general

So, I’m currently making ebooks for people, and it’s come up enough that I thought I should make it generally known that I’m doing so. I’ve been doing this more or less since the mid-90s when I was working part time at a scientific press (which is how I got involved in early HTML standards efforts.)

I’m also doing some other ebook related things, but I thought I’d mention this on my blog because a lot of my friends are authors, writers, and &c, and they’ve been turning around and telling their friends, &c, &c, and it’s become clear I should link up those two efforts. I’m currently extending and redesigning the cuneiverse website as well.

My bag

Originally uploaded by Corprew / Zeitgeist

Examine the contents of this bag.

Rubber Duck Regatta in Cal Anderson Park’s fountain tonight at 7pm. I’ll hold another next week as well.

There are a variety of duck vendors in town for those who wish to ‘prepare.’ Archie McPhee’s come to mind. Check your bathtub for suspects as well.

There will be round robin with ducks, and also heats for any sort of random things that people want to enter into the competition.

The rules:
1. ducks get put into the fountain
2. ducks float downstream through all the rocks and bricks.
3. eventually, a duck reaches the end.

Isn’t that just… ducky.

This will happen again in a couple of weeks. A more exotic web page to follow after we try this and see what kind of web page it needs.

No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
–Animal Farm

The last week or so, obviously, have been somewhat transfigured by pandemic paranoia. Pandemic is ancient greek for either “all peoples” or “freak the fsck out,” it’s hard to tell. This can be easily distinguished from epidemic, which is greek for “upon peoples” and endemic, which is greek for “within peoples.”

Here’s a handy table for disambiguation of various words with demic in them, described in terms of internet memes:

So, with this out of the way, we can proceed upon our merry way. It’s been an exciting week, I have been interested in public health and related things (epidemiology, etc…) for a long time so I’ve been watching the news, websites, twitter, and any other mechanism of public information I could get my hands on.

As for myself, I’m sort of guardedly watching the news (considering I’m traveling soon to Texas, where both US fatalities have occured), but am mostly concerned about the Northern hemisphere flu season. That said, there’ve been a lot of people coughing in this coffee shop today.

This is a test to see if some stuff at celiaciq is working properly. Some of the navigation has yet to be folded into the main site, so things are wonky.

rice rice baby!

home page

books

restaurants

I’ve been doing more stuff with geodata and geoapis recently in support of a project. It’s been fun, as you can see from the previous entry.

One of the things that this project has made me aware of is the importance of caching. A number of the free, public services have occasionally been hit by surges in usage (apparently frequently coming from iPhone apps that weren’t making good use of reuse) and I’m writing an article about this.

In the meantime, largely grasping to consciousness today as I ended up finishing work last night at around 4:30 am. But hey, at least I’m not in a space station that had to be evacuated due to potential debris strike.

For those who haven’t looked at the new whitehouse.gov:

We will publish all non-emergency legislation to the Web site for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Unknown what effect this will have, but welcome to the future again everyone.

Follow-up to the Total Eclipse (of the Heart) event I organized at Cal Anderson park. There’s been some media coverage, which has for the most part been quite nice.

More singers climbed the hill already singing the song, like a weird version of that old “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. And it was an honestly touching event: It’s hard to convey the power of dozens of people repeatedly singing “Forever’s gonna start tonight” all at once, but if you were there and you didn’t feel tingles, you must be a little dead inside.

Yesterday’s coverage from the Stranger’s Music Blog, which was really quite nice. I’m going to have to do a full media and blog roundup at some point, there has been rather a lot.

A blog at the Boston Globe calls my LOLCat Wasteland adaption ‘The Most Astonishing Literary Parody of 2007.’ This makes me insanely happy.

All told, we had 95 people known through the door for the conference, and probably a few more (so, say, an even 100) if you included the people who didn’t bother to register. (It was free for many attendees, and we think a bunch of people, knowing it was free, ghosted the conference.) That’s pretty awesome for a first-time conference in a community which hasn’t really done the unconference thing before.

For a bit of a change of pace, I rewrote TS Eliot’s The Wasteland in LOLCAT: here. I’ve been off busy for a bit doing various things, should have time for blogging again now.

One of the problems I’m running into a bit with the whole cuneiverse whokno.ws project is distinguishing between discussions about ‘movies’ and discussions about particular movies.

You can currently see this in the whokno.ws test category ‘Shrek,’ which pretty much exists to help test the difference between talking about the concept of movies in general and talking about particular movies.

There’s an algorithm in the whokno.ws core that distinguishes between unrelated concepts with similar written representation, distinguishing between, say China the place and China the porcelain. So, say “China (porcelain) exports from China (country)” still gets a little rocky, but “China (porcelain) exports from, say, Ireland” gets figured out pretty handily. Ideally, though, these concepts are automatically distinguished between and only rarely will a document turn up positive for both of them.

