More than 450 Polish-speaking users on Facebook chose to be part of the effort to translate the site from English to Polish. Users who added the Facebook translation application were allowed to submit translations inline while browsing the site. The community then approved all translations through a voting system.

My first thoughts are that the results of this translation are very natural and usable, even for a non-native speaker like myself. Congratulations to the team! The selection of terms for words like “poke” and “wall” feel right, much like they do in English.

Unfortunately, a some of my Greasemonkey scripts that depend on Facebook content stopped working, including a cool script that highlights todays birthdays. Facebook developers, including those making apps and scripts, are going to have to deal with internationalising (i18n) and localising their applications.

If you’re curious what it looks like, scroll to the very bottom of your Profile page or Newsfeed page (if you’re an American or Canadian user), and you’ll see a little link that says “English” with an arrow beside it. Click the arrow, and behold the available options: Norsk, Deutsch, Francais, and more.

Why not use English?

My cousin and I changed the language to Polish just for the novelty of it. So far, I have kept it the language setting simply because it’s a nice, daily way to interact with elements of my culture that I otherwise have little access to. Only after a few days use, Facebook in English feels a little less comfortable, and a little less interesting.

It’s a little utility that enables a couple of things:

1. Let’s you to propose tags for images that don’t belong to you on Flickr. Contributing tags if you want to help describe the image is often not possible, unless: you’re the owner, you’re a contact of the owner, or the person has allowed very permissive tagging rights.
2. Keeps your search queries around the tagging area. Queries are valuable, because you as a user took the time to contribute that text at some point. Now you can leverage that same text when you want to tag an image.
3. Tag your images with the proposed tags, or delete the proposed tags.

If this sounds novel and useful, it is :) Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to prove in my thesis.

Installation

In order to do any of this, you need to:

1. Be using Firefox 1.5+, Flock, and any other browser that can run Greasemonkey 0.6+. This is an untested claim :-)
2. Install Greasemonkey in Firefox, if you don’t have it installed already.
3. Install my magical script: Flickr Search Tagging UserScripts.org

What happens to my contributed tags?

They get stored on a server (atthelib.com), attached to a timestamp, your Flickr account name, and the identifier of the photo you are tagging.

In terms of privacy and control of the tags: there is very little. This whole process is using the “Wikipedia approach”: everyone can contribute. The owner of the image can delete a contributed tag. A deleted, contributed tag cannot be re-added. There are some anti-spam measures, including limits to how many tags can be proposed at one time, in one day, from one location, and so on.

Anywho, this is an alpha release, so any and all feedback is most welcome (feel free to use the comment form below)! This is part of a Master’s thesis, so for now all rights and copyrights are strictly reserved.

Screenshot

I just want to preface this experience with the fact that I speak Polish quite well; it’s my first language, I lived in the country til the ripe age of 7, my parents continue to speak Polish to me on the phone. My technical term knowledge isn’t great, but I anticipated that would come quickly with exposure.

Signing Up and “Logging” Things

Anyways, so I’m signing up for this service, and I realise within seconds that I don’t recognise words. The whole thing feels foreign and uninviting, even though it is laid out quite well. I’m used to getting clues and cues about the state of things from the visual elements and words on a page. I’m missing the familiar combination of “password,” “forgot,” and “logout.” What the hell is a haslo? OK, haslo is password, good. Wyloguj. Is that Log In, or Log out. Wy-Loguj. Is “wy” the in- or out- modifier? I start wondering what it would be like if I was entirely new to the Internet and didn’t really understand what I was “logging” into or out of in the first place. What am I logging? Trees?

I’m already confused. No matter, keep on registering. I’m looking for “Canada” on the list of countries, no dice. Oh right, Kanada. I can imagine that being frustrating for someone from Deutschland, having to find Germany all the time. At least the Polish word for Poland starts with P. Moving on, there is no province field, and none of my home towns show up in the list of cities. I feel like I’m setting up a profil with an incomplete identity.

