randomosity

Reuters released the API for their Calais web service last week. I dabbled with it quickly last week, and then was reminded about it earlier today. I took a closer look and come away very impressed and thoughtful about the application of this technology. Calais accepts text and quickly extracts a variety of meta data about your content or as they phrase it : “automatically annotates your content with rich semantic metadata.” Currently it attempts to determine references to:

• Entities: city, company, continent, country, industryTerm, MoneyAmount, Organization, Person, ProvinceOrState, Region and URL;
• Events/Facts: acquisition, alliance, bankruptcy, businessRelation, buybacks, companyEarningsAnnoucement, companyEarningsGuidance, companyInvestments, compantLegalIssues, jointVenture, ManagementChange, merger, personPolitical, personPoliticalPast, PersonProfession, PersonProfessionalPast, stockSplit

This is a rather rich collection of metadata - and they target expanding from here.
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Check out AideRSS - an exciting new tool to help manage information overload. It takes your existing RSS feeds, ranks posts and returns a list weighted by perceived quality.
Wonderful paradigm shifting technologies are supposed to streamline our lives and allow us to rise to new creative heights. The promise of the paperless office was to provide electronic communications to free us from distractions and the minutiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile technologies were to unchain us from the physical offices to let us quickly complete necessary tasks while simultaneously participating in those pasttimes that we want to. You could ’seal the deal’ while watching your son’s soccer game for example. But, for all the promise, we now deal with more information and have to find ways to cope with greater engagement in more tasks than we have ever faced.
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Sorry for the drought of postings of late. Things get in the way.
There’s a unique concept hotel opening at Gatwick in July. Modeled on the compact sleeping spaces that I have always associated with Asia, they provide what they term ‘cabins.’ The Yotel provide upscale, high quality space designed around human dimensions.
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My attention was drawn to a new Fortune Magazine initiative called the Corporate Org Chart Wiki. It bills itself as in early beta and clearly experimental. It claims to seek to ‘tap the collective knowledge’ of the community and to collect and share enterprise organizational charts. Its collaborativity certainly marks it as a wiki. Unfortunately it seems overly open to the abuse that has been associated with many of the public wikis existent today. There’s no authentication, nor any sort of transparent versioning that I can find. Its a nice little flash app and it functions efficiently. It allows a user to draw relationships and add nodes visually and relatively intuitively. It allows an observer to gain a quick appreciation of the organizational structure.
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Experience the thrill! - 7Mb WMV file of the lift off

Went through a wonderful spate of feelings watching the live coverage of Space Explorations’ attempt to launch their Falcon 1 Space Vehicle -demoflight2. As you may or may not know, Space X was one of the winning contractors to provide private space delivery systems. Unlike government sponsored agencies, such as NASA or the ESA, SpaceX was founded by the chap that made a bit of money selling PayPal to eBay. They have failed on a previous launch attempt after a fuel leak and this subsequent launch went as far as 1:02 when they went into a terminal shutdown procedure.
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In my research into nineteenth century Canadian drinking habits, I very quickly learned that the temperance folks had a special enmity for the custom of treating. The crusade against this special social practise informed much of the pamphleteering and petitioning of legislative bodies. You can see the threat: if you have a lot of friends, and the members of group want to maintain the respect of their peers, the rounds just keep on coming. It was often the exuberant nature of the bar that so threatened the well being of the average Canadian. The warm surrounds of the tavern, the good company of friends and the intellectualizing influence of alcohol. The temperance folks figured that they might be able to somehow beat this custom out of Canadian bar behaviour. There are however some customs that simply do perpetuate and certainly treating is one of them.

So lets take that into the internet age…not constrained by the need to be physically present, the Frog Pub chain has introduced TextToPint. You can now purchase a round for your friends online. Its pretty simple. You pay for the round online and are provided with a simple code that can be text’d to your buddies and they can redeem it from their ‘genial host.’ Brilliant. Good for the pub. What will the temperance folks say???

In the process of doing some a quick market survey I was struck by the tendency of some software publishers to coin unique acronyms to establish their technological credentials. To be honest I am not unfamiliar with this process and did my own fair share of this in another life, but I was surprised when seeing it from the other side.

The basic proposition is this: You find yourself in a marketspace with a number of competitors that, in the eyes of your potential customers, basically accomplish the same task. Higher, faster, cheapper, more efficiently are all wonderful things, but are open to direct comparison and the actual business case is much too complex to address using such simple descriptors. So, what to do? The answer is to describe earth-shattering proprietary process using clever acronyms, some of which may actually contain real words, that suggest that you have a scientific basis for differentiation.

