Guest Post: The Real Problem Isn't Gender; It's the Modern Media

This guest post by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz was adapted from a comment he wrote on a Facebook post of mine sharing this essay.

While gender in tech is certainly an issue, a lot of the controversy over it is unnecessary. What recently happened with the Google memo is a classic case of Scott Alexander’s Toxoplasma of Rage, one of the most brilliant pieces I have ever read. Read his post. Then read it again.

The stories that go viral are those that maximize anger and foster the most disagreement.

Guy writes a memo with a lot of true statements but an aggressive tone bound to infuriate some people. Within two days, everybody is predictably furious.

My hypothesis is that an overwhelming majority of people actually agree on many of the points of contention--or would agree if they were phrased a little less aggressively, in a tone less likely to create controversy and less likely to go viral.

How many people, for example, agree with the following statement?

"We do not know why CS majors are 80% male. It is possible that, even though millions of women have a passion for computer science, there are, in aggregate, fewer women than men who have this passion. We don't know since computer science is kind of new. And also we don't really understand why female CS majors rose to 40% and then plummeted. Since it is possible that discrimination and stereotypes play a role, we should devote resources to making sure everybody with interest in these high-status jobs has ample opportunity to pursue them. Also, everybody should be judged based on their own interest and aptitude in a job, not how many people of their gender would want that job. Finally, the majority of women in tech--as well as many other high-powered fields--have said they have faced sexism, and we should work really hard to stop that."

This addresses many of the controversies that were raised by the James Damore memo and the responses to it, but is phrased in a way such that few people would find it objectionable. Perhaps we should stop falling for these traps that maximize rage and instead try sober analysis. We may find a surprising amount of consensus.

Lastly, no young person, man or woman, should actually be training for anything--driving cars, teaching kids, diagnosing diseases, or writing programs--because AI will soon do all that for us. ;)

For 352 pages of sober analysis on even more controversial topics, you can check out Seth’s book Everybody Lies.

Why It's Not Academia's Job to Produce Code That Ships

Note: The images in this post are inexplicably broken due to some kind of Blogger bug. If someone is reading this at Google, please help!

My scientist friends often scoff at crime show writers' creative interpretation of technology's limits.

The technology shiny world of CSI: Cyber.

"Let's zoom in here," a character says in an investigation room with floor-to-ceiling screens showing high-definition maps of the show's major metropolitan area. A flick of the fingers reveals an image of the suspect at mouth-watering resolution.

In another scene, the characters listen to a voice mail from the suspect. "What's that in the background?" one investigator asks. Using an interface that deadmau5 would kill to have, the hacker of the bunch strips out the the talking, the other sounds. They say some words like "triangulation" and, eureka, they deduce the suspect's exact location.

Yes, real police technology is nowhere near this sophisticated. Yes, nobody (except maybe the government, secretly) has technology like this. But those who criticize the lack of realism are missing the point.

The realities that art constructs take us out of our existing frames of perception--not only for fun, but also for profit. Many important technological advances, from the submarine from the cell phone, appeared in fiction well before they appeared in real life. Correlation does not imply causation, but many dare say that fiction inspires science.

Some complaints against academic Computer Science.

This brings us to the relationship between academic Computer Science and the tech industry. Recently, people in industry have made similar criticisms of academic computer science. Mike Hoye of Mozilla started the conversation by saying he was "extremely angry" with academics for making it difficult for industry to access the research results. This unleashed a stream of Internet frustration against academics about everything from lack of Open Access (not our faults) to squandering government funding (not entirely true) to not caring about reproducibility or sharing our code (addressed in an earlier blog post).

At the heart of the frustration is a legitimate accusation*: that academics care more about producing papers than about producing anything immediately (or close to immediately) useful for the real world. I have been hearing some variation of this criticism, from academics as well as industry people, for longer than I have been doing research. But these criticisms are equivalent to saying that TV writers care more about making a good show than being technically realistic. While both are correct observations, they should not be complaints. The real problem here is not that academics don't care about relevance or that industry does not care about principles, but that there is a mismatch in expectations.

It makes sense that people expect academic research results to work in companies right away. Research that makes tangible, measurable contributions is often what ends up being most popular with funding sources (including industry), media outlets, and other academics reviewing papers, faculty applications, and promotion cases. As a result, academic researchers are increasingly under pressure to do research that can be described as "realistic" and "practical," to explicitly make connections between academic work and the real, practical work that goes on in industry.

In reality, most research--and much of the research worth doing--is far from being immediately practical. For very applied research, the connections are natural and the claims of practicality may be a summer internship or startup away from being true. Everything else is a career bet. Academics bet years, sometimes the entirety, of their careers on visions of what the world will be like in five, ten, twenty years. Many, many academics spend many years doing what others consider "irrelevant," "crazy," or "impossible" so that the ideas are ready by the time the time the other factors--physical hardware, society--are in place.

The paths to becoming billion-dollar industries.

In Computer Science, it is especially easy to forget that longer-term research is important when we can already do so much with existing ideas. But even if we look at what ends up making  money, evidence shows that career bets are responsible for much of the technology we have today. The book Innovation in Information Technology talks about how ideas in computer science turned into billion-dollar ideas. A graphic from the book (on right) shows that the Internet started as a university project in the sixties. Another graphic shows there were similarly long tech transfer trajectories for ideas such as relational databases, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and broadband in the last mile.

The story of slow transfer is true across Computer Science. People often ask me why I do research in programming languages if most of the mainstream programming languages were created by regular programmers. It we look closely, however, most of the features in mainstream languages came out of decades of research. Yes, Guido Van Rossum was a programmer and not a researcher before he became the Benevolent Dictator of Python. But Python's contribution is not in innovating in terms of any particular paradigm, but in combining well features like object orientation (Smalltalk, 1972, and Clu, 1975), anonymous lambda functions (the lambda calculus, 1937), and garbage collection (1959) with an interactive feel (1960s). As programming languages researchers, we're looking at what's next: how to address problems now that people without formal training are programming, now that we have all these security and privacy concerns. In a media interview about my Jeeves language for automatically enforcing security and privacy policies, I explained the purpose of creating research languages as follows: "We’re taking a crazy idea, showing that it can work at all, and then fleshing it out so that it can work in the real world."

Some may believe that all of the deep, difficult work has already been done in Computer Science--and now we should simply capitalize on the efforts of researchers past. History has shown that progress has always gone beyond people's imaginations. Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, the first Commissioner of the US Patent Office, is known to have made fun of the notion that progress is ending, saying, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." And common sense tell us otherwise. All of our data is becoming digitized and we have no clue how to make sure we're not leaking too much information. We're using software to design drugs and diagnose illness without really understanding what the software is doing. To say we have finished making progress is to be satisfied with an unsatisfying status quo.

