Brijit Cuts Magazine Pile Down to Bite-Size Pieces
Topic: High Tech Developments
6:58 am EDT, Nov 1, 2007
The magazines stack up, unread, on your coffee table: the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair. You subscribe to them but don't have time to read them.
So there they sit, a glossy pile of guilt.
Where you see wasted money, Jeremy Brosowsky saw a business opportunity.
The Washington publishing entrepreneur recently rolled out Brijit, a Web site that creates 100-word abstracts of articles from dozens of magazines and rates them. Brijit, Brosowsky said, aims to be "everyone's best-read friend."
Similarity search is the problem of preprocessing a database of N objects in such a way that given a query object, one can effectively determine its nearest...
Dartmouth researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.
The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The researchers discovered that Good Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or corrected.
"This finding was both novel and unexpected," says Denise Anthony, associate professor of sociology. "In traditional laboratory studies of collective goods, we don't include Good Samaritans, those people who just happen to pass by and contribute, because those carefully designed studies don't allow for outside actors. It took a real-life situation for us to recognize and appreciate the contributions of Good Samaritans to web content."
The concept of ceremony is introduced as an extension of the concept of network protocol, with human nodes alongside computer nodes and with communication links that include UI, human-to-human communication and transfers of physical objects that carry data. What is out-of-band to a protocol is in-band to a ceremony, and therefore subject to design and analysis using variants of the same mature techniques used for the design and analysis of protocols. Ceremonies include all protocols, as well as all applications with a user interface, all workflow and all provisioning scenarios. A secure ceremony is secure against both normal attacks and social engineering. However, some secure protocols imply ceremonies that cannot be made secure.
In this paper we propose an over-arching namespace that serves to abstract away the Internet's current and obscure naming schemes from users. We argue for users to have personal namespaces that are not concerned with unique naming of resources, but rather focused on aiding user’s interactions with the system. This additional namespace does not replace any of our current (or future) naming systems. Rather, our vision calls for adding a naming layer that provides the ability for users to meaningfully alias network resources (especially their own). These aliases become context-sensitive, provider independent names for objects that can be easily shared among people. In addition, we sketch a strawman system -- called pnames -- in high level terms as a starting point in the discussion of how such a system might be built.
Of course, just because a futurist's value is hard to measure doesn't mean he's worthless. "What's the value of a single strategic insight that allows you to avoid some catastrophic event?" Chermack asks rhetorically. Even barring mega-insights, there's no harm in hiring someone to collect, analyze and deliver information to time-strapped staffers.
If your company gets blindsided anyway, you might want to consider a career as a futurist.
Forbes has a special feature on futurists. See articles by James Surowiecki, along with a bunch of other names you'll recognize: Cory Doctorow, David Brin, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte, Paul Saffo, Stephen Wolfram, and more.
The future of file systems: a Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore
Topic: High Tech Developments
7:05 am EDT, Oct 18, 2007
This month ACM Queue speaks with two Sun engineers who are bringing file systems into the 21st century. Jeff Bonwick, CTO for storage at Sun, led development of the ZFS file system, which is now part of Solaris. Bonwick and his co-lead, Sun Distinguished Engineer Bill Moore, developed ZFS to address many of the problems they saw with current file systems, such as data integrity, scalability, and administration. In our discussion this month, Bonwick and Moore elaborate on these points and what makes ZFS such a big leap forward.
Also in the conversation is Pawel Jakub Dawidek, a FreeBSD developer who successfully ported ZFS to FreeBSD. Ports to other operating systems, such as Mac OS X, Linux, and NetBSD are already under way, and his experience could pave the way for even wider adoption of ZFS.
The Internet has transformed the world by bring information into our lives ubiquitously. Information when delivered in a timely, relevant, and personalized fashion can be powerful. In the past it has been the prerogative of the news industry to educate minds, entertain readers, and empower citizens with information. However, the net has taken on this role more broadly. The union of computing and journalism was both logical and natural and has yielded a plethora of online news channels. Also, it has brought us value added citizen reporting in the form of blogs and recommendation networks. While connecting people to news and to social networks is very important, this is not the only way in which computing can help journalism. Computers can analyze vast news collections in an efficient and scalable way. They can extract information, induce structure, and transform and categorize text in ways that makes news easy to browse and search for both readers and journalists. This is a ripe area of research with tangible social benefits. If we can apply computers to make news more efficient to produce, distribute and absorb and fundamentally more truthful, it can better inform the actions taken by both individuals and nations.
SIENA: Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis
Topic: High Tech Developments
3:45 pm EDT, Oct 14, 2007
SIENA is a program for the statistical analysis of network data, with the focus on social networks.
The main approach used by SIENA for modeling dynamics of network (or of networks and behavior) is an actor-oriented model, in which it is assumed that the social actors who are represented by the nodes in the network play a crucial role in changing their ties to other actors; in the case of associated behavior dynamics, also in changing their behavior. As an alternative, tie-oriented models are also available. All of these models are Markov chain models; such models are more applicable to relations and behavioral variables that can be regarded as states than to relations or behavior that are more adequately regarded as non-enduring events.
