Media Lab Master’s thesis)

Unlike my thesis readers, who may or may not have made it through all 244 pages, you get to experience the condensed version. The full PDF is here, if you’re into reading and citations.

Participatory Aid
People are using information and communication technologies (like the internet) to help each other in times of crisis (natural or man-made). This trend is the evolution of a concept known as “mutual aid”, introduced by Russian polymath Peter Kropotkin in 1902 in his argument that our natural sociable inclinations towards cooperation and mutual support are underserved by capitalism’s exclusive focus on the self-interested individual. My own reaction is to the bureaucracy’s underserving of informal and public-led solutions.

The practice of mutual aid has been greatly accelerated and extended by the internet’s global reach. I introduce the term “participatory aid” to describe the new reality where people all over the planet can participate in providing aid in various forms to their fellow humans. In many of these cases, that aid is mediated at least partially by technology, rather than exclusively by formal aid groups.

Formal aid groups like the UN and Red Cross are facing disintermediation not entirely unlike we’ve seen in the music, travel, and news industries. Members of the public are increasingly turning towards direct sources in crises rather than large, bureaucratic intermediaries. Information is increasingly likely to originate from people on the ground in those places rather than news companies, and there is a rich and growing number of ways to help, as well.

You are more than your bank account Continue reading