Whokno.ws uses — in its non-trivial web dump form — a SKOS concept map linked to large numbers of data files, term lists, and other impedimenta. A lot of this impedimenta is generated automatically, but some of it isn’t. It isn’t an ontology in the most formal sense of the word, although it is going to approach that in september as a source of incredibly accurate information gets mined somewhat to fill out some of the nascent semantic web bits.

The nascent semantic web bits will enable me to accomplish the original goal of whokno.ws pretty easily.

Of course, this would be more impressive if there wasn’t a bunch of bad data in today’s test run, probably causing it to be much… less relevant than usual.

One of the recent changes that I had to make is changing whokno.ws the concept thesaurus, taking it from (roughly) pre-coordinate to (roughly) post-coordinate. The problem here was that the algorithm used to determine group membership wasn’t blending well with the way the principles of divison works. I think this is a problem with statistical techniques generally.

But here’s a simple way to explain it to you: Say I have two sets, and whether you’re in that set is defined as whether an article contains a particular concept. These sets aren’t disjoint, which is to say that there’s an overlap between the two sets. For Whokno.ws, because the modelling of set membership is statistical, doing a computation *combining* the parameters appeared to be the way to go — the ranker would give high scores to things that were about *both* topics. However, it also gives a high score to things that are only about one of the two topics, but *really* about that topic.

What this means is that, say, articles about “bird flu in vietnam” are best found by looking for articles about “bird flu,” and then looking in that set of articles for articles about “vietnam.” This is very interesting to me, because it means that by the proper way to do this is actually by using the “POM” or “BOTD” engines that I’ve already written. Strange.

Saturday, I went to the morning session of BarCampBankSeattle — I wasn’t able to make it to the other sessions due to work and a wedding — and I attended a couple of sessions about various trends in banking and commerce. I didn’t get to have my session on vertical applications for banking, which is a bit of a shame, but there you go.

I went to three different sessions:

Loyalty Economics
The key question in measuring satisfaction for banking applications (and for many things, I suspect) isn’t “how satisfied are you?” but “how likely would you be to recommend this [whatever] to others?” This, followed up with “why?” is apparently a more useful metric for predicting growth than most others, and is called the Net Promoter Score.

The NPS is measured by asking people to answer that question on a scale of 1-10, and then subtracting the percentage of people who answered 0-6 (your “detractors”) from the percentage of people who answered 9-10 (your “promoters.”) Apparently, the highest rated companies on this score are Harley Davidson, Costco, and USAA.

Money as Primary Social Network
This speaker proposed moving beyond single alternative currencies (such as Ithaca Hours, and various forms of local currencies and hour exchanges) to a system where any group that was large enough in a community could issue their own currency.

This is a strange solution to a well-known problem — sometimes using money to mediate exchange of goods and services fails. This can happen when you have a group of people all willing to exchange with eachother, but they don’t actually have enough money around to mediate the exchange. In the system that currently exists, we’d have to work through informal networks to do that exchange, but in this guy’s proposed system, we’d be able to *issue* eachother currency (essentially formalized network IOUs) to mediate the exchange.

This is all true enough, but I’m not sure that the solution he proposed (100s of currencies in a city the size of seattle all done virtually over the network through a terminal at each vendor) fits the scope of the problem well.

FaceBook and Financial Applications
This was a session about whether facebook is a useful tool for financial applications to use. It mostly came out split between arrant tech utopiana and people talking about human factors in a technical frame, which I think was useful but not relevant.

In short, the conclusion was that “like AOL was, facebook is a tiny closed environment, and it’s hard to see what the impulse is for institutions and apps other than ‘getting stuff up there.’” One participant added “I expect open clients such as the iPhone to be a better investment of my development dollars than working heavily inside of facebook.”

So, that’s my participation wrap-up. Also many congratulations to Betsy and Jason whose wedding celebration I went to Saturday night.

well, I guess the Cuneiverse project resumes on Monday.

A while ago, I went to hear Chuck Palahniuk speak at Seattle Town Hall, and while he was speaking he said a lot of really entertaining things, but he also said some really interesting things about communication in general. He said that the basis of humor is surprising people, telling them something that they’re not expecting to hear. In his context ( like say in fight club), there’s usually a stark difference between how people act and how we expect them to in everyday life. In addition to all the other sorts of reactions his work provokes, there’s usually some shockingly funny stuff there.

So, that’s humor. But what about other things. Generally, most of us go through life in a state of continuous partial attention, and people find themselves not ever really focusing on one particular thing, too distracted by one thing or another to ever actually get anything done. One reaction to this is the whole Getting Things Done system for actually doing things. It’s very oriented towards keeping tasks somewhat minutely focused, and scoping tasks in and out as needed. I’m not a big fan of GTD, because it’s designed to solve a different personal organization problem than I usually have,

Claude Shannon described a problem of identifying information in his paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. In it, he describes information as that which you can’t predict from the previously received parts of the message. So, basically, successful time-management people are able to discriminate between the new information (where they focus) and the rest (where they pay continuous partial attention.) You see people attempting to do this (and usually failing) when they’re using their laptops in meetings. Get Things Done is a management strategy for people who are bad at this (and most are.)

