I'm listening to a panel on how to manage international user research -- whether you're trying to build a product directed at a far-away market, or trying to design for a worldwide audience.

There's fair consensus that international research is budget constrained more than anything else -- in fact, Microsoft keeps coming up as an example of a company with the 'luxury' of having user researchers in many parts of the world and the money to send them to others (as if making those investments weren't a difficult budget decision just like at every other company).

Susan Dray made the good point, though, that deciding to do international research is usually a strategic decision, not a tactical one. That usually puts it in a separate decision-making process for investment.

Lots of discussion about the cultural issues -- both in terms of the 'content,' i.e. discovering cultural issues that affect your design; and in terms of the user research process and how certain practices (and certain questions) are not culturally appropriate in some countries.

I guess we shouldn't be surprised at this point, but Bush just threw another freebie to his buddies in the oil industry. He just temporarily suspended the environmental rules on gasoline production, to try to make it easier to increase production.

Of course, it's not at all clear that the high gas prices actually have anything to do with restrictions on production. In fact, there was a study last week that showed that the profit margins of the major oil companies have shot up. By making it cheaper (and dirtier) to make gasoline, Bush has allowed the retail price of gasoline to drift lower while maintaining the oil companies' outrageous margins.

Here's an interesting story -- a scandal in the making, if anyone actually cared.

Background: last week Google was added to the S&P 500. Which on its own is actually neutral -- it signifies that a company is big and important, but doesn't really signal anything about expectations for the stock to go up or down.

But here's the thing: all of the S&P index funds suddenly need to have that stock represented in their holdings, so they have no choice but to buy it up. So whenever a stock gets added to the S&P 500 or any of the other big indices, it immediately has a bump up.

Apparently someone got wind of this and made a bundle just before the announcement. Put aside that Google (the company) is involved, because it may not have involved anyone at Google. And, in fact, it may not even be illegal since the S&P 500 is not a publicly traded company and thus falls outside of SEC regulations for insider trading.

But someone clearly made the system work to their advantage last week.

I'm in the 'alt.chi' session, which is a collection of papers that are very interesting projects but for one reason or another would not compete well against traditional research papers to make it into the conference programs.

First project: incorporating digital technologies into a playground.  Their first prototype was a mat (looks sort of like two sets of train tracks, side by side) that kids could step or run on, and hitting pressure mats would activate motors. In their second iteration, they got the kids involved in making spinners to put on the motors. Then they observed how kids used it and experimented with it, including inventing their own games.  Their big goal: use technologies toaugment playground equipment without compromising the nature of unstructired play?

Second project: Tokyo Youth at Leisure, supporting the design of new meida to support leisure planning and practice. A user study of young adults aged 18-25 (the only age group that actually has free time) to see how they plan and participate in their leisure outings. Relaxation and companionship were the most important leisure qualities; finding new romance was the least. People and TV were the top resources for planning outings, mobile device was very low (though distinguish planning from coordination, where mobile and PC are used extensively).  'downtime' is essential; they often spend it alone, but hyper-connected (via email and mobile phone). For group outings, you choose the set of people you want to be with first, then decide what to do. Planning a meeting place for a specific activity is the process of minimizing the commute and maximizing opportuinities for other serendipitous activities. One interesting take-away: lots of cultural hype of mobile phones' hyperuse as distinctly Japanese, but the PC was used a lot more than was expected; people liked the large screen for viewing information and planning activities.

Third project: RoomBugs. simulating insect infestations in elementary school classrooms.  Kids use computers to run a simulation over several days of insects in the classroom, as a science experiment where they need to quantify can classify the infestation. PC's act as stations around the room and show the virtual equivalent of a 'sand trap' where they see insect tracks as virtual insects walk voer them. Kids were able to correctly count and identify 94% of over 1500 insect tracks that they were exposed to over a 2-week period. Yow!

Fourth project: Orbital Browser. How to connect up components in a ubiquitous computing environment.

Fifth project: Quill: a narrative-based interface for personal document retrieval.

Living in Belmopan is just so civilized. We have cable television, DSL Internet, shops that are open till 8 o’clock in the evening and there are tennis and basketball courts around the corner. As it’s a concrete house, it’s nice and cool. There are no creepy crawlies, very few mosquitoes (the town sprays against them), no snakes and (best of all) bin men to collect your garbage!

Living at the Dome is more like being in the Wild West in comparison. You have to rely on yourself and your neighbors for so many things. Finding your own solutions to waste disposal, catching snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, putting out your own fires (we once waited all night for the fire brigade…they never showed up) & now the police asked us for a ‘contribution’ to buy a car and supply it with gas, to patrol our area more.

So again, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re better off relying on ourselves and on our direct neighbors, even for something like security. It seems to be the best system when you live ‘out in the sticks’ like us.

So that makes our list of what we’re up to at the moment look like this:

• Take care of a toddler and a newborn
• Expand our resort with 2 extra rooms (in what used to be our living space)
• Build our own house
• Look after our guests every day (we’re fully booked most of the time)
• Buy back our old store in San Ignacio (The Green Dragon)
• Revamp our http://www.greendragonbelize.com/ website. Making it a separate entity from the Belize Jungle Dome, as the travel agency ‘Green Dragon Adventure Travel’
• Sort out the deal with our future business partners Tom & Marge
• Set up security systems for the local area with our neighbors

Building work at the Dome. Hard to believe that in this space there will be a bautiful suite soon.

Can you believe that this used to be our kitchen? What a mess...