There are tons of articles that have been written about the impact of e-mail, IM, text messaging and the link on communication, but this is the first article that I’ve read that discusses their impact on the scientific community [via A&L Daily]. Besides claiming that scientists communicate more informally using the internet than when written letters were the most common form of communication – a non-controversial claim – it looks at the historical impact of not having a tangible record of scientsts’ communications. Analysis of conversation through letters has often been used to trace the path of ideas and ascertain scientists’ original insights and though processes as compared to simply their published final product. It seems possible that this might have implications on patent cases or determination of scholarly credit as well. It’s certainly the case that e-mail can be saved, but I think that most people delete messages or don’t bother maintaining old archives as they move from account to account as they change jobs. Given that one can’t really be sure what communications might be interesting in the future, it argues for more care being taken in electronic archival in general.
That evil textile monopoly….
Via Boing Boing, this article draws a pretty awesome analogy between the RIAA and 17th century French button-makers who worked to block individual innovation to protect their business interests. The quote that is getting passed around the most on this topic as the demand by button-makers to be able to search people’s homes to make sure that they were not using buttons made from outside the guild. Note that the analogy does not (from what I see at least) argue that individuals should be able to rampantly appropriate others’ ideas without due credit and compensation, or argue for the theft of buttons because of the outrageous behavior of the button-makers guild….
Automated Grading
It’s just a short little blurb, but report is that starting this year the MCATs are going to be graded automatically using an artificial intelligence system, rather than human graders. The MCAT, like the GRE, moved to a computerized format recently to allow more frequent administration. The essay section, though, was graded in much the same way with multiple readers scoring the writing samples and a degree of consensus being required for the final score. The claim is that the AI system is more consistent than human scorers. I’ve certainly read that human scoring can vary widely. The AI system, IntelliMetric has been used in a variety of settings so far, including a range of domains. I’ve not read through the papers on their site in detail, but it seems to be a basic learning algorithm that works from a corpus of pre-graded writing samples to match essays to be graded to various scoring catagories. I’ll definitely be reading more about this, both for reference for my own research and possibly for inclusion in my spring class. I want to look into what types of errors they are getting compared to the mistakes made by expert raters, if they have that data available….
Cute Cute Cute
Oh yeah – the little clutch purses whose instructions are given here
are soooo cute and also look like the perfect way to use up a moderate amount of a pretty fabric, though the designer comes at it from more from an interest in using the cool handles you can find in craft stores. The pattern seems very scalable – make a little change purse or a full sized bag – or a set of both. I’ve got some awesome purple plaid silk that I’m going to made a box-pleat summer dress out of, and I’m thinking the scraps would make a really cute accessory, though I’ll have to think about how the plaid will line up in that pattern…
Building Cool New Stuff
I was looking for fun mini-projects last night over at instructables (I made this Simple Circuit Game today but with a buzzer instead of an LED during lab today – if you’re local stop by and play!) and along the way I discovered a ton of instructions for office toy guns, mostly out of K’Nex. The video on the K’Nex Gatling Gun is really awesome. But then again, K’Nex are awesome. At the least, I want to dig mine out and make a K’Nex iPod dock.
Meta-visualization
Relating to another colleague’s intersession class, I lost a lot of time browsing the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods [via Boing Boing]. The periodic table itself is pretty nice, though I found it distracting that the abbreviations were not the expected abbreviations from the periodic table of elements. What would be great would be if, in addition to getting examples of the visualization methods on mouse-over, clicking took you to a page describing the method in detail. I also find their distinction between data and information visualization interesting – they seem to use a distinction similar to the one I often use in class but stressing to a greater degree the impact information, as compared to data, has on cognition – a distinction I might choose to borrow and stress myself next semester.
Are you a robot?
I’ve got robots on the brain this month, so this link via J (who got it from Digg I think) is apropos – old advertisements with robots in them. I actually think that the first one on the page is my favorite; it strikes me as ironic….
Drinking the kool-aid…
Actual Conversation:
Them: Guess what tomorrow is?
Me: What?
Them: MacWorld keynote!
Me: (sarcastic) wooo
Them: It is wooo! That’s when we find out what all the cool new gadgets are.
Me: It’s like a cult.
Them: Yeah – tomorrow is when we hear from our leader!
Me: I hope he doesn’t tell you all to take multiple wives….
Back to school
It’s the first day of the semester for me, tackling a new class which I am both insanely excited about and having the requisite new-class jitters over. One of the things I love about my school is having the opportunity to totally obsess about just one course for a month – I’ve been lucky and always been able to teach something I was interested in obsessing about for a whole month, which I suspect makes all the difference.
But, I’m pretty scatter-brained this morning because of that, so today I’ll just bring you a smattering of random fun stuff – call it the weblog version of the traditionally hodge-podgy first lecture of a class.
It’s been everywhere, but if you didn’t hear, Wired labels Pittsburgh one of the top 10 tech towns, largely because of the presence of CMU but acknowledging the real growing tech industry around here. And our high complement of comic book stores…
I’m not usually a fan of puns, but User Friendly makes a math pun today that just kills me.
While such statements are usually exaggerations, it is quite possible that Digg got it right in labeling the play in this video the worst play in hockey ever.
I suspect there are two distinct groups of people: those who are unwarrentedly geeked about there being a new, and wonderfully horrible looking, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie coming out this spring and those who think it is the final nail in the coffin of our film industry. It is possible that both groups are right.
A resurgence of vi?
Building on yesterday’s post about the command-line interface, the same sorts of interface concerns play into this discussion of the renewed relevance of the vi input model when using a laptop [via Digg]. The argument is that, without a mouse and with generally poorly placed navigation keys, editing that centers on the home keys and minimizes complicated key combinations is ergonmically desirable. This actually relates nicely to an article I saw linked over at Slashdot about motivations behind the design of vi based on an interview with its creator Bill Joy. The liimiting factors back then were certainly different than those motivating a continued interest in the editor:
It was really hard to do because you’ve got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That’s also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow. 9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think.
While this type of bandwidth issue isn’t an issue for most users today, it makes sense that an editor designed to be minimalist in a world where every keystroke cost real time would translate into an editor that is desirable in a physical interface setting where it is also desirable to conserve keystrokes. It makes me wonder if vi isn’t in fact the ideal editor for handheld devices….