When giving information (presenting, teaching, etc…) I try to give people information in a way that allows for this behavior, pushing the main themes much more than the subsidiary and supporting information. This allows the constant partial attention people to blink in and out. However, I also use a lot of humor to get my point across, and to keep people paying attention. Until I was reflecting on Palahniuk’s talk this morning, I didn’t see how this is essentially the same strategy — by confounding the expectations of what people are expecting to hear, you force them to pay closer attention.

This is my annual GPG housekeeping. Some people use the infromation contained in this message to send secure mail to me. If this doesn’t make any sense to you, feel free to ignore it. If it does make sense to you and you can’t verify this, contact me through whatever way seems appropriate. This block contains a revocation of my 5/2006 to 5/2007 key, and then a new 6/2007 to 6/2008 key.

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Hash: SHA1

My new GPG key has signature 5E74 7A06 C111 400A 0DE4  39C9 5B49 2F7C 06D4 119C

Its ID is 5B492F7C06D4119C

Here's an ASCII armored version:

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But I'd really suggest you get it from the keyserver and save yourself the import/export hassles.

Thanks,

Corprew Reed
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Because it’s come up a lot in recent days, a list of ‘popular’ (really ‘prevalent’) cognitive biases from Wikipedia. A lot of what I’ve been doing over the last several days has been wondering why people misestimate things to the extent that they do, and how to help with that. So, it’s been relevant. A good contrast to cognitive bias is ‘field sense,’ which is some people’s ability to sense their surroundings at an apparent supernatural level. While I don’t aspire to the level that Gretzky has this, it’s a useful perception style to try to develop.

This blog is (again) getting up to steam after a couple of weeks of me working on various projects (and writing more elsewhere), and then vacationing and moving. I’ve also collapsed one of my other blog projects into this one.

Since I last wrote here, I’ve been doing a bit of program management for a company based out of Austin, TX (which is not related to the cognitive biases) and it’s been fun and entertaining although it’s a very short duration project.

More on Cruel 2 B Kind (previous post)– a blog post from the Seattle PI by Monica Guzman. The PI has someone covering the tech news who also blogs about what she’s up to when it overlaps with her professional responsibility. Here’s my overlap with her experience.

Then came the finest kill of the day.

Corprew Reed was playing on a team of one. As we came around a building — bam! He got us with a “Happy Bee Day” before we knew what was coming and became the fearless leader we all desperately needed.

I recognized Reed. He had spoken at Ignite Night not too long ago. Actually, I recognized a lot of the players, I realized.

[...]
“OK. We have two options,” Reed announced to the mass. “Either we sit and wait or we take this show down Broadway.”

Moments later we were on Capitol’s Hill main drag wishing everyone we saw a happy Handshake Day. Well, why not?

Since this is my blog, I figured to only include the parts that feature me. You should read the actual article for more information on the fun.

excel:business analyst::microsoft project:pm

analogies

The Hill is Ours!!!

Originally uploaded by dreamline.

Last Saturday, I ‘won’ the first Seattle instance of ‘Cruel 2 B Kind,’ the Benevolent Assassination Game. I’m very interested in ARGs in general, so I was really looking forward to playing this limited time/scope version for a while.

The essence of the game is that players go around complimenting people, and these compliments serve as weaponry against other players. When defeated, players join the team that defeated them. This rapidly causes teams to grow and become larger, and the number of teams to become smaller. To onlookers, it’s an interesting and hopefully pleasant experience, and hopefully a good counterpart to the usual Seattle Chill.

My initial strategy was to stay at the borders of the site while the initial killing spree of compliments took off. I saw S-’s team in disguise a few dozen yards away from me, and sent fake dodgeballs out to attempt to get them to leave their fixed position to attack me (allowing me to sneak up behind them.) After I got bored of that, I went over to the main part of Cal Anderson park.

After a couple minutes in the park spent talking to various people about the game and not finding any players (but hearing large teams off in the distance), I started walking in to the main part of the field. I walked around the game for a while, using ‘internalized ki’ to reduce my normal presence level.

Eventually, it ended up with a team of about 50 walking towards me (one of three left in the game), and so I hid as comically as possible figuring that I would just be captured easily and join them. However, because the team was large and non-focused, they didn’t manage to attack in even a vaguely coordinated fashion, so I defeated them all with a challenge.

Since I was now team leader, we came up with a strategy to keep that from happening to us, which was good because one of the other remaining teams met us again and again (and we tied each time, which was funny.) I enlisted people to watch the front and back of the group, and we went up on broadway greeting people and eventually ended up on teletubby hill.

We faced off against the other group with us on teletubby hill in the park and them about 20 meters away. We regaled them with ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Red Rover,’ and then walked towards them to make the final attack. It was pretty funny, and the picture in this post is from right before the end.

