After 2 weeks of network science lectures and 16 of 17 capstone presentations today, I’m happy to not have any people yappin’ at me in the immediate future. Congratulations to all my classmates cappin’ off the semester with some fine work.
Some highlights:
- Yana — No sooner do I get home and check the web than I see this story, echoing the handout Tiffanie distributed with her capstone. If she had surfed to ESPN during her presentation, she could have had an even more timely example of why places like Middleway House exist.
- Erik, biodesignologist — Start to finish, Erik P delivered a great project. I had made a checklist of things I wanted my capstone to be, and fell short in a couple areas (mostly implementational) because of scoping problems. Like Justin last year, Erik hit all the notes in showing how exposing a biologist to algorithms in a contextual and relevant manner could improve their scientifice creativity. I also liked that he ended with a meta issue: the need to better integrate bioinformatics with HCI.
- Chalkboard drawings — Kynthia‘s presentation was (I think) completely text free, making Josh proud, I’m sure. It was a blackboard (well, greenboard) with very informative sketches all done in chalk. Each was “chalk” full of meaning, simplicity and, of course, the humor that makes even a Grog laugh.
- Christy Reed, v2.0 — I have to believe that HCI Design II next year will feature Nick Gentile’s fine presentation slides prominently. No one has seen much of Nick, since he has been gainful and ABC (all but capstone) for a while. But, with all due respect to Josh, Erik and others, Nick’s presentation may be the high-water mark for this round. (Everyone is probably still looking up at Justin’s Limestick project from last year, even though his cool poster just got bumped off the Informatics wall today.)
- The Recursive Loop — I felt for Ryan, who got untracked during his presentation Friday and floundered trying to get back his voice. I saw it happen: He was talking about examples showing the differences between digital and analog computing, someone coughed loudly, Ryan was startled, and all the words left his head. In times when I get hyper-flustered (when both anxiety and emotion are running too high), I get those same kinds of loops, where my mind keeps telling itself to just grab a thought and get out of the rut … taking up all my available brain processing power doing so. Eventually, with some gentle prodding questions by the other Erik, he got back untracked. I hope Apurva edits the silence into a cross-fade.
- Tetris Weightlifting — From the mind of Tim Tucker comes the marriage of free weights and computer timekillers. Tim had his contraption set up in the lobby, inviting people to try it, and had a nicely organized talk to boot. If Tuckercorp would only go public, I’d invest all my pennies.
- Shweta, Brian, Shunying and Jackie all finished their cappies today, too. Some cool ideas. Plenty of good bio talks today, too. I particularly liked the ones by Kenny, Divya and Jim.
Way to go. Have fun this weekend.