Terms I Don’t Understand

I’ve successfully registered! OK, next, onto site navigation. Once again, thank God I know roughly what the registration process entails .. me entering some stuff including some unique identifier that is not my actual identifier (name), a communication outlet like email, some details, press a button, that “registers” me, and takes me to a “home page” (or Strona Glowna) .. the Head-ish Page. I’m looking at the buttons across the top of the page. Some of them make sense: Fotki i Filmy, Pictures and Videos. Ogloszenia are Classifieds, just like in the newspaper. I feel more comfortable.

I see this term “w gronie” everywhere. I assume it has something to do with the name of the website, but I’m not entirely sure what the connotation is. A grono, as the logo of the website implies, is a grouping of things on a stalk .. winogrona means grapes. I’m assuming I’m a grape. Just goes to show how important the name of your website is in determining expected activity on the site. In frustration, a Polish blogged indicated that grono may also mean .. shit.

Now, what the hell are Grona i Fora? Didn’t I just establish that I was a winogrono/grape. I click it and recognise the familiar groups and forums setup. I’m not sure which are groups, which are forums, which are threads. What’s a thread anyways? Why do we call them threads? Like, a thread in a tapestry, that is a forum? I see these terms: Obserwowane, Moderowane, Fora. Observed, Moderated, Forums. Thank sweet lord that I spent years on TorontoCivics, Honda-Tech, and Stillepost .. otherwise the concept of a “moderated forum” would be foreign and confusing to me.

So I think I’ve found a forum (or is it a group?), and it has threads in it. The word temat (topic) shows up a lot, so does watek. Watek is the word for grape stalk in Polish … so … I’m getting a little tired of the grape analogy already. Especially once I figure out that “topic” and “thread”, or in this case temat and watek are actually the same thing, while grona (stalks) and fora (forums) are not. Then there are posty (posts). What really is a post? What makes it different from a message or a comment?

And now, first pr0st …

Like a good citizen, I’ve decided to read before posting too much. Needless to say, the language, lexicon, and etiquette are different than they would be in English-speaking North American forums. I don’t have good insight into it yet, other than knowing that I’d be the worst kind of n00b: barely-speaks-the-language-n00b. Luckily there are English-language groups and grona, and the majority of young Polish internet-savvy social networkers speak a little English.

Lessons Learned

So as a web guy, it’s nice to get reminded of the few things that I take for granted when participating in or developing web communities:

• People use familiar text and images as cues for activity and context. This is hard to understand until the cues you’re used to go away … you know to look for login boxes and submit buttons, for example, but their meaning is thrown in doubt when the text labels change.
• The registration process is foreign to most people who don’t already use forums. Don’t assume people know what logging in, logging out, registering, and profiles are.
• Ads in the sweet spots centred, above-the-fold totally throw off initial orientation.
• Community terminology doesn’t have to follow the standard “forum”, “post”, “admin” line. New users may have a better understanding of “topic”, “message”, and “community moderator.”
• Be consistent with terminology, and careful about name-branding choices (grape, wth.)
• The language of web communities is something that’s difficult to pick up as foreign national. Dedicated foreigner-friendly forums can’t hurt.

Google Image Search, with its simple interface and reasonable results, is the de-facto consumer-grade image search engine. Offerings from competitors are actually a little more feature rich, especially the MSN Live Image Search, but don’t resonate as loudly in academia or popular usage.

As an example, compare search results for “red corvette” from the big three: Google, MSN, Yahoo. MSN nails the exploratory task: no-refresh scrolling, quick access to filters such as “photos”, “black and white”, and image size options that feel a little more usable and natural than Googles. Yahoo! attempts some categorising and support for ontologies in their interface; while not perfect, it’s a direction highly praised in cutting-edge research.

Focus on a subset

Despite the simple Image Search interface, Google has been very active in image search research, particularly in hopes of making their results more relevant.

First off, there’s the neat little trick that allows you to search for faces.

In general, the goal is to reach a higher level of result-relevancy. In order to do that, a service need sto analyse images more deeply than by just reading the text that surrounds pictures. Image analysis that involves a computer “seeing” an image and extracting features and content is very expensive in terms of computation. So in the interest of progress, despite the heavy computing cost, the New York Times reports how Google plans to roll out some of their image analysis features on a subset of internet images, rather than try to analyse all the images on the whole of the internet. Google is focusing on the top several thousand topics of interest based on query popularity, and popularity in online shopping (iPods, Wiis, Air Force Ones, etc.)

