November 2007
AAAI 2008 (January 25, 2007 / July 13-17, 2008) →
AAAI-08 will be held in Chicago. It is one of the largest annual conference in AI. They also have a special AI and the Web track.
Updating Bill Keller →
In a speech in London for the Guardian, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller says this about bloggers and this blogger in particular:
My friend Jeff Jarvis, a blogger of long-standing and professor of journalism at the City University of New York, refers to news bloggers as “citizen journalists”, which has a sweet, idealistic ring to it. Jeff, like many of the most ardent true believers in...
APML for Del.icio.us →
Last week, I created a web service that will generate an APML profile based upon your last.fm listening habits (see the post here). This week, I’ve added support for del.icio.us. With this web service, you can get an APML profile based upon your tagging behavior. For instance, I can retrieve my Del.icio.us APML profile with:
...
Research productivity: what matters? →
I stumbled upon this nice paper Social-Organizational Characteristics of Work and Publication Productivity among Academic Scientists in Doctoral-Granting Departments (Journal of Higher Education, 2007). I skimmed it and here are some sketchy conclusions:
Being a man and having lots of male graduate students is highly correlated with productivity.
Collaboration is strongly correlated with...
Storytelling and research papers →
I often read that good research papers should tell a story. There should be a continuous flow. We should care about the story, we should be eager to learn about what will happen in the next section.
I do not know about you, but I do not come across many such research papers. Mathemagenic points us to some references, going back to Plato, as to why storytelling is not taken seriously. It seems to...
Lawsuit against Creative Commons →
Creative Commons was dropped from the lawsuit filed against them (and Virgin Mobile) in September. Apparently the problem was that a photographer posted a picture of a minor on Flickr with a CC-Attribution license license, and Virgin picked the photo up for an ad campaign. (Amusingly, Virgin apparently failed the Attribution requirement as well! But: that’s not the topic of the lawsuit.)
...
The YouTube debate →
So the sissy Republicans who tried to avoid their YouTube debate are finally facing The People.
Anderson Cooper acknowledges the concerns about the kinds of questions asked last time but only manages to insult the entire field of questioners by featuring the stupid moments. Thanks, Andy. Next we have a song about the candidates that is an utter waste of time. We have more than 10 minutes of...
Automatically generate APML from your WordPress... →
Matthias Pfefferle has developed a Wordpress plugin to generate APML from your WordPress categories. Very cool. Check it out here.
Is PageRank just good marketing? →
Web search engines such as Google look at which page links to which page to determine what are the authoritative Web pages. A good algorithm in this context is one that is hard to fool: if you and your friends decide to mutually add link to each others, it should be hard to make much of a difference. Sérgio commented earlier on this blog that PageRank is known to be just a marketing. (I sure would...
Sad newspapers →
I was in Detroit on business Monday and thanks to many too many hours in the airport, I picked up the Free Press (where I once interned) and the Detroit News. I was shocked at how thin they were in every sense of the word: few pages and not much in them. We in New York don’t see just how desperate the situation is becoming for metro papers in much of the rest of the country because we have more...
Friends forever: The advantages of publicness →
I say it’s a good thing that our lives are becoming more public and permanent on the internet. It will keep us closer as people. It might make us more civil and more forgiving as a result.
While we tend to focus on the dangers of losing privacy, for a Guardian column I’m working on, I’d like to examine the benefits of living in public, of publicness.
* * *
Start with the idea that young...
Contribute a logo/badge design to... →
Are you a creative person? Want your logo/image used on thousands of sites? Help create the badge that will represent the data portability movement over on DataPortability.org. Upload your ideas to flickr and join in the fun. First prize is the love and admiration of the entire world.
Why bother with Google? Go straight to wikipedia! →
Véronis discovered something very interesting. About a third of the time, Google’s results include the Wikipedia link as the first link. His explanation is insightful:
How can this sudden interest in Wikipedia by both engines be explained? It is undoubtedly connected with the increasing difficultly engines have in calculating satisfactory ranking. The good old days of PageRank algorithms are...
