I'm interested in Reality Mining. My application is to capture the behaviour that makes Organisational Memory or is applied by Group Intelligence.

Clay Shirky's talk about the importance of inconvenience in online social network design. Social networks need barriers to entry to get the right motivation or shared vision.

I've moving the focus of my PhD to utility of interruption for a model of the universal inbox. Still has elements of Attention, Reputation and Trust. Here's an interesting article on Time and Attention. More at Inbox Zero.

Transcript of discussion with Ioannidis and Norman Swan.

John P.A. Ioannidis Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Medicine August, 2005;2;8:696-700

Interesting post from Mark Guzdial quoting Alan Kay's thoughts about teaching computing sent to Bill Kerr.

One of the elements of Shannon's general model of communication is noise. Here's an interesting article about Online Noise.

I was looking at an old post 10 ways to keep online dialogue on topic by Alexandra Samuel found after watching the Gruentransfer. I realised the anti-ads were an example Culture Jamming. I've been thinking how to handle virtual workshops for distance education students. Maybe if I could get them to use a Presence tool such as those developed using the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. If a sufficient number of students indicated they were present and I was also "available" I would hold a class. The agenda could be developed like an Unconference or something formal already prepared. The group size necessary to activate the class would be a quorum. Students would be welcome to gather in the virtual space but I would choose to start the class.
Interesting presence ideas

I think I'm interested in Reality Mining. This is a form of Data Mining but analysing people's behaviour in real-time.

I want to get into playing with data like this Six Degrees of Wikipedia. I'll have to soon with the continuation from the Separating the wheat from the chaff: identifying key elements in the NLA .au domain harvest paper.

Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise" by Josh Catone. I downloaded the PDF file in question. No it didn't check the version of Photoshop I'm using. I don't use Photoshop. I use http://gimp.org.

Distributed Reputation Systems for Internet-based Peer-to-Peer Systems and Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks by Jochen Mundinger, Sonja Buchegger and Jean-Yves Le Boudec. Reputation systems are widely and successfully used in centralized scenarios. Will they work equally well, however, in decentralized scenarios such as Internet-based peer-to-peer systems and mobile ad hoc networks?
Jean-Yves Le Boudec Artificial Immune System For Collaborative Spam Filtering
Summary. Artificial immune systems (AIS) use the concepts and algorithms inspired by the
theory of how the human immune system works. This document presents the design and initial
evaluation of a new artificial immune system for collaborative spam filtering1 .
Collaborative spam filtering allows for the detection of not-previously-seen spam content,
by exploiting its bulkiness. Our system uses two novel and possibly advantageous techniques
for collaborative spam filtering. The first novelty is local processing of the signatures cre-
ated from the emails prior to deciding whether and which of the generated signatures will
be exchanged with other collaborating antispam systems. This processing exploits both the
email-content profiles of the users and implicit or explicit feedback from the users, and it uses
customized AIS algorithms. The idea is to enable only good quality and effective information
to be exchanged among collaborating antispam systems. The second novelty is the represen-
tation of the email content, based on a sampling of text strings of a predefined length and at
random positions within the emails, and a use of a custom similarity hashing of these strings.
Compared to the existing signature generation methods, the proposed sampling and hashing
are aimed at achieving a better resistance to spam obfuscation (especially text additions) -
which means better detection of spam, and a better precision in learning spam patterns and
distinguishing them well from normal text - which means lowering the false detection of good
emails.
Initial evaluation of the system shows that it achieves promising detection results under
modest collaboration, and that it is rather resistant under the tested obfuscation. In order to
confirm our understanding of why the system performed well under this initial evaluation,
an additional factorial analysis should be done. Also, evaluation under more sophisticated
spammer models is necessary for a more complete assessment of the system abilities.

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower struck a chord with me. Here's a summary:

No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.

...For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions.

(created by SummaryService 1.2.1)

Just watched a Google video featuring Peter Norvig on large data and analysis. Some amazing results. This and lots of interesting IT posts at http://catonmat.net.

The Nature article by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore & M. E. J. Newman (2008) Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks suggests that many network structures including communities in social networks could be reorganised into hierarchical structures with missing links predictable in the network.