This concept of focusing on a subset of internet images related to shopping isn’t new: like.com has been in the process of launching and relaunching (that’s a link to the CEO’s blog) its visual search service since early 2007. Their service helps you shop the way you do in real life - visually, with visual feedback and comparison of how things actually look compared to similar items in similar price brackets.

Community Tagging

While image analysis and retrieval based on image features is the future, in the mean time we have tags. Tags are human-contributed textual descriptions of images. There are a variety of problems with tags (inconsitencies, incompleteness, subjectivity, etc.), but their presence reduces the image search problem to a far more manageable text search problem.

With this in mind, Google has quietly launched the Google Image Labeler, a game in which two randomly matched people tag an image co-operatively, and score points. Using a games to entice people to contribute annotation information is cool, but it appears to suffer from over-simplification: a picture of a migrating albatross is far more likely to be tagged as “bird” rather than as “transatlantic migration” or “albatross.” Though I’ve read some promising research that focuses on developing better tools that aid in annotation of images, which will hopefully lead to tags that are more complete, categorised, and community edited.

Leveraging Recommendations

Google has done quite a bit of development and research on the topic of recommendations, especially recommendations related to their Google News service.

I can’t help but think of the possibilities of using recommendation algorithms enhance image search. A service can push new image content to the forefront during queries, inter-mixed with the most relevant results, and allow people searching to annotate the recommended images. This would quickly collect information on how relevant that new image is to that query. Users could dismiss the image as irrelevant by never clicking on it, despite how often it appears in the first row of the result set.

That kind of information would provide a feedback loop for the developers of the relevancy algorithms, and potentially also allow for very personal image results: if those recommendations and your responses to them were kept around and associated with your Google account, future results could take advantage of your previous feedback.

There is much progress to be made in image search, and based on how often I come across interesting and relevant Google research in the field, it’s obvious that Google will continue to be a leader as image search matures.

There’s obviously a need here that needs to be filled: begging strangers for invitations to web beta’s. I’ve found a few places to share invitations, but by far the most beautiful and appealing is InviteShare.com. What a gorgeous, well-thought-out design.

Invite Share

And please, if you have a grono.net invitation, please share it with me.

Discovery

An interesting thing about services like InviteShare is that they promote upcoming projects, aiding in discovery of new and interesting things.

I’m taking a look through Yahoo! Mash right now. It took about 15 minutes after posting on InviteShare before someone offered me an invitation. Mash looks like it has tremendous promise: a social networking service with the chaotic aesthetic of MySpace, but the coherent usability of Facebook.

(Via a SurfLizard post)

Image from Photobucket.

In hopes of simplifying things, I’ve settled on a human-centred, conceptual definition of search:

Search refers to the process of a user developing a need, defining a query, retrieving information, viewing result(s), providing feedback, and refinements of those steps.

The end result does not have to be finding a single result. Occasionally, other steps in the search process, such as seeing a result set, can satisfy the users need. For example, if the need was to gain information (”What does a ‘87 Oldsmobile Toronado FE3 look like?”) rather than find a specific image (”I need a picture of a black ‘84 Cutty!”), viewing the result set may be enough.

Figure 1 is an illustrates the definition of search, in the human and interface context.

Figure 1 - Defining Search - View full size (54KB)

Search begins when a user develops a need for the search, and visits some image search service. The user then enters a query that they believe matches their search need (often is not the case). The form of this query is dramatically affected by the context of the interface: if the interface is just a keyword search bar, the user will enter keywords. If the interface offers a sample-image upload, the user may upload a sample image. If an interface offers domain specific search criteria, it will help the user find relevant images in that domain ex. an automobile search service that allows users to select “modified” vs. “stock” vs. “show” vehicles.

