Vacuum

Novelty and collective attention / Huberman and Wu

If you wait long enough, it won't be novel, and thus it won't be worthwhile to pay attention to. Thus by incorporating a delay loop into your news consumption you'll miss a bunch of transient spikes of things that are no longer newsworthy.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/45/17599

Novelty and collective attention

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman*

Information Dynamics Laboratory, HewlettPackard Laboratories, Palo
Alto, CA 94304

Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and
approved September 14, 2007 (received for review May 25, 2007)

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age
where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus
of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and
eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the
dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an
interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news
stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model
characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate
that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law,
suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention
fades.

(via dragomir radev)

Technorati Tags: attention, novelty, digg

social media metrics / quality without a number

“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.”

Brian Kerr channeling Chris Alexander for a new century and an old industry.

Technorati Tags: qwan

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...

Bradley Horowitz at U of Michigan campus

Brad Horowitz talked at UMich today. Here are unedited notes....(well, lightly edited).

I was deliciousing links along the way too.

thanks for coming! good to hear the talk.

some notes:

john laird introduces; yahoo speaker series.

bradley grew up in flordia, moved to michigan, "flower king" in livonia
michigan, gymnast in high school. as undergrad in ATL down in the lab
doing all kinds of ramesh jain, terry weymouth, brian shunk (sp??)

from here we lost him to mit media lab to entrepreneur with ramesh,
a bunch of companies, most recently landed at yahoo. vp product strategy.

another indication of us building relationships with yahoo. connections.

--

here to convince you to work with or work at; phd dropout, stay in school kids.
thank my host, incredible day, saw my parents in livonia, overwhelmed by the
work today and its resonance with yahoo. working with us despite us and
around us. a lot to make that easier.

the worst student to stand up in front of you all and profess to have knowledge.

almost failued out a couple of times. came in as CS via LSA and took great books
and history of music and art and not interested in requirements. instead up in
ATL building having fun. took 6 years to get degree and graduate. like george
costanza, scholarship for "rebel bad students", on teh verge of dropping out.

really cool job, now VP Advanced Development Divions, "VP ADD". advanced
in the sense of a scout on the horizon, what's next.

career: looking for first real job, a place to park between startups, fell into yaho0
(after virage...) attitude lasted for a day. quality and caliber of people there. not
a company crowing about how smart they are, "very humble guys". taken by
level of their game. one report, doing multimedia search, image search; launched
video, audio, desktop search. then stumbled across flickr.

helped bring flickr to acquire them. poster child for web 2.0 movement. user-generated
content, rich interfaces with ajax.

runs speaker series for yahoo, brought in Negativland band for IP theft

-------

why do you find the internet depressing? you see what people are
actually doing with this stuff, stupid pet tricks or worse. brings out
the worst in people in a lot of ways.

the antidote is the most interesting photos on flickr.

heuristics that separate the wheat through the chaff, through
the lens of personal

"attention is our most precious asset"

flickr - "lowering the barrier to participation"

flickr compared to computer vision; "computer vision is hard";
man plus machine, not man versus machine.

what makes flickr special?

4. flickr services, api, language bindings, encourage 3d parties
to make flickr bettr.

"this is emergent".

"community and themselves monitor that"

--
Edward Vielmetti +1 734 330 2465

Technorati Tags: yahoo, flickr, upcoming

What does # mean in a twitter post? All about octothorpetags.

Twitter needs tags.
Twitter doesn't have tags right now.
It does have names, and if you precede a name by an @, you can follow that name.

Sometimes you want to share a conversation but not create an ID.
For instance, when San Diego was on fire, the tag #sandiegofire was used in Twitters.
That's a hashtag.
No software uses hashtags right now.
But if you are regular about using it in your posts and people catch on, maybe someone will write code.

The use of #hashtags to encode names of channels is shared by IRC.
For instance, Joi Ito is founder and op at #joiito on IRC, according to his LinkedIn.
Channel names live in the same world as hashtags and tags.

If you were to build software to use hashtags, what might it do?

Wiki + hashtags = autolink to a wiki where the name space was tags.
IRC + hashtags = autoconnect to the channel.
Google Search + hashtags = search for the tag.
Google Adwords + hashtags = display relevant ads for that tag.
Flickr + hashtags = display a page with that Flickr tag
LinkedIn + hashtags = search for someone with that tag in their profile.
Facebook + hashtags = search for someone with that tag in their profile.

So, essentially, a hashtag is a search key into a tag space, marked with a #.
Indeed, you can use any search engine that searches Twitter to search for them.
Or, at least, any search engine that doesn't ignore the punctuation.

For more about hash tags, read Chris Messina (factoryjoe).
His Twitter hashtags for emergency coordination and disaster relief describes #sandiegofire.

Chris didn't think much of #arbcamp, but we'll forgive him for that just this once.
And I don't think much of the name hashtag.

I'm going to call them octothorpetags.