The reality is some of these terms and descriptions of process or method are quite valid and simply expressed in a rather abstract way. Others one suspects are actually ‘full of sound and fury, signifying, not much of anything actually real.’ How can one cut through the marketing smoke?

Examples to follow…

I have been of late explores various means for the automated longitudinal matching of census manuscript records. Its a huge challenge and I seem to have spent as much time identifying potential problems as opposed to identifying potential solutions. This is not say I haven’t pondered a couple solutions, but the list of challenges remains much longer and seems to be growing much faster - but, all this means is a more challenging research problem, demanding some innovation in methodology. Fun!

But there is a paradigm shift happening. One that I have been participating in, and certainly embrace, but am seldom always cognizant of. The idea of online collaboration continues to permeate more and more of our everyday tasks. Emerging from specialized research objectives such as the SETI@Home initiative, which sought to use excess personal computing capacity distributed around the world, to other efforts today that take advntage not only of excess processor cycles to the idea of carrying out manual tasks through engagement of the masses in specific tasks.

I started playing with the Google Image identification programme a few months back. If you haven’t tried it, it basically involves matching you with a random online user and you spend 90 seconds typing in words to describe a picture displayed to both users. You quickly type words that come to mind until both users type in the same word, at which point the engine accepts that that word is likely to be a relevant descriptor. The key to participation is that the exercise if fun, fast and you can hop on at anytime and given the global scope, you will quickly be paired with an online user. Moreover, you have the small satisfaction of being part of a bigger exercise of improving the descriptors attached to Google’s image search repository. This little ‘game’ also clearly illustrates one of the downsides of Google’s repository, as these descriptors are determined through a process which renders them simple rather than more specialized. as I ‘play’ I realize that I may recognize the image as a particular movie poster, but also think that my online partner may not catch the subtleties, so I may resort to simply choosing a predominant colour as a suggested word, rather than the name of the movie or say an actor in the movie. As a result I choose the more obvious descriptor word to encourage faster match. The objective in the Google match is to match words for the highest number of images during the 90 second period, which may not achieve the best descriptions. However, the process does deliver some basic descriptions terms that an automated process would miss. The key is making it fun for the participants.

Down this same vein, Kris Inwood pointed me at a census initiative, Automated Genealogy. Working down this same premise of trying to funify a process requiring mass user intervention, at Automated Genealogy, the site is a meeting point for genealogists to signup for and manually enter into a database manuscript census records. The hope here is to engage that vast army of genealogists out there to contribute time to help their fellow genealogists and have access to records which benefit their own research efforts. Collaboration at its best. Additionally they have begun a similar process to match Canadian manuscript census records between the 1901 and 1911 censuses. This is the same task that I have been ruminating over developing an automated process for. At AG they are using automated means to do simple matching and then allowing users to refine the match where human discretion is required. This is a clever approach to a real world research problem. As to progress, the published results indicate that they have transcribed 93.15% of the entire Canadian census for 1911 and 99.99% of the 1901 census with 55.15% of the proofing carried out on this one.

This is a great example of this emerging trend to mobilize individual efforts en masse to assist with processes that in the past would have been carried out by a small group of specialized researchers. Both processes recognize that tasks can be divided and appropriate and different resources applied to varying stages. Mass collaboration on simple tasks made fun!

Now talking about serious luck ;-) From Michele comes this absolutely amazing story, one which I am sure is just making its way to all the major news outlets, but so visually stunning. Apparently a rabbit farmer in Germany has managed to breed a super sized German Gray rabbit. He has further convinced the North Koreans that this is the staple livestock to ‘meat’ their dietary needs. I attach pictures as this has to be seen to be believed. The BBC has picked it up in video as well the Times. The rabbits weigh in at about 7kg and are more than three times the size of the average rabbit offering surprisingly nutritious and fat-reduced meat. Amazing.

According to the first statement on the page, ” Swivel is a place where curious people explore all kinds of data.” Cool! Its is a collaborative space in which people are free to share data and visualizations of that data that they have found interesting. This invites others to play with the same data and see what they can find out. Its an agora of ideas and a sandbox for interested participants to sift through interesting datasets to hone their own perceptions and to contribute to others ongoing research.