The query is then transformed into something that is useful for the information retrieval system. Information retrieval can include retrieving images as well as their metadata, their categories, or tags or whatnot. Here retrieval refers explicitly to the process done by the computers involved, rather than by the user. The bulk of the challenges that are tackled by researchers involved in CBIR occur around this step (query-to-retrieval-to-result-set).

Once the retrieval process is complete, a result set can be displayed back to the user. The format, order, and other information offered by the interface has a profound impact on a users ability to find a acceptable result, or otherwise navigate the result set. The result set can offer enough information for the user to then want to refine their query, or even refine their initial search need.

While interacting with the result set the user can choose to select an individual result for closer inspection, selection, or whatever they want. The user may offer feedback based on their reaction to either a single result, or the part of the result set they are interacting with. The interface hopefully allows for some sort of feedback mechanism which feeds into the relevance calculations of the image retrieval system. The result set then will update based on the feedback. Examples of this would be finding images “more like this one”, excluding small images, offering “yes, this is perfect!”

A users act of selecting an image out of a result set is probably important enough to provide at least some relevance feedback. This idea has been supported by research that claims that the vast majority of image searching work is done by interacting with the result set, well before a single image is selected.

The processing of feedback may not have an impact on the result set, but may improve search results in the future. An example of this kind of feedback would be tagging an image that the user viewed. ex. a photo of the Toronto skyline is viewed, and the user adds a tag or comment: “CN Tower at night”. Flickr, Facebook, and other image hosting services heavily leverage this process in their search process.

Anyway, that’s the taxonomy I will be working with. Feedback and commentary are most welcome.

CBIR is missing the point

As a side note, much of the technology mentioned in CBIR papers doesn’t give much credence to the human use element (”Why would people use this?”), nor the interface element (”How would a person make use of this, even if it was useful?”). There are many, many theses worth of papers to be written about: picking an element used in CBIR and studying the corresponding human and interface artifacts ex. searching with an image texture in mind (”fuzzy dog”), and studying what people are expecting to find, and how an interface can facilitate that.

Since many of us know the tuition increase is imminent, and aren’t really willing to protest against it publicly out of fear of reprisal, skepticism, or ignorance, we say:

Hey at least we’re not in the U.S. … tuition is like $<xx>,000 per semester!

There is a prevailing belief in Canada that American tuition fees are completely out of reach for the average lower-middle-class student; thus in Canada we have it a little better, and shouldn’t complain about 4% tuition increases.

This is a popular theory amongst students in times when the Administration corrects budget shortfalls with student money rather than public money, and raises tuition. In hopes of affirming the “at least we’re not as screwed as the Americans”-theory of public education management, I decided to do some research.

The results were surprising: tuition at Guelph is definitely not less expensive than at similar U.S. schools.

Methodology

First, I visited the U.S. Department of Education College Navigator and found some schools that compared to the University of Guelph in terms of demographics, funding model, and whatever else I could search on.

I used the following criteria: schools that offer advanced degrees (Ph.D, M.Sc, etc.), publicly funded, 10k – 20k Undergraduate students, on-campus housing, a city setting, offer distance learning, and have men’s Football at the varsity level. Once I got that list back (50+ schools), I narrowed it to 13 candidates by demographics: about 17000 undergrads, about 2000 graduate students.

Then I visited StateUniversity.com, a service that collects a tremendous amount of information about post-secondary schools in the U.S., including graduate tuition. I grabbed 2006-2007 tuition data (average, as reported for two semesters) for both resident (In-State) and non-resident (Out-of-State/International) students for each of the schools:

• Ball State University
• Boise State University
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Missouri State University
• Oregon State University
• SUNY at Albany
• The University of Texas at El Paso
• University of Arkansas
• University of Louisiana at Lafayette
• University of Nevada-Reno
• University of Oregon
• University of Toledo
• Western Kentucky University

Then I graphed the resulting data, sorted from lowest to highest.

Guelph Tuition

The tuition reported for Guelph at external sources does not match what you’d find at Student Financial Services, nor what is presented in the graphs: USD 4,700 and USD 10,450.

