My work divides roughly into two categories: practices and projects. Practices are ongoing with no particular goal; projects have a goal and end when it is reached, abandoned, or transformed.
I practice vinyasa yoga.
(From July 2011 to January 2012 I also taught. For my teaching philosophy, please see the Heron Yoga site.)
My main mode of transportation is a bicycle. I am slowly learning to maintain and repair it.
I am slowly working my way through the Project Euler problems, with the help of Ruby and Octave.
I prefer to own few items and avoid signing contracts. I don't find it helpful to elaborate an ideology around these preferences or evangelize about them; it is for example convenient for me that other people like to lease apartments, because then I can rent their couches. Satisfying these preferences is however an ongoing practice; Clarice Lispector wrote, "I only achieve simplicity through enormous effort."
My project work is mainly in software and text.
My main ongoing project is the maintenance of Turkopticon, a web application that lets workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform review employers ("requesters"). Lilly Irani and I built it in 2008. It is now slow, on account of (a) having many more users than we expected, (b) being on a shared host, (c) being originally coded to minimize programmer time, not computer time (it is coded in Rails), and (d) cruft. I am in the process of moving it to another server.
I occasionally do small freelance web development projects. The two sites below were built to be simple (and therefore quick and cheap to build) and owner-editable without web development experience. (I taught both owners a little HTML, though.) In building these sites I took the opportunity to move away from Rails and start working with PHP. I found it very nice for simple things (like making an owner-editable image gallery).
Nomura Research Group, December 2011.
PohmYoga, November 2011.
From January to July 2011, I worked for Assetmap, building standalone web apps and Facebook apps with Rails.
In January 2009, I built an application system for Humanity In Action. The current application system looks like a re-skin of the existing codebase, but I'm not sure.
In fall 2007, I built a custom CMS (in Rails) for the New University, UC Irvine's student-run newspaper. I maintained it until March 2009. It was eventually replaced; I don't think they could find anyone to maintain a Rails app.
From July 2007 to March 2009, I was the "technology person" for StartingBloc. I built several iterations of their public-facing web site (a custom CMS) and application system, and my first two (now defunct) Facebook apps.
In summer 2007 I built a public-facing web site and document management system for the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University (in the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies). I had assurances from Columbia's IT department that they would be able to host a Rails app by the end of the summer. This proved optimistic; the codebase was scrapped.
In June 2007, shortly after I graduated college, a friend called me one Thursday morning around 10 o'clock. She was interning at JP Morgan for the summer, and needed a web app built. She needed to auction some donated items within the company to raise money for the Fresh Air Fund. (This was part of the bank's "Good Venture" scheme, which involved, as far as I remember, giving relatively small amounts of money to nonprofits and talking about it a lot.) I had no idea how to build an auction site, but imagined I could figure it out. I told her so, and asked when she needed it done by (noon Monday), and how much she could pay me if I figured it out (none at all). These answers being somewhat unsatisfactory, I asked if she had a backup plan (no).
I wasn't doing anything else, and had wanted to learn Rails for a while. I hassled her into agreeing to pay me one or two hundred bucks (this later became "dinner", when the rest of her team apparently decided — well, I don't know what they decided, but there was no check — but I don't think dinner ever materialized either), and bought the then-current edition of Agile Web Development With Rails. I spent the first 48 hours reading and coding their example app (you may remember it; "the depot app"), and the next 48 rebuilding it so that it worked like an auction site. I sent her the URL early Monday morning, her team added all the items before lunch, the auction started at noon, by week's end we'd raised a few thousand dollars for the nonprofit, and I was feeling a little exploited but pretty good. In all fairness, I do think I eventually got some hot chocolate out of it.
caniborrowyourgoat.com. Launched April 2010, active. A web database application to help residents of university housing share things. With B. Tomlinson, UC Irvine Department of Informatics.
Augh. Launched March 2012, defunct. Firefox add-on and web database application to avoid unnecessary recall of checked-out library books.
Software package for modelling transportation networks in Octave [documentation and code]. May 2008.
klhx. May 2007. Generalized, extensible, discrete-time water balance model in MATLAB. With G. D. Kelly, Columbia University Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.
Discrete-time extensible integrated simulation of global water demand and food trade in MATLAB. May 2007. With D. Pontoriero, Columbia University Department of Applied Mathematics, and T. Siegfried, Columbia University Earth Institute.
Software (in MATLAB) for analyzing effects of windspeed parametrization on gas exchange at the sea-air interface in general circulation models. With C. Zappa and S. Khatiwala, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University.
In summer 2009, after experimenting with GTD and other task management schemes, I designed my own task management scheme and built a Rails app to support it. I called it the "V Task Manager". Documentation and source code are here. I do not necessarily suggest you use this model, or even that if you find this model compelling you should use this application. (In fact, I no longer keep a to-do list.) I wrote a short piece (an abstract for a longer piece that I never ended up writing) about V here.
Tomlinson, B., M. S. Silberman, E. Blevis, D. J. Patterson, and Y. Pan. Collapse informatics: augmenting the sustainability & ICT4D discourse in HCI. To be presented at CHI 2012.
