18th
November 2007 -
IT
that knows where you are. "A new type of internet application
called geo-location software is satisfying an increasingly
vital need of banks, retailers and content providers to
authenticate – or target – a customer, shopper, or site
visitor even before the web page loads. "
18th
November 2007 -
Computer
says: ‘You’re hired’... and computer
says: ‘You’re fired’. "While many companies have adopted
e-recruitment techniques, posting jobs on the web, the benefits
of e-firing are known to fewer businesses. .... E-firing
software is particularly helpful to managements in the event
of a merger or acquisition, where part of the logic of the
deal is that the combined businesses will need fewer staff.
By using software, the process can be speeded up so that
the best staff do not leave while uncertainty hangs over
the business." (FT)
18th
November 2007 -
The death of mass
advertising?
Facebook Tries 'Social Advertising'. ..."a Facebook
user who rents a movie on Blockbuster.com will be asked
if he would like to have his movie choice broadcast out
to all his friends on Facebook. And those friends would
have no choice but to receive that movie message, along
with an ad from Blockbuster." (from Herald Tribune)
MySpace
reveals 'targeted' ads - "a pilot
scheme that allows it to sell advertisements targeted to
the individual tastes and interests of its millions of users...
[It] will give advertisers the ability to drill down into
100 different user segments. This will allow them to differentiate
between fans of romantic comedy films and action films,
for example."
16th
November 2007 -
"The affair centres on an investigation in the southern
city of Catanzaro into alleged embezzlement of EU funds.
It
has since reportedly spread to take in claims that the centre-left
used public cash to "buy" support in the surrounding region
of Calabria, where Mr Mastella was elected. The fact that
Mr Prodi was being investigated was reported in July but
not officially confirmed until Sunday, when Mr Mastella
said: "The prime minister is, like me, under investigation."
Soon
after it was reported that Mr Prodi was formally under investigation,
justice ministry officials arrived in Catanzaro to start
an inquiry into the conduct of the case. In September,
Mr Mastella asked that the prosecutor in charge, Luigi De
Magistris, and his superior both be transferred to new posts".
(guardian)
15th
November 2007 -
I've used data from the Advogato community in the latest
paper I co-authored. Now I came across this talk: Lessons
From Advogato . Abstract.
TechTalk.
11th
November 2007 -
"Although some theories claim that people connect
in social networks directly to each other, a more flexible
theory is that of social networks as described by Engestrom.
The social object theory can even be extended to
people connecting directly to each other, as people might
connect because one of the participants is the actual social
object. Social objects can range from physical objects,
to semi-physical, to even actual virtual objects. Analysis
of a wide range of offline and online social networks proved
that at least all of the successful ones we analyzed seem
to have some kind of social object present. In some cases
it was even possible to semi-prove that the lack of any
tangible and active social object could be disastrous for
the social network coherency. "
9th
November 2007 -
James Suroweicki's
analysis of four conditions that can lead to “wisdom
of crowds” seems relevant for tagging systems.
The four principles are
(1)
diversity of opinion - each individual brings their idiosyncratic
perspective to bear on the issue. (this is definitely true
for tagging. There is a long tail of tags).
(2)
independence of members from one another (that people make
independent decisions. This is why mass copying of others’
tags is not a good idea.)
(3)
decentralization (with tagging power does not reside in
a central location, but it does seem to very influenced
by the first few taggers..)
(4)
a good method for aggregating opinions (Tag clouds and simple
lists seem to work well for this, though better methods
are needed.
9th
November 2007 -
Someone is said to be suffering from tall
poppy syndrome when his or her assumption of a higher
economic, social or political position attracts criticism,
being perceived as presumptuous, attention seeking or without
merit.
The
tall-poppy
syndrome refers to the behavioural trait of Australians
to cut down those who are 'superior' to them. It is used
to explain why most politicians, some academics, and the
occasional millionaire, command a level of community admiration
inferior to that of a toilet cleaner.
19th
October 2007 -
The Passion
of Pasolini by Nathaniel Rich. "Ragazzi di vita
made Pasolini one of the nation's most visible writers,
but its gritty portrayal of the working classes infuriated
both the left and the right. ... Italy's prime minister...
Antonio Segni ... had the novel confiscated from bookstores
and tried to prosecute Pasolini and his publisher for "publishing
obscene material." (The case was thrown out of court.)
...
Pasolini's reaction to these attacks reveals much about
his motivations: once he had found his line of provocation,
he took it further, making his social criticisms more explicit.
His short 1962 film La ricotta starred Orson Welles as a
director making a movie about Jesus Christ. Although Pasolini
included a disclaimer at the beginning of the film declaring
that "the story of the Passion is for me the greatest story
ever told," audiences were not convinced. At one point in
the film, Welles declares, "Italy has the most illiterate
masses and the most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe.... The
average man is a dangerous criminal, a monster. He is a
racist, a colonialist, a defender of slavery, a mediocrity."
In a single speech, Pasolini had managed to offend not only
Italians on the right and the left, but everyone else in
between. Upon the film's release in March 1963, Pasolini
was prosecuted again, for "insulting the religion of the
state." This time he was convicted, but the conviction was
overturned on appeal."
18th
October 2007 -
Power Of Altruism
Confirmed In Wikipedia Contributions. The beauty of
open-source applications is that they are continually improved
and updated by those who use them and care about them. Dartmouth
researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia
to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors,
the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update
constantly and have a reputation to maintain. The answer
is, surprisingly, yes. (pdf
of research article). A MS thesis on the subject: Wikipedia
as Collective Action.
10th
October 2007 -
That's so cool - my name in Japanese :-) Thanks, Den.
10th
October 2007 -
How causation vs. correlation might be solved in
the attempt to aswer: Does it affect you whether the
people you know vote? "... there is a positive
correlation between whether you vote and whether the people
you hang out with vote. Well, the problem—as in many domains—is
that this pattern could be reverse causation (i.e. that
you hang out with people because they are equally likely
to vote as you are—unlikely, but in some domains possible),
or, more likely, in this case, that there are other factors
(general civic values, SES, etc) that affect both who you
are connected to and your behavior. So, how to figure
out the causal arrow?" Here
you go ;-)
10th
October 2007 -
From this
post: "Here’s a short, and incomplete, list of sociologists
and management scholars who have made a serious impact on
the study of economic behavior:
Ranjay
Gulati - management scholar at the Kellogg School of
Management. Big idea: contracts and alliances emerge
from transactions embedded in social networks. Citations:
1,055 for his 1995 AMJ article.
Jay
Barney - management scholar at the Ohio State Fisher
College of Business. Big idea: you can’t compete away firm
advantages if firms have distinct resources that micro-monopolies.
Citations: 6,550 citations of his Journal of Management
article.
Walter
Powell - sociologist at the Stanford School of Education.
Not only did he co-author the 1983 blockbuster article with
DiMaggio that inaugurated the institutionalist turn in sociology
and political science (4,667 citations), he has also been
instrumental in developing the idea that networks are
a crucial element of markets. Citations: His 1996 ASQ
article on firm collaboration networks has topped 1,400
cites. "
9th
October 2007 -
For our group blog, I'm supposed to stimulate contributions
by sending reminders. Here is an aswer I got today :-)
26th
September 2007 -
The United States Patent and Trademark Office is testing
a new website designed to harness the collaborative power
of the Internet to vet patents. A new website called Peer-to-Patent
intends to harness the power of online collaboration to
streamline patent review. By creating a community around
each application, the site facilitates public discussion
and lets people upload relevant information.
Do
Tank is an experiment to encourage research into projects
that foster community and encourage citizens to take action.
26th
September 2007 -
I love The Economist's pieces but not always: once I read
a patetic review
of Naomi Klein's book "No Logo" (fortunately,
the book has been wisely commented
by Pranav Gupta of LSE). I hope The Economist guys will
do a better job with Naomi's forthcoming book. The book
comes with a sterling video. Watch
it - the six minutes best spent in my life ;-) “The
Shock Doctrine is a six-minute film written by the author
Naomi Klein and the director Alfonso Cuarón ... The brief
movie encapsulates the thesis of a new book of the same
title by Ms. Klein: That unconstrained free-market policies
go hand in hand with undemocratic political policies.
... Western countries, along with the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank, essentially exploited disasters
— hyperinflation, the tsunami, the war in Iraq — to force
through radical changes like privatization, deregulation
and severe cuts in social spending."
25th
September 2007 -
To Save Themselves,
US Newspapers Put Readers to Work. At the heart of the
plan lie two Big Ideas that are sweeping through journalism
circles nationwide: Involve the reader in every aspect of
the process, and take a so-called hyperlocal approach to
news coverage. Citizens are desperate to broadcast their
message to their communities; they just aren't going to
employ the conventions of journalism to do so.
One
of the common criticisms ... is that it is crowdsourcing
content in order to cut staff, but this charge misses the
point. Crowdsourcing enables the publisher to expand: more
Web pages, more niche publications, more ads.
People
don't want to sit back and receive information. They want
to be up there playing with it
Question
to ponder: If citizens brodcast their news, how would
it be solved the resulting information clutter?
25th
September 2007 -
Not Being There. Internet
anonymity can foster fantasy — or mask a manipulative, sock-puppeting
CEO.
25th
September 2007 -
Earphone Identity.
The compulsion to personalize inanimate objects goes to
your head.
25th
September 2007 -
Viral and virtual.
A plague in a computer game may have lessons for the real
world. .. releasing a plague far more virulent than they
had intended ... If epidemiologists had access to a heavily
populated game such as “World of Warcraft”, they could watch
how players' behaviour changes in response to variations
in the risks they face.
25th
September 2007 -
There's life
in the old dog yet. The PC industry is proving to be
surprisingly lively. When the personal computer (PC) turned
25 last year, many anniversary articles read like obituaries.
There was general agreement that the PC had become a commodity
product, its makers mere box-shifters, and that growth prospects
were mediocre. Further consolidation was all the industry
had to look forward to.
In
its second 25 years, [the PC industry] will increasingly
resemble the car industry. Cars may well be a commodity,
but they come in all shapes and sizes, for every lifestyle
and need. In future, PCs will also be more about taste and
tailored products and much less about technology.