The challenge, then, is not to get academics to be more relevant, but to preserve the separate roles of industry and academia while promoting transfer of ideas. As academics, we can do better in communicating the expectations of academic research (an outreach problem) and developing more concrete standards of expectations for "practical" research (something that Artifact Evaluation Committees have been doing, but that could benefit from more input from industry). As a society, we also need to work towards having more patience with the pace of research--and with scientists taking career bets that don't pay off. Part of the onus is on scientists for better communicating the actual implications of the work. But everyone else also has a responsibility to understand that if we're in the business of developing tools for an unpredictable future--as academics are--it is unreasonable to expect that we can fill in all the details right away, or that we're always right.

It is exciting that we live in a time when it is possible to see technical ideas go from abstract formulations to billion-dollar industries in the course of a single lifetime. It is clear we need to rethink how academia and industry should coexist under these new circumstances. Asking academics to conform to the standards of industry, however, is like asking TV writers to conform to the standards of scientists--unnecessary and stifling to creativity. I invite you to think with me about how we can do better.

With thanks to Rob Miller and Emery Berger for helping with references.

* Note that this post does not address @mhoye's main complaint about reproducibility, for which the response is that, at least in Programming Languages and Software Engineering, we recognize this can be a problem (though not as big of a problem as some may think) and have been working on it through the formation of Artifact Evaluation Committees. This post addresses the more general "what are academics even doing?!" frustration that arose from the thread.

--

Addendum: Many have pointed out that @mhoye was mainly asking for researchers to share their code. I address the specific accusation about academics not sharing code in a previous blog post. I should add that I'm all for sharing of usable code, when that's relevant to the work. In fact, I'm co-chairing the POPL 2017 Artifact Evaluation Committee for this reason. I'm also all for bridging the gaps between academia and industry. This is why I started the Cybersecurity Factory accelerator for turning commercializing security research.

What I'm responding to in this post is the deeper underlying sentiment responsible for the misperception that academics do not share their code, the sentiment that academics are not relevant. This relevance, translating roughly into "something that can be turned into a commercial idea" or "something that can be implemented in a production platform" is what I mean by "shipping code." For those who wonder if people really expect this, the answer is yes. I've been asked everything from "why work on something if it's not usable in industry in the next five years?" to "why work on something if you're not solving the problems industry has right now?"

What I'd like is for people to recognize that in order for us to take bets on the future, not all research is going to seem relevant right away--and some if might never be relevant. It's a sad state of affairs when would-be Nobel laureatees end up driving car dealership shuttles because they failed to demonstrate immediate relevance. Supporting basic science in computer science involves patience with research.

The Spam Filter Apocalypse

Spam filters almost prevented these gorgeous photo ops.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were planning to go apple-picking when I noticed she was curiously silent in the group planning email thread. I texted her to inquire. She immediately texted back, "What thread?"

I forwarded her the thread and, after checking that it had included her, asked if perhaps the message had gotten caught in her spam filter. She said no.

The next day in the car, she revealed that the message had gotten caught not in her university spam filter, but in her Gmail spam filter.

This was troubling. University spam filters were widely known the usual culprit for missing emails. In university-land, the best excuse for failing to respond to an email is to say the message "somehow" got "stuck." Who knows what decade the technology was from? Who knows what kinds of dark corners there are, waiting to eat important work emails and social invitations alike?

Gmail, on the other hand, is another story. It is generally acknowledged to be the state of the art when it comes to spam filters. Occasionally I will check my "spam" folder to see what has gotten caught, but in general it does a good job. If Gmail spam filters were categorizing important social emails as spam, then surely it was beginning of the end.

A few months ago, I would have filed this as another piece of evidence that the Robot Apocalypse is not coming anytime soon. When Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian interviewed a couple of computer scientist friends and me for the Upvoted podcast, I had been surprised that he asked how afraid we should be about the Robot Apocalyse. We had all laughed and said that the current state of artificial intelligence is not sufficiently sophisticated to produce robots who will take over the world.

What I have been coming to realize, however, is that unsophisticated robots have already taken over the world. Tethered to our emails, we are at the mercy of the less glamorous, but no less scary, spambots and spam filters. On the way to apple-picking, my friends and I wondered whether it is possible to prevent someone from ever having their emails received again if everyone collectively spam-filtered them. It turns out this depends on the sophistication spam filtering algorithms. It should be terrifying that this is possible--and that this can seriously compromise someone's standard of living.

Fortunately, there are measures that prevent the current robot situation from being more apocalyptic. We more or less trust Google to live up to their promise to "do no evil." We have some degree of trust that if technology creators abused their power, regulators would step in and protect us. And, importantly, we still live in a culture where we give people the benefit of the doubt when technology seems to fail. Behind most important decisions there remains a human to make the final call.

When things become too dangerous is when we begin to trust the algorithms too much. In The Fires, Joe Flood describes how a liberal city government caused New York City's poorest neighborhoods to burn down in the 1970s. The well-meaning government placed trusted the algorithms of RAND corporation to fairly allocate resources. What ended up happening was that, in the poorest neighborhoods, infrastructure was not well maintained and insufficient firefighting resources were allocated. Buildings became prone to fire and firefighters were slow to respond. These algorithms, like humans, were biased. Because the government trusted so much in the algorithms, however, there was too little oversight for too long.

The way to prevent the full Spam Filter Apocalypse is to avoid giving the robots too much power. As consumers, we have the responsibility to educate ourselves about what our technology is doing, think critically about how it could affect our lives, and push back when algorithms are doing too much without oversight. Protecting ourselves is as much a social engineering problem as it is a technical one. It involves educating ourselves enough that, as a society we can establish policies, both informal "best practices" kind and ones that are legally enforced. A first step is to stop regarding the Robot Apocalypse as a nebulous inevitability and to start seeing it as something that is already happening, but whose trajectory we can control.

As software comes to run our lives, the Robot Apocalypse we should fear is not the one that comes about because the technology become too advanced. We should instead worry about what happens when we place too much trust in technology that is not quite ready for the task at hand. The Spam Filter Apocalypse is perhaps less glamorous than what the futurists of times past may have hoped, but it certainly is no less scary.

Dual Booting Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04

It appears that Windows remains ahead in this operating systems arm race: dual booting with Linux has become even more difficult. Here are some updated instructions from the last time I dual booted, in an "idealized order" I have inferred through my various failures*.

1. Shrink the size of your Windows partition and create a new simple partition for your Linux installation to go in. (More.)
2. Get an Ubuntu image onto a DVD or a USB drive.
3. Turn off Fast Boot in Windows. (More.) If you don't do this, your system is going to boot straight into Windows every time.
4. Disable Secure Boot in your BIOS. (More.)
5. Enable UEFI and disable Legacy Boot in your BIOS. (More.) I'm not sure why this has to happen, but my Ubuntu Boot-Repair kept failing until I did this.
6. Boot from your image. (If you haven't turned off Fast Boot, you might discover that there are new ways of doing this in Windows 8.1. But you should have turned off Fast Boot.)
7. Follow the instructions and install Linux onto the partition you've set aside for it.
8. Run Boot-Repair to reinstall your GRUB.