So, I guess I made the single largest capture in the game, and my team was the biggest at the end. This was very amusing. I ‘won’ primarily because I had a huge amount of fun playing the game. I got to lead a group of 60+ people down broadway wishing people ‘Happy Handshake Day,’ and did a lot of fun running around. It also required me to engage leadership skills to keep the team organized as it walked, in a way I usually don’t in Seattle.

As far as ARGs go, this was a great activity to demonstrate the power of games. I went home and read a book on the subject of play. It was all in all an interesting time.

I’m very interested in organizing these sorts of events, and also using them for training and the like. But, it’s great to have the chance to just participate and play in one of them, and I’m very glad that Brady and Jen organized it.

Somewhat randomly, I got contacted by someone I knew from CTY today. CTY is a program for ‘gifted children’ that I went to back when I was a ‘gifted child.’ It was somewhat strange to be contacted by someone I hadn’t talked to in 20 years, but they were doing well.

Morgan Stanley threw down some economic forecasts that make for interesting reading, and probably should be read carefully by anyone in the US who uses money or buys and sells products and/or services.

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but here are our guesses: Job gains have already slowed, and payrolls will continue to decelerate, but not fast enough to undermine consumer wherewithal. The housing recession is far from over, but strong global growth likely will sustain both output and employment. The productivity slowdown is cyclical, but the trend may also have slipped. We still think core inflation has peaked, but inflation risks are rising again. And margin compression implies that profits likely will stall in 2007.

If you live in the rest of the world and not the US, you should probably check out this report instead, which deals with the growing decoupling of the world economies from the US’, as the US begins to lose its unitary global economic superpower status.

On the surface, the latest global trends seem quite consistent with a decoupling scenario. America has slowed but the rest of the world has picked up. In particular, there seems to have been a meaningful shift in the mix of growth in the industrial world. The US economy has downshifted from 3.4% growth over the 2003-05 period to only about 2% over the past year while trend growth in Europe and Japan has accelerated from around 1.5% to 2.5%.

Looks like it is going to be an interesting time, at any rate.  I’m adding this to this blog because I want to give a closer idea of the sorts of things I read from day to day.  Currently, the economic decoupling of the rest of the world from the US Economy is a fascinating topic for reading.  After Breton Woods, most of the world used the US Dollar as the chief medium of financial exchange.  In the last several years, the USD has started to be replaced by the Euro for many things, and the US is no longer the unitary financial superpower.  What this means overall remains to be seen, and many apparently discount this ‘decoupling’ idea, but with the rest of the world’s financial indicators going upwards while the US’ goes down, there may be sufficient pudding for this proof in the next several years.

Technorati Tags: economics, decoupling, euro, economy, useconomy, breton woods, morganstanley, forecasts

One of the other things I’m involved in is I’m on the board of Ignition NW, a local community development nonprofit.

People were concerned that the tone of the Organization’s blog (which I’m responsible for as the secretary of the organization) was too formal, so I’ve started pushing out updates like this. It’s interesting how much the desire for tone varies, and it’s especially interesting when you have an organization like INW whose site is for disparate audiences (members, government agencies, other art and burning man organizations) who are used to seeing different tones.

Managing tone is in some ways as important as being consistently on message. I watch it carefully, because I’m prone to subtle jokes, wordplay, and sarcasm when talking. Anyway, if you’re in the area, you should come to the town hall tonight.

The Ignition NW Board had its spring retreat at Portaplaya’s family’s cabin two weekends ago. The board has two of these a year, where we review the stuff we said we’d do in the last six months, plan for the future, and write things on our knuckles.

The town hall’s tonight, and there will be a lot of information about the stuff we’ve done, and the stuff we’re going to do. There will also be presentations from Burners without Borders and community members talking about what they’re doing. If you join us in the CHAC Lower Level afterwards, you can probably get stuff written on your knuckles too.

The town hall is at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. 1321 12th Avenue Seattle. Starts at 7pm sharpish.

Thanks,

Corprew Reed, Ignition NW Secretary.

Technorati Tags: ignitionnw

I’m currently pushing features out like a madman at gameofthe.net and related projects. There are actually four different applications (’website’) behind gameofthe.net, each of which displays information from amazon and various RSS feeds in different ways (’different slices of the same data.’) Over time, I think this will be an interesting resource for people to work with. I don’t know if this is a ’startup’ in the classical sense¹, but it’s an interesting project for me from an information science/information theoretic point of view.

Stepping back, it’s been interesting how sensitive this project has been to its initial conditions. A few small changes in user sampling has caused things to go down completely different paths than I originally would have expected. I think this is, in many ways, useful as it enabled me to get user feedback early on. However, given a slightly different sample set of initial users, the direction would have been quite different.

¹ In fact it’s not, as I’ve been at startups and this isn’t it.