Consumers
are quite willing to order desktop machines online, but
they prefer to touch laptops before buying them,
since they are much more of a fashion statement than
a beige box under the desk, says Charles Smulders of Gartner,
a market-research firm.
25th
September 2007 -
Who's afraid
of Google? Google is often compared to Microsoft (another
enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer
to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions
grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus
guardians of private information about their finances, Google
is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more
intimate range of information about individuals. ...
from
the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies
to society comes from making profits, not giving things
away. Google is a good example of this. Its “goodness” stems
less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from
Adam Smith's invisible hand. It provides a service that
others find very useful—namely helping people to find information
(at no charge) and letting advertisers promote their wares
to those people in a finely targeted way. Google in effect
controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to
you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google
could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that
it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit
Google's profits from selling to advertisers information
about what you are doing, and make those services less useful.
If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on
to the information, the services will be more useful, but
some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur.
The
answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in
the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to
change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public
interest in Google. But, as the bankers (and Bill Gates)
can attest, public scrutiny also creates a private challenge
for Google's managers: how should they present their case?
Inside
the Googleplex. Google is fast becoming something
like a bank, but one that keeps information rather than
money. This applies equally to its rivals, but Google
is accumulating treasure fastest. .... As Google compiles
more information about individuals, it faces numerous trade-offs.
At one extreme it could use a person's search history and
advertising responses in combination with, say, his location
and the itinerary in his calendar, to serve increasingly
useful and welcome search results and ads. This would also
allow Google to make money from its many new services.
24th
September 2007 -
A UF student was shot with a Taser gun, arrested
and charged with a felony. Why? Police said he started a
riot during John Kerry's on-campus speech. This video clearly
shows that it is not the case: the guy just questioned
John Kerry and was opinionated in doing so - he was
just using words! While the police taser him, most UF students
were just sitting there watching the show (and laughing),
and John Kerry was so nice to stand by and do nothing. Shame
on you all! I bet that working class people (the police)
will (rightly, in this case) pay for that, while the upper
class, in the person of John Kerry whofailed
to rescue the guy, will go unpunished - Mr. Kerry will
surely keep on enjoying his on-campus tour. This situation
shows a victim (the student), a poor side (the police),
and a dark side (the bourgeois Mr. Kerry). To see why the
police is on the poor side and Mr. Kerry on the dark, I
find it instructive to recall what Pier
Paolo Pasolini wrote about The Battle of Valle Giulia
(a clash between Italian left-wing students and the Italian
police): “ When you clashed with the policemen at Valle
Giulia, I sympathized for them. Because policemen are children
of the poor. ” Pasolini stressed the fact that most
of the rioting students belonged to the "bourgeoisie".
10th
September 2007 -
TRULLO (paper
and post)
lifts trust from one context to another. It does so by running
SVD (which determines the extent to which the two contexts
are similar). This
post explains why
SVD improves similarity measurement. It
is clear that using the Singular Value Decomposition to
reduce the dimensionality of the word-chunk (term-document)
matrix results in a better measure of word-word similarity.
It seems to me that there are at least three hypotheses
about why SVD improves the similarity measure:
1.
High-order co-occurrence: Dimension reduction with
SVD is sensitive to high-order co-occurrence information
(indirect association) that is ignored by PMI-IR and cosine
similarity measures without SVD. This high-order co-occurrence
information improves the similarity measure.
2.
Latent meaning: Dimension reduction with SVD creates
a (relatively) low-dimensional linear mapping between row
space (words) and column space (chunks of text, such as
sentences, paragraphs, or documents). This low-dimensional
mapping captures the latent (hidden) meaning in the words
and the chunks. Limiting the number of latent dimensions
forces a greater correspondence between words and chunks.
This forced correspondence between words and chunks (the
simultaneous equation constraint) improves the similarity
measurement.
3.
Noise reduction: Dimension reduction with SVD removes
random noise from the matrix (it smooths the matrix). The
raw matrix contains a mixture of signal and noise. A low-dimensional
linear model captures the signal and removes the noise.
(This is like fitting a messy scatterplot with a clean linear
regression equation.)
*
Jon Kleinberg: Challenges in Social Network Data
*
Chris Anderson: Calculating Latent Demand in the Long Tail
9th
September 2007 -
From
bbc:
"Scientologists want "the global obliteration" of psychiatrists,
who they say were to blame for the rise of Nazi Germany.
. Sickening, nasty and wholly unconvincing - modern psychiatry,
for all its faults, is not Nazi and to press the point in
the way that Scientology does devalues the horror of the
Holocaust.
. I have met too many good people who say Scientology was
founded by a liar, L Ron Hubbard; that it attacks its critics
without mercy; and the celebrities who endorse it have not
the foggiest idea what it is really like."
Given that, I don't understant this (and I am almost embarrassed
to live in London):
"Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley of the City of London
police helped open a new £20 million Scientology centre
in London, and the authorities in the City of London have
granted it cut-price rates".
Watch
this bbc
video and read this article.
And make up your mind!
8th
September 2007 -
"And call me naive, but I also think that..."
I'm interested in the notion of a self-negating admission.
By writing "...call me naive" Rodrik is showing a level
of self-awareness which seems to be signaling he is not
naive. ... I wonder why writing "Call me naive..." should
be more effective than simply writing "I am not naive."
Or for that matter writing "I am naive." (What is the influence-maximizing
claim to make about one's own naivete?)(post)
... "it's humility over hubris." ... "It's
shorthand for "I have considered and rejected more sophisticated
explanations." "
1st
September 2007 -
Whenever one of my papers is rejected, "No Thanks,
Mr. Nabokov" might be a good read (web,
pdf)
27th
August 2007 -
That's the talk on TRULLO I gave at Mobiquitous.
27th
August 2007 -
The psycology
of social design (also in pdf)
23rd
August 2007 -
Nice slides on how to present ;-)
23rd
August 2007 -
"Seymour Hersh stands out as a preeminent chronicler
of US power. In 2006, he revealed that the administration
was considering a nuclear strike on Iran, and reported
that the US had encouraged Israel to plan and execute
the war against Lebanon, in which more than a thousand
Lebanese civilians were killed. If the aim of journalism
is to hold the powerful to account, Hersh is a towering
example on how to do just that." (html)
21st
August 2007 -
In the last post, I was raving on about ..., uhm,
probably about trust bootstrapping, right? :-) I went from
a definition of cold reading to a very personal interpretation
of Posner's review of Blink. Now, in the same vein (i.e.,
keeping on being delirious), I move on this nice paper,
which carries out (in a way) not offender profiling but
MySpace user profiling.
Title:Is Britney Spears Spam? (pdf) Problem: In social network websites (e.g., MySpace),
to decide whether to accept invitations to connect, users
manually examine the senders' profiles. However that may
be time consuming! Existing Solutions: One may automate the acceptance
of invitations by having users running trust propagation
algorithms. Complication: The authors write that using current
trust propagation algorithms may be less than desirable
since trust both decays with the number of hops and is usually
one-dimensional. Proposal: Use machine learning techniques to classify
user profiles. The classification describes a profile across
two dimensions: sociability and promotin. Based on these
dimensions' values for a profile, users then decide whether
to accept the invitation of that profile's user. To come
up with a dataset on which to evaluate their algorithm,
the authors randomly select and rate by hand MySpace users.
Future: I would:
> Apply a new trust propagation algorithm (pdf)
to avoid trust decay and apply TRULLO (pdf)
to handle multi-dimensional trust.
> Look at literature on criminal profiling. In UCL's
main library, I noticed many books about criminal profiling.
I wonder whether those books could inform a (future) paper
titled "On profiling (not only criminals but) Web 2.0
users" ;-)
> Look at literature on statistical discrimination (previous
post) and on customer profiling (mining customer data).
>
Consider Tim Finin's comments:"It would be interesting
to see how well various measures of the network structure
around false and true profies serve as features. I think
this is very similar to the problem of recognizing spam
blogs (splogs). In our work, we’ve found that local features
work well, but splogs can also be recognized by looking
at the network structure as well."
20th
August 2007 -
"Cold reading is a technique used to convince
another person that the reader knows much more about a subject
than they actually do. Even without prior knowledge of a
person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain
a great deal of information about the subject by carefully
analyzing the person's body language, clothing or fashion,
hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or
ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of
origin, etc. This technique is also called offender
profiling. Cold readers commonly employ high probability
guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals
from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the
right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing
any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly
moving on from missed guesses".
This
definition of cold reading reminded me of Posner's (harsh)
review of Blink - Blinkered (html).
There are two points from Posner's essay that may suggest
how person A may set her initial trust in B. The
first point may suggest that A does so based not only on
B's behavior but also on the (social) group(s) to which
B belongs. The second point may remind us that: asking for
recomendations about B may be costly; and that Bayesian
reasoning may help in rationally deciding whether to trust.
Here are the two (by now-coveted) points:
(1) "If two groups happen to differ on average,
even though there is considerable overlap between the groups,
it may be sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics
to each member of the group, even though one knows that
many members deviate from the average. An individual's characteristics
may be difficult to determine in a brief encounter, and
a salesman cannot afford to waste his time in a protracted
one, and so he may quote a high price to every black shopper
even though he knows that some blacks are just as shrewd
and experienced car shoppers as the average white, or more
so. Economists use the term "statistical discrimination"
to describe this behavior. It is a better label than
stereotyping for what is going on in the auto-dealer case,
because it is more precise and lacks the distracting negative
connotation of stereotype, defined by Gladwell as "a rigid
and unyielding system." But is it? Think of how stereotypes
of professional women, Asians, and homosexuals have changed
in recent years. Statistical discrimination erodes as the
average characteristics of different groups converge."