After these many steps, you should be able to enjoy the pleasures of dual boot. Enjoy.

* I found this post to be quite a helpful resource during the process. Because I somehow still kept failing, I felt that my shorter summary may be helpful for people who, like me, thought they didn't need such a detailed step-by-step.

Careful Where You Click

The other day, a friend and I were talking about how fun it was to check Google Analytics. When I asked her if she knew most of her readers, she said she could figure out who many of them were. Especially if they were outside New York. Especially if they were in some remote location.

Google Analytics, a fantastic tool for optimizing your website, can also be a precise tool for stalking. All you need to do is insert a bit of code in the header and you can know who has visited your website, how they came across your website, how long they visited your site, and whether they have been to your site before. I show on the left a screen shot of analytics on the visitors from Florida for one of my websites*. Since there is only one person accessing the site from each of Gainesville and South Miami, we can figure out how much time each person spent on the site. As my friend Rishabh would say, "Walk the walks, stalk the stalks."

We've recently seen that even if you use tools that supposedly hide you, there are still ways you can be tracked. Last month, Special Agent Thomas Dalton released this document of how he tracked down that the bomb threats to Harvard buildings during exam originated from a Harvard student hoping to avoid exams. To avoid detection, the student had used Tor, software that prevents others from detecting the IP address from which an action originates--akin to anonymizing a phone number before making a prank call. Unfortunately for the student, the Harvard network was able to figure out who was accessing Tor at the time the e-mail was sent, narrowing the suspect pool down to our perpetrator.

There are many ways that you can be exposed if you are among a small handful of people engaging in some behavior. Last month, I attended a fascinating talk by Mike Specter at MIT about how people can track searches of obscure terms. Mike had done a search for "Pentagon SMO code" and discovered there was a gov.cn (Chinese government) website showing up towards the top of the search results. He clicked on this website, he discovered that it showed its own search results for the terms--but not before tracking that he had visited the site**. Upon further investigation, Mike discovered that the site had performed search-engine optimization so that it could show up towards the top of the search results. Because search engines rely on automated algorithms, people can trick the algorithms into thinking their page is more important or more relevant to a given search term. This page used particularly insidious optimization techniques, including putting invisible comments called "pingbacks" on legitimate websites (such as the Yale University homepage) and using the .gov.cn domain so as to show up in all searches and not just searches in China. (Google personalizes results based on search location.) Mike found that this website showed up for many long-tail (obscure) searches, both relevant to the American government and otherwise. While it's not clear what this site is doing with this information (Mike speculates profit motives), what is clear is that people can easily be exposed while performing obscure searches.

While we can hope that researchers like Mike continue to watch out for us, we will also need to learn to watch our for ourselves. As our lives come to depend on increasingly complex technology, it is important for everyone to develop a basic level of technological literacy. It is clear that technology can be quite powerful in reducing and compromising internet privacy. It is up to us to define how much we allow: by raising awareness, by taking precautions, and by protesting when we find something to be unreasonable. As recent legislative decisions have shown, powerful people have been doing a lot of thinking about the future of the internet. It is up to us to make sure the future is not one in which we have no choice but to be exposed!

* Not this blog, guys. Florida readers, you remain anonymous here! 
** How much the site can find out about you depends on the level of sophistication of the site and the measures you have taken to hide yourself. The WSJ has a nice widget at the top that tells you what they can find out about you. I show mine below.

Dual Booting Ubuntu and Windows 8

This blog post commemorates the better part of a work day I spent installing a dual boot of Ubuntu Linux 13.10 and Windows 8 on my Lenovo X230 Thinkpad. I did not expect to have such trouble, but I did, and once I came out in the open about it on Facebook and Twitter I heard from many others who have fought the good fight--and given up. So maybe this post will be helpful to some of you.

If you're looking for quick instructions for adding an Ubuntu partition to a machine with Windows 8 installed, here they are:

1. Manually partition your memory on your Windows 8 operating system. Go to the Control Panel, go to Disk Management, and create a new partition from your main partition. (More information here.)
2. Acquire an Ubuntu installation mechanism, either from Ubuntu or by downloading a disk image and burning it onto a flash drive or CD.
3. When starting up your computer, press "Enter" to interrupt the normal boot sequence. Press F12 to get into the boot menu. Select the option to boot from the flash/CD drive. Follow the directions to install Ubuntu.
4. The Ubuntu install will mess up your boot loader and prevent you from loading Windows properly. To fix this, install Boot Repair on your Linux system and select "Recommended Repair." This will reinstall your GRUB and do some other things.
5. The final piece of what you'll need to do is disable Secure Boot in your BIOS. Windows 8 uses it to make sure the pre-OS environment is secure. You can do it by pressing "Enter" at startup, getting into the BIOS options, and selecting "Disable" for the Secure Boot option. (More here on Secure Boot and here on disabling it.)

Read on for the full story.

The first question to address is why the dual boot. Linux is non-negotiable for coding. Besides feeling somewhat like it would be a waste to wipe out Windows, Windows is pretty useful for programs like Powerpoint, SolidWorks, and the new software that came with my drawing tablet (Autodesk, ArtRage, and Photoshop). Why don't I just get a Mac, you might ask. Maybe I'm waiting for free software to get good enough that I don't have to use Windows anymore. Or maybe I just haven't... yet...

The second question to address is why the dual boot and not virtual machines. At one point I was running a Windows virtual machine on Linux to use Powerpoint. And then my Windows decided to install updates... for ten minutes... during the beginning of my Research Qualifying Exam. After that, I decided dual boot was the better way to go. I hear having Windows as the host is better, but I mostly spend my time in Linux anyway. Windows is just for the special stuff every now and then.

Now for the story. I went on the Ubuntu website, downloaded a disk image, and burned it onto a disk as I normally do, expecting to be able to boot off the disk as usual. Ha. I tried turning on my computer a couple of times, thinking the system would detect the disk and boot off of it. That didn't work, I had thought because the boot order was not in my favor. I then wondered if I could take the easy route and use WUBI, the Ubuntu Windows installer, which was also part of the Ubuntu disk image. It looked like I was getting a little bit far in my Ubuntu installation: the system told me it succeeded and I even got a pretty "which OS do you want, Ubuntu or Win 8?" screen. But every time I tried to select the "Ubuntu" option I got a black screen of death saying my \ubuntu\winboot\wubuildr.mbr file was missing. A quick internet search revealed that WUBI is not to be used in conjunction with Windows 8 or UEFI hardware. (Okay, here I'll admit I tried reburning the CD at least once before doing this...) Apparently WUBI doesn't work with UEFI, the Universal Extensible Firmware Interface, because it uses grub4dos, which doesn't support GPT (GUID partition table) disks, which is a more flexible disk partitioning mechanism associated with UEFI.

