Fri, Aug 22, 2003
I Blog Like a Girl!
#
I discovered The Gender
Genie from LaughingMeme, which led me to Moshe Koppel and Shlomo Argamon's
algorithm, described in
Nature and the
New York
Times Magazine. The Koppel-Argamon algorithm analyzes the text and
guesses the author's gender. (90)
The algorithm was very simple, so I implemented it as a Perl module --
Lingua::EN::Gender.
I just registered for a PAUSE ID, and will upload Lingua::EN::Gender to CPAN as soon as my registration is confirmed. (91)
See more....
/tech/perl |
Posted at 3:56pm
Thu, Aug 21, 2003
More on Marc Smith and Joshua Tyler
#
Going through some old notes, I found some other references to both
Marc Smith
and Joshua Tyler. Marc wrote about Netscan in, "Tools for Navigating
Large Social Cyberspaces" (Communications of the ACM, April 2002,
pp51-55). Joshua has a paper from when he was at Stanford entitled,
"When Will
You Read And Reply to My Email? A Study of Rhythms and Temporal
Patterns in Email Use." (8Z)
/collaboration |
Posted at 2:27pm
Wed, Aug 20, 2003
HP and Microsoft Study Online Communities
#
Two articles in recent days highlighted social scientists at
Hewlett-Packard (Joshua Tyler) and
Microsoft (Marc Smith). Tyler, 25, studies the rhythms of composing and
answering e-mails, work that he started while pursuing a master's
degree at Stanford. Smith has been studying USENET newsgroups, and
his team at Microsoft has developed software called
Netscan. (8Y)
/collaboration |
Posted at 11:03pm
Mailing List Etiquette and Experimentation
#
I've been an e-mail user for over 10 years, and a mailing list and
USENET user for just about as long, so I have strong beliefs about
proper mailing list etiquette. That puts me in an interesting
position as a participant in the BlueOxenCollaboratories. On the one
hand, these collaboratories are supposed to be shining examples of
high-performance collaboration. On the other hand, they're also
supposed to be testbeds for experimentation and coevolution. (8K)
Sometimes, people use the lists in ways that conflict with my inner
sense of etiquette. However, etiquette is a form of social
constraint, and if we forget why we find these constraints valuable,
our sense of etiquette can impede collaboration. (8L)
The collaboratories are a perfect place to have metadiscussions about
this sort of behavior as it happens, but unfortunately, it's hard for
me to participate or initiate those discussions. Because of my
position at BlueOxenAssociates, my commentary can be perceived as law
rather than opinion, and I don't want that to be the case. (8M)
That, of course, is the reason for this blog -- for me to
WhineInPrivate in public. Which leads me to today's topic. (8N)
See more....
/collaboration/tools |
Posted at 12:16pm
Mon, Aug 18, 2003
purple v0+1i blosxom Plugin Released
#
purple v0+1i is now available, both as part of the
official PurpleWiki
distribution and on its
own. Now you too can have cool purple thingies on your blog! (8J)
/tech/blosxom/purple |
Posted at 11:22pm
PurpleWiki v0.9 Released
#
PurpleWiki v0.9 is now available. ChrisDent's
announcement covers the basics. A few words on how we got here, and
where we're going. (83)
See more....
/tech/purple |
Posted at 1:01pm
Thu, Aug 14, 2003
A Brief History of Purple Numbers
#
A few weeks ago, ChrisDent
posted a brief history of PurpleNumbers, noting, "This is likely full
of errors as the story as I've heard it is incomplete and I was unable
to check some things because the network path to California was busted
while I was writing." His account is pretty good, but there are a few
holes here and there. Most of my clarifications are nitpicky. In
case you, my dear readers, haven't realized it yet, I am very anal. (7W)
See more....
/tech/purple |
Posted at 11:41pm
Revising Blog Entries
#
RossMayfield
observes
that, when there are sudden news events, bloggers continually revise
the same post rather than make new post after new post. He notes that
this is very Wiki-like behavior and is not how blogs are supposed to
be used, citing DaveWiner?'s essay,
"What Makes a
Weblog A Weblog?". (7U)
This all goes back to DannyAyers's
recent question about
dynamic content in Wiki pages, and my
subsequent
response. (7V)
/collaboration/tools |
Posted at 10:43pm
DARPA's Bizarre Failures
#
Today's Los Angeles Times published,
"Army of Extreme Thinkers", which compares DARPA's great successes
with some of its unusual failures: (7O)
But the price of success has been an equally impressive record of scientific kookiness. And now, in a darker era of amorphous terrorist threats, even some of its staunchest supporters are feeling a twinge of anxiety over such projects as the FutureMAP? terrorism market. (7P)
In the 1970s, DARPA studied telepathy and psychokinesis. Another
project was to create a mechanical elephant for traveling through the
jungle. (7Q)
According to the article, 85-90 percent of DARPA's projects fail to
accomplish their stated goals. Nevertheless, PaulSaffo is quoted as
saying that DARPA has "paid back its investment by orders of
magnitude." I would love to see a study that showed this. (7R)
This year, DARPA granted $2.7 billion on more than 200 projects,
including $12 million for creating a brain-machine interface. (7S)
This article makes me think of Donald E. Stokes's Pasteur's
Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Brookings
Institution Press 1997). When I get a chance, I'll pull up my notes
and post a review. (7T)
/articles |
Posted at 10:31pm
Language and Adolescence
#
Penelope Eckert,
Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, gave a talk entitled, "Language
and Adolescence," this afternoon at the
PARC Forum.
