, 1 min read
Wikipedia defines bureaucracy has having the following three properties: well-defined division of labor; consistent patterns of recruitment and stable linear careers; authority and status are differentially distributed among actors. Yet, we should all suspect, at least intuitively, that…
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Bureaucracy is the ennemy of Science, or is it?
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As Sylvie points out, it is difficult to keep track of all of the Web 2.0 applications out there. Maybe it is worth it sharing our favorites? Flickr for finding and sharing pictures. I also like Google’s Picasa Web. I use neither very much. I have used YouTube to share videos however. I think…
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This was unavoidable. Amazon.com will sell DRM-Free MP3 Music. If Amazon.com is good at one thing, that’s selling stuff over the Web. They are the best at it. They have brand recognition. They have excellent technology and solid engineering. They are an innovative, hard-to-catch company. Now?…
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Amazon.com to Launch DRM-Free MP3 Music
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Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning
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Tag-Cloud Drawing: Software Available for Download
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I often rant about the bias we find in modern science toward positive results. That is, the typical research paper in Computer Science is about some new technique that improves over the previous techniques. Not everyone focuses on these sort of papers, but they are the easiest to get accepted and…
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Owen made available the source code related to our recent WWW 2007 workshop paper Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization. It should run fine under MacOS and Linux. Firefox needed. There is a mix of Java code and C code. Take your pick: lemur-tagging-0.0.zip or…
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I generate such as list on a regular basis, but I think it is still useful to rehash it. Here is the the software I use on MacOS currently. Fink, mostly for gnuplot, subversion and tetext. Python. My favorite language. Firefox. Firefox is good enough, but not great. Some applets do not work on…
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I am not exactly sure why this would be needed, but I just want to record here that there are tools such as latexdiff to generate diffed out TeX or LaTeX document. Could be used by a graduate student to show “yes, see, I have worked on my thesis.” Another application I see is “yes, dear…
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Odeo: Turning to Web into a Giant Radio
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I like listening to the radio. I have always been a radio freak. And podcasting is even more interesting. If YouTube is the new TV, then Odeo is the new radio. (Ok, my analogy is flawed. And yes, I use the iTunes store too.)
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So, the conference is over. For me, this was a pretty good experience: I was not sick, I met cool people, some folks appreciated my work, and so on. The conference was well organized: coffee was good, the hotel was well chosen, and so on. For people who know me, this is quite a review since I…
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SIAM Data Mining 2007
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I am currently attending SIAM Data Mining 2007 in Minneapolis. If you are not here, you can still read the papers. They are all online. Interesting facts: Association Rules and frequent itemsets are at an all time low (6% of accepted papers); they keep the conference size the same, but the number…
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This morning, I read a fascinating paper, Evaluations: Hidden Costs, Questionable Benefits, and Superior Alternatives by Bruno S. Frey and Margit Osterloh (October 2006). This paper is concerned with the undesirable effects of the focus on bibliometric indicators (“publish or perish”). In many…
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Andre sent me a link to the projects that will be supported by Google for the Summer of Code. The Collaborative Filtering library Taste will get two developers over the summer. That’s pretty good. I wonder why IBM, which is 100 times richer than Google, never thought of supporting Summer of code…
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The WWW 2007 Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization Workshop has published its list of accepted papers: Learning User Profiles from Tagging Data and Leveraging them for Personal(ized) Information Access by Elke Michlmayr and Steve Cayzer Network Properties of Folksonomies…
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Richard T. Snodgrass, the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Database Systems wrote a beautiful editorial (ACM TODS, Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2007) explaining why they just changed the journal to use a double-blind review system, that is, a review system where authors do not know who reviews…