Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

Archives for 2011

Paper – Improving Human-Computer Interaction by Developing Culture-sensitive Applications based on Common Sense Knowledge

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Today I read a paper titled “Improving Human-Computer Interaction by Developing Culture-sensitive Applications based on Common Sense Knowledge”

The abstract is:
The advent of Web 3.0, claiming for personalization in interactive systems (Lassila & Hendler, 2007), and the need for systems capable of interacting in a more natural way in the future society flooded with computer systems and devices (Harper et al., 2008) show that great advances in HCI should be done.

This chapter presents some contributions of LIA for the future of HCI, defending that using common sense knowledge is a possibility for improving HCI, especially because people assign meaning to their messages based on their common sense and, therefore, the use of this knowledge in developing user interfaces can make them more intuitive to the end-user.

Moreover, as common sense knowledge varies from group to group of people, it can be used for developing applications capable of giving different feedback for different target groups, as the applications presented along this chapter illustrate, allowing, in this way, interface personalization taking into account cultural issues.

For the purpose of using common sense knowledge in the development and design of computer systems, it is necessary to provide an architecture that allows it.

This chapter presents LIAs approaches for common sense knowledge acquisition, representation and use, as well as for natural language processing, contributing with those ones who intent to get into this challenging world to get started.

Read – The Annotated Turing

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Today I finished reading “The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine” by Charles Petzold

Paper – User Experience, Software Interfaces, and The Unconscious

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Today I read a paper titled “User Experience, Software Interfaces, and The Unconscious”

The abstract is:
Ideas about how to increase the unconscious participation in interaction between ‘a human’ and ‘a computer’ are developed in this paper.

Evidence of impact of the unconscious functioning is presented.

The unconscious is characterised as being a responsive, contextual, and autonomous participant of human-computer interaction.

The unconscious participation occurs independently of one’s cognitive and educational levels and, if ignored, leads to learning inefficiencies and compulsive behaviours, illustrations of which are provided.

Three practical approaches to a study of subjective user experience are outlined as follows: (a) tracing operant conditioning effects of software, (b) registering signs of brain activity psychological or information processing meaning of which is well-explored and (c) exploring submodality interfaces.

Implications for improvement of current usability study methods, such as eye-tracking, are generally considered.

Conclusions consider advantages and disadvantages of unconscious-embracing design and remind about a loss of human evolutionary choices if unconscious participation is ignored, complicated or blocked in interaction with computer interfaces and built environment.

Paper – Simulated annealing for weighted polygon packing

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Today I read a paper titled “Simulated annealing for weighted polygon packing”

The abstract is:
In this paper we present a new algorithm for a layout optimization problem: this concerns the placement of weighted polygons inside a circular container, the two objectives being to minimize imbalance of mass and to minimize the radius of the container.

This problem carries real practical significance in industrial applications (such as the design of satellites), as well as being of significant theoretical interest.

Previous work has dealt with circular or rectangular objects, but here we deal with the more realistic case where objects may be represented as polygons and the polygons are allowed to rotate.

We present a solution based on simulated annealing and first test it on instances with known optima.

Our results show that the algorithm obtains container radii that are close to optimal.

We also compare our method with existing algorithms for the (special) rectangular case.

Experimental results show that our approach out-performs these methods in terms of solution quality.

Paper – Cybermatter

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Today I read a paper titled “Cybermatter”

The abstract is:
In this paper we examine several aspects of the impact of Cyberworld onto our Reality conceptions, and their social implications.

Studying – Cartography illustrations

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This month I am studying “Cartography illustrations”

Had a lot of fun creating a bunch of maps in Illustrator last month so I decided to actually take a class in cartograpy for this month.

This is an in-person class of about 8 hours split over two days.

Update: Logged 11 hours total between in-person class time and extra practice.

 

Paper – Clique Graphs and Overlapping Communities

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Today I read a paper titled “Clique Graphs and Overlapping Communities”

The abstract is:
It is shown how to construct a clique graph in which properties of cliques of a fixed order in a given graph are represented by vertices in a weighted graph.

Various definitions and motivations for these weights are given.

The detection of communities or clusters is used to illustrate how a clique graph may be exploited.

In particular a benchmark network is shown where clique graphs find the overlapping communities accurately while vertex partition methods fail.