Eckert explained the role that adolescent language played in
developing peer social order, and dispelled complaints that teenagers
were hurting language by using it irresponsibly. Her theories are
based on extensive ethnographic studies of junior high school students
in Detroit and the Bay Area. (7E)
I went to this talk for two reasons. First, I couldn't pass up the
opportunity to hear an academic lecture on "jocks" and "burnouts."
Eckert clearly enjoyed emulating various teenage and adult speech
patterns, and garnered many giggles throughout her talk. Second, I'd
like to eventually recruit a sociolinguist to BlueOxenAssociates, and
wanted to get a sense of what such research entails. What do language
patterns reflect about communities? What do we already know, and what
remains to be studied? (7F)
See more....
/talks |
Posted at 7:33pm
Wed, Aug 13, 2003
Groupware Patterns Wiki
#
SebPaquet points to the Groupware
Patterns Wiki. (7B)
I had lunch with RichardGabriel, one of our advisors, on Monday.
Richard is one of the foremost interpreters of the PatternLanguage
concept, and is president of the Hillside
Group, which organizes the Pattern Language of Programs (PLoP)
workshops. One of the things we discussed was how the theory
underlying pattern languages requires many different communities
exploring patterns together. Most existing patterns work seems to
happen in relative isolation. To some extent, Hillside fosters
intercommunity exploration of patterns, but it wants to increase its
activity in this area. (7C)
So does BlueOxenAssociates. If the pattern work we do is to be
effective, it cannot be done in isolation. (7D)
/collaboration/patterns |
Posted at 10:32pm
Purple Metadata in Blosxom
#
PurpleWiki supports document metadata. The metadata is stored at the
beginning of the document using the following syntax: (6Y)
{name value} (6Z)
Currently, PurpleWiki supports the following metadata: (70)
All of this metadata is available to blosxom
via the purple plugin under the $purple namespace. However,
I'd also like to override blosxom's mechanism for determining an
entry's title and date. (77)
See more....
/tech/blosxom/purple |
Posted at 9:56am
Tue, Aug 12, 2003
Purple Numbers and Link Integrity
#
DannyAyers is looking to implement PurpleNumbers in his Wiki, and had
the following question: (66)
But is the expectation that the anchor will always refer to the same information item? (67)
If we're going for coolness, I think this may cause problems in the context of Wikis. Ok, pages come and go but the URI will (usually) always address something sensible - edit new page if the one originally addressed has gone. (68)
But the Purple anchors are pointing to info-snippets that may be modified (no problem - it's still conceptualy the same item) or be deleted (problem). (69)
The expectation is that the information to which an anchor points may
change. This is obviously not ideal. (6A)
In March 2001, I wrote some notes for the Open Hyperdocument System entitled, "Thoughts on Link Integrity." I
had posted those notes to a mailing list, but those archives no longer
exist, so I reproduce those thoughts below. (6B)
See more....
/tech/purple |
Posted at 6:22pm
Tue, Aug 05, 2003
OHS Launch Community: Experimenting with Ontologies
#
My review of The
Semantic Web resulted in some very interesting
comments.
In particular, DannyAyers challenged my point about focusing on
human-understandable ontologies rather than machine-understandable
ones: (5D)
But..."I think it would be significantly cheaper and more valuable to develop better ways of expressing human-understandable ontologies". I agree with your underlying point here, but think it's just the kind of the Semantic Web technologies can help with. The model used is basically very human-friendly - just saying stuff about things, using (triple) statements. (5E)
Two years ago, I set out to test this very claim by creating an ad-hoc
community -- the OHS Launch Community
-- and by making the creation of a shared ontology one of our
primary goals. I'll
describe that experience here, and will address the comments in more
detail later. (For now, see JayFienberg?'s blog entry,
"Semantic web
2003: not unlike TRS-80 in the 1970's." Jay makes a point that I
want to echo in a later post.) (5F)
See more....
/collaboration/experiments |
Posted at 9:52am
Sun, Aug 03, 2003
Do We Need the Semantic Web?
#
The Semantic
Web, by Michael DaConta, Leo Obrst, and
Kevin Smith (Wiley 2003), is a good book. I've worked with Michael a
bit in an editorial context, and I've enjoyed some of his other
writing. He thinks and explains things clearly, and this book is no
exception. I especially enjoyed how The Semantic Web's crisply
defined a number of hairy concepts -- ontologies, taxonomies,
semantics, etc. With some restructuring and condensing -- there is
some technical detail that isn't that important, and the sections on
ontologies could be more cohesive and should come earlier -- this book
could go from good to great. (4V)
My goal here, however, is not to review The Semantic Web. My goal
here is to complain about its premise. (4W)
See more....
/books |
Posted at 12:33am