B. Tomlinson, J. Ross, P. André, E. P. S. Baumer, D. J. Patterson, J. Corneli, M. Mahaux, S. Nobarany, M. Lazzari, B. Penzenstadler, A. W. Torrance, D. J. Callele, G. M. Olson, [M.] S. Silberman, M. Ständer, F. R. Palamedi, A. A. Salah, E. Morrill, X. Franch, F. Mueller, J. Kaye, R. W. Black, M. L. Cohn, P. C. Shih, J. Brewer, N. Goyal, P. Näkki, J. Huang, N. Baghaei, and C. Saper. Massively distributed authorship of academic papers. To be presented at alt.chi 2012.
Kaufman, S. J. and M. S. Silberman. Rebound effects in sustainable HCI. Presented at Everyday Practice and Sustainable HCI, workshop at CHI 2011.
Baumer, E. P. S. and M. S. Silberman. When the implication is not to design (technology). Proc. CHI 2011: 2271-2274. Awarded "Honorable Mention" (best 5% of accepted papers). Included in Patterson's Winter 2011 User Interaction Software syllabus at UC Irvine.
Silberman, M. S., J. Ross, L. Irani, and B. Tomlinson. Sellers' problems in human computation markets. Proc. HCOMP 2010: 18-12. Talk text. Responses: [1, 2]. Included in Hartmann, Franklin, and Parikh's Spring 2011 Crowdsourcing Seminar syllabus at UC Berkeley.
Silberman, M. S. and B. Tomlinson. Toward an ecological sensibility: tools for evaluating sustainable HCI. Proc. CHI 2010: 3469-3474 (works-in-progress).
Ross, J., L. Irani, M. S. Silberman, A. Zaldivar, and B. Tomlinson. Who are the crowdworkers? Shifting demographics in Mechanical Turk. Proc. CHI 2010: 2863-2872 (alt.chi). Included in Hartmann, Franklin, and Parikh's Spring 2011 Crowdsourcing Seminar syllabus at UC Berkeley.
J. Huh, L. P. Nathan, [M.] S. Silberman, E. Blevis, B. Tomlinson, P. Sengers, and D. Busse. Examining appropriation, re-use, and maintenance for sustainability. Proc. CHI 2010: 4457-4460 (workshop).
Silberman, M. S. and B. Tomlinson. Precarious infrastructure and post-apocalyptic computing. Presented at Examining appropriation, re-use, and maintenance for sustainability, workshop at CHI 2010.
Silberman, M. S. Designing economic interactions. Presented at Defining the role of HCI in the challenges of sustainability, workshop at CHI 2009.
Silberman, M. S. Experiments in critical mathematical modelling. UC Irvine M.S. Thesis, 2009.
Raha, S. A critique of statistical hypothesis testing in clinical research. Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine 2(3): 105-114, 2011.
Tomlinson, B. Greening Through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability. MIT Press, 2010.
Tomlinson, B., M. S. Silberman, and J. White. Can more efficient IT be worse for the environment? [preprint] IEEE Computer 44(1): 87-89, 2011.
Silberman, M. S., L. Irani, and J. Ross. Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork. XRDS 17(2): 39-43.
Silberman, [M.] S. Don't text message breakup, betch. New University 43(13), 11 Feb 2008. Partial text.
Silberman, M. S. Un/sustainable futures. Column, Columbia Daily Spectator.
Future-forward, 23 Jan 2007.
Infra-everything, 6 Feb 2007.
Infrastructural adjustments, 20 Feb 2007.
Externalize this, 27 Mar 2007.
Transparen[tization] and its discontents, 10 Apr 2007.
The end of the beginning, 24 Apr 2007.
Morgante, N. and M. S. Silberman. Ruckus tries hard, but misses its aim. Columbia Daily Spectator, 19 Mar 2007.
Silberman, M. S. Efficiency and sustainability [version without equations]. In conversation with James White, Bill Tomlinson, and Nadine Amsel, 2010.
Choontanom, T. and M. S. Silberman. Edge effects: complex practices between open source and proprietary software development. UC Irvine Lab. for Ubiq. Comp. and Interaction Technical Report LUCI-2010-001.
Silberman, M. S. and [B.] Tomlinson. Practical cartographies in material-semiotic assemblages. Unpublished manuscript, 2009.
Silberman, M. S., S. Kaufman, and [B.] Tomlinson. Notes toward an experimental political ecology/nomy. Unpublished manuscript, 2009.
Silberman, M. S. and B. Tomlinson. Design as reconfiguration [extended abstract accepted to DRS 2010: Design as situated reconfiguration: toward a transdisciplinary framework between ecology and design].
Silberman, M. S. Protocological experiments toward a critical gaming: further notes on distributed communications and weaponized theory. Unpublished manuscript, 2009.
Silberman, M. S. We, in some strange power's employ, move on a rigorous line (with all apologies to Samuel R. Delany). Extended abstract accepted to DAC 2009.
Silberman, M. S. Modelling transportation networks with Octave (and MATLAB). Unpublished manuscript, 2008.
Silberman, M. S. Relating to theory in the social sector. Listserv post, 2010.
Silberman, M. S. DINOCONOMICS. Theory by webcomic, 2009.
Silberman, M. S. A glossary for random processes in electrical engineering. Class notes, 2009.
Silberman, M. [S.] and T. Heikkila. Information architecture and sustainable development. Incomplete working paper, 2007.
In February 2007, I designed the print layout for Issue 2 of Outlet, Columbia's student-run sex magazine. This was eventually — well, "featured" is a strong word; let's say "mentioned" — in a New York Times Magazine article.