I tried a little harder to boot off the disk and discovered that pressing "Enter" got me out of the normal boot sequence and F12 allowed me to boot off the disk. It looked like I successfully installed Linux again, until I shut down and tried to enter my Windows partition. There I got an equally scary screen saying my Windows couldn't be accessed anymore. I searched the error on Google and it said that I could probably address my boot issues using Boot Repair. I installed it, and during installation it reinstalled the GRUB (GNU GRand Unified Bootloader) and told me I needed to disable Secure Boot. Wondering if the second part was really true, I tried starting up Windows without disabling Secure Boot. No luck. It turns out that if Secure Boot is enabled, Windows 8 expects it to report back on certain properties that the dual boot breaks. (More here.) I went into the BIOS, found the Secure Boot [Enabled] option on the right-most screen, and set it to [Disabled]. (Apparently Linux systems can support Secure Boot now, but--unless I'm missing something--not for dual booting.)

And... then... it... worked! Now I have a working dual-boot of Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.10. My usage of Windows 8 has been an endless source of amusement for my office friend Rishabh. ("Why do you have to do this just to get that to work?") Perhaps this can be the subject of a future blog post.

Why I'm Not Taking a Vacation from Facebook

The internet does not seem to like Facebook these days. Studies are coming out (for instance, this PLOS ONE study) suggesting that Facebook decreases happiness in young adults. In solidarity with the teenagers, Kayak founder Paul English is taking a vacation from it the month of October.

This is too bad. I don't hate social media. Like any of you I also like going into the mountains, throwing my phone into a lake, and bonding over shared processing of primal angst. But I wouldn't be the most happy doing only that. I thrive on being connected to hundreds of people at once. And you might, too.

I have always loved the internet for making this possible. As a kid with diverse interests and not that many people to talk to about them, the internet was a way for me to have the conversations I wanted to have. I have had an e-mail account since 1995. I may have read every page on the internet about the USA women's gymnastics team during the 1996 Olympics. I got a lot of flak for running my own GeoCities website about tamagotchis--complete with pop-ups and frames--in middle school. During my teenage years, when I became only slightly cooler, my social life consisted mostly, to my mother's chagrin, of spending my evenings with at least five AOL Instant Messenger chat windows open while "doing my homework." I talked to friends from my school, friends from other schools, friends I met at summer camp, and friends of friends who were interesting to talk to. If only there were a way for me to do this more efficiently...

When Facebook first came out, I was excited that everyone else could join me in having an active online life. As part of the first Harvard class ('08) to have Facebook accounts before arriving on campus, we all spent the later parts of our summers stalking our soon-to-be classmates. By the first week of freshman year, it was rare to come across someone who had not already established, through judging self-manufactured personas on Facebook, who was hot, who was not, and who was planning to take way too many classes. And sure, at times it was a bit overwhelming to be able to browse just how much smarter, better-looking, and popular other people seemed to be. But that's college. Insecurity is inevitable, especially on a campus where it seems like every other person is jumping to tell you how early they got up, how many miles they ran, or how smart their boyfriend was. And you learn to calibrate for the "Facebook gap:" people are probably adding a couple of inches to their height, taking a few pounds of their weight, and lying about their age... oh wait, that's online dating.

Even in the beginning, Facebook was useful for facilitating deeper connections. In late August before our freshman year, one of the Harvard websites had a glitch that allowed us to see our room assignments, which normally would not be available until we arrived on campus. News of this glitch spread through the mailing list for the incoming class (another useful virtual community) and many of us posted our room assignments to Facebook. This is how four of my five freshman roommates and I found each other and began corresponding. By the time we had gotten to school, we already knew where the others were from, what our backgrounds and habits were like, and what our hopes and dreams were for our freshman year. This helped us establish a rapport--as well as real memories we still refer back to--before we were able to meet in person. It may not be a coincidence that despite being quite different on the surface, the four of the five of us continued living together for the rest of college.

Social media, by supporting the broadcast-and-see-what-comes-back method of social interaction, has enriched my life in many ways over the years. When I was younger and less busy, I would announce on Facebook whenever I was going to be in a different city so I could meet up with whichever friends happened to be there at the time. One time, Facebook helped me reconnect with a Korean-American friend I had not seen since we met at art camp in high school who was randomly teaching English in my Chinese hometown. Another time, my Facebook-location-announcement scheme facilitated a San Francisco hang-out with a childhood friend who introduced me to a friend who introduced me to a friend--via Facebook--who ended up showing my friend and me a fun evening in Barcelona. By giving me a forum for announcing my intentions to the world, Facebook has made it easy for the world to help me achieve what I want, whether it is having a discussion about some topic or acquiring some physical object. Facebook has given me all sorts of things: product and app recommendations (I learned about InstaPaper through Facebook), link suggestions, and even roommate invitations.

Because of how easy it makes it to access interesting information, social media has come to dominate my media consumption. For the media diary we were supposed to keep for a class last semester on the news ecosystem, I discovered that I spent 78.6 hours in conversations and it was my primary form of media consumption. (I had a pretty insane spreadsheet for tracking this...) Of my conversations, 27.6% occurred on social media. One could wonder whether I am spending my time gossiping when I could be reading the news, by let me convince you that this is not the case. On Facebook and Twitter, I like to follow people (for instance, Arianna Huffington) and organizations (for instance, Forbes Tech News) who post informative pieces. I also actively unfollow people who flood my stream with posts I don't care about. I have recently also begun following Facebook pages that provide a steady stream of positive quotes, for instance Positivity. Social media has made it much easier to do two of my favorite things: read about the world and have conversations about what I read.

You might ask whether this time I am spending on Facebook is taking time away from forming genuine connections. I don't think so. Much of the time I spend on Facebook is time I would otherwise use for working or reading, activities that are not particularly social. If I weren't having a conversation on social media, I would likely not be having a conversation at all--in-person conversations during work breaks take far higher levels of coordination and serendipity than the asynchrony of social media requires. For me, taking a break to go on Facebook or Twitter is like walking down a hallway full of exactly whom I want to see. For some kinds of work, it's also nice to have Facebook providing a warm background buzz. Of course it's good to have one-on-one conversations, but sometimes it's nice to be able to go to a coffee shop or party and experience human interaction secondhand. And just as it's not the best idea to do all of your work in the busiest coffee shop in town, you probably do not want to be constantly connected to all 3000 of your best Facebook friends.

So sure, if you are a misanthrope or agoraphobe it's probably best to stay off, but social media does not have to be bad. It may take some establishment of good practices, but what worthwhile activity doesn't?

Travel Meets Technology: A Weekend in Portland, Oregon

When Facebook Graph Search came out, skeptics bemoaned the end of personal privacy. Now that people can perform targeted queries over your social media history, there are few places to left hide. Facebook Graph Search will make it all too easy for your mother to find out that you have been drinking and for your boss to find out that you are a Republican.