Paper – Self-organization in social tagging systems

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Today I read a paper titled “Self-organization in social tagging systems”

The abstract is:
Individuals often imitate each other to fall into the typical group, leading to a self-organized state of typical behaviors in a community.

In this paper, we model self-organization in social tagging systems and illustrate the underlying interaction and dynamics.

Specifically, we introduce a model in which individuals adjust their own tagging tendency to imitate the average tagging tendency.

We found that when users are of low confidence, they tend to imitate others and lead to a self-organized state with active tagging.

On the other hand, when users are of high confidence and are stubborn for changes, tagging becomes inactive.

We observe a phase transition at a critical level of user confidence when the system changes from one regime to the other.

The distributions of post length obtained from the model are compared to real data which show good agreements.

Paper – Navigation in non-uniform density social networks

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Today I read a paper titled “Navigation in non-uniform density social networks”

The abstract is:
Recent empirical investigations suggest a universal scaling law for the spatial structure of social networks.

It is found that the probability density distribution of an individual to have a friend at distance $d$ scales as $P(d)\propto d^{-1}$.

Since population density is non-uniform in real social networks, a scale invariant friendship network(SIFN) based on the above empirical law is introduced to capture this phenomenon.

We prove the time complexity of navigation in 2-dimensional SIFN is at most $O(\log^4 n)$.

In the real searching experiment, individuals often resort to extra information besides geography location.

Thus, real-world searching process may be seen as a projection of navigation in a $k$-dimensional SIFN($k>2$).

Therefore, we also discuss the relationship between high and low dimensional SIFN.

Particularly, we prove a 2-dimensional SIFN is the projection of a 3-dimensional SIFN.

As a matter of fact, this result can also be generated to any $k$-dimensional SIFN.

Paper – Agent-based Social Psychology: from Neurocognitive Processes to Social Data

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Today I read a paper titled “Agent-based Social Psychology: from Neurocognitive Processes to Social Data”

The abstract is:
Moral Foundation Theory states that groups of different observers may rely on partially dissimilar sets of moral foundations, thereby reaching different moral valuations.

The use of functional imaging techniques has revealed a spectrum of cognitive styles with respect to the differential handling of novel or corroborating information that is correlated to political affiliation.

Here we characterize the collective behavior of an agent-based model whose inter individual interactions due to information exchange in the form of opinions are in qualitative agreement with experimental neuroscience data.

The main conclusion derived connects the existence of diversity in the cognitive strategies and statistics of the sets of moral foundations and suggests that this connection arises from interactions between agents.

Thus a simple interacting agent model, whose interactions are in accord with empirical data on conformity and learning processes, presents statistical signatures consistent with moral judgment patterns of conservatives and liberals as obtained by survey studies of social psychology.

Paper – Incremental and Transitive Discrete Rotations

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Today I read a paper titled “Incremental and Transitive Discrete Rotations”

The abstract is:
A discrete rotation algorithm can be apprehended as a parametric application $f\_\alpha$ from $\ZZ[i]$ to $\ZZ[i]$, whose resulting permutation “looks like” the map induced by an Euclidean rotation.

For this kind of algorithm, to be incremental means to compute successively all the intermediate rotate d copies of an image for angles in-between 0 and a destination angle.

The di scretized rotation consists in the composition of an Euclidean rotation with a discretization; the aim of this article is to describe an algorithm whic h computes incrementally a discretized rotation.

The suggested method uses o nly integer arithmetic and does not compute any sine nor any cosine.

More pr ecisely, its design relies on the analysis of the discretized rotation as a step function: the precise description of the discontinuities turns to be th e key ingredient that will make the resulting procedure optimally fast and e xact.

A complete description of the incremental rotation process is provided, also this result may be useful in the specification of a consistent set of defin itions for discrete geometry.

Paper – Modular Adaptive System Based on a Multi-Stage Neural Structure for Recognition of 2D Objects of Discontinuous Production

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Today I read a paper titled “Modular Adaptive System Based on a Multi-Stage Neural Structure for Recognition of 2D Objects of Discontinuous Production”

The abstract is:
This is a presentation of a new system for invariant recognition of 2D objects with overlapping classes, that can not be effectively recognized with the traditional methods.

The translation, scale and partial rotation invariant contour object description is transformed in a DCT spectrum space.

The obtained frequency spectrums are decomposed into frequency bands in order to feed different BPG neural nets (NNs).

The NNs are structured in three stages – filtering and full rotation invariance; partial recognition; general classification.

