Partially Attended

O'Reilly are hosting a Collaborative Intelligence foo camp this coming weekend. There is some discussion bubbling out already on crowdvine at a group that has been created for this meeting. One of the participants, Greg Linden, says the following: "Hi, Cass. Absolutely, this is called the pigeonhole problem and can be an issue if personalization is done poorly. Done right, personalization enhances discover by helping you find things you ... (more)

I'm at the netsci08 conference and there is a really delightful talk about the network of papers published in the creationisim/evolution debate. The group looked at key people in the ID debate and people who acted as strong defenders of evolution. One can then make a graph of the links between the groups and intra-groups based on citation and co-citation. Now one area of social science that is pretty interesting in this debate ... (more)

This article in Guardian today is describing a method of restoring colour to some original BBC tv shows whose master tapes were wiped in a purge of the BBC archives. The shows were originally made in colour, then the master tapes were destroyed to make more room in the BBC archive, however black and white copies were made for distribution to countries which didn't have colour TV capability. The black and white versions were on a smaller format (16 mm) ... (more)

I've been thinking about the streamosphere (as coined by Euan Adie), and how I am starting to get dragged down in it again. I'm getting daily notifications from pounce, twitter, friendfeed, linked in (I've been ignoring facebook for ages, facebook, you bite my ass). What I really need is a way to manage my notifications and communications in the way that I now manage my rss feeds, through a bespoke piece of ... (more)

I've been interested for a while now in entity disambiguation, particularly where the e ntities are the names of authors in academic journals. Jian Huang, Seyda Ertekin and C Lee Giles have a paper from 2006 in which they describe the method that they used to diambiguate the CiteSeer data set of over 700,000 article s. The paper is "Efficient Name Disambiguation for Large-Scale Databases". They were able to use this algorithim to disambiguate this data set ... (more)

So, after a little more investigation it is clear that earlier links are broken and new links have the snap preview. Well, I guess I am just going to have to write links as plain text until they get this thing sorted out. tags: vox sucks Read and post comments | Send to a friend ... (more)

Having just gotten engaged and begun to look at the relative costs involved in organising a wedding I woke up this morning with the unavoidable realisation that the need to save for the wedding is going to make purchasing an iPhone, while I have a perfectly normal n95 that works rather well (especially since the broken key unstuck and started working again) untenable. My cunning plan had been ... (more)

I am, one might say, a bit of an RSS junkie. It has been the main source of news and information for me for about the last year or so, but I began to feel as if I was drowning in it. I subscribe to something over 80 feeds, some of which, like techcrunch, spit out over 40 or 50 items a day. A few days away from my feed reader and there could be well over 1000 entries ... (more)

In response to a query that popped up on Friend Feed: I taught myself years ago with O'Reilly's Learning Python. The web book 'Dive into Python' is essential, and the blog posts on respectively 'How to Code like a Pythonista' and 'How to think like a Pythonista' will get you a long way towards familiarizing yourself with common idoms in the language. Read and post comments | Send to a friend ... (more)

I've just signed up for an account with twidox, which is a start up that is collecting shared documents of interest to scientists, I believe. They are in the private beta stage, but had a link on their homepage for requesting an account. I got the following message when I hit the verification link: Registration is taking place! Many thanks for you interest in twidox. Your account has been activated. ... (more)