The unveiling of Graph Search was exciting to me for more than voyeuristic reasons. For years, I have appreciated how Facebook has helped better connect me with people and enrich my world view. I have also liked how social media democratizes knowledge and allows for everyone to express their views in ways only experts and journalists previously could. Graph Search seemed like a useful way to learn even more about the people in my social network and also the rest of the world.

To explore my stance, I decided to see if Graph Search was useful for researching topics other than my friends’ personal lives. I came up with the goal of researching a lifestyle piece using solely Graph Search. As the target destination I chose Portland, Oregon because I had never been there and did not have many friends posting about it on Facebook. I assumed having few contacts in a location would be the most common experience of someone using Graph Search to learn about something new, as most people’s social networks tend to be fairly limited. I then planned a trip to Portland to compare the Graph Search itinerary to the New York Times’s 36 Hours in Portland, which represents an expert-curated itinerary for the same length of time.

This project became not just an evaluation of the effectiveness of Facebook Graph Search, but a study of the changing relationship between people, technology, and experts. On the one hand, technology provides us tools to scour the internet’s fares and opinions to potentially provide us with succinct summaries of the world’s information. On the other hand, it is not clear whether someone familiar with the domain in question can outperform technology. There is also the question of how we can use technology to enhance interactions with experts or to democratize the availability of expert knowledge. To explore this, I used other tools such as AirBnB, Bing Travel, and non-Graph Search capabilities of Facebook. The final itinerary is a result of cross-referencing the Graph Search and Times itineraries with sites like Yelp and with Portland locals, combined with serendipitous events.

I found my ad-hoc internet travel agent to be immensely useful for giving me fast and easy access to large quantities of information. Fare search and predictors give even amateur trip planners a good idea of times and prices at which to buy. Graph Search allowed me to see a collage of what my trip could look like visually through a simple search of “Photos taken in Portland, Oregon.” Sites like Graph Search, Yelp, and AirBnB provided up-do-date information about where people where spending their time and money. Advances in search technology, combined with innovations in peer-to-peer models for communication, allow us to learn about the world in previously impossible ways. With all this information at hand, it is tempting to think that the masses provide us with all of the opinions we need.

During this project, however, I learned to appreciate the curation of experts. Someone local or known to have good taste is more likely to make good recommendations than a random sampling of people from the internet. In general, unless you know something about the people posting about a place, it is difficult to determine how much to listen to the opinions presented. I realized that with sites such as Yelp and AirBnB, I close-read the writing style and content of reviews to form my own opinion about how “expert” I deem a reviewer about the relevant domain. It is, at present, difficult to determine the taste “footprint” of Facebook users posting about a place. Especially for researching travel and entertainment, it would be useful to be able to identify and weigh more highly the contributions of certain people, for instance relative experts or those with similar taste.

I describe the results in the form of a timeline for both the planning and trip periods.

Some night, months before.
12am.
Use only Facebook Graph Search to research a travel itinerary for Portland, Oregan (see According to Facebook Graph Search: 36 Hours in Portland, Oregon and Facebook Graph Search as a Journalistic Tool).

The next day.
Post to Facebook, Twitter, and your Gmail chat status about these posts. Chat online with a friend on the West Coast until he suggests a trip to Portland to explore these itineraries. Use Bing travel's fare predictor to decide the best time to book plane tickets. (In my case, it told me to wait.)
Tools: social media; online messaging; fare search.

Some other night, a month before.

11pm.
Plot geographic locations corresponding to both the Graph Search and the New York Times (NYT: 36 Hours in Portland, Oregon) itineraries. Discover that the Graph Search itinerary seems to be concentrated around downtown (West) Portland, while the NYT itinerary has locations on both sides of the Wilamette River. Discover that many of the places mentioned in the NYT article, written in August 2011, have already closed.
Tools: Google Maps; Google Places.

12am.
Examine the availability of people renting available apartments, rooms, and guest houses on AirBnB. Discover that the more interesting, affordable, and highly rated locations seem to be in East Portland. Make a booking in the Mt. Tabor neighborhood.
Tools: AirBnB.

Yet another night before the trip.
Make a proposed itinerary for the weekend by combining activities from the two itineraries. Cross-reference with Yelp; discover that many of the Graph Search locations seem to be reviewed less favorably as being "touristy." Cross-reference with TripAdvisor; find that the recommended activities seem to be less urban and more outdoorsy.

Use Facebook to contact Joe, a friend of a friend who lives in Portland. Make plans to meet up.
Tools: Yelp; TripAdvisor; messaging.

Friday of the trip.

11am.
Brunch at Cafe Broder, whose Scandinavian brunch comes highly recommended by the Times. Broder is worth every minute of the potentially long wait. Try the lefke (potato pancake) and a baked egg scramble.
Tools: New York Times.

2:30pm.
Walk off brunch by shopping in the vintage and curiosity shops. Walk past Pok Pok, one of the most popular Asian restaurants in Portland.
Tools: serendipity.

4pm.
Get a late lunch at Por Que No? Taqueria, recommended by the Times itinerary. The Times warns of a long wait, but during off-peak hours the line is fine. The ceviche is delicious and there is the option of getting it on cucumber slices rather than with chips.
Tools: New York Times.

7pm.
Jog up Mt. Tabor, recommended by fellow reviewers of your lodging on AirBnB. Mt. Tabor once an active volcano but is now merely a hill. Watch the gentlemen of Portland ride low bikes and skateboards down the hill as the sun sets.
Tools: AirBnB; serendipity.

10pm.
Try in vain for thirty minutes to call a cab from numbers off Google Search. (We still don't know if Mr. Taxi is real.) Default to dining at Sapphire Hotel, recommended by both your AirBnB host and a friend, a former seedy hotel that now probably has one of the better cocktail menus you have ever seen. Enjoy bacon-wrapped figs and perhaps a burger while your friend drinks the "You're not my real dad," a bourbon cocktail that comes with a cigarette.
Tools: word of mouth.

12am.
Take a walk down Hawthorne Street, recommended by AirBnB reviewers as being close to shopping and dining locales of interest. Consider stopping in and playing pool or drinking a beer at one of the bars. Walk past various closed shops and a group of 20-somethings sitting on an awning and drinking. Take the scenic route back along residential streets. Take some time to smell the flowers. Especially if it is summer, they will smell great.
Tools: AirBnB; serendipity.

Saturday.

11am.
Propose going to the Portland Saturday Market, recommended by Graph Search. Wait for Joe to veto this suggestion, saying that it is full of people from the suburbs. Have Joe instead take you for Vietnamese food at Ha VL in Southeast Portland. Be impressed by the fact that it is in a shopping complex full of Asian restaurants and that the other patrons are largely Asian. Did you know that the Vietnamese have pho for breakfast?
Tools: Graph Search; word of mouth.