(2)
"Such pratfalls, together with the inaptness of the
stories that constitute the entirety of the book, make me
wonder how far Gladwell has actually delved into the literatures
that bear on his subject, which is not a new one. These
include a philosophical literature illustrated by the work
of Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge and on "know how"
versus "know that"; a psychological literature on cognitive
capabilities and distortions; a literature in both philosophy
and psychology that explores the cognitive role of the emotions;
a literature in evolutionary biology that relates some of
these distortions to conditions in the "ancestral environment"
(the environment in which the human brain reached approximately
its current level of development); a psychiatric literature
on autism and other cognitive disturbances; an economic
literature on the costs of acquiring and absorbing information;
a literature at the intersection of philosophy, statistics,
and economics that explores the rationality of basing
decisions on subjective estimates of probability (Bayes's
Theorem); and a literature in neuroscience that relates
cognitive and emotional states to specific parts of and
neuronal activities in the brain. "
18th
August 2007 -
Two well-written
talk abstracts:
>>>
Possible Futures for Software (Vernor
Vinge)
No one knows what software technology will be in twenty
years. However, there are variables that will probably drive
the outcome, for example, hardware improvements, success
at managing large projects, and demand for "secure computing".
In this talk, I consider four scenarios for the software
future, based on different values for these drivers. There
are things to love and things to loathe in these scenarios,
but consideration of their various onset symptoms could
be helpful in adapting to (or affecting) what really happens
in our future.
>>>
Flying Linux (Dan
Klein)
We all know that "Linux is better than Windows." Few intelligent
people would board a fly-by-wire airplane that was controlled
by Microsoft Windows. So how about Linux? When your life
is at stake, your attitudes change considerably. Better
than Windows, yes—but better enough? This talk will look
at what it takes to make software truly mission-critical
and man-rated. We'll go back to the earliest fly-by-wire
systems—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and look at such diverse
(but critical!) issues as compartmentalization, trojans
and terrorism, auditing and accountability, bugs and boundary
conditions, distributed authoring, and revision control.
At the end of this talk, what you thought might be an easy
answer will be seen to be not so easy.
17th
August 2007 -
I grew up reading (and dreaming with) On the Road, which
now turns to be "a
hymn to purposelessness, an antidote to what John Fowles
once decried as our modern “addiction to finding a reason,
a function, a quantifiable yield” in everything we do"
:-)
6th
August 2007 -
I saw the exhibition on Bruce Nauman at MACM.
6th
August 2007 -
From PresentationZen:
"What makes some images so powerful and others unremarkable?
One of the first lessons visual artists and designers learn
early is the basics of composition, including the "rule
of thirds" and the Golden mean. The "rule of thirds"
says that images (video scenes, etc.) may appear more interesting,
engaging, dynamic, compelling, etc. if the subject is
not placed in the center. If you try moving your subject
away from the center, perhaps nearer to one of what are
called "power points" (where the gridlines intersect), one
can create a more powerful or interesting visual."
21st
June 2007 -
Andreas Kluth, The Economist's technology correspondent
in San Francisco, has won this year's Mirror Award for the
best subject-related series of articles for his special
report on new media, “Among
the Audience” (April 22nd, 2006).
21st
June 2007 -
"ANYONE
who follows an election campaign too closely will sometimes
get the feeling that politicians think voters are idiots.
A new book (The Myth of the Rational Voter) says they are.
...
The world is a complex place. Most people are inevitably
ignorant about most things...
Many political scientists think this does not matter because
of a phenomenon called the “miracle of aggregation” or,
more poetically, the “wisdom of crowds”. If ignorant
voters vote randomly, the candidate who wins a majority
of well-informed voters will win. The principle yields good
results in other fields. On “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”,
another quiz show, the answer most popular with the studio
audience is correct 91% of the time. Financial markets,
too, show how a huge number of guesses, aggregated, can
value a stock or bond more accurately than any individual
expert could. But Mr Caplan says that politics is different
because ignorant voters do not vote randomly. Instead, he
identifies four biases that prompt voters systematically
to demand policies that make them worse off. First, people
do not understand how the pursuit of private profits often
yields public benefits: they have an anti-market bias.
Second, they underestimate the benefits of interactions
with foreigners: they have an anti-foreign bias.
Third, they equate prosperity with employment rather than
production: Mr Caplan calls this the “make-work bias”.
Finally, they tend to think economic conditions are worse
than they are, a bias towards pessimism. "
21st
June 2007 -
Of
all those running for president, Mr Obama is by far the
best orator. Examples: "1)
Some black Americans worry that he is not really one of
them because his ancestors were not brought to America as
slaves and he played no role in the civil-rights movement.
He addressed such worries, brilliantly, in a speech in Selma,
Alabama, on the anniversary this year of a voting-rights
march that was dispersed with tear gas and bullwhips. His
grandfather, he said, was a cook for the British in Kenya,
who called him a “house boy” even when he was 60. “Sound
familiar?” he asked. Without the civil-rights movement,
his white mother and black father might not have wed. “My
very existence might not have been possible had it not been
for some of the folks here today,” he said, with a nod at
the civil-rights lions in the audience. “So don't tell me
I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm
not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”
2)
His energy policy is also slightly underwhelming. In a speech
in Detroit last month, he stated the problem in epic terms.
After Pearl Harbour, he said, President Franklin Roosevelt
asked America's carmakers to start making tanks and war
planes. He demanded seemingly impossible quantities of arms,
but Detroit miraculously delivered. Now, said Mr Obama,
America's oil addiction funds terrorists and jeopardises
the planet, so it is time for car firms to sacrifice once
more for the nation by accepting huge subsidies to make
more eco-friendly cars."
21st
June 2007 -
"
SWEAR WORDS, like everything else, are subject to fashion.
Since the London bombings of 2005, a new obscenity has entered
the lexicon, alongside the anatomical and the blasphemous:
multiculturalism. Once it connoted curry and the
Notting Hill carnival; these days, when applied to British
politicians or their policies, “multiculturalist” is almost
as derogatory a term as “socialist” or “neocon”. Even more
than they agree about most other things, the main political
parties are united in their conviction that multiculturalism
is a perniciously naive idea whose time has gone, or ought
never to have come at all. The shock of hearing a suicide-bomber's
video testament delivered in a Yorkshire accent—hitherto
more associated with cricket commentary than terrorism—spelled
the end for multiculturalism. ... The vogue for promoting
a new, inclusive Britishness is well-intentioned, but probably
doomed. National identities cannot be confected—and besides,
the British already have one. Privacy and freedom are two
of its nicer components, and multiculturalism, for all its
failings, has been a fine expression of it. "
21st
June 2007 -
"
INFORMATION technology in China is once again making political
waves. In the tropical seaport of Xiamen citizens still
talk excitedly about how an anonymous text message on their
mobile phones last month prompted them to join one of the
biggest middle-class protests of recent years. And in Beijing
politicians are scrambling to calm an uproar fuelled by
an online petition against slave labour in brick kilns.
Chinese officials have had reason to worry before about
the rallying power of the internet and mobile phones. Two
years ago they helped activists organise protests against
Japan in several Chinese cities. But the government, at
least initially, sympathised with those protests. By contrast
the demonstrations in Xiamen were directed at officialdom,
and the slave-labour scandal embarrasses the government.
It involves allegations that officials ignored kiln-owners'
use of abducted boys to perform dangerous work. This has
triggered a heated online debate about the political flaws
that allowed such horrors to happen. "
21st
June 2007 -
"As
the time taken to process computer-generated trades falls
to thousandths of a second, algorithms are being created
to react to news headlines faster than the eye can scan
them. Dow Jones and Reuters, the news providers, now offer
electronically “tagged” news products that algorithms pick
up to make programmed trading decisions. (Dow Jones claims
the business is so secretive that it cannot divulge details
of customers.) Britain's Financial Services Authority, a
regulator, also hopes to use algorithms to comb through
trading data to find hints of suspicious activity, which
it reckons takes place before about a quarter of all takeover
announcements."
21st
June 2007 -
"These are great times for flag
manufacturers. Union Jack vendors did brisk business across
the Middle East this week, as mobs vented their anger with
a bonfire of flags and effigies of Queen Elizabeth. The
blaze was sparked by the knighting of Salman Rushdie,
the prize-winning British-Indian author who angered many
Muslims with his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses”.... Some
Iranians see the honour as a deliberate snub, perhaps
in retaliation for Iran's kidnapping of 15 British sailors
and marines in March. In fact, it may not have been half
so calculated. The committee that recommended Sir Salman
claims it considered only the merit of his books, and
the Foreign Office says it plays no part when figures from
the arts are nominated for a knighthood. Rather than
trying to rile Iran, it appears that Britain forgot all
about it. That must be far more hurtful" (from an Economist's article).
6th
June 2007 -
Part of "The Long Tails" is online (pdf,
txt).
1st
June 2007 -
Habemus Papa! For decades, priests abused children
in parish after parish while their superiors covered it
all up (superiors who did not do so were threatened of excommunication).
Now it turns out the orders for this cover up were enforced
for 20 years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who had apparently
done such a good job that he recently got promoted to be
Pope Benedict XVI). (BBC video
and article).
25th
May 2007 -
Easy guide to Crawling
the Web with Java. It is excerpted from chapter six
of The Art of Java.
21st
May 2007 -
Khaled Hosseini's The
Kite Runner was a great book! I look forward to reading
Khaled's second
book: "Fans of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini's
much admired first novel which has sold more than 8m copies
worldwide, will not be disappointed by his second.
This is another sweeping Afghan saga that once again reveals
the author's talent for storytelling and his love for his
homeland." (The Economist)
21st
May 2007 -
The most emotionally wrenching article
I've read. It is about foreign adoption and, in particular,
about what a couple decided to do when they got assigned
a baby with healt issues. It is well worth reading!!!!!
20th
May 2007 -
The classic mistake that engineers make is to talk about
features, not benefits. Engineers will talk about the
technology and assume that people will know why it's important
and believe that it works. But it doesn't work that way.
... It's not very difficult -- it's trivial compared to
the technology stuff. But inventors need to have absolute
clarity about what their message is: what's the benefit,
what's the reason to believe, what's the dramatic
difference. Doug Hall, Inventor. IEEE Spectrum, August
2006, p. 46
15th
May 2007 -
A paper
by R. Thornhill (just published in Evolution and Human Behavior)
shows why conservatives had happy childhoods but liberals
have more sex. In presenting
this paper, the Economist concludes: it "is all fine
and dandy—except that last year a group of researchers at
the University of California, Berkeley, came to exactly
the opposite conclusion. Their study found that insecure
and fearful children were more likely to grow up into conservatives,
and that confident kids were more likely to become liberal.
