This quarter i am taking another one of BJ Fogg's classes. Its the much talked about Facebook class. Just for the purpose of being thorough - the official name of the class is - Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook (CS377W). I love this course! I am just having a lot of fun in it. Now if you have taken any CS course (live databases, algos, programming, OS), you might know they are incredibly time consuming and require a lot of hours during the quarter. This course is similar in those terms - asks for a more than reasonable time commitment (though really depends on your motivation) - but its different than all the rest of the cs courses in a very important way - USERS! There is an incredible amount of emphasis which is put in understanding the user needs and their psychology in using apps - especially on facebook. Its surprising that all of computer science equips you with technical know-how of making a good software - writing good code - but somehow the users are pushed to the back seat. The usual considerations of performance, size, error checking, etc are common to almost all software designs - but for most of the courses that i have taken at stanford - the user hasnt really been a big part of the thinking process in designing the solution.

As I walked back to the row from German class, I saw some dozen students staging a "die-in" for the SCAI, where each student in the protest "represent[ed] one of 4,267 Palestians killed by the Israeli armed forces since September 2000".

The SCAI petition encourages the Stanford Board of Trustees to "divest from corporations profiting from human rights abuses and violations of international law".

But what does the Board of Trustees invest in, anyway? And who, what ombudsman or NGO, researches and makes known some corporate "scorecard"?

Recently, the NYTimes reported on recent efforts here at Stanford by law students to hand out "diversity report cards" to their potential employers.

Elsewhere, a columnist suggested that this generation might be known as "Generation Q", for "quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad". What say you Stanford, to be Gen Q or not Q?

I mentioned a few weeks ago about the Gumball Challenge - a one-week competition that creatively engages students with microfinance. Student-teams are given a loan of $27 and one week to do something creative and entrepreneurial. At the end of the week, the loan is returned and any extra revenue does to the Gumball Fund - which loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world through Kiva. The whole thing is a project of Gumball Capital - a nonprofit started by Stanford students earlier this year. The Challenge is also being run at 5 other schools this month.

The Stanford Challenge is now heading into its 5th day, and the 9 competing teams have been doing some pretty awesome stuff! One team has being holding a Penny War in White Plaza and has raised over $60 (including some from our own Vice Provost ). Another team did In-n-Out runs on Thursday night and made $75. Others are hosting a Wii tournaments in the dorms or making 5ft towers out of quarters.

What excites me most about the Gumball Challenge is the creativity on speed. This idea is epitomized by the success of National Novel Writing Month, which is all of November. In 2006, 13k people wrote a 50,000 word novel, many who have never done anything like it before. The excitement of throwing things together, pushing through obstacles and achieving success in a creative way is addictive and awesome.

Now for that video I promised of Vice Provost John Bravman supporting the Penny War by smacking down the senior class. Ouch!

I recently heard a report on NPR about the role Yahoo played in China helping the Chinese government track down and imprison a political dissident Shi Tao-
Shi Tao’s political offense was contacting the Asia Democracy Project through his Yahoo email account to tell them about an order the Chinese Government gave to all journalists: not to report on any democratic protesters on the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square (June 4, 2004).

The Chinese government found out about this email, and demanded that Yahoo provide the user’s private information, which Yahoo did without asking why. This became a US scandal when the US Yahoo representatives told the US Senate that Chinese Yahoo had done no such thing, which it later retracted, claiming that it had made this claim on the grounds of an inaccurate translation from the Chinese Yahoo office.

Martin Eberhard is the Co-founder and President of Technology at Tesla Motors. Before Tesla, he was the Co-founder of Network Computing Devices and the CEO of NuvoMedia.

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"What keeps me up at night is the complexity of the problem," Martin reflects upon engineering the Tesla Roadster.

After founding various successful startups in the computer and internet space, Martin took a departure and co-founded Tesla Motors with Marc Tarpenning. With a passion for cars going back to his childhood, his goal is to create a sleek, high-performance all-electric vehicle.

The highly anticipated Tesla Roadster will go from 0 to 60 mph in under 4 seconds, drive 245mph on one charge, and will be powered by the equivalent of laptop batteries. Owners in the first shipment include Matt Damon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and of course, Martin himself.

We catch up with Martin at the Tesla Motors headquarters in San Carlos, CA. In this interview, check out what Martin has to say about creating a startup car company, his reflections on risk taking, and the engineering and market challenges in the electric car milieu.

