Friday Night Links
I’ve been very busy with school and travel. This week we had our fifth annual Big Sur trip. While we were only able to stay for the first half of the week–we still have a blast. We got flat tires in two different cars on both our trip down the coast from SFO and our trip back. For the later we managed to hitchhike to Monterey, catch a bus to SFO then barely catch the flight only because it was delayed an hour!
On the plane I was able to finish the instruments for my customization project and I have started collecting data for a pilot study. With only 3 weeks left of school I can taste summer–only 80 pages of writing between me and freedom.
- The focus groups for another project I’m working on has led us to think about collecting data online from a national sample, rather than going to health fairs as we had previously discussed. Knowledge Networks (the service used by TESS), Polimetrix and Harris Interactive all seem like promising services, but I haven’t heard back from them yet. I’m guessing they might all be busy at the annual AAPOR conference.
- Speaking of AAPOR, my advisor (Dr. Gerald Kosicki) is away at the conference. The last few weeks he and I have discussed having our public opinion class over the Internet since we have covered online deliberative software like Picola. We decided to try Skype and it worked really well–up to 9 people can use a conference call for free! I hadn’t actually had a chance to use their service before, so I was pretty happy to see how nice their UI and actual service quality was.
- In other news, a paper I wrote on reconceptualizing Gatekeeping Theory has been accepted to AEJMC, my first conference paper!
- The debate on having open political debates has moved forward. CNN has decided to release their debates to the public domain.
- A good friend of mine that is very involved in the political scene is pretty sure Bloomberg is going to jump into the race in ‘08 as an independent. If so, are we looking at another Perot type deal? Does he have a shot?
- And finally, I thought the recent debate over the cracked AACS code, take downs, and flood from Internet users sharing the algorithm was interesting. This is sort of like DeCSS all over again. This is exemplary of the power of the networked public sphere.