Fun with Sky →
I’m in my CUNY office visiting with friends from Sky and showing them the Flip Video. The fruits thereof:
When has a problem been solved? →
I have stated before that researchers should focus on new problems or on providing solutions that are at least an order of magnitude better than previous solutions. There is a catch to this statement: it says that if you are within an order of magnitude of the ultimate answer, then you should stop, unless, maybe, you can prove that you have achieved the ultimate solution. Proving you have the best...
The Battle Mix →
You know that music discovery is mainstream when it is the subject of a Doonesbury strip:
Congrats to Pandora!
How Many People Listen To Podcasts →
Just over a month ago I ran a quick analysis over Scouta’s data, and found that a small sample showed that possibly only 10% of downloaded podcasts are consumed to any degree, and only 50% of those are consumed over 50%: Are Only 10% of Podcast Downloads Consumed?
We mentioned then that we’d do another analysis after a few more weeks with some more data. Today was that day, and we did another...
The Ghost Map →
Over the Thanksgiving break, I read the Ghost Map The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Stephen Johnson. This is the story how John Snow convinced the London health authorities that the Cholera epidemic was not caused by bad air (miasma), but was caused by contaminated drinking water. Johnson does an excellent job...
On the Media: Open up →
I’m a fan and loyal listener of On the Media. They devoted their entire show this week to the fate and future of the book and though it had plenty of good segments, I was frustrated listening to it because I knew of other interviews I wish they’d done that I could have suggested — if only they’d asked.
And so it struck me that On the Media should open up the process of making its show. When they...
Physical factors making your smarter: white noise,... →
It does seem like coffee makes you smarter, even in small doses. There are several methodological issues however. The main problem is that if you are a coffee user, your brain without caffeine might be negatively impacted due to a withdrawal effect, hence giving you the illusion that caffeine helps. However, it seems that heavy coffee users still outperform before they drink coffee!
A...
The fight for world domination →
Editors Weblog at the World Association of Newspapers notes that the Guardian now has a bigger audience online than the vaunted New York Times:
With 18.4 million users in October, the Guardian was ahead of nytimes.com, which registered 17.5 million users in the same period, according to Nielsen / NetRatings. This was a record for both sites, as The New York Times’ user pool grew due to the...
How Good do Spam Filters Have to be? →
Interesting article on Read/WriteWeb about Spam emails outnumbering legit emails this year. They also point out that the user experience continues to get better all the time, even as the raw amount of spam keeps increasing, because spam filters keep getting better. One interesting open question is how good spam filters have to be before they make spam uneconomical. After all, even though spam...
On why we accept worthless pieces of paper and... →
Exercise for the reader: Let suppose you are the chief of Saudi Arabia, you sell most of the oil in the world. Why would you ask to be paid in a currency that is not your currency? Think why Saudi Arabia asks to be paid in dollars and not directly in its own currency (Riyal).
Did it?
Ok, so now the news from Reuters: some OPEC countries are considering/threatening stopping asking dollars in...
DNA2.0 or how to google your genome (and put it in... →
If you haven’t watched Gattaga, this might be a good time for doing it.
23andme is a society funded with 10.000.000 dollars by Google. 23andme was co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, which is the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
23andme sells the following service: for 1000 dollars, you send us your saliva and we send you a complete analysis of your DNA.
This is already enough scary, as...
DNA2.0 or how to google your genome (and put it in... →
If you haven’t watched Gattaga, this might be a good time for doing it.
23andme is a society funded with 10.000.000 dollars by Google. 23andme was co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, which is the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
23andme sells the following service: for 1000 dollars, you send us your saliva and we send you a complete analysis of your DNA.
This is already enough scary, as...
Do not write like we taught you to! →
It is easy to think that the big deal these days has to do with multimedia (YouTube) or social networks (Facebook), but the written word is changing too! As someone who writes for a living, I am fascinated by how writing has changed drastically in recent years. Of course, the Web has changed the way we write in an obvious way: writing is less of a formal activity and more of a social one....
