Prelude Interactive

Starting in September of 2009, we’ve been involved in development of tools for research related to the JSTEPS project at George Mason University. The tools will be deployed at correctional institutions and courthouses around the country.  The program aims to identify better ways to guide individuals with a history of drug or alcohol abuse, or other criminal behavior, through their probationary period into full recovery.

Dr. Faye Taxman at the GMU Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence is the primary investigator, and we have been working with her team to develop data entry and analysis tools that parole officers and other officials can use with their clients.

Due to the highly specialized nature of the application, we decided to build the database and “backend” system using the Symfony PHP framework.    Symfony allows for rapid database development and application scaffolding, and also includes many of the features needed by new, custom applications such as a permissions model, strong MVC (model-view-controller) separation, and support for AJAX requests.  With Symfony, we were able to devote most of our time to developing the custom logic and data model rather than re-inventing the wheel.

The data entry screens, using Symfony’s AJAX hooks, are built with jQuery and other Javascript libraries to give the users a large amount of information and many features all on the same screen, minimizing clicking, waiting, and navigating through different parts of the application.  Prelude is supplying the database and backend infrastructure with Symfony, but members of Faye’s team are contributing significantly to the user interfaces.  So, JSTEPS has also been a productive exercise in collaborative software development.

The JSTEPS application is now in final stages of testing, and we are hopeful that it helps decrease the often negative interaction of probation and preexisting drug, alcohol, and criminal behaviors.

The Science of Social Media – PowerPoint Deck

The Science of Social Media – SlideShare

Search Terms (General – to learn more)

• Network analysis
• Social network analysis
• Network visualization
• Community detection

Links

• Danah Boyd – Youth & Social Networks – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_Boyd
• Mark A. Smith – Node XL – http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2009-connected-action-marc-smith-social-media-network-analysis
• Starting point for YouTube social networks presentations: – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEp0nVf26F0
• Example of Possible Mixup of Causation vs. Correllation – http://danzarrella.com/data-shows-that-negative-remarks-lead-to-fewer-followers.html

• Watts & Strogatz Small World Paper – http://tam.cornell.edu/tam/cms/manage/upload/SS_nature_smallworld.pdf
• Barabasi & Albert Scale Free Paper – http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0107/0107419v3.pdf
• Girvan & Newman “Community Detection” algorithm – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girvan%E2%80%93Newman_algorithm
• LIWC – http://www.liwc.net
• Analyze Words (LIWC for Twitter) – http://analyzewords.com
• Tweet Psych – http://tweetpsych.com
• MIT class discovers “Facebook Gaydar” – http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?page=full
• Regressive Imagery Dictionary – http://www.kovcomp.co.uk/wordstat/RID.html
• GreaseMonkey script for political bias in links:  http://waxy.org/2008/10/memeorandum_colors/
• Wikipedia list of social network analysis software:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis_software
• Quick n’ Easy Twitter Graph – http://twitnest.appspot.com/nest/index.html
• Wikipedia Article Network resesarch – http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki/
• Friendship Prediction on Facebook: http://www.scribd.com/doc/747/Friendship-Prediction-on-Facebook
• Social Network Analysis Toolkit – SocialAction:  http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction/
• Jake Hofman’s del.icio.us – http://delicious.com/jhofman/networks
• Pete Skomoroch’s del.icio.us – http://delicious.com/pskomoroch
• Jure Leskovec http://snap.stanford.edu/na09/schedule.htmlhttp://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/talks/
• Jon Kleinberg & David Easley’s book http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

Browser_Automation_FTW – Slides

http://www.slideshare.net/ehrenfoss/browser-automation

Keyboard Vs. Mouse

• http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001088.html- Keyboard Vs. Mouse Debate Jeff Atwood
  
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000825.html – Keyboard Vs. Mouse Debate Jeff Atwood
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MPJZ6M52dI – The first mouse
  
• http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html – Wearable, Gestural Interface
  

FireFox Shortcuts

• http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts

Gmail Shortcuts

• http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594

Ubiquity

• https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/

Self Control

• Rescue Time – http://www.rescuetime.com/
• Hosts File – http://practice.chatserve.com/hosts.html
• LeechBlock - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

Macros

• iMacros – http://www.iopus.com/imacros
• Selenium – http://seleniumhq.org/

This graph is a chart of how much revenue Prelude Interactive brought in last year, by month, and color coded by client.  Just like the contractors chart, there’s not a huge amount that we can learn, but it does tell a semi-accurate picture of the year.    Light Blue is my biggest nonprofit client, and their three spikes represent the start or completion of major phases of development of their SalesForce applications.

Also critical to our continuing to live indoors is Orange, another development firm who feeds us a consistent, fresh pile of PHP web application work every month.  Being a sub-contractor for Orange, Gray, and Taupe really drove the business last year.  Green is actually a small asteroid that broke off Orange in July.

As for how we got these clients, in all cases except Light Blue, we either stumbled into the work through a referral or just plain dumb luck.  Maybe someday we’ll need to do more sales and marketing, but until then, the fantastic network we love so much does the job quite well.

Amounts paid to Contractors - 2009

It’s one of our core beliefs that all the effort which goes into building data systems is wasted unless you are prepared to study and learn from what you collect.  Thus, it was well past time we started drinking our own Kool-aid ® in this regard.

The above graph charts the dollar amounts paid to Prelude Interactive contractors throughout the year.  Color and X-axis labels are absent, of course, but I will share that contractors were about 21% of the revenue we brought in, and full time staff (moi!) were around 54%. Actually, I think Prelude became Dark Green’s primary source of income starting in October, which is interesting.

SamaSource is dark pink.  oDesk is the avacado green/yellow at the top of October’s peak.  Together they comprise 10 distinct contractors, so all told we worked with at least 20 other people this year.

Why do we refer to ourselves as we?  It’s a good habit to be in when, as you see starting in July, contractors started having a huge role in Prelude’s output.  It’s safe to say that at this point the business would not be possible without them.

Can we learn anything from this graph?  It tells an accurate picture of the year, I think.  May and the start of June were a long vacation, and to achieve that I really had to ramp down and get back going again through the summer.  In September I wrote “Say No To New Projects!” on my whiteboard.  In early December I wrote it again, bigger, and more in my line of sight.

It took a long time to learn how to use contractors effectively.  Giving up control is hard.  Not doing everything yourself is hard.  Spending 30 minutes documenting something that would take you 30 minutes to do doesn’t make sense at first, but if you’re handing it off to someone who can do it better, now and down the road, it starts to.

I would not have been able to handle any of the major projects this year solo.  My role is no longer that of a PHP/SalesForce/MySQL programmer, but an assembler and planner of resources, a project manager.   I am deeply indebted to (not literally), and highly appreciative of each of the individual colors of the mismatched rainbow above.