Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Reification is an ontological imperative

Reification is an ontological imperative.

I think that this might be some deep statement about the
semantic web, but it's so deep that I really don't understand it.

Reification in this sense appears to have something to do with
taking abstract concepts and making them concrete, turning
ad hoc heuristics into code, writing down a set of things into
a list so that it can be machine processed and sorted, and
otherwise taking thoughts and ideas and turning them into bits.

Ontological has to do with categories and classification, the
relationships between things, and especially how to create data
structures to represent these. In typical ontologies, the result
is some data structure that looks like a graph, often but not
necessarily a hierarchy, which puts things into buckets based
on their essential features.

If I had to reprocess this through my own experience, it would
have to do with the relationship between writing things down
and sorting through them. Fundamentally, if you are going to
take a long list of abstractions and make them concrete, you
get as a necessary side effect the ability to distinguish between
them and group them into bunches based on attributes that may
not have been explicit in the abstract conceptions of things.

To see someone else having thought through the repercussions of
this, see:

Clay Shirky, "Ontology is overrated". On tagging systems
vs. hierarchical classification, and how it's OK to have tag
collections from a bunch of people make sense of the identity
of things on the net vs. having centralized catalogers do that.

Tim Spalding on Tags: A reading and listening list, from Thing-ology.
Tim has addressed the problem of making explicit people's
information about their own books in a way that makes
collective information visible with LibraryThing, and there's
a lot more to it than just saying "tags rock!".

Ed Yourdon, "The Politics of Metrics", a talk he gave at the Software Best Practices conference in Detroit in April 2008.
When the thing to be reified is the behavior of individuals, and
the ontology that is applied is a measure of quality or success,
there are all manner of messy politics and second-order effects
that come into play.

Brian Kerr channeling Christopher Alexander:

“To seek the timeless way we first must know the quality without a number. There is a central quality which is the rooted criterion of life and the spirit of man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be numbered.”

I write this down (reification), and then Typepad insists that I add a category to it (ontological imperative). It landed in "cyberinfrastructure", this weird bag of side effects of computerizing the world.

slimtimer - observing what you do, so that you can report on it later

I need to be mindful of what I am doing all the time, so that things get done and I don't just wander off into cyberspace. (Cyberspace, remember that, data gloves and VRML and the metaverse and all that? Yeah. There.)

There are two fundamental issues in time tracking for me: accurately logging the start and stop of each task, and determining which bucket of pre-assigned tasks it goes into (or determining that a new bucket needs to be allocated to describe that task).

There is a great interview of Caterina Fake by Tod Maffin on CBC Radio, back when Flickr was in Vancouver BC and new and hip and was Canadian content, and Caterina talked about Flickr's use of tags in this way:

"The way that most systems had worked prior to this sort of tagging system is that you would in advance of knowing what you were going to categorize had to put together a category list and that involves a lot of cognitive overhead that you really don't want to engage in at the time uploading photographs and labeling them makes tagging so successful add tags on the spot you know beach sunset fire sand enter"

it's a rough transcript, but I've listened to this piece dozens of times and the phrase "cognitive overhead" sticks in my brain. I don't know where that piece is online, but it should be....

so, slimtimer. "beach sunset fire sand" then start the timer. never mind that you hadn't planned in advance to go to the beach, you'll account for that later.

Technorati Tags: slimtimer

Yahoo Alumni Association

Quite a few people got laid off at Yahoo today; reports are trickling in from Twitter.

UPDATED: This hit techmeme; adding a few details throughout.

CNET reports 1000 (but "no details").

"We are aligning resources to support our big bets: starting points, must buy, and open," a Yahoo spokeswoman said. That refers to Yahoo's new mission of being the most popular starting place for people on the Internet and the most popular advertising platform, as well as the company's focus on opening up Yahoo's network to third-party publishers.

Asked to confirm the exact number of employees affected or what departments they were in, the spokeswoman said the company was not providing details.

"We're making these targeted reductions in areas of our business that don't support our critical growth initiatives," she said.

Some news coverage:

Yahoo Layoffs Happening Now - Search Engine Land roundup.

Some people by name:

Susan Mernit (Personals)

Well, the law of continuous revolution just gave me a good shove.
Today is my last day at Yahoo and the start of something new.

Patrick Houston (Lifestyles) - via PaidContent

I’m told now the number for the Media Group will be about 50. That’s lower than it probably would have been had other actions like the dismantling of the Brand Universe group (some reassigned, some laid off) not already been taken in the last few months.

Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar

It turns out that this force reduction included [me] Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar - much to our mutual surprise as we each had strong contributor/leadership roles in the company. From here it looks like they might have gone after those with larger salaries given the number of top-quality people we saw get the axe today. Given what we were working on, it was doubly confusing.