On why we accept worthless pieces of paper and... →
Exercise for the reader: Let suppose you are the chief of Saudi Arabia, you sell most of the oil in the world. Why would you ask to be paid in a currency that is not your currency? Think why Saudi Arabia asks to be paid in dollars and not directly in its own currency (Riyal).
Did it?
Ok, so now the news from Reuters: some OPEC countries are considering/threatening stopping asking dollars in...
Do not write like we taught you to! →
It is easy to think that the big deal these days has to do with multimedia (YouTube) or social networks (Facebook), but the written word is changing too! As someone who writes for a living, I am fascinated by how writing has changed drastically in recent years. Of course, the Web has changed the way we write in an obvious way: it has become less of a formal activity and more of a social one....
How to become smarter →
Work on projects you love doing, even if only part of the time. You can only be as smart as you are motivated. I will never be a smart electrician.
Reading and learning are important, but people learn by doing, by tinkering.
Carry a notebook or a PDA, and use it to record ideas. Periodically discard most of your ideas.
Having a blog can’t hurt.
This is probably the most important point:...
How to become smarter →
Work on projects you love doing, even if only part of the time. You can only be as smart as you are motivated. I will never be a smart electrician.
Reading and learning are important, but people learn by doing, by tinkering.
Carry a notebook or a PDA, and use it to record ideas. Periodically discard most of your ideas.
Having a blog can’t hurt.
This is probably the most important point:...
Happy Thanksgiving!!! →
Nice job Jane!
ThanksgivingThanksgiving
Having scientific meetings with brilliant people…... →
I had two important meetings today. One of them was with my good friend Harold Boley (of RuleML fame) and another well know professor. The other meeting was with an infamous professor who shall remain nameless.
What is most amazing about these meetings is that they happened in my kitchen, using Skype and the builtin webcam of my MacBook. And these meetings were efficient, to the point,...
Having scientific meetings with brilliant people…... →
I had two important meetings today. One of them was with my good friend Harold Boley (of RuleML fame) and another well know professor. The other meeting was with an infamous professor who shall remain nameless.
What is most amazing about these meetings is that they happened in my kitchen, using Skype and the builtin webcam of my MacBook. And these meetings were efficient, to the point,...
An APML Experiment →
Lately there’s been quite a bit of attention being paid to making sure that the data that describes the things that we like, our attention data, is portable. With portable attention data, we could go to any music store and be directed to the music that we are most likely to want to listen to. We won’t have to spend any time rating tracks or artists, we’ll just show the music...
I’m not dating your cookie →
The click-through will soon be dead or at least seriously wounded. Here’s a case in point:
In this morning’s NY Times, Stuart Elliott writes with unquestioning, even breathless acceptance (yet again) about another advertiser’s idiotic idea: a social site based around a cookie.
Now why the hell would anyone with half a life go to a site from a cookie company telling her how to make friends? Why,...
The Global Gender Gap Report 2007. Italy? 84th out... →
The Global Gender Gap Report 2007 is out.
Sweden (1), Norway (2), Finland (3) and Iceland (4) once again top the rankings in the latest Global Gender Gap Report. The Report covers a total of 128 countries.
Ah yes, you are wondering about Italy? Why really wondering? Anything else to do? Uhm, ok here is the raw reality: Italy is 84th out of 128.
Our cousins of Spain are 10th (!), Latvia is in...
The Global Gender Gap Report 2007. Italy? 84th out... →
The Global Gender Gap Report 2007 is out.
Sweden (1), Norway (2), Finland (3) and Iceland (4) once again top the rankings in the latest Global Gender Gap Report. The Report covers a total of 128 countries.
Ah yes, you are wondering about Italy? Why really wondering? Anything else to do? Uhm, ok here is the raw reality: Italy is 84th out of 128.
Our cousins of Spain are 10th (!), Latvia is in...
Kindle? →
I’m not getting Kindle in both senses of the verb — not buying and not understanding, both as a device and as a model.
