alanG/\lan lives – Visualize, Design, Develop, Affect – inspired Technologist

On Monday Aug 3 I learned of my summer boss’/advisor’s decision to discontinue his managerial position with the NLP project that is being led by Cynthia Farina of the Law School’s Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative. His decision made a significant dent on my plans for the 10 months. As of now, I am considering joining JP Pollak’s project, which is funded for years. More about this project below.

Mobile Phone-based Social Support for Cancer Patients

Funded by the NIH, this project aims to develop novel mobile phone-based applications that lead to socially supportive behaviors in cancer patients. Numerous studies have expounded on the benefits of social support for health, demonstrating improvements in overall quality of life, reductions in anxiety, reductions in perceived pain, increased comfort, and even faster recovery times. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to extensive social support networks or socially supportive therapy groups, and even those who do frequently don’t have access when they need it most, such as when sitting in a waiting room or lying in bed awake late at night. To that end, we have created Aurora, a mobile phone-based application that allows patients to quickly and easily share their current mood and emotions with one another. Patients select colors, photos, or designs that they feel represent their current emotional state, and can likewise view the current emotional state of their peers. Aurora supports a range of forms of communication designed to help each patient balance their own privacy with their desire for social interaction, and encourages them to reach out to one another in times of need or maintain distance as appropriate. This rich interaction, centered around the sharing of emotion, should help a greater number patients reap more of the benefits of quality social support. Further, the emotions each patient records in the system on a daily basis represent new and highly frequent data points that can be evaluated by care providers, and the monitoring of patient emotions on a daily basis could help stave off many potential problems before they arise fully.

Twitter, today I will speak in support of you and against myself. Your ability to connect me to the random thoughts and activities of people who are awesome (whom I don’t know yet still follow!) is much appreciated but, alas, quite dangerous. Today, via alesh’s tweet I rediscovered that I am a Natural Born Chiller.

Spend countless minutes wandering the net I will.

Eventually, I will reach a point where I am so satisfied with my findings, that I will stop whatever I’m doing and report my finds to the world via this blog. Hence:

	Jungle Brothers – Brain (Natural Born Chillers Remix)
	Found at skreemr.com

Not that you care, but let me interrupt myself to tell you how I use Twitter. I use twhirl as my client for several reasons. First, it’s built with {en:Adobe AIR}. Because twhirl was one of the first AIR applications that I installed on my Macbook Pro, I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by the “richer” experience that the AIR runtime is supposed to provide. So far so good.


Secondly, I prefer using a desktop client instead of a browser-based client because

I already have too many tabs open in my browser.
I can quit the client to avoid constant distractions, and launch it to find the newest tweets

Point being: Regardless of my planned behavioral patterns for using Twitter, my curiosity always gets the best of me. I don’t have constant distractions, but as a Natural Born Chiller, one great tweet will take me -> two, three, four pages -< into the net and I will come out blessed with a truly sickkk find.

Bye bye undisturbed productivity. Hello awesomeness and inspiration. In my current situation — deadline looming and design unfinished, ideas unborn — which is most important?