Clearly, as scientists are so fond of saying, more research
is needed."
15th
May 2007 -
"A
Chicago law firm recently put up a billboard with the slogan
“Life's short. Get a divorce.” Also on the billboard
were pictures of a hot babe in her underwear and a hot hunk
in a towel—a sample of the delights that await the newly
single". Knowing how people in Chicago look like, I
would strongly suggest to first find a hot babe/hunk before
venturing into a divorce :-)
10th
May 2007 -
How do mobile phones promote economic growth?
A new paper provides a vivid example. One particularly popular
tale is that of the fisherman who is able to call several
nearby markets from his boat to establish where his catch
will fetch the highest price. Mr Jensen's paper adds some
numbers to the familiar stories and shows precisely how
mobile phones support economic growth.
8th
May 2007 -
World's
Best Presentation Contest Winners:
27th
April 2007 -
The UK's Guardian newspaper is presenting a series of the
best speeches of the 20th Century. Winston Churchill,
We shall fight on the beaches, June 4, 1940
John F Kennedy, Ask not what your country can do for
you, January 20, 1961
Nelson Mandela, An
ideal for which I am prepared to die,
April 20, 1964
Harold Macmillan, No going back, February 3, 1960
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The only thing we have to
fear is fear itself, March 4, 1933
Nikita Khrushchev, The cult of the individual, February
25, 1956
Emmeline Pankhurst, Freedom or death, November 3,
1913
Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream, August 28,
1963
Charles de Gaulle, The flame of French resistance,
June 1940
Margaret Thatcher, The lady's not for turning, October
10, 1980
Jawaharlal Nehru, A tryst with destiny, August 14,
1947
Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own, 1928
Aneurin Bevan, We have to act up to different standards,
December 5, 1956
Earl Spencer, The most hunted person of a modern age,
September 6, 1997
09th
February 2007 -
From hippies to fanboys. In the sixties, young people
supported fine ideals. Today, they are obsessively supporting
products.
09th
February 2007 -
Cell Phones Vital in Developing
World. "People in poor countries may find mobile
phone email particularly useful because it is extremely
low cost and non-intrusive. These are the same two factors
that helped kick-start the now highly prevalent use of mobile
phone email in Japan. Japanese teens were the first in Japan
to use mobile phone email, because it was cheep enough for
them to use often and because its non-intrusive nature allowed
them to stay connected without drawing attention from parents
and teachers. Of course, there also many differences between
the uses of mobile phone email among Japanese teens and
those in poor countries. Many Japanese teens received phones
from their parents, while people in poor countries often
adopt them for business purposes. Nevertheless, the interesting
thing about these two cases is that it was the congruency
between the affordances of the technology and the social
situations that ultimately lead to its integration into
everyday life." Banking over mobile phones in Africa (The Economist):
"In most of Africa, meanwhile, only a fraction of people
have bank accounts—but there is huge demand for cheap and
convenient ways to send money and buy prepaid services such
as airtime. Many Africans, having skipped landlines and
jumped to mobiles, already use prepaid airtime as a way
of transferring money. They could now leap from a world
of cash to cellular banking".
09th
February 2007 -
"The Cleveland Cavaliers envision an arena full of
cheering fans with no tickets in their pockets. Ticket brokers
say it can't be done, but the team believes electronic ticketing
will sweep the sports and entertainment industries much
as it did the airline industry". In 2005, we presented
a paper
describing a protocol for e-tickets on mobiles.
09th
February 2007 -
How some Ebay power-sellers use shills to mess with the
bids on their own auctions. "Customers of the internet
auction site eBay are being defrauded by unscrupulous dealers
who secretly bid up the price of items on sale to boost
profits. An investigation by The Sunday Times has indicated
that the practice of artificially driving up prices — known
as shill bidding — is widespread across the site".
09th
February 2007 -
Silicon Valley’s
High-Tech Hunt for Colleague. "This is a remarkable
illustration of social capital—the social capital story
underpinnings are: (a) that Gray had many ties; (b) these
ties were to people who control important resources; (c)
that these relationships were strong enough to mobilize
these individuals; (d) that their network of relationships
enabled effective collective action, and (e) the role that
technology has played in allowing a bottom up, distributed,
effort in the search."
09th
February 2007 -
"AllTheCode
have today launched a new code search engine which has joined
a group of existing solutions including site such as Krugle,
Koders and Google Code Search, no less".
09th
February 2007 -
Using the WIKI method to write a business book: We
are smarter than me.
09th
February 2007 -
"Online search is a folksonomy. Every search a user
performs could be seen as a tag she's applying to the result
she ultimately clicks on. Over time, you could imagine a
page featuring a tag cloud formed of all the searches that
got people to that page."
09th
February 2007 -
Just as the internet allows users to create and share their
own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital
material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing
formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey
has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized
content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts.
On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag
or categorize online content. The report features an interview
with David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and fellow at
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society (pdf
of Report)
22nd
January 2007 -
Video
of "I have a dream" speech of Martin Luther king.
The last three minutes? Amazing!
22nd
January 2007 -
Great video
by Clemens Kogler who attempts to "answer all questions
of the universe and some more".
22nd
January 2007 -
On writing simplicity: The most valuable of all talents is that of never using
two words when one will do. Thomas Jefferson The chief virtue that language can have is clearness,
and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar
words. Hippocrates The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate
the power of simplicity. Robert Stuberg Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side
of a brimming mind. Cicero Any
fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move
in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
16th
January 2007 -
Troika
Design. Cool stuff!!! Troika is a multi-disciplinary
art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer,
Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at
the Royal College of Art.
1st
December 2006 -
Stuff I've underlined in "The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-time":
p.
12 - I think prime numbers are like life. They are very
logical but you could never work out the rules, even if
you spent all your time thinking about them.
p. 15 - Metaphor= carry from one place to another
p. 29 - [In] the Bible it says Thou shalt not kill but there
were the Crusades and two world wars and the Gulf War and
there were Christians killing people in all of them
p. 62 - The Monty Hall Problems
p. 90 - Occam's razor = Entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitatem (No more things should be presumed
to exist than are absolutely necessary)
p. 101 - Sometimes things are so complicated that it is
impossible to predict what they are going to do next, but
they are only obeying really simple rules (e.g., population
of frogs in a pond by May, Oster, and Yorke).
21st
November 2006 -
Richard Quest's tips on presentations: •
It's a performance. Like it or not, he said, if you
are giving a speech or a presentation, you are performing.
Of course, people like Richard are at an advantage compared
to the rest of us, he admitted, since he does this for a
living. Still, it is useful for all presenters to remember
that they are, for that moment when they have the floor
at least, performers. •
You've got to grab 'em by the grapes... Richard was
adamant, animated, and colorful about this tip. Forget the
thank yous and small talk at the beginning, you can work
that in later he said. At the start you immediately have
to grab them and bring them in. Many people he said start
their presentations off weakly, meekly. Open with a bang
and remember to end your talk by tying the big finish back
in with that dynamic opening. •
Engage your audience. Ask questions, look them in
the eye, get them involved.
• Slow down, you are in control. This is your show,
your stage. Use your voice to emphasize certain crucial
points. Don't just rush through talking points, etc.
• Pay close attention to your audience. Have some
empathy for your audience. If they are not getting it or
if it becomes clear that you have prepared too much or the
wrong material, then switch gears, cut it short, whatever
the situation calls for. Good presenters can read the nonverbal
cues and act accordingly.
• Tell stories, give plenty of examples. You don't
have to make 14 points. Make a single big point. Most people
try to include too much information not too little.
21st
November 2006 -
Richard Dawkins' review
of "Intellectual
Impostures", which is a book by Alan Sokal and
Jean Bricmont that refers to the Sokal Affair. This affair
"was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on
the editorial staff and readership of a leading postmodern
cultural studies journal called Social Text (published by
Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics
at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper
for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see
if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish
an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded
good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".
The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards
a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was published
in the Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue of Social
Text"
20th
November 2006 -
earFeeder
scans your music collection and automatically creates a
single RSS newsfeed containing news about your favorite
artists including new releases on iTunes, concert dates
and ticket availability, Rolling Stone articles, etc.
16th
November 2006 -
Joseph Ratzinger is set to become the first Pope to launch
his own calendar (hopefully not a Pirelli-style one). The
German Shepherd's calendar promises to show the Pontiff
in a daring range of poses. Cardinal Ruini (who has used
lectures, homilies and rare interviews to help squash talk
of Italy following Spain's lead on gay marriage and has
challenged the use of the abortion pill) will follow suit
with a calendar titled '365 days of prohibitions'.
15th
November 2006 -
Ambience Intelligence (Nigel Shadbolt): I don’t know
about your house, but mine and those of most of my friends
are exhibiting alarming amounts of technological clutter.
Rather than the disappearing computer, our homes have grown
lumps of plastic or metal containing a PC or three, a specialized
games box, a wide-screen TV, a lot of small-screen TVs,
a stereo, a VCR, a DVD player, a lot of cordless phones,
fixed phones, satellite set-top boxes, and on and on. Far
from having the technology disappearing, I’ve got more chips
in more boxes, each with incompatible interfaces and an
endless array of charging devices. I can’t wait for the
day when all these functions have happily receded into the
background and I am living Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous-butcalm
computing.
14th
November 2006 -
George Heilmeyer/Heilmeier was the director of ARPA in the
mid 1970s and required proposals for new programs to answer
these questions.
*
What is the problem, why is it hard?
* How is it solved today?
* What is the new technical idea; why can we succeed now?
* What is the impact if successful?
* How will the program be organized?
* How will intermediate results be generated?
* How will you measure progress?
* What will it cost?
(in Heilmeier’s Catechism).
8th
November 2006 -
Seth: Why
does frequency work so well in marketing? Why did candidates
spend more than two billion dollars on the last election...
that's about $10 a voter. Clearly, the information could
have been transmitted a lot more cheaply than that. It starts
with the fact that ten percent (!) of voters polled acknowledged
that they decided who to vote for on the day they voted.
