High-Class Consultant.
Today LinkedIn officially anounced the launch of its new search platform. It’s slick, and it’s certainly an incremental improvement on their previous search functionality. But I still think they would benefit tremendously from faceted search, or from any approaches that enable exploration of large result sets, such as this one:
I see that Greg and Iadh are attending CIKM 2008, and I hope they’ll find the time to blog about it. I’m particularly curious to hear any reports from the Workshop on Search in Social Media.
p.s. If anyone knows who mantains the CIKM site, please inform them that it’s been hacked. I tried to report this a while ago, but to no avail.
Just saw this piece in the New York Times: “You May Soon Know if You’re Hogging the Discussion“. A quick excerpt:
The inventor of this technology is Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has developed cellphone-like gadgets to listen to people as they chat, and computer programs that sift through these conversational cadences, studying communication signals that lie beneath the words.
If commercialized, such tools could help users better handle many subtleties of face-to-face and group interactions — or at least stop hogging the show at committee meetings.
As an MIT alum, I appreciate the aspiration to improve interpersonal communication skills. I’m a bit skeptical of such a reductionist approach, but perhaps it’s no more mechanical than what passes for active listening.
Well, I suppose it can’t be personal (or so they claim), but at long last this blog has achieved something I never thought possible–it’s achieved a higher ranking than Shannon on a Google search for noisy channel.
And even Google Suggest seems to be showing some love:
Noisy chickens? Well, my thanks go out to all of the pigeons at Google who have been conspiring to bring on the noise here at The Noisy Channel.
Ever since I started blogging, I’ve wondered why academics don’t embrace blogs and other social media. In fact, I just blogged about it earlier today. But a great example of an academic who gets blogging is Daniel Lemire.
Daniel has been blogging since May 2004. He is a professor of computer science at the Université du Québec à Montréal (yes, he also has a French-language blogue). Perhaps it is to be expected that he has made the most of online media, as he teaches almost exclusively online, in areas that include information retrieval and data mining. He’s also spent some time outside the ivory tower; his industry accomplishments include the design of signal processing and recommendation systems.
Daniel’s blog doesn’t have a mission statement, but he is at his best–and most passionate–when presenting his perspective on computer science research. He cites these as some of his best posts:
As should also be clear from these titles, Daniel has personality. He doesn’t pull punches, and his candor and passion make for great reading. Moreover, his openness brings out the same in his commenters, which ensures that his more controversial posts become engaging discussion forums.
One quirk of his blog: in order to post, you have to pass a CAPTCHA that requires answering a Roman numeral arithmetic question. He soon discovered, however, that the Google calculator happily performs this task. He posted about it:
I can’t help but imagine the discussion between between the Google engineer and his boss:
- (Engineer) Hi boss! I plan a new feature for our search engine…roman numeral arithmetic!
- (Harvard MBA) What a great idea! (Thinking to himself: I need to replace this guy.)
Check out Daniel Lemire’s blog for yourselves. And, if you are an academic, check out his thoughts on academic blogging.
I just read a nice piece in the New York Times entitled “If No One Sees It, Is It an Invention?“. The gist: then CMU PhD candidate Johnny Chung Lee drew over six million views to a five-minute video he posted on YouTube showing how to use a Wii remote to transform a normal video screen into a virtual reality display. Correlation isn’t causality, but I think it’s not entirely coincidental that Lee received “lots of offers from all the big places” and ultimately took one in the applied sciences group of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division.
Granted, producing YouTube videos isn’t exactly the same as blogging, but the moral of the story is summed up in these two paragraphs:
Contrast this with what might have followed from other options Mr. Lee considered for communicating his ideas. He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others.
Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. “Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,” he says. “If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.”
Grad students–and other inventors–should learn from this story that communicating your ideas to a broad audience can be a huge success factor. Blogging and posting to YouTube aren’t the same as publishing in peer-reviewed venues, but they can be as or more important in advancing your professional career.
Is Twitter a potential terrorist tool or the next Netscape? Amazingly–or at least amusingly–top stories on Techmeme today suggest both possibilities:
I actually see utility in Twitter, which makes me a bit of an oddball among my peers. But I think it’s interesting that so much of the discussion about it veers towards hyperbole.
This blog hasn’t exactly been gushing about Google’s enterprise solutions–then again, neither have their executives. Still, I thought it fair and balanced to point to an article that Google Enteprise Product Manager Nitin Mangtani wrote in Forbes defending his group’s work.
Thanks to Bob Carpenter for calling my attention to this nugget in an interview with Nach Waxman in the New York Times Diner’s Journal:
Google is a blessing, and we all use it to locate individual specific pieces of information — including one or another recipe. However, it does not seem, in any practical way to serve as an organized repository of information that can be browsed as a book is browsed. It supplies particular facts, not a rich array of possibilities.
While I wouldn’t consider a physical book as the ideal of browsability, I agree with the sentiment that there’s more to information seeking than known-item search. Interfaces that support exploratory search open up a rich and appetizing array of possiblities.
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.3. Please let me know if you experience any unexpected behavior.
The Noisy Channel 