The designed multi-stage BPG Neural Structure shows very good accuracy and flexibility when tested with 2D objects used in the discontinuous production.

The reached speed and the opportunuty for an easy restructuring and reprogramming of the system makes it suitable for application in different applied systems for real time work.

Adwords, VentuRocket and low-ball offers

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Couple of days ago I came across a  blog post about VentuRocket, an alternative way to find a job. This is a neat little startup that is hoping to change how people find jobs and how companies find good employees.

It works very much like Google AdWords, you specify how much you are willing to pay for a particular keyword that advertises your skills to the world, or at least, the world of companies looking for new people.

I thought I would give it a whirl, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Who knows, maybe I will find some cool start-up that is willing to make me an offer I cannot refuse.

Sign-up was easy, and within minutes I’m listing out some of my choicest skills and how much I am willing to pay, AdWords-style, to get those keywords in front of someone who is hiring.

Now I consider myself a world class software developer — who doesn’t consider themselves that, right? – I have 30+ years of commercial product experience, over three-quarters of a billion dollars of shipped entertainment products and commercial websites.

I’m a serial entrepreneur, I’ve personally started five companies, two of which I’ve sold, the others, well, not everyone rolls a natural 20 every time.

I’ve worked for Fortune 50 companies and little two man start-ups.

I’ve lead technical teams of a hundred plus people and managed multiple multi-million dollar projects. I’ve been lowly grunt programmer, project manager, director of business development, director of development, lead engineer, chief technical officer, chief executive officer, managing director and also chief bottle washer.

I’m published.

I’ve got multiple awards.

I teach at colleges.

I speak publicly.

That’s my resume and work experience in a nutshell.

Now VentuRocket is a neat concept, you put down money of how much you think your skills are worth. You get contacted by employers who are willing to spend the same amount of dollars to talk to you.

As they claim on the VentuRocket website, “no resumes!” Awesome! Pretty much every job I’ve ever had that I thought was worth a damn didn’t involve the usual resume submission process.

Now imagine my surprise when I get contacted a few hours later by an interested company, “Holy Hell! This thing actually works!”

A little less than $20 spent and someone is wanting to talk about a job and it hasn’t even been 24 hours since I created my VentuRocket account. I even got to talk to the main decision maker at the hiring company a few hours later after the initial contact.

Awesome and fast!

On VentuRocket’s FAQ they address the question of “What if I am not interested in working for the company?” with the answer “It’s great you can be that picky.”

Unfortunately, I and many other people are going to be that picky but not for the reason VentuRocket thinks.

It just cost me $7 to find out that someone is trying to hire me, and is willing to pay the glorious sum of $30/hr.

Well, see, that’s the problem right there.

I cannot afford to work for $30/hr.

I wouldn’t even consider it.

Why would I work for $30/hr?

That yearly sum won’t even cover my monthly expenditures.

I think I can state with some certainty that this company, which will rename nameless, they meant well after all, will not be the last company to offer such a low rate of pay either. Any look at Cyber Coder or Monster or Craigslist will tell you that.

The fundamental flaw is that it will cost job hunters real money to be offered jobs that are not even in their ballpark price range because there is always someone out there willing to try a low-ball to see whether someone desperate enough will take it.

This is the fundamental flaw in the VentuRocket plan.

I don’t think VentuRocket can fix it with a “job must offer this minimum amount of income before I am willing to talk to the company” either because I have been through actual in-person interviews where they know up front what I am seeking as an hourly compensation, the person on the other side of the desk is eager to hire, but when it comes down to negotiation, the offer opens at less than a quarter of what I am seeking and doesn’t move up very much from there.

I honk for ducks!

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Automated cars with no human controls are a complete non-starter where my future mother-in-law is concerned.

Take away the indicator, the horn and the ability to flash the high beams at other drivers and she will have nothing to do whilst I’m driving her around.

Studying – Creating maps in Illustrator

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This month I am studying “Creating maps in Illustrator”

I love maps. I am looking forward to this class on how to make them in Illustrator.

This seems to be a hybrid class. It has an in-person one-on-one workshop component and then a bunch of video tutorials and exercises to work through. Should be interesting to see how the format plays out.

Update: 27 hours logged between the half-day workshop, the video tutorials, the exercises and the extra work I did.

