The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments ["The Great Good Place", 1989]. But capitalist society has been eroding those third places, and society is left impoverished. In "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam brings forth, in riveting and well-documented detail, reams of evidence that American society has all but lost its third places. Over the last 25 years, Americans "belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often." [2000] For too many people, life consists of going to work, then going home and watching TV. Work-TV-Sleep-Work-TV-Sleep. It seems to me that the phenomenon is far more acute among software developers, especially in places like Silicon Valley and the suburbs of Seattle. People graduate from college, move across country to a new place where they don't know anyone, and end up working 12 hour days basically out of loneliness.

Building Communities with Software

This is a hierarchical organiser for tasks, notes, lists, weblinks and RSS feeds. You can categorise items, drag and drop stuff, share branches of your tree and more.

Treedolist

This site is about a GIMP plugin called Liquid Rescale.

It is a free, open source implementation of the algorithm described in this paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

It aims at resizing pictures non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts.

It supports manual feature selection, and can also be used to remove portions of the picture in a consistent way.

Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin

Our instinct is to fix bugs when we come across them, but sometimes that can cause more harm than good.

Henry Petroski put it best when he said we should beware the lure of success and listen to the lessons of failure. In software security, perhaps we should ignore them both sometimes.

With an example about OpenSSL.

Sit back and do nothing

Recommenders exemplify consumers' growing power to focus on what they like and filter out all else. "This becomes telling when we consider that recommenders increasingly affect not only the music and movies we see but also, through customized newspapers, the news and political views we are exposed to," says Fleder, adding that, as legal scholar Cass Sunstein notes, filtering and focusing on people's interests creates a diverse society with many points of view, but commonality creates one whose members can understand each other.

The above is from a news article about the subject paper:

This paper examines the effect of recommender systems on the diversity of sales. Two anecdotal views exist about such effects. Some believe recommenders help consumers discover new products and thus increase sales diversity. Others believe recommenders only reinforce the popularity of already popular products. This paper is a first attempt to reconcile these seemingly incompatible views. We explore the question in two ways. First, modeling recommender systems analytically allows us to explore their path dependent effects. Second, turning to simulation, we increase the realism of our results by combining choice models with actual implementations of recommender systems. We arrive at four main results. One, some common recommenders lead to a net reduction in average sales diversity. Because common recommenders (e.g., collaborative filters) recommend products based on sales and ratings, they cannot recommend products with limited historical data, even if they would be rated favorably. In turn, these recommenders can create a rich-get-richer effect for popular products and vice-versa for unpopular ones. This finding is often surprising to consumers who express that recommendations have helped them discover new products. In line with this, result two shows it is possible for individual-level diversity to increase but aggregate diversity to decrease; recommenders can push each person to new products, but they often push us toward the same new products. Result three finds that recommenders intensify the effects of chance events on market outcomes. At the product level, recommenders can 'create hits' out of products with early, high sales due to chance alone. At the market level, in individual sample paths it is possible to observe more diversity, even though on average diversity often decreases. Four, we show how basic design choices affect the outcome. Thus, managers can choose recommender designs that are more consistent with their sales or product assortment strategies.

See also here.

Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity

We examine what drives the diffusion of different types of information through email networks and the effects of these diffusion patterns on the productivity and performance of information workers.

In particular, we ask:

What predicts the likelihood of an individual becoming aware of a strategic piece of information, or becoming aware of it sooner?

Do different types of information exhibit different diffusion patterns, and do different characteristics of social structure, relationships and individuals in turn affect access to different kinds of information?

Does better access to information predict an individual's ability to complete projects or generate revenue?

We characterize the social network of a medium sized executive recruiting firm using accounting data on project co-work relationships and ten months of email traffic.

We identify two distinct types of information diffusing over this network - 'event news' and 'discussion topics' - by their usage characteristics, and observe several thousand diffusion processes of each type of information.

We find the diffusion of news, characterized by a spike in communication and rapid, pervasive diffusion through the organization, is influenced by demographic and network factors but not by functional relationships (e.g. prior co-work, authority) or the strength of ties.

In contrast, diffusion of discussion topics, which exhibit shallow diffusion characterized by 'back-and-forth' conversation, is heavily influenced by functional relationships and the strength of ties, as well as demographic and network factors. Discussion topics are more likely to diffuse vertically up and down the organizational hierarchy, across relationships with a prior working history, and across stronger ties, while news is more likely to diffuse laterally as well as vertically, and without regard to the strength or function of relationships.

