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.