One of the premier research platforms around here is Cyclopath, a geowiki and route-finding service for Twin Cities bicyclists.

Now, we've expected Google's announcement that they were getting into the bicycle routing business for some time. But that doesn't mean yesterday was relaxed for us. :)

After sleeping on it, (and speaking for myself) I think this development is actually either neutral or good. We're in a different niche than Google -- we're focused on open content and community, not just maps, and we're strongly local with personal connections to the cycling community and local agencies. And on the plus side: almost all of the reactions from the community I saw on the social web were very supportive of us, and I've never seen so much passion at Cyclopath Headquarters as I did yesterday!

We'll continue to write and publish consistent with our excellent track record (e.g., of the 5 papers we've submitted to top-tier conferences, 4 have been accepted on the first try and 2 have been nominated for Best Paper).

Details on what Google's announcement means for Cyclopath, from the user perspective, are here.

Lastly, and off-topic, please follow @grouplens and @cyclopath_hq on Twitter!

Doctors: do no harm.

Authors: keep the reader turning the page.

Speakers: keep the listener, uh, listening.

The title of this post and the third aphorism represent the sine qua non for a successful research talk (or any kind of public speech). Once the audience stops listening, you, the speaker, might just as well stop speaking.

I've been thinking about this ever since the CSCW conference last week. I saw quite a few talks on subjects I'm interested in, with good research, good content in the presentation, and good - i.e., fluent - delivery. I was engaged by the content in many cases and asked a lot of questions.

However, in reflecting on my experience, many of the talks began to seem, hmmmm..., monotonous. The speakers didn't look animated. They didn't use much of a dynamic range in their speaking: they weren't loud sometimes and quiet others, fast sometimes and slow others. There weren't too many jokes (shout out to Cliff and Reid, two speakers who did joke a bit). The slides too were pretty homogeneous: none that shouted "I'm important - notice me!".

Again, the content was good - it wouldn't have gotten in otherwise!

But speakers, lively up yourselves! It'll keep your audiences' ears open, so that your great content will get in. (And please: if you do a lively presentation with poor content or poor organization or poor slides, it'll just seem ... poor.)

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about survey writing. In 2008, I took a short three day course with Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, which made me think about survey writing in a new way. In particular, I started realizing that the surveys that I wrote were poorly written.

Since then, it seems like I keep finding poorly written surveys everywhere I turn. Here are some examples I've found recently in  my everyday life:

The US Postal Service sent me a Postal Customer Questionnaire lately because they were thinking about closing my branch. "If you now receive Post Office box service, you will be able to transfer your remaining box rent credit to another post office, or you may be eligible to receive a partial refund. How would you feel about consolidating the Dinkytown station with other postal stations? Better, Just as Good, No Opinion, or Worse" I answered No Opinion. Then I crossed it out and marked Worse. Then I crossed it out and marked No Opinion and wrote a three sentence explanation in the "Please explain" section. Why was this such a hard question to answer? Well, primarily because they'd never asked me about how I'd feel about the consolidation WITHOUT the refund. So now they were merging my opinions about the consolidation in with my feelings about the refund. Personally, I was mad that they were consolidating and I'd feel cheated if they didn't refund my money, but really the refund wouldn't change my opinion at all. No where on the survey did they ask me anything to this effect.

This second example isn't exactly a survey, but is still getting at some of the problems with survey writing. I'm having problems with allergies and need to go see an allergy specialist. So the clinic sent me my paperwork so I could fill it out before my appointment. Leaving aside many of my other complaints (and there are many!), the first main page has a section entitled "Chief complaints of patient." For each option you are supposed to check "Yes" or "No." The options are Asthma, Rhinitis (Hay fever), Urticaria (Hives), Eczema, Sinusitis, Chronic recurrent bronchitis, Nasal polyps, Recurrent otitis media,  Recurrent pneumonia, G.I. disturbances (colic, diarrhea, etc), Insect sting reaction, drug reactions, or blank lines. Now I'm a pretty smart person. I've been in school for a grand total of twenty-one years now, but I can't tell you what many of those things are, and I can't tell you which ones I should select. I have a runny nose and a cough. I've been diagnosed with something, but I forget what it is, and it didn't include the second two symptoms, just the runny nose. Why on earth is this questionnaire that is obviously for the patient or patient advocate full of doctor jargon instead of patient jargon?