 

Paper – Relativity as a Consequence of Quantum Entanglement: A Quantum Logic Gate Space Model for the Universe

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Today I read a paper titled “Relativity as a Consequence of Quantum Entanglement: A Quantum Logic Gate Space Model for the Universe”

The abstract is:
Everything in the Universe is assumed to be compromised of pure reversible quantum Toffoli gates, including empty space itself.

Empty space can be configured into photon or matter gates simply by swapping logic input information with these entities through the phenomenon of quantum mechanical entanglement between photons and empty space Toffoli gates.

The essential difference between empty space, photons and matter gates are the logic input values of their respective Toffoli gates.

Empty space is characterized by an inability for the logic inputs to influence the internal logic state of its Toffoli gates since the control lines are set to logic 0.

Photons and matter are characterized by Toffoli gates where the control lines are set to logic 1 enabling their logic inputs to control their internal logic states allowing for their interaction according to the laws of physics associated with reality.

Photons swapping logic input information with empty space results in the propagation of light.

Photons facilitating the swapping of information between matter and empty space gates leads to the laws of motion including relativity.

This model enables the derivation of many physical laws from purely quantum mechanical considerations including the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Lorentz transformations of special relativity, and the relationship between relativistic energy and mass.

The model provides a possible explanation for many physical phenomena including dark matter, anti-matter, and an inflationary Universe.

Paper – A Wavelet-Based Digital Watermarking for Video

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Today I read a paper titled “A Wavelet-Based Digital Watermarking for Video”

The abstract is:
A novel video watermarking system operating in the three dimensional wavelet transform is here presented.

Specifically the video sequence is partitioned into spatio temporal units and the single shots are projected onto the 3D wavelet domain.

First a grayscale watermark image is decomposed into a series of bitplanes that are preprocessed with a random location matrix.

After that the preprocessed bitplanes are adaptively spread spectrum and added in 3D wavelet coefficients of the video shot.

Our video watermarking algorithm is robust against the attacks of frame dropping, averaging and swapping.

Furthermore, it allows blind retrieval of embedded watermark which does not need the original video and the watermark is perceptually invisible.

The algorithm design, evaluation, and experimentation of the proposed scheme are described in this paper.

Paper – Multi-camera Realtime 3D Tracking of Multiple Flying Animals

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Today I read a paper titled “Multi-camera Realtime 3D Tracking of Multiple Flying Animals”

The abstract is:
Automated tracking of animal movement allows analyses that would not otherwise be possible by providing great quantities of data.

The additional capability of tracking in realtime – with minimal latency – opens up the experimental possibility of manipulating sensory feedback, thus allowing detailed explorations of the neural basis for control of behavior.

Here we describe a new system capable of tracking the position and body orientation of animals such as flies and birds.

The system operates with less than 40 msec latency and can track multiple animals simultaneously.

To achieve these results, a multi target tracking algorithm was developed based on the Extended Kalman Filter and the Nearest Neighbor Standard Filter data association algorithm.

In one implementation, an eleven camera system is capable of tracking three flies simultaneously at 60 frames per second using a gigabit network of nine standard Intel Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo computers.

This manuscript presents the rationale and details of the algorithms employed and shows three implementations of the system.

An experiment was performed using the tracking system to measure the effect of visual contrast on the flight speed of Drosophila melanogaster.

At low contrasts, speed is more variable and faster on average than at high contrasts.

Thus, the system is already a useful tool to study the neurobiology and behavior of freely flying animals.

If combined with other techniques, such as `virtual reality’-type computer graphics or genetic manipulation, the tracking system would offer a powerful new way to investigate the biology of flying animals.

Paper – Code Similarity on High Level Programs

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Today I read a paper titled “Code Similarity on High Level Programs”

The abstract is:
This paper presents a new approach for code similarity on High Level programs.

Our technique is based on Fast Dynamic Time Warping, that builds a warp path or points relation with local restrictions.

The source code is represented into Time Series using the operators inside programming languages that makes possible the comparison.

This makes possible subsequence detection that represent similar code instructions.

In contrast with other code similarity algorithms, we do not make features extraction.

The experiments show that two source codes are similar when their respective Time Series are similar.

Paper – A New Clustering Algorithm Based Upon Flocking On Complex Network

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Today I read a paper titled “A New Clustering Algorithm Based Upon Flocking On Complex Network”

The abstract is:
We have proposed a model based upon flocking on a complex network, and then developed two clustering algorithms on the basis of it.

