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Jan Miczaika from the Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management just sent me an email. Their movie (DVD) recommender system hitflip (German site) is using the Slope One collaborative filtering algorithm I presented at SIAM Data Mining 2005. I believe he found useful the technical report I wrote…
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Working too much is bad for your health
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A year or two ago, talking against XML Schema meant talking about what W3C touted as the one thing that would replace DTDs. Now the cat is out of the bag, XML Schema is a complete failure. Among other testimonies, I found the following quote on Cafe con Leche XML: I wrote an XML Schema for SVG…
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PageRank is this well known Google measure of how influential a web page is. Name of the school |PageRank | -------------------------|-------------------------| Stanford University |9 | University of Toronto (I got my B.Sc. and M.Sc. there!) …
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These medical studies are often funny because they state the obvious and seem to have costed a bundle. This being said, proving the obvious can be hard sometimes. Ever tried to prove that a closed loop has an inside and an outside? Camille Jordan thought it was easy and he made the textbooks by…
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Here’s a nice article stating that “Money Can Buy Happiness, Up to a Point.” The gist of it is that you are happy if you are richer than your peers, here’s the consequence of this theory: As incomes in the U.S. tend to rise over the course of our lifetimes, individuals may find themselves…
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How many emails are we sending?
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Earlier, I was interested in how many pages google indexes over time, today, I’m interested in how many emails are sent. After two hours of research, I still haven’t found a reliable source. However, a paper by Jaeyeon Jung and Emil Sit gives me some indication at least. It seems that between…
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I could not find out how many pages Google indexed over time but I found the self-reported numbers of Google’s timeline. Here they are in a convenient table: When |Number of web pages indexed | -------------------------|-------------------------| May-June 2000 …
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To fully use your brain, you have to act
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Will wrote an important blog post where he cites a cool study about the fact that the brain represents objects in different manner depending on contexte (where you are seeing it or trying to grab it): this work remind[s] us once more that (ultimately) the brain did not evolve to enable us to…
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The famous Robin Millette let me know about Coral. Coral lets you create a free mirror of any site of your choosing. It is a research project in peer-to-peer web caching: Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows…
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Searching for Intelligence in Edinburgh
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The Register mentions the IJCAI’05 conference where we happen to have a paper. Last week the top researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) gathered in Edinburgh to analyse the state of their subject. The topics under discussion ranged from robotic exoskeletons, to what tool-using crows can…
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My anglo readers don’t know this but “Daniel Lemire” is a famous name in Montreal. There is another “Daniel Lemire” (beside my father, that is) who is a famous stand-up comedian. He was made famous by some of his nasty quotes. Benzes cites him : (the translation is mine) There is a lot…
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Benzes: J´ai de la misère, ô calvaire…
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Tim Bray follows up on his quest to get people to stop using the slogan Web 2.0 or at least, to agree on what it is. Here’s the gist of it: AJAX? Maybe. Tagsonomies? Not yet. Social networks? Not yet. Blogging and Syndication? Definitely Hmmm… Stephen Downes said so much ealier: RSS is the…
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The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software
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The Heraclitus Project
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There seems to be a flood of paper predicting the golden era of thread-based programming. The key reason is that we seem to have hit a wall in CPU clock speed: we have reached 2GHz in 2001, but can’t seem to get to 4GHz processors in 2005. However, the number of transistors per CPU keeps on…