We also find access to information strongly predicts project completion and revenue generation. The effects are economically significant, with each additional 'word seen' correlated with about $70 of additional revenue generated. Our findings provide some of the first evidence of the economic significance of information diffusion in email networks.

Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks

We investigate the long held but empirically untested assumption that diverse networks drive performance by providing access to novel information.

We build and validate an analytical model of information diversity, develop theory linking network structure to the distribution of novel information among actors and their performance, and test our theory using a unique ten month panel of email communication patterns, message content and performance data from a medium sized executive recruiting firm.

While our theory and results demonstrate that network structures predict performance due to their impact on access to information, we also find important theoretically driven non-linearities in these relationships.

Novel and diverse information are increasing in network size and network diversity, but with diminishing marginal returns. There are also diminishing marginal productivity returns to novel information, consistent with theories of cognitive capacity, bounded rationality, and information overload.

Network diversity contributes to performance even when controlling for the performance effects of novel information, suggesting additional benefits to diverse networks beyond those conferred through information advantage.

Our theory and results suggest subtle nuances in relationships between networks, information and economic performance, and the methods and tools developed are replicable, opening a new line of inquiry into these relationships.

Network Structure & Information Advantage

Developments in information and communication technology and networked computing over the past two decades have given rise to the notion of electronic government, most commonly used to refer to the delivery of public services over the Internet. This volume argues for a shift from the narrow focus of "electronic government" on technology and transactions to the broader perspective of information government--the information flows within the public sector, between the public sector and citizens, and among citizens--as a way to understand the changing nature of governing and governance in an information society.

Contributors discuss the interplay between recent technological developments and evolving information flows, and the implications of different information flows for efficiency, political mobilization, and democratic accountability. The chapters are accompanied by short case studies from around the world, which cover such topics as electronic government efforts in Singapore and Switzerland, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's effort to solicit input on planned regulations over the Internet, and online activism "cyberprotesting" globalization.

A sample chapter, "From Electronic Government to Information Government," is available.

Governance and Information Technology

Securing Very Important Data: Your Own

The newest generation of web services is starting to collect and store far more than just the standard suite of identity data — name and address, phone, Social Security or credit-card numbers — that populates the databases of banks and credit-card processors. They increasingly store information, generated by us, that is directly linked to those virtual identities.

And users are loving them.

...

“We’re in a situation where business holds all the cards."

ONE way to change this, he said, is to make people more like organizations.

To this end, Mr. Neuenschwander and his colleagues have floated the intriguing concept of the L.L.P.: the Limited Liability Persona. This persona would be a legally recognized virtual person in which users could “invest” the financial or identity resources of their choosing.

The Limited Liability Persona

Corporations were invented during the age of exploration, when the risk associated with mounting an expedition to foreign lands was so high that no single person - even a rich noble - could underwrite a venture without running the risk of total financial ruin.

The fundamental ideas underlying the corporation are (1) the notion of a legal person distinct from a "natural person", (2) perpetual lifetime, and (3) limited liability.

Limited liability was critical to the idea of the corporation, because it allowed investors to put a strictly limited amount of money into a risky enterprise without having to take the chance of losing everything.

Law of Relational Risk

It’s a simple law, but I believe leads to important conclusions about how relations are structured:

Contribution to the relationship that is not met proportionally by the other participants is a loss to the contributor.

...

Culture, values, and shared beliefs improve parties’ confidence in assessing risks. This is particularly true where the culture practices reciprocity—possibly through status and reputation—in connection with stated values.

The principles also suggest that single sign-on (SSO) efforts are often misguided. In the interest of promoting relational continuity, the more authenticated connections the better—particularly if the user can parlay these authentications into improved reputation. Recognition of participants based on multiple channels of connectivity would be the method for improving identity assurance rather than on a single login event.

... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Mark Allman is giving a talk on personal namespaces at this conference on 14-15 November 2007.

The Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-VI), to be held in Atlanta, GA, will bring together researchers in the networking systems community to engage in lively discussion of future trends in networking research and technology. The workshop, which is sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM, provides a venue for researchers to present and discuss ideas that have the potential to significantly influence the community in the long term; the goal is to promote community-wide discussions of those ideas.

The workshop will be held at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, which is the new home of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, in the Midtown area of Atlanta.

Personal Namespaces at HotNets-VI 2007