In the algorithms, firstly a \textit{k}-nearest neighbor (knn) graph as a weighted and directed graph is produced among all data points in a dataset each of which is regarded as an agent who can move in space, and then a time-varying complex network is created by adding long-range links for each data point.

Furthermore, each data point is not only acted by its \textit{k} nearest neighbors but also \textit{r} long-range neighbors through fields established in space by them together, so it will take a step along the direction of the vector sum of all fields.

It is more important that these long-range links provides some hidden information for each data point when it moves and at the same time accelerate its speed converging to a center.

As they move in space according to the proposed model, data points that belong to the same class are located at a same position gradually, whereas those that belong to different classes are away from one another.

Consequently, the experimental results have demonstrated that data points in datasets are clustered reasonably and efficiently, and the rates of convergence of clustering algorithms are fast enough.

Moreover, the comparison with other algorithms also provides an indication of the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Paper – On the Efficiency of Strategies for Subdividing Polynomial Triangular Surface Patches

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Today I read a paper titled “On the Efficiency of Strategies for Subdividing Polynomial Triangular Surface Patches”

The abstract is:
In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of various strategies for subdividing polynomial triangular surface patches.

We give a simple algorithm performing a regular subdivision in four calls to the standard de Casteljau algorithm (in its subdivision version).

A naive version uses twelve calls.

We also show that any method for obtaining a regular subdivision using the standard de Casteljau algorithm requires at least 4 calls.

Thus, our method is optimal.

We give another subdivision algorithm using only three calls to the de Casteljau algorithm.

Instead of being regular, the subdivision pattern is diamond-like.

Finally, we present a “spider-like” subdivision scheme producing six subtriangles in four calls to the de Casteljau algorithm.

Paper – Jamming in complex networks with degree correlation

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Today I read a paper titled “Jamming in complex networks with degree correlation”

The abstract is:
We study the effects of the degree-degree correlations on the pressure congestion J when we apply a dynamical process on scale free complex networks using the gradient network approach.

We find that the pressure congestion for disassortative (assortative) networks is lower (bigger) than the one for uncorrelated networks which allow us to affirm that disassortative networks enhance transport through them.

This result agree with the fact that many real world transportation networks naturally evolve to this kind of correlation.

We explain our results showing that for the disassortative case the clusters in the gradient network turn out to be as much elongated as possible, reducing the pressure congestion J and observing the opposite behavior for the assortative case.

Finally we apply our model to real world networks, and the results agree with our theoretical model.

Paper – Predicting relevant empty spots in social interaction

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Today I read a paper titled “Predicting relevant empty spots in social interaction”

The abstract is:
An empty spot refers to an empty hard-to-fill space which can be found in the records of the social interaction, and is the clue to the persons in the underlying social network who do not appear in the records.

This contribution addresses a problem to predict relevant empty spots in social interaction.

Homogeneous and inhomogeneous networks are studied as a model underlying the social interaction.

A heuristic predictor function approach is presented as a new method to address the problem.

Simulation experiment is demonstrated over a homogeneous network.

A test data in the form of baskets is generated from the simulated communication.

Precision to predict the empty spots is calculated to demonstrate the performance of the presented approach.

Paper – Fundamentals of Mathematical Theory of Emotional Robots

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Today I read a paper titled “Fundamentals of Mathematical Theory of Emotional Robots”

The abstract is:
In this book we introduce a mathematically formalized concept of emotion, robot’s education and other psychological parameters of intelligent robots.

We also introduce unitless coefficients characterizing an emotional memory of a robot.

Besides, the effect of a robot’s memory upon its emotional behavior is studied, and theorems defining fellowship and conflicts in groups of robots are proved.

Also unitless parameters describing emotional states of those groups are introduced, and a rule of making alternative (binary) decisions based on emotional selection is given.

We introduce a concept of equivalent educational process for robots and a concept of efficiency coefficient of an educational process, and suggest an algorithm of emotional contacts within a group of robots.

And generally, we present and describe a model of a virtual reality with emotional robots.

The book is meant for mathematical modeling specialists and emotional robot software developers.

The Greatest Story Never Sold

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Pepe looked up from his work, staring thoughtfully at the middle distance.

“I’m telling ya, people don’t write anymore” he stated forcefully, his old voice unwavering. “Was a time when you could read a story and actually make sense of it all.”