I was approached to add BuzzMachine to the blog available for sale on the device but didn’t pursue it because I don’t see the sense in selling this blog when it’s available on the web for free. Oh, I’d love to think that I could sell it — nothing against money; though I’m often...
Directed research is useless →
There is a nice article in Forbes which basically says that directed research is pretty much useless. Directed research is what happens when you tell researchers what they must work on, because you predict that it is what is important. The article is based on a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Here are two great quotes from the article:
...
Acer refunds Windows in Italy so I asked for the... →
Acer announced they refund Windows if you don’t want it (link to a news in Italian)! This is great news! I was waiting for this moments since years! Also it is a very lucky coincidence since an association which I already helped making their website, Gruppo Trentino di Volontariato, bought an Acer laptop this very last Saturday and luckly enough we didn’t yet push the dooming button “accept the...
Report from the Information Architecture summit... →
After the first day, there was the second day. Yes, yes, I was surprised as well.
I overslept a bit and I miss the first talk, sorry.
The second one was titled “The Web2Architect” and given by Chris Addison, Antonella Pastore, Pier Andrea Pirani. They work for Euforic which is an organization that is actively trying to push adoption of web2.0 tools in international cooperation organizations and...
Report from the Information Architecture summit... →
During the past weekend near Trento there were many interesting events: a conference about new media and communication “Creativita’ in video” in Rovereto, the South Tyrol Free Software conference 2007 with speakers from Google, Gnome, Samba, MIT, OpenOffice, in Merano and the second Italian summit on Information Architecture in Trento.
I decided to attend the latest and I was satisfied with the...
Matlab code and efficient algorithms for BIG... →
Peter released a technical report (available from arxiv) on the computation of the Tucker decomposition on large tensors: the Tucker decomposition is just a multidimensional generalization of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The report includes a new algorithm designed by Peter which is more accurate than competing Matlab implementations, in the case where you have very large tensors (3 or...
Report from the Information Architecture summit... →
After the first day, there was the second day. Yes, yes, I was surprised as well.
I overslept a bit and I miss the first talk, sorry.
The second one was titled “The Web2Architect” and given by Chris Addison, Antonella Pastore, Pier Andrea Pirani. They work for Euforic which is an organization that is actively trying to push adoption of web2.0 tools in international cooperation organizations and...
Report from the Information Architecture summit... →
During the past weekend near Trento there were many interesting events: a conference about new media and communication “Creativita’ in video” in Rovereto, the South Tyrol Free Software conference 2007 with speakers from Google, Gnome, Samba, MIT, OpenOffice, in Merano and the second Italian summit on Information Architecture in Trento.
I decided to attend the latest and I was satisfied with the...
Acer refunds Windows in Italy so I asked for the... →
Acer announced they refund Windows if you don’t want it (link to a news in Italian)! This is great news! I was waiting for this moments since years! Also it is a very lucky coincidence since an association which I already helped making their website, Gruppo Trentino di Volontariato, bought an Acer laptop this very last Saturday and luckly enough we didn’t yet push the dooming button “accept the...
My research process →
One thing you never read about is how people do research in their mind. People do describe how to write papers, how to get an academic job, but somehow, I cannot recall anyone describing their thought process.
Mine is simple enough. It includes both theoretical and experimental work. So here it is…
I usually start with a specific problem. This problem must be about something significant: a few...
Today →
I’m gone today saying goodbye to my brother-in-law. There are a few posts from the weekend below and here is my Guardian column: Glam redux.
Pandora opens the classical box →
This week, Pandora opened access to their classical collection, and this morning I’m giving it a try. What better way to spend a Sunday morning than reading the paper and listening to some Vivaldi radio? Pandora currently has about 20,000 classical recordings - more than I am likely to listen to even with a month of Sunday mornings. Thanks Pandora!
Beatblogging →
For reasons below and with apologies, I’m late linking to Jay Rosen’s next project, BeatBlogging.
As Jay said, this may not look new because reporters have always been surrounded by networks of experts, people who — pace Dan Gillmor — know more than they do.
But those experts have not been linked and their expertise has not been open. The reporter was a gatekeeper before — only the expertise...