Now that I know better, I want to do my best to avoid writing bad survey questions, but at the same time, it's incredibly difficult to write good survey questions. So what I've been doing is writing my same old, same old questions and then revising...and revising...and revising. Trying to revise them to turn them into good questions isn't easy, but I try. I also ask for a lot of feedback and am very self-critical. One proof-reading pass doesn't cut it for a survey, even if it's only going out to 10 people. That would reflect poorly on me, my advisor, my lab, and my university...so I do more work. Hopefully if you take one of my surveys, you'll see the result of this work, and if not, I hope you'll take a moment to let me know.

The drama here in Minnesota these days is the recount of the U.S. Senate race -- and it's dramatic: a difference of a couple of hundred votes out of 2.5 million cast, a hand recount, going to court, etc. Kind of like Florida in 2000, but more competent. (Minnesota Public Radio has good background coverage.)

But the most interesting part is the "challenged" ballots: these are ballots where the election judge doing the recounting wanted to classify the ballot one way, but a campaign observer objected. There are a few thousand of these ballots; most of them are fairly clearly frivolous, being done for PR reasons, and now the number of challenges is fluctuating day by day as the campaigns withdraw and unwithdraw challenges.

These ballots are now before the Canvassing Board, a 5-member panel convened by the Minnesota Secretary of State to determine the final disposition of each. You can watch the proceedings, live during the next few days or archived. Here's a direct link to one 90-minute segment of today's proceedings. (I was only able to make the link work on Internet Explorer. However, don't use Explorer until you've patched the latest nasty zero-day vulnerability!)

I find the process fascinating. Each board member, and a lawyer for each campaign, has a binder containing photocopies of each challenged ballot. For each ballot, the committee chair (MNSOS Mark Ritchie) announces which ballot is being considered, and then makes a motion with a proposed disposition ("I move to reject the challenge and allocate this ballot to Coleman"). Simultaneously, the board members and lawyers examine their photocopies, and an aide passes the original ballot down the line of board members. The process takes a few tens of seconds for a ballot where there's immediate agreement with the chair's motion, and maybe a couple of minutes if there's discussion.

Having the original ballots (Minnesota uses optical scan voting) is critical; some of the ballots which are clearly one way when viewing scans online are clearly something else when the original is viewed. (Example: The pen ran out of ink. The bubbles are blank in the scan, but on the original you can see the indentations in the paper where the voter tried to mark -- clear voter intent, which means the vote must be counted under Minnesota law.)

Also, if the decision takes more than a few tens of seconds, the camera switches to a laptop feed, where there is someone manipulating a PDF viewer to show the ballot. You can see the mouse cursor and UI manipulations and everything.

It's a very human process, with synchronization all accomplished by verbal announcement, at least one synchronization error ("Mr. Secretary, I missed the decision on ballot Minneapolis foo"), and occasional dry humor on the part of the committee members.

Bottom line, I think there's some HCI research with a great story here. I think the basic premise is a case study of the human processes going into this laborious and monotonous task, with some participants having extreme vested interests, some but limited computerization, the need for high public visibility, and a very high-value outcome.

Who's gonna do it?

(Crossposted to my personal blog.)

This much!

Max and Reid choose to show their love of research in much calmer ways.

John Langford recently blogged about researchers preference to cite recent research. He calls this tendency "the forgetting" of prior work. John suggests a number of reasons recent work may be remembered (including "Dead men don't reject your papers for not citing them").