Ryan Kuder who was twittering the news.

Holy crap! Just catching up...What an overwhelmingly supportive response to my layoff tweets today. Y'all are awesome. Thank you.

Salim Ismail (Brickhouse) (TechCrunch)

Salim Ismail, who has led Yahoo Brickhouse since since March 2007, left the company today as part of broader layoffs at Yahoo. Layoff packages were being offered, he said, and he left voluntarily.

There's more I'm sure.

Tips for someone starting an alumni association: use free infrastructure, like a mailing list and some kind of directory, to bootstrap yourself. See e.g. the Cisco Alumni Association which now numbers 700+ ex-Cisco employees on a Yahoo group and in LinkedIn.

Predictably, the recruiters have chimed in:

Memo to YHOO Staffers - WatchMOJO

When I started Mojo Supreme, it was because I wanted to hire people and build something big. I no longer have to think about it, I can actually do it. So, if you have left YHOO or simply looking for a gig, check out what we do and drop me a line.

Wanted: Any Yahoo - furrier.org

Consider this an open call for Yahoo entrepreneurs who know social networks and social graph technology: I’m looking for product managers and engineers for my new social advertising startup.

Technorati Tags: alumni, autumn, jobs, layoff, yahoo

Yahoo leadership - nature abhors a vacuum

As GigaOM notes in Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight

Yahoo has a staggering 500 million users. However, it does a rather poor job of monetization. The vision that Yang shared at CES last week (“At Yahoo we want to be the most essential starting point for your life”) can come true if the key activities that we perform online are channeled through its My Yahoo service. And on the financial side, each of those activities needs to be backed up by a monetization model that takes full advantage of the traffic that Yahoo consistently manages to generate and preserve.

If you have an interesting network with a huge number of users and an awful way to monetize the traffic, people divert their attentions to other interesting networks with perhaps less users and much better ways to monetize traffic.  This is particularly true if the gating point for your interest and attention is your ability to fund day-in, day-out, constant attention to a project, and account or a campaign.

Jerry and Sue, you need to show some leadership.  Make it possible for me to make money on your network.  If you can't, I'll systematically divert my attention (and my clients spend) to other networks that perform better than Yahoo.  I'll happily take good ideas from Brad and Caterina and Stuart and Les and Susan and Joshua and put them to work somewhere that will generate good cash flow.  And I'll invite anyone who was laid off or who left Yahoo to join me on the Yahoo alumni network where we can figure out what's next.

Michigan primary results - 2008 presidential primary

2008 Unofficial Michigan Primary Election Results from http://miboecfr.nicusa.com - who are these people, are they really part of michigan.gov ? Something is being outsourced, very badly.

The short story:
Dem: Clinton 55, Uncommitted 40, Kucinich 4
Rep: Romney 39, McCain 30, Huckabee 16, Paul 6, Thompson 4, Guiliani 3

Best counties (overnight approx, data from NY Times, where is my spreadsheet full of numbers?)

Democrats:
Kucinich: 9% in Washtenaw
Clinton: 88% in Houghton, 64% in Macomb, 66% in Chippewa
Uncommitted: 49% in Emmet, 46% in Washtenaw

Republicans:
Romney: 47% Oakland, 44% Leelenau
McCain: 40-42% Van Buren, Crawford, Marquette, Keewenaw, Kalamazoo

SOS - Elections in Michigan SOS stands for "Secretary of State", and the crummy TITLE tag is one reason why this page is hard to find. You'd think, with Google in Ann Arbor, that the state of Michigan would have better search engine friendliness for the state government site.

The best overall politics tracker is memorandum's political web; here's a snapshot of the overnight results at 1am.

Best Michigan 2008 primary map is from the New York Times, showing leaders by county. They picked a weird color choice for the Democrats, leaving Clinton and Uncommitted almost the same color.

The Democratic party pull quotes:

Hillary Clinton won a largely uncontested Michigan Democratic primary - Boston Globe

The Obama Campaign is not participating in the Primary and has not instructed supporters in Michigan whether or how to vote - National Journal, Hotline Blog

Because of the hopelessly messed-up nature of this year's Democratic primary, this is a perfect opportunity for progressives in Michigan to make a statement without taking any risk. And the way to do that is to vote for Dennis Kucinich. Detroit Metro Times editorial

The Republican party pull quotes:

Romney is the son of former Michigan Governor and 1968 presidential candidate George W. Romney (Wikipedia)

Ambassador Weiser, an Ann Arbor resident and chairman of McCain's Michigan campaign, said Lieberman will join McCain at a joint town hall meeting on Election Day (Ann Arbor News)

My personal election story was not as good as it could be. I tried at the last moment to figure out what the status was of the ACLU Michigan Primary Election law lawsuit, where the Green Party and a political consulting firm among others are suing for the right to have access to primary voter lists. If they win, I'm going to buy me a list; even if they don't, you can get voter lists (city of Ann Arbor through the Ann Arbor City Clerk, $5). Hm, time to put that online too.