8th
November 2006 -
Email is dead Do young people have email accounts? Yes.
Do they login to them semi-regularly? Yes. Do they use it
as their primary form of asynchronous communication for
talking with their friends? No. Academics have been noting
that young people's social and emotional energies have been
moving from email to IM.
7th
November 2006 -Yahoo's
Grand Mobile Ad Experiment. The popular Web portal will
start including ads with wireless content. Will users on-the-go
slow down for a message from a sponsor?
7th
November 2006 -
Seattleduck's Kevin Broidy captured the essence of user
passion when he said, "Passion starts with two simple words:
F***ing Cool!"
6th
November 2006 -
Building a Better Computer. PC makers are racing to
ensure tomorrow's machines meet the increasing demand for
information and entertainment anywhere, all the time.
6th
November 2006 -
Google's New
Frontier: Print Ads. With a slew of big-city newspapers
on its side, Google sets out to reproduce the success of
its online ad programs—offline (WP).
Google is rolling out its most ambitious print advertising
initiative yet, an online marketplace that will let advertisers
place bids on space in more than 50 major newspapers across
the U.S.
5th
November 2006 -
The Price of
Climate Change: how some economists are studying the
weather itself (particularly the potential impact of global
warming) and how others use weather as an instrumental variable
to measure various human behaviors, including crime, war,
rioting, etc.
5th
November 2006 -
The
price per mL of various fluids -- with crude oil at the
bottom, and HP black ink #45 for printer cartridges way
out in front:
5th
November 2006 -
Zamzar, a free online file conversion tool, launched last
week. Like a similar tool, Media Convert, Zamzar allows
users to upload a file and have it converted into a number
of formats.
4th
November 2006 -
Digg continues
to grow, claiming 20 million visitors per month and an increasing
amount of mainstream attention. But as traffic to Digg has
grown, the incentive
to “game” the site to get stories to the home page has
also increased.
4th
November 2006 -
Changes
and reorganizations in the Gannett Company (publisher
of USA Today and more than 90 other US dailies): The initiative
emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national
news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news
operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites
do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing
methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers
and researchers in large, investigative features.
So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever.
Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:
1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change
the world.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered"
by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of
crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete
with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were
put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the
props.
11. Don't try to stand out from the cro
3rd
November 2006 -
Each
year, TED
hosts some of the world's most fascinating people. In particular,
Richard Dawkins explains how our size affects our model
of the world
3rd
November 2006 -
Following
the 2006 International Virus Bulletin Conference, Kelly
Martin takes a look at the profit
motives of the cyber criminals behind modern viruses,
targeted trojans, phishing scams and botnet attacks that
are stealing millions from organizations and individuals.
3rd
November 2006 -
M.I.T.
and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce
a new joint research program in Web
science (TechReview
and Official site)
3rd
November 2006 -
Driving
Impulse Shopping with a Smart
Cart Supermarkets could soon turn to monitoring technology
to make us buy more stuff.
3rd
November 2006 -
Phone
creates interactive
maps from snapshots.
3rd
November 2006 -
Like
Skype, The Venice
Project is simple - you download and you get free television.
It is near television quality, and it needs about one megabit
per second. [The business model will be] ad-based, close
to the television model. We will do revenue share with the
content providers.
3rd
November 2006 -
MySpace
moves to quash music pirates. The hugely popular social
networking site will use "audio fingerprinting" software
to stop users uploading copyrighted music files without
permission
3rd
November 2006 -
Charles
Leadbeater has released a first draft of his upcoming
book for anyone to read and comment on. It's called
"We Think: Why mass creativity is the next big thing".
3rd
November 2006 -
Iqbal
Quadir on TEDTalks: The impact one cell phone can make
on a village...
3rd
November 2006 -
Best
American Non-Required Reading is edited five years running
by Dave Eggars and truly coming into its own. The eclectic
collection is wonderfully curated, incorporating stories,
essays, blog entries, answers to the EDGE question, transcripts
from The Daily Show, excerpts from graphic novels, and,
er, the Iraqi constitution..
2nd
November 2006 -
About RFID: *
RFID
& The Internet of Things is a workshop for a maximum
of 16 designers and artists who want to learn more about
RFID and its possible (cultural) effects and uses. *
Interview with RFID
implanter *
Fun with RFID aka Researchers see privacy pitfalls in no-swipe
credit cards They call it the "Johnny
Carson attack," for his comic pose as a psychic divining
the contents of an envelope
* The
RFID-Zapper
is a gadget to deactivate (i.e. destroy) passive RFID-Tags
permanently
*Getting
"Chipped" - Interviews with RFID Pioneers
1st
November 2006 -
America's
Best Young Entrepreneurs. Check out 25 smart new businesses
from some of the brightest entrepreneurs in the U.S. aged
25 and under. They include:
*
Another way to market and sell independent music? Amie
Street, an online music retail site for independent
content, uses a unique rating system where all songs are
available for free at first. Then, depending on how popular
a song is within a market, it goes up in price. The
site tries to engage users by giving them a set number of
recommendations and rewards them with a set amount of free
music they can download when their recommendations do well.
*
While working as Wall St. financial advisors during 2005,
fellow Pace University graduates Vitaly Feldman and Alexander
Koretsky daydreamed about starting a business together that
would improve the process of searching for a reliable plumber,
taxi service, or virtually any other service provider. Launched
in June, 2006, the MetroHorse
Web site gives users an alternative to thumbing through
the phonebook, relying on businesses and consumers to trade
information, with businesses posting profiles detailing
their services and consumers bidding for a particular service
and adding feedback about it, which any user can access.
* Tired of waiting in long lines for coffee in his hometown
of New York City—and assuming that others felt the same
way—Glass invented Mobo,
a mobile ordering system where customers order and pay
for takeout meals from restaurants on their cell phones.
The service, which launched in June, 2005, alerts users
with text messages when their meals are ready, and is
quickly catching on, neighborhood by Manhattan neighborhood.
* When he was working at digital advertising company DoubleClick
in New York, Eliot Horowitz grew increasingly frustrated
trying to find unbiased price comparisons whenever he shopped
online. So Horowitz, who studied computer science and artificial
intelligence at Brown University, set out to solve the problem.
He spent six months building a virtual spider designed to
crawl the entire Web to seek out the best price on a
product and incorporated his work into his site, which launched
in 2005 (shopwiki.com).
Unlike traditional search engines and comparison shopping
sites, companies can't pay to place higher in the search.
* Lindahl and Simmons launched
Extreme Entrepreneurship Education Corporation in their
junior year with the goal of helping young people realize
the value of pursuing entrepreneurship through education
and outreach. To clarify exactly what they wanted to communicate,
they spent months interviewing mentors, entrepreneurs, and
other successful people, and assembled their findings into
a book called "The Student Success Manifesto," which
their company published in 2003. Speaking requests started
pouring in. After graduating in 2005, the couple launched
the Extreme Entrepreneur Tour, a series of speaking engagements
at colleges around the country, where they bring along renowned
young entrepreneurs to speak to students about pursuing
their passion.
Wired
Digital Acquires Reddit. Wired Digital has purchased
the personalized social news aggregation website Reddit,
the company announced Tuesday
28th
October 2006 -
Stephen Dubner (Correlation vs. Causality) The “Moratorium”
argument —[which stated that a moratorium on prison construction
would decrease crime rates]—rests on a fundamental confusion
of correlation and causality. Consider a parallel argument.
The mayor of a city sees that his citizens celebrate wildly
when their team wins the World Series. He is intrigued by
this correlation but, like the “Moratorium” author, fails
to see the direction in which the correlation runs. So the
following year, the mayor decrees that his citizens start
celebrating the World Series before the first pitch is thrown
— an act that, in his confused mind, will ensure a victory.
The
manipulators. ... He had manipulated the system, pushed
himself up to the top of the chart in a successful attempt
to get a bunch of traffic to his site. Every day, there
are literally hundreds of ad agencies working hard, trying
to figure out how to slip corporate ideas into the system
under the guise of it being homemade and real. They don't
have remarkable products or services, they don't have clients
willing to reconsider what it is they actually produce,
so they're busy trying to break the community systems online
to help them (selfishly) succeed. At some point, it's going
to come down to who we trust. We didn't trust Beechnut after
we find out they put water in the apple juice. We didn't
trust Audi for a decade, even though there wasn't anything
actually wrong with their car. And we won't trust Enron,
Worldcom or Adelphia with our money for a long time to come.
And the upside? The upside is that individuals (and organizations)
that don't stoop, that manage to figure out how to have
influence without trying to profit from it, those brands
are the ones that will last, that will thrive and that will
bring the rarest commodity--trust--to the table.
28th
October 2006 -
A New Campaign
Tactic: Manipulating Google Data. Fifty or so other
Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated
Google bombing campaign intended to game the search engines
ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references
to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific
articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage
of Google's formula and force those articles to the top
of the list of search results
Six
Apart announced last night the launch of its newest social
networking site, Vox. Besides all the basic features
of a social networking site, Vox includes extensive privacy
controls, a tag cloud for blog posts and a beautiful WYSWIG
composition page. One of the things that users are going
to love about Vox is that the advertising is incredibly
unobtrusive.
Have
you guys checked out the controversy
over Digg recently? It’s similar to Stephen’s issue
with Wikipedia, but the misinformation is more intentional
(see
comment).
27th
October 2006 -
Digg This: Talking
to Gen Y Digg.com CEO Jay Adelson's tips for communicating
with the younger generation in your workplace.
(example
of specialized social nets) Maya’s
Mom Raises Angel Round, Launches. Other companies are
addressing the parenting/family social network opportunity
as well (we’ve covered Minti, Famster and FriendsForFamilies).
But Maya’s Mom is focused on allowing users to request and
offer advice to others first, and more traditional social
networking features second.
24th
October 2006 -
Technorati Announces Support for Open ID. OpenID
is a decentralized digital identity system, in which any
user's online identity is given by URL (such as for a blog
or a home page) or an XRI (such as an i-name), and can be
verified by any server running the protocol. Starting with
version 1.1, OpenID uses the Yadis service discovery protocol.