Technorati Tags: gameofthenet, whoknows

Technorati Tags: gameofthenet, hireme, whoknows, tags

Until then, I will work on the remainder of the new features list for 3.0 as I have time. Right now, I’m busy applying for jobs. Want to hire a corprew? I’ll send you a resume. There’s one online as well, but I have a couple of different ones for different sorts of jobs (as I can be everything from a Web Systems Director to a Tech Lead depending on the size and type of company you have.) Full time or contract.

Technorati Tags: gameofthenet, hireme, tags, whoknows

Someone is sending out spam with a return address of corprew.org that contains windows viruses. we aren’t this host, we don’t run windows, and no one here runs outlook.

Calculated Risk: Tanta: Information is Power, Which is Why You Don’t Get Any

I thought this might make an interesting counterpoint to many idealistic discussions of information.  It discusses how information gets used, misused, and not used at a bank.

I was talking to someone today about my realization that a lot of my exposures to the ideas that are important in Enterprise Content Management and Knowledge Management were actually contained in the books of Robert Anton Wilson, a counter-culture article who recently passed away.

RAW had a lot of insights into how people’s minds worked, and although he’d have probably found this pretty horrifying or hilarious, a lot of insight into how businesses worked as a result.

The prime example of this is the Snafu Principle, the poem associated with I’ll reproduce here:

In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification; And the plan was without form, and the specification was void.

And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof; And they spake unto their leader, saying: “It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer.”

And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader: “It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof.”

And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying: It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it.”

The section head then hurried to his department manager, and informed him thus: “It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”

The department manager carried these words to his general manager, and spoke unto him saying: “It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong.”

And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news unto the Vice President. “It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful.”

The Vice President rushed to the President’s side, and joyously exclaimed: “This powerful new software product will promote the growth of the company!”

And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good.

Don’t know if it was originally his, but his writings were my first exposure to the ideas of people changing how they transferred information in regards to the power dynamics around them. That idea has stuck with me, and as I’ve gotten to work more in the ECM and KM spaces, I’ve gotten to see how a lot of the software written there is actually about attempting to get around how people communicate in regards to power and threats to their own security (siloing, withholding, spinning, eliding.)

Anyway, I’d just thought I’d share that, because I was thinking about RAW and KM at the same time today.

Technorati Tags: robertantonwilson , knowledge management, km, ecm, enterprise content management

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

After looking at the periodic table of visualization methods, a lot of people have commented that the periodic table is, in and of itself, a visualization method.  Ironically, however, it isn’t apparently contained within the periodic table.

The question I have is whether the periodic table is a treemap with all equal size boxes, and ordering determined by the row being the number of electron shells and columns being the number of electrons in the unfilled shells.  The grouping is by similar chemical properies (so, for example, Nobel Gases, Metals, Lathanides/Actinides, and etc…  are all their own groups, and could also be described as the configuration of electrons in the shells.)

There are other possible visualizations of the periodic table that make this sort of thing a lot clearer (and there are basically a crazy number of sites with this information), and the current table seems like more and more of a hack now that there are so many more elements around than when Mendelyev came up with it.  In particular, the way that the Lanthanoid and Actinoids are squeezed into the table seems particularly inelegant.  I can only imagine how strange things will get over time as more elements are ‘discovered’ and physicists begin to get super-heavy elements that are actually stable on non-crazily short time scales…

But, anyway, so, the Mendelyev visualization is almost a treemap, but is it really one?  Enquiring minds want to know.

Technorati Tags: periodic table, visualizations, datavis, electrons

Two recent things of note on this blog.  Surreally, I became the #1 hit for various phrases having to do with ‘auderves’ because I’ve got somewhat of a strange sense of humor, so I created an ‘auderves’ page that points people at ‘hors d’oeuvres’ and gives some recipes.  Seemed like a good plan.

Also, apparently by posting about  Jordan Weisman’s comments at  Dorkbot Seattle, I managed to  help people figure out who was doing the vanishing point game that started yesterday at CES.  Interesting.  Apparently, entry points to this game are in a lot of the vista filled gift/review laptops that microsoft has been sending out to high-end bloggers and others.  It’s pretty hilarious, overall.  I’m hoping to get into making these games in the next several months, at least as a small scale hobby.  So, we’ll see what happens.

Also, I’ve switched from using ecto, which is a blogging program for the macintosh to using a blog program built into firefox.  Ideally, this should help me keep things updated.

And that’s it for updates — I’m going to be updating a lot of the pages (as opposed to blog posts) on corprew.org in the next while, and I’ll probably post again when I’m done with that.  Currently, there’s going to be more ‘review this specification’ stuff coming through the blog for the next while.  I’ve got a couple of different ones on the queue.

Well, we appear to be safely up and running at our new home. I moved corprew.org from the old Static Factory Media hosting machine to a new home at dreamhost. Largely, I needed to install some demo applications I’ve written which require more resources than SFM’s host machine can spare for any particular client (it remains a good machine for general hosting needs and is operated by BizNik, who acquired SFM’s technical assets approximately six months ago and are excellent people whose services I highly recommend.)
SFM was an interesting company, with a lot of promise but plagued by many of the problems that plague startups. It didn’t really consistently keep a single message, but I learned a lot about running a business from it. I wasn’t one of the executives, but had experience running businesses, and therefore advized on various areas.