To get Guelph’s numbers: I took the SFS reported tuition in 2006/2007 (varying by semester), took the average for all programs with the most common program (”Other”) weighted four times heavier. Then multiplied by two, for two semesters. Same was done for the International (Non-resident) tuition. The compulsory UHIP fee was added to the Non-resident tuition. The final amount was adjusted for the exchange rate, at 0.95 USD.

American Tuition

The reported tuition for the American schools involved in this study are averages based on posted tuition fees for all programs. The U.S. tuition fees for graduate programs vary in cost based on number of hours per week, from 3 to 25+. Also, health care coverage is sometimes included, sometimes not, often subsidised. Since I had no control over that data, I decided to just use the value which was reported on StateUniversity.com.

Results

The two figures (click on either to get a larger, more readable version) show the graduate tuition fees of each of the schools, including the University of Guelph. Figure 1 shows resident tuition, Figure 2 shows non-resident tuition (International, Out of State, etc.).

Figure 1 - Graduate Tuition - Resident Students

Figure 2 - Graduate Tuition - Non-resident Students

Raw data is available upon request.

In both cases, resident and non-resident, tuition at the University of Guelph is decidedly in the middle-of-the-road, and far from the blow-out I was expecting. Tuition at Guelph may be significantly less expensive than at the University of Toledo, but it is significantly higher than at the University of Arkansas.

Regardless of Ohio, the hypothesis that tuition at Guelph is less expensive than at equivalent schools in the U.S. of A. has been proven false.

Discussion

So who cares? Check out Figures 3 and 4 and let me know if students are bearing a proportionate brunt of the increases in the cost of education. There are many other sources for revenue that can be tapped, though undoubtedly student tuition is the easiest one to access.

Some U.S. states have progressive policies about funding public education that do not involve increased tuition. Georgia has the Hope Scholarship program. All Georgia residents are eligible: as long as a student gets out of high school with a 3.0 GPA, and maintains that GPA in University, tuition is free.

Figure 3 - CFS Tuition increase data.

Figure 4 - U of G revenue breakdown.

Join the Student Budget Advisory Group (SBAG) for Tuition Action Day:

U.C. Courtyard
Thursday, March 20, 2008
11:00am to 1:00pm

Anyways, reviewing a list like this made me realise how quickly I forget how important certain tracks were for me at a given point in time. So without further ado, two lists, one rock, one hip hop.

Warning: YouTube videos ahead.

Rock Tracks of 03-07/03-08!

Last year it was hardcore (Corta Vita, Rosesdead, and the like), two years ago it was all-indie all-the-time (Death Cab, Wintersleep, etc.) and this year … indie-pop. Awkward transition, but possibly due to the fact that I’m not an artsy snob, melancholy, or angry anymore.

Like many other college-aged, white people, I really appreciated the Juno soundtrack, and stuff they play as background music at Booster Juice.

10. Belle & Sebastian - Piazza, New York Catcher
9. Peter Bjorn & John - Young Folks

I listened to far less Canadian music this year than last, but at least my hardcore pick of the year, The Kidcrash, broke into the top 10.

8. Tegan and Sarah - The Con
7. The Kidcrash - Ground Eats You

The Kidcrash - A Conduit Rather than a Vault (at someone’s house in California)

One of these albums is terrible, one of them is fantastic. Though I pretty much exclusively either buy or download entire albums at a time now.

6. Kate Nash - Foundations
5. Kings of Leon - Trani

There is this great collection of Brit-centric indie, 500 songs per month, that comes out on torrent servers every month.

4. Maximo Park - Books from Boxes
3. The View - Face for the Radio

Ultimately I rocked out to some melodies that were probably marketed to people ten years younger than me.

2. Tokyo Police Club - Cut Cut Paste
1. Silversun Pickups - Lazy Eye

Silversun Pickups - Lazy Eye

Hip Hop I Grind’ed (Ground?) To

After going to Mississippi twice for Hurricane Katrina related stuff, I developed an appreciation for the South. New York (specifically the Wu and NaS) once had my heart, but the South has a grip on ma’ booty and diamond-studded chalice.

Mixtapes are back in MP3-blog-promoted form.