OpenID 2.0 is now developing into a complete framework for
user-centric digital identity.
On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users don't need to create
and manage a new account for every site before being granted
access. Instead, they only need to be able to authenticate
with a trusted site that supports OpenID, called the identity
provider or i-broker. The identity provider/i-broker can
then confirm ownership of the user's OpenID identifier to
other OpenID-enabled sites, called relying parties. Unlike
most single sign-on architectures, OpenID does not specify
the authentication mechanism. Therefore, the strength of
an OpenID login depends on how much a relying party knows
about the authentication policies of the i-broker. Without
such knowledge, OpenID is not meant to be used on sensitive
accounts (banking, e-commerce transactions, etc.), but if
an identity provider/i-broker uses strong authentication,
OpenID can be used for all types of transactions.
Zune
Spreads the Love, Offers Credits for “Shared” Songs. The
Zune mystery thickens. Our CrunchGear rumorists have discovered
that when you share a song via Wi-Fi using Zune’s three
day/three play system AND the other party purchases the
song later in the iZunes Music Store (IZMS), you get a credit
that you can later trade in for music and media. Very
clever, Microsoft, very clever. Clearly the goal here is
to create a bit of viral marketing for music and,
as an added bonus, drive sales on the IZMS.
23rd
October 2006 -
What Comes
After YouTube. Meet the startups making deals with Big
Media for online video's next step.
A
Student’s Video Résumé Gets Attention (Some of It Unwanted).
He says he has been interested in finance since he was 12,
when he was creating financial data models. So Mr. Vayner,
who is a member of the class of 2008 at Yale, decided a
few weeks ago to look for a job at a Wall Street firm. He
thought that making a video would help him stand out amid
the intense competition for investment-banking positions.
By emphasizing his various athletic pursuits, which he said
included body sculpting, weightlifting and tai chi, Mr.
Vayner said he could show that he had achieved success in
physical endeavors that could carry over to the financial
world.
20th
October 2006 -
Web sites using
wisdom of crowds. Web sites using wisdom of crowds.
The Washington Past has a story about web sites (e.g., PicksPal)
that use a “wisdom of crowds” approach to predict the outcome
of sporting events and stock performance. For $20 a month
you can subscribe to market predictions aggregated from
Marketocracy the 100 best performers in their fantasy market.
SocialPicks, which is not yet launched, will combine social
networking with stock picking. All of this relates to James
Surowiecki's 2004 book Wisdom of Crowds about the aggregation
of information in groups, resulting in decisions that are
often better than could have been made by any single member
of the group.
The
Dynamics of Viral Marketing (interesting paper). The
paper’s key points, as summarized by Eric Kintz are
* Viral marketing does not spread well. In epidemics, high
connectors are very critical nodes of the network and allow
the virus to spread. In recommendations networks, a few
very large cascades exist but most recommendation chains
terminate after just a few steps.
* The probability of viral infection decreases with repeated
interaction. Providing excessive incentives for customers
to recommend actually weakens the credibility of those links.
* Viral effectiveness varies depending on price and category.
Social context has a high influence on the potency of viral
infection. Technical or religious books for example had
more successful recommendations than general interest topics.
Smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive
to viral marketing.
Here’s
an interesting application of RFID: Australia Post is
using tagged test letters to monitor the performance of
its services and to discover potential problems within its
delivery network.
Why
do some competing stores locate near one another, while
others don't?
* Car dealers cluster because it is in their best interests
to do so, given consumer behavior. Buyers would be less
prone to buying if dealers were discrete and far away from
one another, but they are more prone to shopping
(and possibly buying) if dealers cluster around one another.
Such, of course, is not generally the case with groceries.
* Take the arrival of Bed Bath & Beyond on the 6th Avenue
in NY. It generated a search-related information externality
-- whenever people search for information, their search
behavior is generally influenced by what they can learn
from the actions of others. This tends to generate herding
phenomena, among other things. When stores saw the success
of BB&Y, they relocated there, some because of the spillover
effect of BB&Y's success (it re-legitimated the area), and
some because they wanted to take advantage of the new and
larger crowds on lower Sixth Avenue.
16th
October 2006 -
How Cisco's CEO
Works the Crowd. Imagine how successful you could be
if you incorporated John Chamber's five key public-speaking
skills into your presentations
Europe Takes
to Location-Based Cell Service. Services that give cell-phone
users place-based info fast are finally taking hold in Europe—and
are welcomed by revenue-hungry providers
16th
October 2006 -
IT evolution meeting demand for speed, efficiency and accuracy
(ft.com). Barry McQuain (Lionhart) says: "Blackberry
has made a huge change for us. Our teams can get market
information constantly, wherever they are". Mr McQuain
cautions that too much information is not a good thing.
Specific information needs to be identified and delivered
to a manager for a decision to be made.
Reuters is developing a trading element based on machine
readable news. This wil play into event-driven trading strategies,
with sophisticated software triggering trades based on specific
events. Also, sentiment scoring will be added; this signals
whether news is positive or negative for a particular trade.
15th
October 2006 -
From the "History Boys" (Alan Bennet): "Take
it. Feel it. Pass it on".
14th
October 2006 -
Shaman, Bless
This Lab. How to cross the cultural divide when working
overseas.
Acronym
Addiction. Spectrum's Guide to Recent Electronics Industry
Acronyms and Abbreviations.
13th
October 2006 -
The Media-Sharing Mirage.
Many tools now exist for capturing and sharing data collected
on mobile devices. Will they turn us into globe-trotting
personal publishers--or glorified file clerks?
Email
Marketing Best Practices. In the past, small companies
could never hope to compete with the Fortune 100 in terms
of direct marketing dollars. But compared to other forms
of direct marketing (e.g. direct mail and telemarketing),
e-mail is extremely inexpensive. In other words, the mom
and pop convenience store now has a potent marketing tool
to compete with the huge conglomerate at the strip mall.
With proper targeting, tracking tools and a carefully built
opt-in list, e-mail can be highly personalized to the needs
of individual customers. Communications sent on behalf of
companies from messaging solution providers can be targeted
and customized using sophisticated database marketing techniques.
The technology can capture and track individual responses
throughout the campaign, "learn" more about customers from
response and purchase behavior, and refine customer profiles
for future communications.
30th
September 2006 -
Head barista
- Andrea Illy of Illycaffe is bringing beatiful coffee to
the masses.
(The
wheels on the bus) "A man who, beyond the age of 26,
finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure".
So Margaret Thatcher is reputed to have said in 1986. No
comment.
19th
September 2006
- Social
Networks: Execs Use Them Too. Networking technology
gives companies a new set of tools for recruiting and customer
service—but privacy questions remain ... Doostang was started
as an invitation only network at Stanford last year and
has so far grown to over 50,000 members. The great thing
about Doostang is that these members are graduates from
the top schools and that's why all the top companies that
do not recruit online have started to use Doostang.
A
reader's comment: "As social networks become more prolific
I can see the newer ones becoming "niche" networks. This
is even better in that the search engines have difficulties
delving into "micro specific" searches and a "niche" network
makes it easier for focused category searches. Additionally
these new "niche networks" will (I believe) be more effective
for the various users that join them. Right now whether
it be corporate execs, students, housewives or musicians
the greater part of the time on the networks is spent browsing
through to the area you find most interesting. While that
might be fun it is not as effective as having a system point
you directly to your particular area of interest and that
is where a niche network will work."
16th
September 2006
- Giving ideas
wings (Entrepreneurs can struggle to raise the first
million or so, even with a good idea. But a business angel
might smile on them.)
Ecco il conto,
presindente. Marco Tronchetti Provera took control of
Telecom Italia five years ago. Now the bill is due.
14th
September 2006
- Severgnini's lastest book: La bella figura (NYT's
review). In Italy, red lights come in many varieties.
A rare few actually mean stop. Others, to the Italian driver,
suggest different interpretations. At a pedestrian crossing
at 7 a.m., with no pedestrians around, it is a “negotiable
red,” more like a weak orange. At a traffic intersection,
red could mean what the Florentines call rosso pieno, or
full red, but it might, with no cars coming, be more of
a suggestion than a command. It all depends. ... There is
one rule, by the way, that cannot be violated. It is wrong,
and possibly illegal, to order a cappuccino after 10 a.m.
This is worse than eating pizza in the middle of the day.
It is nonnegotiable. Discussion over. Rosso pieno.
13th
September 2006
- Beautiful in its simplicity: Little Miss Sunshine is the
story of a dysfunctional family from New Mexico. (NYT's
review)
9th
September 2006
- Admire the
best, forget the rest. Outsiders look enviously at Sweden's
economic success. So why are the Swedes thinking of voting
out the ruling Social Democracts next weekend. ... Different
countries have different strenghts. Mr Bildt puts forward
his own toungue-in-check recipe for the perfect "Nodic
model", stretching the geography: Finland's education,
Estonia's progressive tax policy, Denmark's labour market,
Iceland's entrepreneurship, Sweden's management of big companies
and Norway's oil.
Welcome aboard
- In flights announcements are not entirely truthful. What
might an honest one sound like?
2nd September 2006
- The trouble with YouTube.
....[Parallel between Starbucks and MySpace/YouTube]. By
offering a setting for free interaction, such sites provide
the online equivalent of comfy chairs. The trouble is that,
so far, there is no equivalent of the overpriced coffee
that brings in the money and pays the bills
Life
2.0 (the new science of synthetic biology is poised
between hype and hope. But its time will soon come.).
Bedroom biotech (Like IT before it, biotech is starting
to spawn hackers)
26th
August 2006
- Who
killed the newspaper? The most useful bit of the media
is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic.
More
media, less news. ...newspaper readers has long shown
that people like short stories and news that is relevant
to them: local reporting, sports, entertainment, wheater
and traffic. ...
Gannet is trying to make its journalists more local. It
has invested in "mojos"...