Over the years I was involved with them, I had to jump in and help with administrating the SFM machine a lot. So, moving my stuff off that machine represents an end for me to my involvement with my role there. It’s strange, and bitttersweet. Because there’s a lot of happiness to being done with particular things even when they have a lot of good memories, which being involved with SFM did.

corprew.org is in the process of moving to a new host.  please excuse any difficulties between 12/29 and 1/3 as stuff gets transferred to a new site (and various new technologies.)

At some point in most people’s lives, they sit down and try to do something. There are a variety of methods of figuring out how people do things, but I thought I’d try and explain this in sort of an information science friendly way. So, here’s a lovely(ish) explanation of why you can’t get anything done (in information science, with pictures and diagrams.)

Obviously, actually doing something presupposes an actor, and generally, this actor is a person. This causes a number of inconveniences, but as of yet there hasn’t been much we can do about it. Occasionally, you get computers doing things on behalf of people and complicated rube goldberg machines with gears, rope, and most of the contents of a decrepit hardware store, but let’s not try to draw one of those. We’ll also ignore robots, because we know how that sort of thing generally turns out.

So, yeah, you have this person sitting around and then suddenly they get a crazy idea that they actually want to do something. If we can’t dissuade them of this, we’ll call it ‘performing an action,’ and put it on the diagram as follows. It’s customary to represent the action as an arrow with subject and object at the head and tail, but here we’re going to make the action a circle and the arrow can be doing. For example, consider bob goes to the store — typically, you’d represent this as subject ‘bob’ action: ‘goes to the store’, but here we’re representing this as subject: ‘bob’ object: ‘goes to store’, with the action ‘does.’

This is called ‘reification,’ and is like ‘objectification’ for verbs. It’s either a complex intellectual process or a handy trick for making diagrams. At any rate, it’s a suitably long word.

You might say okay, that sounds fairly reasonable and non-problematical, but it just gets more complex from there.

Most people have a very complicated view of the world, but despite that manage to get through life without too many unusually horrible things happening to them. There are occasional exceptions to this, like people whose worldview consists entirely of ‘stuff’ or desire for products advertised on television. In general, though, people’s conceptual world consists of cloudy masses of ‘things’ and ‘stuff.’

Every action requires specific pieces of information do to it. For example, getting to work in the morning generally requires one to know where one’s pants (or pants equivalent) is.

People, with the possible exception of astronauts, don’t operate in a vacuum. They generally operate in a context, which can be summed up as ‘all the information that they bring with them to a particular task.’ This context is accumulated throughout people’s entire lives, and can conveniently be thought of as ‘why other people are wrong.’But are people actually wrong, or do they just have different opinions on what makes up reality?

The last part of this is the domain, which reflects that people, even thought they may be doing the same action with the same information and same context, may do something entirely different depending on the ‘field’ they’re working in or trying to serve. To use a somewhat gross simplication, the action “this hamburger should have cheese on it” may have a very different response depending on the environment (sort of restaurant) the person is working in, even if it’s the same person.

To top this off, things like Cognitive Work Analysis divides domain up into about 7 different layers, all of which come together in a big bullseye, but I’m only making so many lines in these damn diagrams. Personally, I think about this as as a massive oversimplification of this and call it the PICAD model, because calling things ‘ACRONYM model’ makes it seem more impressive than a bunch of circles with arrows in a box.

ocean

Originally uploaded by Corprew / Zeitgeist.

After the playa this year, I dropped a friend who’d rolled his vehicle off at his house in Corvallis, and then went out to the Oregon Coast and cruised up it into Washington. This marks the completion of the entire length of 101 for me, although I plan to redo Corvallis -> Bay Area at some point.

While I was out there, took some time to see the major sites and enjoy some of the parks in the area. It was a quick trip, but felt good after the two weeks of heat on the playa.

best slide ever:

Q: car, d1: driver, d2: fish ——> S(d1, q) > S(d2, q)

(where S == Semantic Term Matching)

aside from that, I missed blogging the last talk in Semantics due to the laptop battery dying.

Technorati Tags: informationretrieval, semantics, sigir, sigir2006

Speaker: Thomas Roelleke

About the semantics of models.

Goal: figure out how to make abstract data models and languages for implementing IR models. (BIR / Language Modeling / Poisson Model are the three existing models.)

This was a very strange talk, that explained a paper they’d written. It had many fine visual aids, including dice describing the different sorts of models. The dice had different things on them for the different models.

BIR has a die for each term with one side for each document, the side has a one or zero on it, you judge probability that way.

LM has one die with a side for each word-position in the collection, with what word’s there.

PM is like BIR, but it involves numbers other than one or zero on a side?