Technorati Tags: arbcamp, hashtags, factoryjoe, octothorpetags

Human Computation: Luis von Ahn at STIET, Thursday Oct 18 2007

STIET Seminar (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions)
Thursday, October 18
4-5:30 pm, 1202 SI North, 1075 Beal Ave.

Human Computation

Luis von Ahn

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Students are invited to a pre-seminar meeting at 3:00 with Luis in 2295 SI North. A background paper can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/research.html More information is available at http://stiet.cms.si.umich.edu/node/141

Seminar Description:

Construction of the Empire State Building: 7 million human-hours. The Panama Canal: 20 million human-hours. Estimated number of human-hours spent playing computer solitaire around the world in one year: billions. A problem with today's computer society? No, an opportunity.

What if this time and energy could be channeled into useful work? What if people could play computer games and accomplish work without even realizing it? What if billions of people collaborated to solve important problems for humanity or generate training data for computers? My work aims at a general paradigm for doing exactly that: utilizing human processing power to solve computational problems in a distributed manner. In particular, I focus on harnessing human time and energy for addressing problems that computers cannot yet solve. Although computers have advanced dramatically in many respects over the last 50 years, they still do not possess the basic conceptual intelligence or perceptual capabilities that most humans take for granted. By leveraging human skills and abilities in a novel way, I want to solve large-scale computational problems and/or collect training data to teach computers many of these human talents. To this end, I treat human brains as processors in a distributed system, each performing a small part of a massive computation. Unlike computer processors, however, humans require an incentive in order to become part of a collective computation. Among other things, I use online games as a means to encourage participation in the process. In this talk, I will describe my work in the area of Human Computation.

Seminar Speaker Bio:

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and was named one of Popular Science Magazine's "Brilliant 10" scientists of 2006. His research interests include encouraging people to do work for free, as well as catching and thwarting cheaters in online environments.

Technorati Tags: luis-von-ahn, stiet, google-talks, human-computation, go-urgently, recaptcha, umich

Weekly 103bees search feedback report for September 27, 2007

These search queries are a sample from 103bees of what's hitting this weblog this week. Your feedback is welcome on any of them. I've linked each of them that are easy to link to - mostly to Arborwiki pages, which will in turn link back to this blog if appropriate; the tag "warning:indirect-selflink" is appropriate.

VACUUM (http://vielmetti.typepad.com)
> detroit tiger stadium
> cafe ambrosia ann arbor
> borders books blogs
> what kind of spider is this? michigan
> what spider in illinois resembles a mushroom
> "address book" fields mac
> michigan northville regional psychiatric hospital sale lawsuits
> pull from webdav into gmail
> prices of pumpkins
> has problem accents request tracker

VACUUM QUESTIONS
> related:alumnac.com/personal_page.php?id=112344
> what kind of spider is this? michigan
> how long does it take to run or walk 1.5 miles
> google-security system residential wireless- how does it work?
> what do pelicans eat

Michigan who? 34-32 - Division I-AA Appalachian State beats #5 Michigan at home

Waiting to see who carries these t-shirts locally - my guess it would be Elmo's if anyone (they carred the Pfired shirts).

Detroit Free Press:

All I do know is that week one is over, Michigan has a lot of work to do, Appalachian State paraphernalia will become the most popular items of dress whenever a team from Ann Arbor goes to visit another school and Lloyd Carr should not be fired.

Beyond Page One - editor's blog for the Watauga Democrat

Miss S.C. Teen USA Caitlin Upton defended her Friday gaffe on the Today Show and announced she would be attending Appalachian State.

Facebook search for "Fire Lloyd Carr":

Group: FIRE Lloyd Carr!!!!
Network: Global
Size: 904 members
Type: Sports & Recreation - College Sports
New: 878 More Members, 7 Board Topics, 142 Wall Posts

Figure eight school bus derby in Flat Rock, June 16 2007

School is out so it's time for school bus racing at the Flat Rock Speedway!

Saturday, June 16 at Flat Rock Speedway features the wildly-popular Marco's Pizza School Bus Figure 8 races! Picture 8 school buses racing on the Figure 8 track.....fender-banging, door-banging action and the occasional flip of a bus as it enters one of the turns. We'll throw in the Toledo ARCA A-1 Auto Parts Factory Stocks and the Michigan Legends Cars for a great night of entertainment! Reserved seating is just $16 per seat and can be obtained in advance by calling the track at 734-782-2480. ALL general admission tickets (approximately a total of 3000) go on sale the day of the race at 4 p.m. when the front gate and ticket office opens. Racing begins at 7 p.m.

Video of this event!

Here's a photo from Jose of the fun a couple of years ago watching school buses flip over and smash into each other.

Flat Rock is down river south of the airport.

To give you some idea of what this is all about, here's a clip from a race at the Rockford Speedway:

Technorati Tags: crazy, figure-eight, flatrock, racing, schoolbus, schools-out-for-the-summer

Seasonal trends in search patterns

Google Trends is fun. Compare this summer activity:

poison ivy

with this winter activity:

icicle

Technorati Tags: google, googletrends, poison-ivy, icicle