24th
August 2006
- Pump
and dump. "Spammers issued unsolicited e-mails
telling investors to buy stock shares.....The 111 with sufficient
historical data tended to fluctuate 13% more after the e-mails
went out than other shares on the indices. In the short-term,
they said prices tended to rise after a spamming campaign.
They did not study long-term effects". Another comment
on the topic: Buy
low and spam high, it works!.
23rd
August 2006
- Getting
personal. "The magic of the PC is that it is a
general-purpose machine to which new functions can be added
simply by installing a new piece of software. “The PC is
a very fertile device,” says Dan Bricklin, the inventor
of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. But this versatility
comes at a price, since it makes the PC more complex, less
secure and less reliable than a dedicated, single-purpose
device. ... As a result of these shortcomings, many technologies
incubated on the PC are moving off it... As a result, the
PC is no longer centre of the technological universe; today
it is more likely to be just one of many devices orbiting
the user".
The
PC is a general-purpose platform on which technologies tend
to appear first (incubation). To extend their benefits,
technologies then migrate onto other devices, which are
dedicated (e.g., console) and cheaper (e.g., phone). Firms
working to bring the benefits of the web to mobile phones
are a case in point.
22nd
August 2006
- Google, known for its innovative hiring practices and
research-based worked environment, unveiled its most interesting
laboratory to date: a wireless network in Mountain View,
CA, that covers "11.5 square miles and has 380 access points
in the city with a population of about 72,000, 35 miles
south of San Francisco," according to this Bloomberg article.
While the service will remain free and not supported by
advertising, the Guardian is reporting that Google will
use it to test location-based advertising, allowing
the company to serve specific advertisements to people based
upon their location, a service that ad agencies are increasingly
pushing.
22nd
August 2006
-
What Baseball Can Teach Those Who Dream of Creating the
Next Silicon Valley THEY say that everything is bigger
in Texas. Last week, the state tried to bring that attitude
to academics with the announcement of a $2.5 billion initiative
for science teaching and research in the University of Texas
system. The hope, it seems, is to use the university system
to jump-start economic development and continue to move
Texas away from its traditional dependence on energy, raw
materials and real estate.
But advocates should remember an old maxim of economic development:
Beware of investing in things that can move. As it
turns out, graduates and research ideas both tend to move
around a lot.
19th
August 2006
- Italy
triumphs in coding contest - Stel magnolia. Talk Talk.
By T.C.Boyle. In his new novel, "Talk Talk", T.C.Boyle
portrays not only the profound violation of having a double
walking the world, using - and destroying - your good name,
but also the thief's curiously proprietary relationship
to his new persona.
A litany of abuse... In July 2003 George Bush gave his statement
on Iraq: ... A year later ... one insurgent group issued
its response: "Have you another challenge?"
Keeping
it real. Thus far the internet has proven an effective check
on digital forgery. Although it allows potentially fake
images to be disseminated widely, it also casts many more
critical eyes upon them.
Communicating
the Skype way. Sten Tamkivi, the Estonian manager of Skype,
is helping to change the face of telephony.
Another
hero lost. A left-wing firebrand [Guenter Grass] comes clean
about his murky past.
14th
August 2006
- Italy
triumphs in coding contest - The Italians beat 41 other
entrants in the Software Design category. A team of Italian
students has won Microsoft's Imagine Cup which lets
budding software designers compete for a large cash prize.
The quartet from Turin Polytechnic beat 41 other
teams to take home a cheque for $25,000 (£13,000).
13th
August 2006
- In an interview,
Prabhakar Raghavan (head of Yahoo Research) said: " We have
something of a success Yahoo Answers [where people in an
online community ask and answer specific questions], which
is ramping up faster that you can imagine. As a community
like that takes off, you want its value to grow faster than
the membership. To get that done, you need to find a better
way of routing answers to people with questions. Quite likely,
after a while, the question that you've asked has been answered
by someone already, except in a different guise. How do
we play this matchmaker role? How do we create a reputation
system that rewards good answers and mitigates poor quality?
How do we create an incentive structure for people to exhibit
the right kind of behavior for social welfare? "
This
interview reminds me an article about artificial
artificial intelligence on the Economist: Any computer
might be able to find you a baseball schedule but they cannot
tell you if the Yankees are in town. Nor can they tell you
whether sitting in the bleachers is a good idea on a first
date. AskForCents can, because its answers come from people.
"Whatever question you can come up with, there's a person
that can provide the answer - you don't have the inflexibility
of an algorithm-driven system," ... Amazon's Turk is part
toolkit for software developers, and part online bazaar:
anyone with internet access can register as a Turk user
and carry out the Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) listed
on the Turk website (mturk.com). ... The premise is that
humans are vastly superior to computers at tasks such as
pattern recognition, ... so why not let software take advantage
of human strengths?
12th
August 2006
- The Idea Man- Doug Hall: "There are three laws of what I
call marketing physics, three things that matter. The first
is “overt benefit,” which, in a consumer’s words, is “What’s
in it for me?” The second is “real reason to believe,”
which translates to “Why should I believe you?” And
the third is “dramatic difference,” or “Why should I
care?” The classic mistake that engineers make is to
talk about features, not benefits".
... "We
developed a system for logical brainstorming, where
you apply judgment throughout the process, testing ideas
against those questions of why should I care, what’s in
it for me, and why should I believe you?"
The alliance against Google.
A ticket for corruption. Sleazy countries are best a breaking
New York City's parking rules.
11th
August 2006
- Steven J. Murdoch: "When I first started supervising undergraduates
at Cambridge, Richard Clayton explained that the real purpose
of the security course was to teach students not to invent
the following (in increasing order of importance): protocols,
hash functions, block ciphers and modes of operation. Academic
literature is scattered with the bones of flawed proposals
for all of these, despite being designed by very capable
and experienced cryptographers. Instead, wherever possible,
implementors should use peer-reviewed building blocks,
as normally there is already a solution which can do the
job, but has withstood more analysis and so is more likely
to be secure".
10th
August 2006
- Tim Finin: "Harry Chen writes about the 2006 Gartner's
Hype Cycle For Emerging Technologies. In July 2006, Gartner
published a new report on the hype cycle of emerging technologies.
Last year, Gartner published a similar report. Among those
technologies mentioned in 2005's report, Corporate Semantic
Web, mesh sensor networks, and location-aware applications
are the few that also appeared in this year's report.
Harry notes that technologies newly mentioned in 2006 include
Ajax, Web 2.0, folksonomies, social network analysis, offline
Ajax, and Wiki."
9th
August 2006
- A Face Is Exposed for AOL
Searcher No. 4417749. Buried in a list of 20 million
Web search queries collected by AOL and recently released
on the Internet is user No. 4417749. The number was assigned
by the company to protect the searcher’s anonymity, but
it was not much of a shield. And search by search, click
by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier
to discern... to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who
lives in Lilburn, Ga At times, the searches appear to betray
intimate emotions and personal dilemmas. No. 3505202 asks
about “depression and medical leave.” No. 7268042 types
“fear that spouse contemplating cheating.” There are also
many thousands of sexual queries, along with searches about
“child porno” and “how to kill oneself by natural gas” John
Battelle said AOL’s misstep, while unfortunate, could have
a silver lining if people began to understand just what
was at stake. In his book, he says search engines are mining
the priceless “database of intentions” formed by the world’s
search requests.
July
2006
- Metcalfe's Law is Wrong. Communications networks increase
in value as they add members - but by how much? The devil
is in the details. [Zipf's Law]
24th
July 2006
- Microsoft's Zune
portable music player will let people share and sample tracks
via wi-fi, reports suggest.
24th
July 2006
- Serial entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis
are at it again, this time with a venture for distributing
TV and other
video over the Net.
24th
July 2006
- Raising the Bar on Viral
Web Ads. Those funny clips that push products are getting
slicker and more expensive to make and distribute. YouTube
and Google are taking note.
10th
July 2006
- At the Diane Rehm Show. Social
Networks on the Web [mp3]. Many millions of Americans
have joined online social networks. We'll talk about their
appeal and what corporate and government researchers could
learn from them.
Guests: Jennifer Golbeck, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Kathleen
Carley.
9th
July 2006
- "Web
firms press visions of 'social search'(txt) "A
visitor looking for information on, say, New Jersey beaches
can get the user-recommended sites, grouped by users. One
user's cluster gives you restaurants, Internet cafes and
other information on the coastal town of Ventnor City, N.J."
... Google then came along with page ranking, essentially
allowing the community — through Web site owners — to vote
on the relevance of a site. The more other sites link to
it, the more it is deemed worthy. But site owners, particularly
those with big budgets, wind up with the greatest influence
in the results. Social search attempts to let the entire
community of users decide. In theory, the best ideas win
out in the online marketplace and are less open to manipulation.
6th
July 2006
- Faces... things that the brain clearly holds in
high regard because there's a specific region devoted to
processing them and recognising different individuals. But
how does it work out who's who, and can we be forgiven for
thinking that foreigners all look the same? Well, it turns
out that it's all down to a process of deduction, that is
the brain deducts the face it's seeing from an internal
model of what the average face should look like.
3rd
July 2006
- "A New Platform for Social Computing:
Cell Phones(txt) .... the desire among users to put
their phones to new uses, such as media sharing, says M:Metrics'
Donovan. "The areas where we have seen the largest growth
[in mobile-phone usage] center around creating, connecting,
and sharing -- people taking pictures, capturing video,
sending those files to the Web, and chatting through instant-messaging,"
he says"
11th
June 2006
- For Some,
Online Persona Undermines a Résumé(txt) "Many companies
that recruit on college campuses have been using search
engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks
on seniors looking for their first job"
17th
May 2006
- Simplicity
the Key to Privacy? "Deleting data after use. I
wonder -- could this be a key component to protecting privacy?"
16th
May
2006
- On Secondary
Use of Information ... People will give you personal
and sensitive information if you are totally up front about
it and can clearly articulate the reason for collecting
the information and the benefit that the end user gives
them. ... Most of us are happy to give out personal information
in exchange for specific services. What we object to is
the surreptitious collection of personal information, and
the secondary use of information once it's collected:
the buying and selling of our information behind our back.
12th
May 2006
- Data Mining
at NSA. Social networking analysis on billions of phone
records.