Cory Doctorow discusses Clay Shirky's new book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". See the presentation. given at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The appropriate time, that is, for him. Having turned over his mental life to a computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around by random inputs and requests. Naturally, this can be annoying to people whose messages tend to sift to the bottom. "After four months," Biedalak says sadly, "you sometimes get a reply to some sentence in an email that has been scrambled in his incremental reading process." Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

I'm listening to a Churchill Club event Silicon Valley Fights Back Against the (Information) Monster it Created. 22:15 "I can decide if certain people send me too many messages that they declare important but I'm completely uninterested and I can stop listening to them. I can leave them in my pocket. I can leave them on my computer and walk away." "And your pocket fills up. The problem is we don't know how to contain ourselves and that makes it harder for us to filter given the present state of technology... Lotus Notes gives me a big blue (hehe) dot if the message is addressed to me." 23:41 "Is there an etiquette that gives us permission to say no?" "I have friends that IM me all times of the day and night and if I ignore them that's fine." "You have an expectation that someone will respond in a timely fashion ... dilutes the value of the network." 28:53 "I think there is an implicit social contract in that if I ask you a question and you don't answer that rude. I think generationally that's changing in that the younger you the less that might be the case." "Couple of Harvard Psychiatrists who have using the phrase Acquired Attention Deficit Disorder" 31:02 "Today we generated 60 billion emails five years ago we generated not even 60 billion emails in year ... half the estimated it has cost 1 billion dollars a year in throttled due to information overload"

I've spent some time developing software to analyse an email discussion list. Now Google has come out with their own version.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. - Quentin Crisp 1968 The Naked Civil Servant. I seemed to remember that he also said in an interview that the more important or useful objects in his living area didn't get dust on them. I also remember an office tip about dealing with papers in your in-tray. Put a dot on each one you consider in your in-tray each time you process it. After awhile items you really should do something about will have lots of dots. You should probably archive them.

An interesting product that relies on e-mail identity is Spam Arrest. It filters based on identity and keeps disallowed messages in a mailbox for seven days. Today I got a heap of bounces from all over the place. A spammer has been using my address. Filtering on identity isn't enough.

Sarah Perez Where to Find Open Data on the Web. There is a fair bit of agitation about access to data produced by governments. The Australian Bureau of Statistics used to have a policy of user pays but now makes much of its data freely available via the internet.

In a blog entry by Steve Steinberg Group think he discuss lots of interesting terms like "human terrain mapping", "crowd theory" and "social simulation". He notes Isaac Asimov wrote stories about psychohistory which allowed the prediction of the future of large groups of people in a similar way that the action mass of atoms can be predicted. The co-incident was I watched the Einstien Factor tonight where one of the contestant's special subject was Asimov's Foundation Series. I remember reading a short story along these lines. I've found the Wikipedia article about the story.

The column Just Behave seems to have a collection of interesting results on social networking.

I watched a movie called Vantage Point today. I got a bit of deja vu doing my usual scan of http://popurls.com when found this bloke. I just want to do small corner of what he is thinking about. Just the bit about lots of people in an organisation reacting to email messages.

According to a Wired article by Chris Anderson
the "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads).

All I want to do is unfuzz (model) those two economies and make that academic department.

The Future of Reputation or how your real reputation is affected by online behaviour. The first chapter mentions the "dog poop girl". She failed to clean up after her dog on a train. While her identity is not important her real-life reputation from the online behaviour of others was so influential that she was forced to drop out of university.

Building Trust On-Line: The Design of Reliable Reputation Reporting Mechanisms for Online Trading Communities has some interesting ideas in the "future research" section.

To be able to validate the model I propose I'll need to analysis some user behaviour. I just found an interesting corpus the Enron e-mail database. So if I have trouble with the Ethics committee and the several collections of messages that I have I'll use this and other corpus I've found through theinfo.org. and datawrangling.com.

Deigueiredo and Barr have an interesting paper TrustDavis: A Non-Exploitable Online Reputation System. In their paper they discuss the problem of identity. I propose to avoid the problem by using a developing trust signature sort of similar to the web-of-trust (explanation and analysis) or Friend-of-a-Friend but constructed using an individual's online behaviour (see Goldbeck's paper on Semantic Web Interaction through Trust Network Recommender Systems)

McLuhan proposed the tetrad as an alternative means for discussing the effect of technology on society.

In today's online society geeks' reputations are better than rock stars.

I've just been listening to Seth Goldstein's talk on Applications for the New Attention Economy. He mentions you might devote attention to reading a Thomas Hardy book based on the author's reputation. I might argue that you wouldn't based on the author's reputation for writing books that are difficult to understand. He discusses "attention bonds" and reputation. He compares "mortgage bonds" which made housing more affordable. It is interesting to note the problem with sub-prime lending and housing. Later he asks who do you pay attention to? One answer is people you trust.