“It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most of the time. Now it’s just babble to satisfy the machines.”

He returned to re-arranging bright red, Coca-Cola bottle caps on a small work table in front of him, his old eyes scanning their shiny surfaces for the slightest imperfections, his strangely smooth hands and delicately manicured fingernails expertly flipping over entire rows of caps to ensure no edges had been bent or become misshapen.

“They say everyone has a book in them. Well ain’t that the truth. These days everyone does have a book in them, or three, or four. Time now is you can’t talk to anyone, anywhere without them mentioning their latest fancifully imagined tell-all memoir about a life they never had or their ridiculous fantasy trilogy that mines every popular Westernized myth ever posted on our information super highway.” He snorted derisively at the statement, using the expression to show his distaste for everything that the internet had done to his career.

“Don’t just pour them out, they scratch. How many times do I have to tell you not to do that? Those caps are worth money, worth more than my words. People will pay good money for pristine vintage caps.”

“I only ever had one book in me. Never got to find out if I had more. Oh, I wrote, lots of paid for words, never stopped writing right up until the end. It was the end when it all went wrong. People stopped writing to be read.” Pepe sighed at the memory, pulled out several damaged bottle caps to one side, sliding them silently across the green baize of the work table and continued to sort.

“Did you ever read any of the greats?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Niven, Scalzi, Bear. They were some of my favourites when I was young. Younger, anyway. You can still find them if you look around, though nobody carries them anymore. They just disappeared when people starting writing for themselves.”

“If you can ever find one of theirs, even if it’s illegal, you grab it and you read it.”

“My book? My book had action in it, it was a thriller, very sophisticated, you never knew what was going to happen until the very end. Very important that, in a thriller, keep your readers guessing.”

“Why? Because…. Because! That’s why! You don’t want to reveal what’s going on in your story until its necessary to do so, keeps the reader’s interest. Makes them want to read some more. Makes it a real page turner.”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t know where that expression came from. Page forwarder then.” Pepe sighed exasperatedly at this companion. “Fine, make you want to download the next book.”

“We had editors and proof readers that would make sure the crap stayed out. Most of the time they made sure the crap stayed out anyway.”

“Look, the moment that people could self-publish with ease it began to kill off those kinds of jobs. ‘We don’t need no stinking editors acting as gate-keepers’ they would say. Well, yes, yes you do.”

“Pretty soon we were all acting as editors and proof-readers and who has the time for that? The slush pile growing ever higher. We needed a service where someone could read through the crap, decide what was worth paying attention to, and then tell us what was worth reading.”
More bottle caps. More sorting. Moving to the flat above the pub had its benefits.

“The service? We already had that, it was called the publishing industry. But new writers, always eager to get published, didn’t want those gate keepers. Kept them out of being published is what they would tell you.”

Pepe sat back, wet his lips, the recognizable sign that a long monologue was coming.

“Of course it did, who would want to read their crap! Pretty soon some clever people wrote algorithms that would analyze what had been written, proof read it, edit it, automatically correct it, and then let you publish it to be read. Didn’t matter that you couldn’t write worth shit. The software could fix up your poorly chosen phrases and incorrect word usages. But then people started getting lazy. Lazier than normal I mean. They started writing their words to fit what the machines wanted to see. Writers began gaming the system, making their work match what the machine expected to see, making their work score the highest possible score the machine could give. If your book got a high score by the machine, in the early days, it became an almost instant best seller, even without marketing and promotion. People paid attention to the machines. The brilliant software algorithm was being gamed by the not so brilliant but far more cunning writers. The people in power, the editors, updated the algorithms to prevent the gaming from taking place. The writers adapted to the new algorithms. It didn’t take long. Oh it didn’t happen literally overnight, six months, maybe a year, and now those same bad authors pushing out rubbish were scoring high marks by the algorithms again. Then came the smart adaptive algorithms that could evolve their style to the whims of the market, to pick and choose what was wanted based on a pool of readers and what they were buying. And of course, the writers adapted almost as fast as the software, everyone was looking for an edge. It’s a spiral, its unsustainable, pretty soon everyone who can write has given up and everyone else who wants to write has started composing, and I use that word loosely, ‘composing’ pure drivel to satisfy some adaptive algorithm. And the readers, hah, you blame the writers, but the readers are buying the books. Well, you cannot really call them readers can you? They download and collect thousands of books, more than you can read in a lifetime, on little devices that can store the Library of Congress ten times over.”