12th
May 2006
- Bringing Digital
Ads to the Local Mall. OnSpot Digital Network will sell
commercial time on screens to be placed at or near the entrances,
food courts, escalators and corridors of Simon malls across
the States...
("screenery" describes the proliferating screen scene)
7th
May 2006
- The Nitpicking
Nation. THEY are single, gay, straight, biracial, conservative,
liberal and tattooed — and they have as many preferences
for a potential roommate as an online dater has for a potential
lover.
... their postings provide a sociological window
into housing trends and desires across the country...
... discriminatory postings are exceedingly uncommon, and
those few that do reach the site are typically removed quickly
by our users through the flagging system that accompanies
each ad.
... "There is no window," the listing says, "but you have
a full-sized door."
... Democrats are more vocal than Republicans in expressing
a desire not to live with the opposing party, though two
"hip professional guys" found elusive harmony on Capitol
Hill: "One guy is straight, and one is gay. One is a Republican,
and the other is a Democrat," they wrote in a listing for
a third roommate. "We appreciate and welcome diversity."
4th
May 2006
- New Social
Networking Technology Packs a Wallop. The original Wallop
team at Microsoft Research seem to have stumbled on a truth
that's eluded other builders of social networking sites:
most people don't go online simply to socialize. Instead,
they want to find information and build relationships that
will make their offline lives richer, and to help others
do the same. Wallop will attempt to bring together, in one
place, the tools one needs to find groups of friends, publish
and share creations and experiences with those friends,
and track what one's closest friends in the network are
sharing.
18th
March 2006
- The cutting
edge. A Moore's law for razor blades?
18th
March 2006
- Open, but not
as usual. As “open-source” models move beyond software
into other businesses, their limitations are becoming apparent
16th
March 2006
- “Is your cat
infected by a computer virus?“, the paper about writing
a virus for RFID tags, by Melanie Rieback, Bruno Crispo
and Andrew Tanenbaum, which got huge press coverage following
its “press release” yesterday, has just been given a “best
paper for high impact” award.
"A group of European computer researchers have demonstrated
that it is possible to insert a software virus into radio
frequency identification tags, part of a microchip-based
tracking technology in growing use in commercial and security
applications. ..." In other words, " it introduces the possibility
that RFID tags with bad data can introduce a virus into
an RFID reader which could propagate via writable RFID tags.
This prospect may seem unlikely today, but will get much
more plausible as tags with high data capacity become more
common, especially if they include writable data segments."
11th
March 2006
- Hackers go
home. Technological tinkering, or hacking, is not limited
to computers. Cars, cameras and vacuumcleaners can be hacked
too.
11th
March 2006
- Wi-Pie in
the sky? Communications: Cities across America plan
to build municipal Wi-Fi networks to widen access to broadband.
Will they work?
11th
March 2006
- Power to the
people. Iqbal Quadir pioneered wider access to mobile
phones in Bangladesh. Can he do the same for electricity
and clean water?
15th
February 2006
- TechnolyReview: A
Shopping Phone. "Toshiba mobile-phone software will
offer online reviews of products by using bar codes...
mobile-phone technology that searches for product reviews
on up to 100 Web journals, or blogs, in 10 seconds... Just
use the phone's digital camera to snap a photo of the bar
code of a product you're thinking about buying... The bar-code
information is sent wirelessly to a Toshiba server,
which gathers data on blogs from the Internet and analyzes
them, and then sends a reply back to the cell phone.
15th
January 2006
- Has anyone seen my computer? - Stephen Hailes: "In
June this year two ...."
5th
January 2006
- ... "That has prompted some psychologists to ask
if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning
machine. They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw
strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the
way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends
and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation,
and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.
...In research to be published later this year in Psychological
Science, Thomas Griffiths of Brown University in Rhode Island
and Joshua Tenenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
put the idea of a Bayesian brain to a quotidian test.
They found that it passes with flying colours."
Bayes rules. A once-neglected statistical technique may
help to explain how the mind works. The Ecomonist.
[ article - pdf ]
30th
October 2005
- " Constructive criticizers Vs Trashers: constructive
criticizers (genuine conventurers) are genuinely engaged
in the creative process: they identify an idea's problems
AND figure out how to overcome them; trashers are
never satisfied with anybody else's idea and usually devote
all their intellectual energies to finding flaws in an idea,
but do not try at all to find good responses to the objections."
Why Not? B. Nalebuff and I. Ayres. Harvard Business School
Press.
13th
October 2005
- Nice article in TechnolyReview: "Yahoo
Aims To Be Research Powerhouse" "What Prabhakar
has achieved in two and a half months of recruiting is to
attract the top minds in the world in the spaces of search
and social media," says Fayyad. Ongoing research projects
include: (i)Search and retrieval; (ii)Data mining and machine
learning; (iii)User interfaces and user experiences; (iv)Utility
computing; (v)Microeconomics.
5th
August 2004
- "You can almost certainly not remember the time
when you decided to trust your mother! Initial trust bootstrapping
is not such a big issue in many human organisations as stiffening
members against later subversion. If our future is to
be built on huge ad-hoc networks of communicating smart
objects, from swarms of robot insects down to nanites
circulating in our bloodstream, then the mechanisms we
use to command and control them may be much more similar
to societal mechanisms than to existing industrial control
technology". R. Anderson, H. Chan, A. Perrig Key
Infection: Smart Trust for Smart Dust. ICNP 2004.
4th
August 2004
- "The fact
is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh
computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am
firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and
that DOS is Protestant". Umberto Eco. The
Holy War: Mac vs. DOS. Espresso. September 30, 1994.
3rd
August 2004
- "Benjamin era veramente un genio e come tutti
i geni ha individuato la domanda e ha sbagliato la risposta".
Alessandro Baricco in una intervista
a MediaMente.
2nd
August 2004
- "While
almost everybody else was worrying about aspect ratios and
numbers of lines, refresh rates, pixel shape, and interlace
versus progressive scanning, Chiariglione and MPEG
were looking at moving picture coding strictly from the
user's perspective". Chiariglione and the
birth of MPEG. William Sweet. IEEE Spectrum. September
1997.
1st
August 2004
- Der chilenische Gebäudereiniger Juan Burgos, 55, über
eine berühmte Leiche im University College London
"Ein bisschen merkwürdig sind die Engländer ja schon:
Setzen einen vor 172 Jahren verstorbenen Mann mitten in
das Hauptgebäude der Universität. Aber der Mann hat
es nicht anders gewollt. Jeremy Bentham ist sein Name, er
war ein großer Philosoph und geistiger Vater dieser Universität.
In seinem Testament hat Bentham verfügt, dass seine Leiche
konserviert wird. Seither gehört er zum Mobiliar. Ich mag
ihn mittlerweile richtig gern. Manchmal begrüße ich ihn
sogar, wenn ich zum Putzen komme. Früher hat sich immer
viel Staub angesammelt, in der kleinen Box, in der Bentham
sitzt. Mittlerweile ist die Vorderfront verglast. Ein paar
Studenten hatten sich nämlich einen Spaß erlaubt und mit
seinem Kopf Fußball gespielt." Was
war da los, Herr Burgos? - Der Spiegel. July 19,
2004.
Recently
I have moved to 
21st
June 2007 -
"ANYONE
who follows an election campaign too closely will sometimes
get the feeling that politicians think voters are idiots.
A new book (The Myth of the Rational Voter) says they are.
... 
21st
June 2007 -
"
SWEAR WORDS, like everything else, are subject to fashion.
Since the London bombings of 2005, a new obscenity has entered
the lexicon, alongside the anatomical and the blasphemous:
multiculturalism. Once it connoted curry and the
Notting Hill carnival; these days, when applied to British
politicians or their policies, “multiculturalist” is almost
as derogatory a term as “socialist” or “neocon”. Even more
than they agree about most other things, the main political
parties are united in their conviction that multiculturalism
is a perniciously naive idea whose time has gone, or ought
never to have come at all. The shock of hearing a suicide-bomber's
video testament delivered in a Yorkshire accent—hitherto
more associated with cricket commentary than terrorism—spelled
the end for multiculturalism. ... The vogue for promoting
a new, inclusive Britishness is well-intentioned, but probably
doomed. National identities cannot be confected—and besides,
the British already have one. Privacy and freedom are two
of its nicer components, and multiculturalism, for all its
failings, has been a fine expression of it. "
1st
June 2007 -
Habemus Papa! For decades, priests abused children
in parish after parish while their superiors covered it
all up (superiors who did not do so were threatened of excommunication).
Now it turns out the orders for this cover up were enforced
for 20 years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who had apparently
done such a good job that he recently got promoted to be
Pope Benedict XVI). (BBC 
10th
May 2007 -
09th
February 2007 -
From hippies to fanboys. In the sixties, young people
supported fine ideals. Today, they are obsessively supporting
products. 
16th
November 2006 -
Joseph Ratzinger is set to become the first Pope to launch
his own calendar (hopefully not a Pirelli-style one). The
German Shepherd's calendar promises to show the Pontiff
in a daring range of poses. Cardinal Ruini (who has used
lectures, homilies and rare interviews to help squash talk
of Italy following Spain's lead on gay marriage and has
challenged the use of the abortion pill) will follow suit
with a calendar titled '365 days of prohibitions'.
14th
September 2006
- Severgnini's lastest book: La bella figura (
13th
September 2006
- Beautiful in its simplicity: Little Miss Sunshine is the
story of a dysfunctional family from New Mexico. (
5th
January 2006
- ... "That has prompted some psychologists to ask
if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning
machine. They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw
strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the
way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends
and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation,
and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.
...In research to be published later this year in Psychological
Science, Thomas Griffiths of Brown University in Rhode Island
and Joshua Tenenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
put the idea of a Bayesian brain to a quotidian test.
They found that it passes with flying colours."
Bayes rules. A once-neglected statistical technique may
help to explain how the mind works. The Ecomonist.
[
3rd
August 2004
- 
1st
August 2004
- Der chilenische Gebäudereiniger Juan Burgos, 55, über
eine berühmte Leiche im University College London