1pm.
Take a walk around the Japanese garden, recommended by Graph Search, the Times, and most other travel itineraries for Portland. After you achieve a sense of peace, take in the beauty of the rose gardens, founded in 1917 and the oldest continuous operating rose garden in the United States.
Tools: Graph Search; New York Times; word of mouth.

3pm.
Get all natural, hand-crafted ice cream at Ruby Jewel, recommended by Joe. If you have enough appetite, try the salted caramel apple pie a la mode.
Tools: word of mouth.

4pm.
Do some shopping downtown at stores you serendipitously discover by wandering around. Tanner, Polar, and Yo! Vintage are all on the same block.
Tools: serendipity.

5pm.
Wander around Powell's Books, discovered by Graph Search as a highly recommended destination. The largest independent new and used bookstore in the world, Powell’s takes up a city block and has multiple sections, including ones for comics and rare books.
Tools: Graph Search.

7pm.
Discover Cacao Drink Chocolate while walking and take a hot chocolate break. Sample the hot chocolate espresso shot or a cup of melted single-origin chocolate.
Tools: serendipity.

8pm.
Dine on French cuisine at the Little Bird Bistro, recommended by the NYT as the more accessible alternative to the popular Le Pigeon, flagship of chef Gabriel Rucker.  Spend a leisurely couple of hours enjoying the food and cocktails.
Tools: New York Times.

11pm.
Imbibe local beers at  Eastburn, recommended by Joe for its proximity to Little Bird. Enjoy the wide variety selection of beers on tap, perhaps on the patio.
Tools: word of mouth; serendipity.

Sunday.

11am.
Have brunch at Woodsman Tavern, which you discovered on your way back from Broder the other day that a local called her favorite restaurant in Portland. On your way out, browse the snacks and sodas at the adjoining store.
Tools: serendipity; word of mouth.

2pm.
Ditch the original plan of going to Voodoo Donut, discovered via Graph Search, after a local tells you that it is "touristy" and a "last result." After failing to hunt down the donut truck that is supposedly the best source of donuts, pick up a snack at Blue Star Donuts before they run out for the day. (This usually happens in the early afternoon!)
Tools: Graph Search; word of mouth.

3pm.
Wander around the boutiques of East Burnside. There is Redux, recommended by the Times as an analog Etsy housing the work of over 300 artists. There are also fun surrounding vintage shops. In the way of designer boutiques there is Machus for mens's high fashion and Lille for lingerie.
Tools: New York Times; serendipity.

5pm.
Continue exploring downtown Portland. Walk around Pioneer Courthouse Square, recommended by Graph Search. Peer into some boutiques you passed by earlier but did not enter, such as Frances May.
Tools: Graph Search; serendipity.

7pm.
Dinner at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant recommended by the Times. Enjoy the yakitori (grilled chicken), handmade ramen and udon, rice balls, and sake.
Tools: New York Times.

Discussion.
It turned out that while Graph Search provided a nice initial preview of what Portland would be like, the New York Times and locals suggested higher-quality activities: those that were more highly reviewed on internet sites such as Yelp and by other locals. Serendipity is also a useful tool: finding one thing you like can help you find other similar things, either by walking around the neighborhood or by asking people there for suggestions. For all technology can do to provide new ways for people to interact, for purpose of travel it would do well to start by replicating these processes of consulting experts and exploring clusters of similar options. Since we already have sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor to allow people to do this with strangers, it will be interesting to see how Facebook Graph Search can allow us to leverage the social graph to improve upon this.

Facebook Graph Search as a Journalistic Tool

Facebook is becoming an ever-powerful stalking tool. The social network now associates users with not just profiles stating some facts about their status and interests, but also, among other things, with photographs, location check-ins, games, and "pages" corresponding to businesses, brands, and celebrities. Until recently, however, the only way to thoroughly stalk someone was to manually comb accessible photos, locations, and pages.

Then came Facebook Graph Search. Graph Search allows users to search Facebook data to which they have access. Not only is it now easy to find which friends, friend of friends, and friends of friends of friends live in each city in the world, but we can find out who is tagged in photos with whom, who has been to what location with whom, and what pages our friends are liking. Anything that gets posted can now be scrutinized by those with permissions to access.

Facebook has posited that this is potentially a useful tool for journalists. For the final project of the News and Participatory Media class I am taking at the MIT Media Lab, I decided to investigate this claim. As part of this endeavor, I wrote According to Graph Search: 36 Hours in Portland, Oregon, a travel piece written without much prior knowledge of the destination and researched solely using Facebook Graph Search.

In this post, I describe how Facebook could be useful for writing about lifestyle and recreation. I also discuss why Facebook and Graph Search may need to undergo some changes for it to be useful for topics with more political and policy implications.

What can I do with Facebook Graph Search?
Facebook Graph Search allows users to programmatically access information about data that other users have posted socially. The interface currently allows users to search photos, tagged people and locations, and pages that users have "liked." Example searches include:

• Games that my friend play.
• Restaurants in Cambridge, Massachusetts that people I work with visited.
• Photos of Democrats and Republicans.
• Friends of my friends of friends who live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This search capabilities allows users to search the activities of a specific person or the people associated with specific photos, locations, etc. Graph search allows me to discover that my friend Jane has been at the Grand Canyon either by searching Jane or the Grand Canyon.

Graph search currently only supports search over explicitly labeled data: user tags, location tags, and page tags. Thus it does not support search over status updates and "likes" of status updates. This is not a fundamental limitation of graph search: being able to search the contents of posts would require graph search to work on a much larger scale. Adding hashtags would allow users to be able to search based on dynamically generated labels. Supporting search over the content of posts would require crawling over post data in real time. This is at the cutting edge of search technology and probably more than we can expect from Facebook at this point.

There have been some concerns about Graph Search and privacy. Privacy by obscurity is no longer possible: users can no longer hide behind how difficult it is for other users to access information. Graph Search guarantees that searches will only search over what a user is allowed to see. Users are now allowed to see more information than was previously convenient to browse. For instance, a user can "hide" a photo in which they are tagged from their timeline, but it is possible for Graph Search to make this photo available to those with permissions to see the tags. Previously, a user would have had to go to the profile of the user posting the photo in order to discover it. While these problems are not fundamental privacy issues, we increasingly rely on Facebook to support and correctly enforce palatable policies on what data other users can search.

How useful is Graph Search for journalism right now?
Facebook Graph Search allows people to easily search people who may have useful information about an event or location. For instance, "People who have been to the Boston Marathon Finish Line." These searches can also be narrowed: "People I work with who have been to the Boston Marathon Finish Line." There is also potentially useful timestamp information, as users can see when a photograph or check-in happened. It is also helpful that Facebook users tend to list some basic demographic information publicly, for instance name, gender, and current city. Many users also publicly list educational and/or work information.

