A while back I had collected all the information from the ETD page for our department into a database. It was being used to generate the faculty pages in the Center for HCI's website. Recently, I was interested in generating some graphs from these data. Here they are.

Last week Puerto Rico faced a major labor strike yet nothing was to be found on the general news sources. There estimates of participants between 100,000 and 200,000 protesting the firings of 17,000 public employees by the governor of PR. The demonstrations were peaceful, something to be proud of, and even something that's a sign of a civil and modern society. Yet, nothing on the news.

This just looks too good. Don't miss it, October 12 & 19 on your PBS station.

The Principles of Community are important for Virginia Tech. Unfortunately many students don’t know what they are. I have even heard students say they are nothing more than “a paper on the wall.” I wanted to take the opportunity to express my views of why the Principles of Community are important. I do so around some common misunderstandings that I have heard uttered on campus about these principles. The Principles of Community are available on the web at http://www.vt.edu/diversity/principles-of-community.html.

As some of you know, I help manage the computer labs at the Blacksburg New School. This year, the school has an addition and with it a new computer lab. The original lab has Windows XP but practially all the software used is open source (we don't have enough money to be paying for software/hardware). When the new space became available, we started looking on how to set things up. This describes our current setup, which honestly, is very sweet.

Recently I had a revelation, a moment of inspiration. Then again, maybe I am just crazy.

Say a hypothetical organization collects data about the climate and the work environment within the ranks of their employees. Say also that the data shows some serious discrepancy between members of the larger group (majority) and members of the minority (underrepresented group). This hypothetical organization excuses these as saying "but we can trust this because the N is small."

Much is made about diversity and how "color sensitive" we need to be. I recently ran across the phrase at the title of this blog, "Colorblind vs colorful." In its context, it implied that we need to be colorblind before we can be colorful. The notion of "color blindness" is appealing. It means we won't prejudge people for their race. It means, presumably, that we would quickly end all the slavery-based racism that this country's history is covered with. But, I would argue, that such a goal will produce a climate that is only comfortable to the white majority and thus will not integrate minorities (colored-people) into the mainstream of society.

After many attempts at learning different methods of being productive and organized, I have come to a simple conclusion. There is only one way to avoid having your to do list always expand like your weight after visiting a doughnut shop. More after the jump.

Most of the time we waste with computers, aside from playing games and watching movies, is wasted because we don't manage effectively our attentional resources. I am convinced that we have to make extra efforts in configuring our computer in such a way so that it doesn't distract us, doesn't call attention to things that can wait until the time is appropriate for us to act on it.

Lots of activity around Twitter and my life lately. As some of you know, I used Twitter in my graduate course last semester and I think it was a total success. Then, someone nominated me for a XCaliber award (ok, I nominated myself), then FDI asked me to give a presentation about how I use Web 2.0 in the classroom, and now the Chronicle of Higher Education is recruiting professors that use Twitter for an article. Guess it time to wake up, Twitter has arrived in academia.