I'm excited that I have officially finished the reading phase, with the Twidale and Grudine articles, and that I am MOVING ON to the more reflective and creative phase of designing a collaborative interface for DynaCat, a system that dynamically categorizes search results. I have been strongly encouraged to think and reflect upon my own experience with document management and collaboration within the iMed group to gain a better understanding of what type of collaborative interface would be helpful to research groups. Afterall, we are a medical informatics research group, but not the target user, a medical research group.

I'm realizing, yet again, that I love problem solving and that I love making connections between people, places, things, and ideas. It was neat to learn how Google deals with design through another online MURL lecture. However, it was even more interesting to find out that they publish weekly Snippets on their intranet that provides snippets of each employee's current work to the rest of the group. They even have a shaming factor: those that do not submit their Snippets have their name displayed at the top of that week's Snippets. Also I was glad that I was able to understand a lot of the material that a Ph.D student in Computer Graphics/Vision was explaining to me. It was very interesting to learn about the ubiquity of Fourier transforms, and applications of segmentation in 3D medical images. I am learning a lot through other people, and through the articles I have been reading, some of which have general computer science and technology topics.

My goals for the coming week:
~ Do an interface mock up for the collaborative DynaCat.
~ Start studying for the general and computer science subject test GREs.
~ Take out some computer science books.
~ Continue exploring Seattle.
~ Visit the public library near my house.