The technological snafu was voting as though I was a vision-impaired voter and trying to use the AutoMARK machines provided for that purpose. (press release from SOS) The machine marks ballots with audio prompting; it has awful industrial design, a very clumsy ballot shield, the poll workers had not run a real ballot through it all day (just a sample ballot), and when it spat back my ballot a half dozen times they directed me to the hand marked ballot booth rather than spoiling the ballot and starting with a new piece of paper.

The other technological snafu (again from the perspective of the vision impaired) was that the ballot eating machine has no audio or tactile feedback that a ballot was successfully accepted, and even its visual feedback is really bad (a tiny lcd display hard to read in dim light). I had really no way of knowing that the ballot eating machine really took my ballot, not even a reassurance that some bell dinged. Had I had no sight at all, some poll worker could have taken my ballot and disposed of it or remarked it and I'd be no wiser.

Technorati Tags: vote, michigan, election08, bibimbop, primary

Macbook flickery pixels - diagnosing and fixing a screen hardware problem

I have a Macbook, it's partially broken right now.

There is a stripe of pixels top to bottom on the screen, about 1/8 of the screen, running top to bottom that is flickering. It's not what Apple calls a "pixel anomaly", since it's not a single isolated spot; rather, it's a big stripe. It starts at the middle of the screen, and goes to the right from there.

I have Applecare (whew).

I ran TechTools Deluxe, their self-help diagnostic CD; all of the hardware that it tests checks out OK, including the video ram.

I double-checked the video issue at multiple screen resolutions, and it appears that the same screen stripe is fubar independent of resolution, which suggests that it's a problem with the screen itself and not the circuitry driving it. The external monitor looks fine.

@bdimcheff on Twitter noted that he had a similar problem which was "the bottom set of input circuitry on my LCD was falling off".

On hold to Apple Support right now (1030am EST), estimated wait 15min plus. I can still work. "Please continue to hold for the next representative".

I'm not going to fix it myself (did I mention Applecare)? But here are some people who did replace a Mac laptop screen:

Replace MacBook Screen - A Tutorial - Tweak OSX

A client of mine sent me a MacBook with a broken screen. It was his daughter’s computer, and she had accidentally broken the screen. I told him I couldn’t help him repair the screen, and he should look to Apple to make the repair for him. I turns out that the repair is 90% of the cost of the computer itself.

"Clear to me right now that it's a hardware issue; don't have to worry about it because it's a hardware issue. Need to send this one to our Apple Depot and have it fixed; the turnaround time is 5-7 business days. Genius bar doesn't have the parts to be sure and have it in stock, but you can ask them. Box delivered by DHL, just the computer into it; they will deliver it back to us; call them if it's ready for pickup. Box valid for 30 business days; always back up the files."

(sigh)

The next problem is to figure out a transitional period where I get a laptop for 5-7 days to work while my system is in the shop, and enough data and code on that laptop to make it work. Without going into an exhaustive search for rentals, it appears that the value of a machine for one week as a rental is in the $250 range.

Technorati Tags: hardware, mac, macbook, sad-mac

quantitative measures of usability (or, measuring measurability)

I did the Google search for "quantitative measures of usability", to see if that line of thinking would get me something useful. Here's some explorations around those search results, and some reflections on that line of reasoning.

CHI: single usability metric

There is a site "measuring usability" which unsurprisingly ranked high on the list. It introduces the novel concept of a "single measure of usability", which looks like the sum of a bunch of individual metrics all mushed together into a single number. (Sauro and Kindlund, CHI 2005). It measures task completion times, task time, satisfaction and error counts, and is a formalized version of what looks like an original Excel spreadsheet.

From an electronic commerce point of view this is a promising number, but an expensive one to compute - from web server logs you can impute task completion and task times, and maybe get some sense for errors, but satisfaction is hard to grind out of a server log. It comes from the CHI tradition of simple models of user behavior assessed from small data sets. But it's a start.

Patents: quantitative measures of qualitative usability

There's a patent filing (Ed Chi, Christopher Olston) with this initial claim:

A system for determining a quantitative measure of qualitative usability of related Web pages, comprising: stored Web pages that each include at least one hyperlink referencing and proximal cues relating to distal content included in another Web page; a stored information goal identifying a target Web page; an activation network, comprising a directed graph comprising nodes corresponding to the Web pages and arcs corresponding to the hyperlinks, wherein a weight is assigned to each arc to represent a probability of traversal of the corresponding hyperlink based on a relatedness of keywords in the information goal to the proximal cues included in the referenced Web page; and a simulator to evaluate a traversal through the activation network to the node corresponding to the target Web page as a quantitative measure of usability.