But what’s the point, really? This is fairly obvious based on the normal expression of these models… what does this demonstrate:

1. BIR and PM assume the collection to be a set of non-relevant documents, the LM assumes you’re selecting terms from relevant documents.

2. Poisson Bridge: see the paper for this, I dropped out of applied math grad school for a reason.

3. BIR and LM deliver the same ranking if the BIR term weight == LM term weight. This seems unlikely to happen, but is true.

4. TF-IDF. If you apply the poisson bridge to BIR + LM, you get TF-IDF.

This was more an ‘interesting alternate view’ of probability than anything new. It was pretty enjoyable though.

Technorati Tags: semantics, sigir, sigir2006

Semantics: Knowledge and Domain of Clinical Medicine — Jimmy Lin, Dina Demner-Fushman

Their approach is “more than just a ‘bag of words,’” and explores the role of knowledge in specific domains. ‘bag of words’ refers to the classic IR technique of searching for and ranking results on word order, frequency, probability.

Parts of a problem: Problem Structure / User Tasks / Domain knowledge

a framework for clinical reasoning, and an instantiation in the domain of clinical medicine — retrieval of relavant articles in medline. Concept-based retrieval in this sense moves from matching on keywords to matching on ‘little knowledge elements.’

What are these LKEs? Things that are extracted from documents, little chunks of inference, stuff like that. They have built a series of extractors that is described in an AAAI article from the same authors. effectiveness: 90%

Why medical? Evidence-based Medicine is a paradigm that emphasizes evidence based on clinical research. In this framework, the documents describing the research done provides the LKEs.

Then: use a ranking system to go back over, compare to medline’s original and a current state of the art article. See chart in actual talk for comparison.

Result: Knowing the problem structure helps a lot, better than purely statistical methods. This may only be applicable to medical domain, and quality, depth and size of resources for other domains.

Technorati Tags: informationretrieval, semantics, sigir, sigir2006

DSC00583.JPG

Originally uploaded by Corprew / Zeitgeist.

A couple of weeks ago, the Seattle Memorial Temple crew asked if the the NW Rangers could help with the procession from the 2112 house where the bluehouse slayings happened to the place in Seattle Center where the temple was being installed proper. I went out with a couple of other rangers to help them.

It was a fairly emotional day. I know that excitement has been running high during the temple day, but a lot of that was replaced in the installation of the temple with a sense of the purpose that folks were there for. Pictures in the set include various views of the procession, the temple, the Seattle police chief, a bunch of temple/space needle views, and one or two pictures of friends.

It was good to see people out and about, and to see the installed temple. I put up a view of the templee with the space needle in this post I thoguht was nice. The procession was good, a nice 2.5 mile walk. There were a lot of police escorting us, many more than I would have expected for a parade of this size. I suspect that was related to friday’s killings.

It’s weird, I’m largely past the 2112 events– there’s been a huge amount of personal perceptual time since those events, but the story that someone read at the end of the events about someone dying and finding themselves in a dust storm moved me to tears and just thinking of that story still does, probably will for a while.

well, now that i’ve graduated, i suppose i should start posting again here more often.  Daily posts will start again in about a week.  I’m queuing up some content that, while it isn’t going to thrill anyone to death, will at least be somewhat relevant to the topic at hand.

Originally uploaded by msim2006 (a friend of mine from one of the iSchool’s masters programs.)  It’s me (r) talking to Dave Winer (l) about something or other.  Eventually, someone’s going to do a ‘1000 kung fu postures of Corprew’ given the way I move my hands around when I’m talking.

This is a photograph from one of the sessions at Mind Camp 2.0 that I participated a lot in, it was called ‘del.icio.us inside,’ which was a presentation about delicious-type stuff and its possible role in corporate intranets. The main talkers there were dave winer, some ms guys, a msim guy, and myself. It was an interesting time and I learned a lot. Apparently, though, my tendency to ask difficult questions that derail conversations and agendas continues.

The second was called ‘a penguin is a bad bird,’ and was about Lakoff and basic-level categories (I picked the name, which seems to be a generic example of prototype effects.) It was at 9:00 AM in the morning, so I warmed up the largely comatose people who came with a category theory-based comedy routine. I think saying ‘category theory-based comedy routine’ is pretty much admitting you have a problem, but the people who were crazy enough to be there seemed to have enjoyed it. It was originally going to be ‘a penguin is a bad example of a bird,’ but there wasn’t enough space on the schedule.

Overheard (as reported to me):
guy1: “What is this penguin one?”
guy2: “Someone said that guy is awesome but has an weird sense of humor and it would probably be worth going to if it wasn’t sunday morning.”

So, it went pretty well. There was something I wanted to go to at 66% of the sessions, and the other sessions I just hung around and hung out with my friendsnetworked with colleagues. I had a lot of fun, and I’m getting the hang of this self-organizing conference thing. I’m also having better luck at choosing information science topics to talk about in that sort of combo presentation/rap session format. The next mindcamp is scheduled for November and I’m going to try to be more involved in that one — this one had too much grad school work in big piles around it for anything to happen other than just attending and gibbering. Ran into people from Hackers, BM, Stronghold, and various other things.