Graph Search provides a nice first pass for writing about locations and people. Facebook has "pages" that are essentially profiles for celebrities, businesses, brands, and other non-persons. Pages can be tagged in photographs and check-ins. Pages report the number of users that "like" the page, that have "checked in" to the location corresponding to the page, and that are currently "talking about" the page--either through a check-in, on the page's "timeline," or in a tag. Facebook also supports star rating and reviews for pages corresponding to businesses. These reviews tend to be much shorter than Yelp reviews, making it possible to get a wider range of opinions. The flip side of this democratization is that there is less filtering.

There are some open issues with using Graph Search for journalism. One obstacle is verification: determining the veracity of tags and identities. It also remains unclear what barriers privacy settings might impose on using Graph Search for journalistic purposes. Journalists using Graph Search must be careful to account for the fact that the cross-section of location, photo, and "like" data is skewed based both on who is sharing information: people in their social networks and also people sharing information publicly. It seems, however, that there is always such a bias in journalism.

Facebook and Graph Search are currently not well-suited for reporting on topics outside of lifestyle and recreation. For breaking news, people do not seem to post as much news on Facebook as on Twitter and there is currently no way to search by topic. Ever since Facebook allowed "public" posts, there is more information publicly available, so these seem to be more incidental issues. A major issue that remains, however, is the linking of user identity with posts. It is one thing to associate restaurant reviews with your identity, but for many, especially those in countries with more restrictive governments, it is another thing entirely to associate your identity with political opinions. Because it is more difficult to be anonymous on Facebook, Facebook will need to implement additional mechanisms--and ones that people trust--to feel they can share "serious" opinions with relative impunity. What prevents people from posting more political opinion outside of small trusted circles is a more fundamental issue.

On using Graph Search to write a travel piece.
As Facebook and Graph Search currently seem to be best suited for lifestyle pieces, I wrote According to Graph Search: 36 Hours in Portland, Oregon using primarily Graph Search to evaluate it as a journalistic tool. The only other source of information I used was Google Maps for learning about relative locations. I proceeded as follows.

1. I looked at the results of the query "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon" to see what looked interesting.
2. I looked at the pages associated with the locations tagged in the photos to learn more.
3. I queried for restaurants, bars, night clubs, and coffee shops in Portland, Oregon to fill out the rest of the weekend. In selecting which activities to include, I looked at the average star rating assigned by Facebook users, how many "likes" and check-ins the place had, and the general sense I got from reading the description, wall posts, and reviews.
4. To help order the activities in a sensible manner, I used Google Maps to plot the locations.
5. To flesh out the article, I returned to the pages corresponding to the businesses and look at the wall posts and reviews for quotes. I also looked at the
6. Whenever I used a quote, I looked up the profile of the user associated with it to see what other information I could find. Most users had their current city publicly listed. I did not go further to verify these details, but I suspect that reporters do not go much further in cases like this, where identities do not matter as much. 

I was surprised to produce weekend plan that I would be happy following. I was also surprised that so much information about people's opinions of businesses was available to me essentially publicly: I only came across one post from a Facebook "friend" and I did not end up using this information.While it would have been interesting to see what friends post, for journalistic purposes it seems better to search based on the less social aspects of Facebook data. An additional note is that while people made their opinions public, their profiles remained relatively private: I was not even able to see the current city of some of the users.

In comparing to the New York Times's version of 36 Hours in Portland, Oregon, I learned that I had the right idea with many of the activities (beer; karaoke; antiques; nature) but only overlapped with the Times writer Freda Moon on one activity, the Japanese Gardens. Since the "36 Hours" activities are fairly specific and a weekend is a short period of time, the lack of overlap is not surprising. The activities proposed by Moon are arguably more hip and sophisticated, perhaps reflecting the difference between the intended Times audience and the cross-section of population making public posts on Facebook. The curation of the Times is useful: there is less quality control when crowd-sourcing travel advice to Facebook.

In its current state, Facebook Graph Search is better-suited for writing a travel article than Twitter but not obviously better than Yelp or Google Maps/Places. Facebook has an obvious advantage over Twitter because it contains more information about users and links data from users with data about locations and businesses. At present, Facebook's advantage over Yelp or Google is that it lowers the barriers for Internet users to post opinions, thus decreasing the selection bias. Because of the relative youth of these features in Facebook, however, Yelp and Google currently have more reviews.

In the future, I could see Facebook surpassing Yelp or Google to provide more relevant personalized recommendations. It is incredibly powerful to have a system that associates user identities with demographic information with other activities such as "like" and check-in information. In the future, it will be easy to find people according to what they like and where they have been. It will also be easy to figure out what is popular among whom. If we could look at how star rating change based on different interests, locations, and other likes, we can get a precise idea of who is interested in what. This could make it possible to algorithmically generate travel suggestions tailored to the interests of each individual traveler.

A Future with Graph Search
As Graph Search matures, it is exciting to see how it enables journalists to write about people's preferences and opinions. I am curious to see how adding features like search through posts could make it Facebook more useful for reporting breaking news and public opinion on topics outside of lifestyle and recreation. In order to make people feel comfortable posting "serious" opinions on Facebook, however, Facebook will need to think about how to protect people's identities while allowing them to share information credibly.

Despite my affiliation with Facebook as a Facebook Fellow and former intern, the views I express in this post are 1) my own and 2) based solely on publicly available information.

According to Graph Search: 36 Hours in Portland, Oregon

Photo credits, clockwise from top left: The Portland Japanese Garden Facebook page; Powell's Books Facebook page; Ray's Ragtime Facebook page; LaurelThirst Public House Facebook page; Jesse Cornett via Facebook; Deke Dickerson via Facebook.

I wrote this piece as part of an experiment to see how much I can learn about a city primarily using Facebook Graph Search. I chose Portland because I have never been there, have only a vague idea of what the city is like, and have few Facebook "friends" who post about it.

The goals of this piece are twofold: to produce an act of journalism in the style of the New York Times's 36 Hours series on weekend trips and to evaluate hypotheses about the viability of Facebook Graph Search for journalistic purposes. I wrote this article using leads obtained solely information from using Facebook. I used Google Maps for validating locations and for clustering sighseeing of nearby locations. After each activity, I have a brief note on how I discovered it.

Some questions to think about while reading this piece are as follows. How might my social network be biasing the article? How might the population of active Facebook users be biasing the article? How are these biases different from the usual biases of journalists? What information is missing if we look only on Facebook? For comparison, you may be interested in reading the New York Times's version of 36 Hours in Portland, Oregon.

FRIDAY

4 p.m.
Start your weekend at Powell’s City of Books, a popular book store, coffee shop, and tourist attraction liked by 17,204 Facebook users. Over 66,740 Facebook users checked into this book store and 374 are currently "talking about" this "bibliophile's dream." Portland resident John Stephenson says, “I know some folks that should live here simply for this one store.” According to Nicole Bell of Oregon City, “Everything and Anything to read is right at your Fingertips.” Portland State student and National Guard member Bobby N Marci claims this is her favorite place on earth. Those who "like" Powell's also "like" the author Haruki Murakami and advice columnist Dear Sugar from the online literary magazine The Rumpus.