Check out the Roadster!

A Roadster prototype at the San Carlos headquarters.

Thanks to Roger Gill for contributing to this podcast.

- Min Liu and Nir Eyal of iinnovate

I have recently been consumed by a new addiction on Facebook: Scrabulous. The game uses the Facebook platform in a great way because, as the creators point out on the app homepage, users don't have to be online at the same time to play. It's got a lot of users (almost 400k active users, according to Facebook) and it is even popular among Facebook employees (Facebook blog). I don't want to do what seems to be the whole requisite tech thing and start reviewing Facebook apps, but this particular one has been making some waves (subscription, or access to Stanford log-in/computing, required)-- particularly because it's clearly just the game Scrabble. Which belongs to Hasbro.

Anyways, I play Scrabulous all the time. I love it. In fact, I love it so much that I feel it's perfectly suited for a limerick:

There is this new game on the Platform,
Everyone seems to play-- it's the norm;
It is really quite fabulous,
And oh so much fun...
That wonderful, wonderful game called Scrabulous!

Now that's out the way and I've used my expansive (voluminous, perhaps?) vocabulary to show you why I'm clearly so good at Scrabulous, let me move on to a problem. I'm not talking about a bug in the code or any UI complaints. I took a screenshot of my problem below:

Can't see my problem? I'll zoom in a bit:

Still can't tell what I'm talking about? Here, I'll even caption it for you:

Crappy Scrabble Move Rewards Big

"Za" is the most bogus of all words. In fact, that's because it isn't a word. How is it that "Zen" is not a word in Scrabble (one of the most disputed Scrabble words out there) but "Za," not even a common sound, is a 36-point play?

My friend, Darius, is cheating I'm sure, that's all.

Holiday time is rapidly approaching, so I wanted to take a moment to suggest three possible gifts, each falling into its own price range (from $0 to $999) but each being techie in its own way. Ready? Let's start at the top, with the most expensive of the gifts...

23andMe: A new Bay Area company, 23andMe is one of the first commercial genomic companies out there. For a mere $999, 23andMe will collect a sample of your saliva and provide you with your genotype information. What is that, and why should you care? Well, if Mom's always wanted to be able to blame Dad for your flat feet, you can give her the ammo. I first heard about 23andMe in a sophomore IntroSem with Prof. Russ Altman in the Med School. 23andMe's Linda Avey came and presented to us about the company in its infancy.

Kindle: Kindle is Amazon.com's new e-book reader, which retails for $399. In attempting to revive the e-book, Kindle has received only mixed reviews in the blogosphere (such as this one on TechCrunch). Among my biggest complaints is the fact that you have to pay for subscriptions that you ordinarily wouldn't have to-- like blogs for example. Still, if you're interested in the e-book realm, Kindle is the best iteration out there.

I promised you gift ideas (from the techie world) from $0 to $999 so here is your free one: Ubuntu. I'll admit this is not a new Bay Area start-up or a hot item from an online retailer, but I recently myself started running Ubuntu on an aging Dell Inspiron 600m. Ubuntu is the most popular flavor of Linux, a type of OS which gracefully walks the line between Mac OS and Windows. It also has all the customize-ability of, say, Firefox, but across your entire OS. There are many many great things to say about Ubuntu, all of which I won't get into here, but let me say that for your free gift, you can't get any better.

I came across this interesting article in the NYTimes about technology in the classroom: New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology - New York Times

Apparently lots of teachers are annoyed with the fact that students use their laptops and smart/cell phones in class instead of listening to the Prof. According to one:

"The more you give, the more they take. These devices become an indisposable sort of thing for the students. And nothing should be indisposable. Multitasking is good, but I want them to do more tasking in my class.”

The author replies:

"To which one can only say: Amen. And add: Too bad the good guy is going to lose."

Seriously? How is text messaging worse than doodling on the corner of the page, daydreaming or passing notes? They are all ways of ignoring the teacher and have been around for as long as boring teachers have.

If profs want to get more student engagement, they need to make their classes more engaging. Lots of education research shows that lecturing is just not very effective at fostering serious intellectual thinking. I wrote my PWR2 paper on cooperative learning which does a much better job.

All I have to say is that at least these students are coming to class. I think many more people would just skip lecture if they weren't allowed to text, surf facebook or according to the article, watch porn, during lecture.

What do you guys think? Technology in classrooms yay or nay?