10. Mick Boogie & Marco Polo Newport Authority Mixtape (free download)
9. Ghostface Killah - Kilo

After seeing interviews with both David Banner and Fifty, it’s obvious Banner would both kill, and probably give a far more eloquent eulogy than, our dear Curtis. That link is David Banner defending hip-hop infront of Congress. No word of a lie.

8. David Banner - Lost Souls
7. 50 Cent - I Get Money

Weezy and Wiz are easily my two favourite MCs of last year, both of whom I probably found via exposure to Cocaine Blunts and Nah Right.

6. Lil’ Wayne Greatest Rapper Alive series, especially #3
5. DJ Nicolay ft. Wiz Khalif - Way It Used to Be

Birdman ft. Lil Wayne - Pop Bottles (Clean, boo)

… and now, please put some dirty Souf’ in yo mouf’. I’ve been head-bobbing and watching dance-off videos basically non-stop. Huey, from St. Louis, seems to be hopping on that bandwagon, but whatever, it all works for me. More interesting, less club-worthy artists like Bun B, UGK, Shawty Lo, and Rich Boy (sorry) are keeping my playlist busy this year.

4. Hurricane Chris - Ay Bay Bay
3. Unk - Walk It Out
2. TI - Big Shit Poppin (most embarassing entry)
1. Huey - Pop Lock and Drop It

Unk - Walk It Out

It’s tough to find information on the specific outstanding issues, but information from the UGFA at least details what faculty members were voting for when they voted for the strike mandate.

But what are we students supposed to do: Graduate Students who are GTAs, Sessionals, or those of us just attending classes?

Teaching Assistants

I’m currently a GTA, so a member of CUPE 3913. CUPE 3913 is the union for all UTA, GTA, GSA, and Sessional Lecturer employees on campus. I’ve been trying to get some information about what to do, as a GTA, in case there is a faculty strike and my supervisor is on the picket line.

Remember that nobody is legally allowed to ask GTAs to do the work of the striking faculty. Furthermore, performing that work would seriously undermine and cut the legs out from underneath the people striking. Strikes are typically financially crippling for the people on the picket lines, and personally I don’t feel like compromising their position any further. The rule of thumb for TAs is don’t do anything differently than you would otherwise do if your supervisor wasn’t on strike.

If you’re unsure of your duties, check out the Unit 1 Collective Agreement between the U of G and CUPE 3913 … it’s a great read for a variety of reasons. This year is also the year this agreement expires (in August). Notice how only one (1) of the 70+ pages of the agreement concerns itself with the hourly wage. There is a lot of information there regarding benefits, leave, termination, multiple supervisors (not allowed), overtime, health & safety, harassment, rules regarding guaranteed TA-ships, and much more.

Update: If there is a strike & Survey (from CUPE 3913) as received in my inbox on March 12, 2008.

Sessionals

Sessional Lecturers are employees hired to teach one course, one semester at a time. Since they are not faculty, they are not subject to the UGFA vs. U of G negotiations. They have their own Unit 2 Collective Agreement, which also expires this August.

Sessionals are generally used in place of faculty to do the same teaching, with similar qualifications, for far less pay, less benefits, and very little job security.

I think Sessionals can use this strike as an opportunity to raise a little hell regarding their position as well. If you’re a sessional, I believe that during a faculty strike it’s the Dean of your College that becomes your immediate supervisor. Before crossing the picket-line, call your supervisor and ask for your legally-entitled security escort, and join the picket-line for a bit. :)

Show some solidarity with the UGFA, because God knows your union will need some faculty support during Unit 2 contract negotiations this summer!

Students

If you’re a student, remember that it’s the job of the University Administration to make sure you get your education without compromising their duties and responsibilities towards their employees.

I hate to see students vocally undermining organised labour, special interest groups, and fellow students in realms where the Administration makes policies, doles out the cash, and ultimately has control. In the 1960’s and 70’s students used to strike and picket on behalf of groups and causes that were far removed from student life … now we can’t even rally together for causes affecting people on our own campus.

Educate yourself before decrying someone’s work. Keep your eye on the official University of Guelph News for updates on exams, classes, and their negotiations with the UGFA.