I discovered this by searching "Shopping & Retail places in Portland, Oregon."

7 p.m.
Grab a burger and a beer at the Deschutes Brewery, a Pearl District destination liked by 2,954 Facebook users and visited by 33, 392 users that combines Northwest culture with a Scottish Pub feel. Deschutes has 18 taps featuring, in addition to the mainstays, seasonal and experimental beers developed and brewed on site by Ben Kehs. Vancouver, Washington resident Steven Venetta says this is his "favorite place to go out to eat/drink in Portland." For food, Venetta recommends the elk burger; for beer, he recommends Abyss, Hop Trip, and Green Lakes. Facebook user Charles Replogle raves about the gluten-free menu and reports that there is a "TASTY" gluten-free microbrew on tap.

I discovered this by searching "Restaurants in Portland, Oregon."

10 p.m.
Go for drinks and karaoke Alibi Tiki lounge, liked by 2,109 Facebook users and visited by 14,402 users. According to Los Angeles musician Deke Dickerson, Alibi is a "national landmark" frequented by "young hipsters" that "retains enough local flavor to be the real deal." Locals and tourists alike seem to be enthusiastic about the karaoake and the tiki aspects of this lounge. Cornelius, Oregon resident Geoffrey Waggoner recommends the "Luau Pork Sammich," calling it “orgasmic.” Regulars like to post on the Facebook page when they plan to go for, in the words of Portland resident Jessica Boyd, "sexy singing times."

I discovered this by searching "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon."

SATURDAY

10 a.m.
Spend a leisurely few hours at the Portland Saturday Market, liked by 68,158 Facebook users and visited by 53,966 users. In operation since 1974, it is our nation's largest continually operating outdoor arts and crafts market. At the artist's booths, you can not only meet the artists but witness the creation of one-of-a-kind pieces. You can pick up breakfast and lunch from the exotic food offerings while enjoying the live music. Facebook fans rave about everything from the food to the live clothing to how the market is a “great place to take pics.” According to several Facebook fans, this is the one destination they do not miss during visits to Portland. But be careful: Matthew Futrell of South Carolina cautions against “beggars and cigarette bums.”

I discovered this by searching "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon."

2 p.m.
Take a relaxing hour or two to enjoy a stroll through the beautiful hills of the Portland Japanese Garden, liked by 14,776 Facebook users and visited by 25,893 users. The garden has been proclaimed the most authentic Japanese garden outside of Japan. Facebook fans like the "peace" and "perspective" that a walk through the garden provides. Those who like the garden are quite enthusiastic about recommending it to others. Federal Way, Washington resident Lance Ferrell says, "I would make a special trip to Portland just to see this."

I discovered this by searching "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon."

4 p.m.
Grab a snack at Voodoo Donut, a vegetarian and vegan restaurant liked by over 107,000 Facebook users and visited by 141,100. According to US News and Travel, Voodoo is among America's best donuts. Alaska resident Lori Campbell high recommends the maple bacon donut, saying she hand carried it all the way back to Anchorage, Alaska. Brandon Krenzler of Pendleton, Oregon says, "You'll not find doughnuts like this anywhere else" and calls Voodoo a "Keep Portland Weird classic."

I discovered this by searching "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon."

5 p.m.
Take a stroll along the Portland Waterfront and surrounding areas. Watch people play with their dogs in the Waterfront Park, walk by the Portland City Hall, and make your way to Pioneer Courthouse Square, liked by 8.248 Facebook users and visited by 50,512. In this city park there are shops, there is food, and there are people. There are public movie showings. This next month, Weezer is coming for a free concert. According to photographer and Independence, Oregon resident Ryan Zeigler, this is the "REAL center" of Portland.

I discovered this by searching "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon."

8 p.m.
 Rest your feet at Portland's historic non-profit Hollywood Theatre, liked by 5,199 Facebook users and visited by 1,348. According to the Facebook page, it was built in 1926 and has "beer, wine, pizza, and the best popcorn in Portland." It has hosted vaudeville shows, silent films with live orchestration, and more. Facebook fans are enthusiastic about the theater's "personality," its popcorn, and its film selection. Vix Standen of Kingston upon Thames writes, "the hollywood is the best cinema in the entire universe. the staff are beautiful, the 'corn is delicious, the seats are super comfy and, most importantly, the film selection is always rad."

I discovered this by searching "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon."

11 p.m.
Check out local live music at the LaurelThirst Public House, liked by 2,241 Facebook users and visited by 4,463. According to Ben Waterhouse in the 2011 WWeek bar guide, "The leaders of the city's bluegrass, folk, old-time, gypsy jazz and Americana scenes, plus various combinations thereof, can be found every night at this entirely kickass bar. I've never seen a bad show here." According to bar's Facebook page, there is live music every day and twice a day Wednesday through Sunday.

I discovered this by searching "Night clubs in Portland, Oregon."

SUNDAY

11 a.m.
Have brunch at Tasty n Sons, liked by 4,236 Facebook users and visited by 20,327. Tasty serves "Toro Bravo style brunch" with a menu that changes based on seasonal variations, local farmers' produce, and the kitchen crew's inspiration. Patrons are excited about, among other things, the bacon-wrapped dates, cauliflower, and lamb sausage. Carl Brochu of Renton, Washington recommends the bloody Mary. Anna Va writes that Tasty served her the "best and most memorable food I've ever had."

I discovered this by searching "Restaurants in Portland, Oregon."

1 p.m.
Relax in Wilamette Park. When you are ready, try stand-up paddle-boarding on the Wilamette River, renting boards at Gorge Performance.

I discovered this by searching "Photos taken in Portland, Oregon" and then trying searches involving "Wilamette."

4 p.m.
Get a cup of coffee at the Coffeehouse Northwest, liked by 567 Facebook users and visited by 1,153. Portland resident Jon Powell admires the “little patterns in the mocha,” saying it is “like a dream.” Portland residents Leah Flores and Michael Jensen say this is their favorite coffee shop in Portland. Nicholas Walton of Corvallis, Oregon comments on the "beautiful space" and "beautiful equipment." Shem Ishler of Minneapolis, Minnesota says the coffee is “the way it was meant to be."

I discovered this by searching "Coffee shops in Portland, Oregon."

5 p.m.
Go vintage shopping at Ray’s Ragtime, a vintage shop featured on LA Frock Star. According to the Facebok page photos, the store features clothing across the decades, jewelry, masks, books, dolls, and other collectible items. Portland resident Victoria Taylor says that this is “one of her favorite all-time stores.”

I discovered this by searching “Photos taken in Portland, Oregon.” 

Have fun! And in case you are curious, I reflect on this experiment using Facebook Graph Search in this post, Facebook Graph Search as a Journalistic Tool.