“What? Don’t mumble. I hear fine, but mumbling is as bad as bad writing.”

“That was a measurement we had once. A Library of Congress. It was tens of thousands of books and other written works that mattered, all stored in a single place. Now we tote around more information in our hand than an entire generation of people could read or care to read. The readers aren’t reading. They’re collecting. Collecting utterly pure drivel.”

“Here, let me show you what I was working on for the past year. It took me an entire year to write this book. Yes, yes, I know most people do it in a few days at most. What’s wrong with me? Nothing. It took me over ten months to perfect the algorithm, and then the book was written in just a few seconds. I uploaded it to three of the biggest distribution channels in the world just a few hours ago. See these numbers? This book of mine is outselling the closest competitor by a wide margin, almost five to one in some regions.”

“Let me look at the analytics. Well would you look at that, says not only are people buying it, but real people are reading it too. There’s a chap here in Bangor that has gotten up to page 60 already! Now that’s dedication, 60 pages in just a hair under four hours. That’s unheard of in today’s readership.”

“Looks like the automated foreign translations are doing incredibly well. And the machine generated reviews from the New York Times and the Guardian have given me quite a boost in sales too. What’s the book about? How should I know! I never wrote it. Here, let me see what the reviews say: “One of the most powerful exposes on political intrigue in America in this decade.” I guess it’s a political book. Oh, this automated review gave me really good marks, “9.5 out of ten, if Tolkien and George R.R. Martin had a love child book, this would be it.” Um, yes, well, I guess it is sort of a cross-genre fantasy political book. “The first in what will prove to be a deciding trilogy of some of the greatest work this century.” I guess I need to run my application again as apparently I have written the first part of a trilogy.”

“Package those up. Do it carefully. Turn out the table lights when you’re done. I might be a New York Times bestselling author today, but by tomorrow, those vintage bottle caps are still going to be worth more than my words. And will be around longer too. I need to see what my new book is about…”

 

First draft in October 1997.

First published in print March 2009.

Copyright 1997 Justin Lloyd

Paper – The “Unfriending” Problem: The Consequences of Homophily in Friendship Retention for Causal Estimates of Social Influence

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Today I read a paper titled “The “Unfriending” Problem: The Consequences of Homophily in Friendship Retention for Causal Estimates of Social Influence”

The abstract is:
An increasing number of scholars are using longitudinal social network data to try to obtain estimates of peer or social influence effects.

These data may provide additional statistical leverage, but they can introduce new inferential problems.

In particular, while the confounding effects of homophily in friendship formation are widely appreciated, homophily in friendship retention may also confound causal estimates of social influence in longitudinal network data.

We provide evidence for this claim in a Monte Carlo analysis of the statistical model used by Christakis, Fowler, and their colleagues in numerous articles estimating “contagion” effects in social networks.

Our results indicate that homophily in friendship retention induces significant upward bias and decreased coverage levels in the Christakis and Fowler model if there is non-negligible friendship attrition over time.

Paper – Personal applications, based on moveable / resizable elements

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Today I read a paper titled “Personal applications, based on moveable / resizable elements”

The abstract is:
All the modern day applications have the interface, absolutely defined by the developers.

The use of adaptive interface or dynamic layout allows some variations, but even all of them are predetermined on the design stage, because the best reaction (from designer’s view) on any possible users’ movement was hardcoded.

But there is a different world of applications, totally constructed on moveable / resizable elements; such applications turn the full control to the users.

The crucial thing in such programs is that not something but everything must become moveable and resizable.

This article describes the features of such applications and the algorithm behind their design.

Paper – Mining Meaning from Wikipedia

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Today I read a paper titled “Mining Meaning from Wikipedia”

The abstract is:
Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility.

It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks.

This article provides a comprehensive description of this work.

It focuses on research that extracts and makes use of the concepts, relations, facts and descriptions found in Wikipedia, and organizes the work into four broad categories: applying Wikipedia to natural language processing; using it to facilitate information retrieval and information extraction; and as a resource for ontology building.

The article addresses how Wikipedia is being used as is, how it is being improved and adapted, and how it is being combined with other structures to create entirely new resources.

We identify the research groups and individuals involved, and how their work has developed in the last few years.

We provide a comprehensive list of the open-source software they have produced.

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