About
Transapient Musings of an S6 Archailect

Metacognitive trivialities over smooth topologies and Julian knots of subgeometric spaces; a.k.a mastermind Singularitarian, node of the Larger Submind and Clone of the Ineffable Original.

Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/
email: kanzure@gmail.com
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Archives

• 2008 (720)
  • April (370)
  • May (257)
  • June (93)

Wed, 11 Jun 2008

Why do online opinions evolve differently to offline ones?
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The way in which opinions form, spread through societies and evolve over time is a hot topic among researchers because of their increasing ability to measure and simulate what’s going on.

The field offers some juicy puzzles that look ripe for picking by somebody with the right kind of insight. For example, why do people bother to vote in elections in which they have little control over the result when a “rational” individual ought to conclude that it is not worth taking part.

A similar conundrum is why people contribute to online opinion sites such as Amazon’s book review system or the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDB) ratings system. When there are already a hundred 5-star reviews, why contribute another?

Today Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman at the HP Laboratories in Palo Alto present the results of their analysis of this problem. And curiously, it looks as if online opinions form in a subtley different way to offline ones.

The researchers studied the patterns of millions of opinions posted on Amazon and the IMDB and found some interesting trends. They say:

“Contrary to the common phenomenon of group polarization observed offline, we measured a strong tendency towards moderate views in the course of time.”

That might come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the discussion on almost any online forum but Wu and Huberman have an idea how moderation seems to evolve. They suggest that people are most likely to express a view when their opinion is different from the prevailing consensus because such a contribution will have a bigger effect on the group.

They tested the idea by looking at the contributions of people who added detailed reviews against those who simply clicked a button. Sure enough, those who invest more effort are more likely to have an opposing view. It is these opposing views that tend to moderate future views.

By contrast, sites such as Jyte in which users can only click a button to give their opinion tend to show herding behaviour in which people copy their peers, just as they often do offline.

Wu and Huberman’s analysis raises more questions than answers for me. But they point out that the study of online opinions has been neglected until now. That looks set to change.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0805.3537: Public Discourse in the Web Does Not Exhibit Group Polarization

Tue, 20 May 2008

Deriving information from structured data
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On net@nite I heard that Dipity, a great site for mashing up timelines uses Freebase as one of its information sources. An excellent example is this timeline for Marillion embedded below

Earlier today, on Friendfeed, Alex Iskold described an “aha” moment for Powerset, which I have been quite underwhelmed by thus far (although it has a gorgeous UI). When I browsed over to the search link, it seemed to be that the reason the results appeared as they did were because they came from Freebase, whose structure made the query very powerful. Wonder if others think that’s the primary reason as well? The Wikipedia results for the query were not that impressive.

So what do these results tell us? Well, perhaps there is value in taking data and adding structure the way Freebase and dbpedia are doing. The ability to generate different representations, etc is quite powerful. I can already envision what Pierre might do with some of these tools and the work he has been doing with Freebase and Wikipedia.

These examples are somewhat trivial, but it is not difficult to imagine more interesting scenarios, perhaps to represent protein interactions, or trying to find non-obvious relationships and linkages. Will be interesting to see what kinds of applications are developed on the backs of these data platforms

Technorati Tags: Powerset, Freebase, Wikipedia, Semantic Web, Structured Data

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The Indignity of Ice Cream Cones
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AP Photo by Charles Dharapak

Jason Rosenhouse of EvolutionBlog linked to an article by Steven Pinker in The New Republic:

The Stupidity of Dignity

Conservative bioethics' latest, most dangerous ploy.

This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation...

Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. ... Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.

Floyd E. Bloom, M.D.
Professor Emeritus in the Molecular and Integrative Neurosciences at The Scripps Research Institute, and the founding CEO and board chairman of Neurome, Inc.

Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.

The report's oddness begins with its list of contributors. Two (Adam Schulman and Daniel Davis) are Council staffers, and wrote superb introductory pieces. Of the remaining 21, four (Leon R. Kass, David Gelernter, Robert George, and Robert Kraynak) are vociferous advocates of a central role for religion in morality and public life, and another eleven work for Christian institutions (all but two of the institutions Catholic). Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

from: The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature
By Leon Kass, M.D., Ph.D.
Published 1999 (new edition, University of Chicago Press)
original published in 1994, now out of print: (New York: The Free Press)

-ibid

Much that he has to say is significant, and even cogent. But it is one thing to draw attention to such neglected topics as the duty of hospitality, or good table manners, and another to spend such energy denouncing minor shifts in public appetites: ’the walking street eater ... is a being led by his appetite ... this doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view’. So eating a hamburger ’on the run’ is really wicked: not - we must presume-because it’s bad food badly cooked, not because its purchase finances bad farming practices, but because it’s too impatient, too ’uncivilised’, because it imposes our ’ingestions and chewings’ on others.

Fri, 09 May 2008

Emergency party button!
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Holy Wow!

Basically, it is exactly what it sounds like; a button that instantly launches a party. When pressed, the blinds to my apartment close, the kitchen, hallway, dining room, and living room lights dim, the stereo starts blasting Haddaway - What Is Love, black lights turn on, laser lights start moving to the music, a strobe light goes on, and the fog machine starts up.

With another press of the button, the party is gone as easily as it started.
It may not be the most hi-tech thing in the world, but people sure as hell love it when they come over.

Build pics and info - Emergency party button [via Zedomax - Thanks, Max!]

Related:

International Dance Party transforms to a booty shaking powerhouse

The science and poetry of clouds
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There's a Cloud Appreciation Society. Who knew? Lots of pictures, art, poetry, science, folk lure, discussion, etc. Cloud books, too (The Cloudspotter's Guide).

The Cloud Appreciation Society [Thanks, Patti!]

Related:

• The wonder, science, and how-tos of snowflakes

Sun, 20 Apr 2008

How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It
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With the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google's own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. The logic of search may also flip inside out. Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it's conceivable that the information could attempt to find us. As new content enters the Web, it could tumble through the various filters that you set up around your identity and then show up on your home-page news feed, or in your in box, or pop up on a ticker that follows you around as you browse from page to page. (Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4259135.html)

posted at: 16:30 | path: /social | permanent link to this entry