There's more (of course, it's a patent, there's a lot more). It appears to be a simulator-driven version of the same PageRank algorithms that Google started out with, except that rather than assuming a random walk through page space it takes into account what Google would call quality scores and what they call "information scent". Chi works at PARC, and this looks like an elaboration of their ScentTrails paper (TOCHI 2003). Note that it's not about task completion as above but more about findability within a search space, and as thus it describes a different problem than above.

More work

I'm sure there's more relevant work in this field, but given that the first words I used to look both unearthed CHI related papers, I'm not sure I have the right language to express the thing I'm really after. so I'll stop...

Brent Hill, Google / Feedburner speaking in Ann Arbor, Dec 4 2007

A talk tonight, 12/4:

Ann Arbor SPARK Hi-Tech Tuesday: Google's Brent Hill Offers Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS

What: Google's Brent Hill presents "Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS"

When & Where: Tuesday, December 4, 2007, 5-7 p.m. at Google, McKinley Towne Center, 5th Floor, 201 S. Division, Ann Arbor

Purpose: As content syndication on the web proliferates, audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented. How do marketers leverage RSS feeds to deliver targeted marketing messages? And how do publishers measure and monetize their audience?

Presenter: Brent Hill is a team manager in the Global Media Solutions division at Google. Previously vice president of Advertising Services at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider that was acquired by Google in 2007, Brent has worked in a variety of interactive marketing, e-commerce, and consumer services businesses. He frequently speaks at industry events on the topic of advertising in syndicated content, and his insights have been published in Advertising Age, Adotas, and DMNews. Brent received a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Bradley University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Information: Registration is free.

More infos: Brent Hill bio, June 2007 interview reported by Online Media Daily, 2006 interview at Internet Marketing Voodoo.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, google, goog, blog, rss, feed

Privacy and security course from Don Blumenthal at the UM School of Information

Don Blumenthal is teaching this course at Michigan in the winter term:

Snippet from a course announcement for a winter class to be
taught by Don Blumenthal at the U-M School of Information:

This course will examine: 1) privacy issues related to the
safeguarding of sensitive information against inadvertent disclosure;
2) policy and societal questions concerning the value of security and
privacy regulations, the real world effects of data breaches on
individuals and businesses, and the balancing of interests among
individuals, government, and enterprises; 3) current and proposed laws
and regulations that govern data security and privacy; 4) self-help
and private sector regulatory efforts; 5) emerging technologies that
may affect security and privacy concerns; and 6) issues related to the
development of enterprise data security processes and programs that
take into account the requirements of all relevant constituencies:
e.g., technical, business, and legal.

Thanks to Brian Kerr for the pointer; more from and about Don Blumenthal on LinkedIn.

Technorati Tags: infosec, privacy, hosting, security, don-blumenthal, via:bkerr

NSFNET reunion, a perspective

I was at the NSFNET 20th reunion last week. Here's some notes after the fact.

I took good notes on URLs mentioned on delicious - look at http://del.icio.us/vielmetti/nsfnet to get the running commentary as I was trying to do it.

History is written by the winners, and thus the NSFNET history was written by the winners - the winners of the 1987 contract to manage it (Merit, MCI and IBM), and those who personally or corporately won out when the backbone was transformed from a research and educational network into a commercial one. The tone was primarily uncritical, self-congratulatory, and celebratory.

History is also written by those who collect and carefully store their papers, and there were several retired academics and network builders who were looking for long term institutional homes for the collections of maps, documents, email, standards and correspondence that they accumulated over the years. Those looking to produce a history would do well to look at collections like the Merit Network Inc. Records 1966-2002 at the Bentley Historical Library, which has not only all of the official publications from the time but also some amazing depth (60 linear feet) of printed correspondence, proposals that did not win, and other parts of the history some forgotten and some simply unspoken.

For a broader context of a part of this time, the Dot Com Archive at Maryland has an (as of yet sealed) collection of dot com era business plans from a failed law firm - again telling the story from the accumulation of documents, and not the selective memory of a few.

Thanks to everyone I saw there (cja, mayabe, dsobeloff, glee, srh) and especially to those who were young enough in 1987 to disagree with the networking orthodoxy of the time (because we had nothing to lose and everything to win).

Technorati Tags: nsfnet, 1987, party-like-its-198x, nethistory, merit, archives, ans, mci, ibm