IMG_0048Originally uploaded by albill. (not me)

I thought it would be interesting to give a presentation about some of the ideas (Prototypes, Basic Categories) in Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things at MindCamp 2.0 in Seattle.

A penguin being a bad example of a bird is sort of a running theme in almost every presentation on prototype categories I’ve run into. It’s clearly a bird, but it doesn’t have all the attributes that most people would think of if you asked them to describe a bird.

Also amusingly, I was clearly in the low-rent porn and love district when I gave this presentation (which was on Sunday morning at 9am.)  I’d like to thank the people who actually came out for it, it was a good time.

I think this quote from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco best sums up my Indexing and Abstracting class and in many ways life generally at the moment.

“I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”

“But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . .”

“What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”

I love this class, incidentally.  Life, also, is fairly beautiful

Over at The Universe of Discourse, MjD has been doing a monthly wrapup of search terms that people have been using to find content on his site. I thought I’d inaugurate that feature here, and do it on a monthly basis. I’m doing it early this month because the next four weeks are going to be an unremitting hell as I attempt to finish grad school. Here goes:

• “Lauren Classification” — this was a relatively frequent search term this month. The Lauren Classification is a method for classifying tumors. I have a blog post about classification that my friend Lauren commented on, so this is an entirely useless search result.
• “verbs” and “vodka” — these were pretty common searches, and I can’t figure out what they were looking for on my site with the possibility that
• “modal auxiliary” and “modal verbs” are other popular search term that describes verb helpers (like ‘must,’ ’should,’ ‘may,’ etc….) and they may have looked at a blog entry I made describing them in John Wilkin’s constructed language.
• “sample stemmers” — I do actually have sample stemmer implementations on my website, so it was presumably a happy day for someone.
• “/tmp/spamd_full.sock” — I actually have an article about card tricks and development metholodology that has the answer to the usual problem contained within, so assuming they looked through my purple prose, they found what they were looking for.
• “pop culture management” — possibly a good idea, but nothing will help you with that here.
• “aboutness” and “pre-coordinate” remain things that people come here a lot for. For a while, my post about “pre-coordinate” vs. “post-coordinate” was the #1-#3 entry on google on the topic, beating out more definitive answers like the spec and various professional societies in my field.

There were a bunch of other search results, but most of them were either to fiction that I’ve written (and which is contained elsewhere on this site) or they were fairly quotidian queries that people more or less got the answers they wanted for.

Since it comes up now and again, Tom Boutell has published instructions on how to host bit torrents from your home PC. This is highly useful if you want to have information downloaded from a server, but want to limit the amount of bandwidth you use. Why this is handy (and actually relevant) will be seen shortly.

Apparently, I still remember obscure things I learned about british calendars, about 14 years after college.I’m fascinated by the measurement of time, especially from when periods had a radically different notion of what time is, how it should be measured, and how time passes than we do today.

An example of this wouldd be a medieval book of days, which described what people did in particular seasons, but also see an old british book of days, for things that happened on particular dates that people in the 1880s felt were important.

So, I upgraded to WP 2.0 today, and everything appears to be going reasonably well so far. I’ve started producing new posts offline, but content production largely will have to wait until I’ve finished writing up a bunch of papers.

I added a secondary blog full of old posts, mostly representative samples posting to usenet.  This is going to be a testbed for a bunch of metadata stuff that I’m going to do over the next several weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

The earlier poster said that he didn’t get Tim Patrick’s talk, so I thought I’d give my own interpretation of it.

There are two different meanings of collaboration in this session, one is collaboration between different groups of people, internal or external, covered by the other speakers. Collaboration in Tim’s sense is also called Read the rest of this entry »

I’d read a bunch of people write in the past how ‘blogging’ a conference enriched their understanding of the material covered in the talks that they went to, so when I saw the ASIS&T conference make a call for bloggers, I signed up. During the conference, my posts will be visible here. After the conference, I’ll post here whether it changed my impressions. I really enjoyed last year’s conference, and I’m looking forward to it.

asist2005

i was cleaning out the old corprew.org blog today, and i figured adding this post here would be amusing, i think a lot of it is still truish.

For the last while, I’ve been astounded that everyone who sets out to create an open source content management system either creates a blogging tool or a slashdot clone. It is really strange, and I don’t know why those are seen as replacements for general-purpose CMSs.

Anyway, I found this discussion of same over at kalsey.com interesting, as it has a more or less current analysis of the issues at hand.

At some point, I hope to go to the information school at the UDub, and I will not contribute to open source content management for obvious reasons, but it is interesting to see where these systems go. My own assumptions about what a content management system is supposed to do is shaped by several years of work and thinking, but it is definitely thinking about different things.