Made out of people

Getting Information Out

I've already discussed the power of the Wikipedia's Recent Changes list, and how one can derive a fair bit of power from the information that's one gets from it. I made an analogy to RSS feeds as a way to find the newest information.

The problem is (and this is an issue I've been wrestling with for a while) is that you don't always want the latest-and-greatest. RSS solves many problems, but it definitely doesn't solve all of them.

(continued ...)

If you got here recently--and speaking probabilistically, you did--you missed out on some past posts:

The rise of the "quickie" as a modern institution must also be understood within this [temporal] context. -- source

There are 3250 walk buttons. 2500 of them don't do anything. 750 of them do. There is no visible difference between the sets. There is no clear way to know which one they are. And if it works, it has a 90 second delay. -- source

It would be a real shame to see a distributed denial-of-service attack hit that server. Fortunately, Guido here is an expert in preventing those denial-of-service attacks, and for a strictly nominal fee, he'll be glad to help provide it. -- source

That's fine. I don't blame you for not reading my whole archive--I certainly haven't read your whole archive, unless you started blogging today, and told me about it. But it's out there, and you maybe even would have wanted to see it, had you known about it.

(Indeed, often you don't know what you want).

If you know what you are looking for, it's easier. Part of the answer to this is search: want my resume? Type in a few words to Google. Are you wildly popular, and so people are nice enough to categorize stuff for you? Again use Google the Brad DeLong way¹. Similarly, if I have it locally, there are projects like "Stuff I've Seen": http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/sis/ and Keeping Found Things Found

Wikipedia, unbound by temporality, has the nice feature that you can dig out stuff that you are interested in because you know how an encyclopedia works: it's alphabetical, easily searchable, and we have social conventions for this sort of thing. (We expect, say, "Washington" to be in Wikipedia, but "experience as a microsoft intern" not to be.) Which means that we don't know what sort of cool things are out there at all.

But what about thinigs I don't know exist? What are the orgnaizing principles behind all the cool stuff that I don't know where it is?

Metafilter and BoingBoing and all sorts of other blogs partially try to bring things to your attention -- but those, too, are phrased in terms of the newest and greatest.

StumbleUpon is a slightly different take: a method for reccomending other stuff that might turn out to be of interest. It takes a collaborative filtering approach of one sort (as does Amazon's reccomender); a different sort of collaborative filtering comes from the collective tagging made visible by deli.cio.us and flickr

A few sites seem to have automated, or semi-automated generators that link to other stuff. (I haven't looked into this for a while, but I kind of like the idea that a page might suggest other things of possible interest.)

¹ At this point, the phrase "Danyel Risher resume", in quotes, on Google, finds Brad DeLong echoing me -- but not me. I find this funny.

Cyclical Temporality, in practice

We all know that time is cyclical. And that means that July 4th next will someday be July 4th past. And that means that "noon" happens, yesterday and today and tomorrow. But it wasn't until I saw these two signs, right next to each other, that I realized just how interlinked they can be in practice ...

(From a store in Portland, Oregon, in mid-August, 2004.)

Temporality and Virtue

Ok, so I don't have to be tracking references manically anymore. But I will, 'cause that's what I do as a grad student.

Crooked Timber discusses virtue, vice, Netflix, and the temporality of decision making:

Participants made the choices either in a sequence, meaning that the viewings would be in the immediate future, or made them all simultaneously, meaning that some of the viewings would be delayed. Participants who made the choices in a sequence tended to pick mostly vice films, while participants who made the choices simultaneously picked many more virtue films.

The decision horizon affects the decision. Even for rental movies.

Autocollaboration

Our term of the day is one that I made up during a job interview. I was trying to explain what categorization problems (such as those made visible in del.icio.us) and described in Sorting Things Out) have to do with CSCW.

One of the major things that one does with categorization, of course, is put stuff somewhere so one can find it again. You want others to find it too, of course. But sometimes, it's just about finding it yourself some other time. That's a form of collaboration, of course: it's collaboration across time, instead of space. And it's collaboration with yourself.

"Autocollaboration."

I like it. More later, I think.

Sequence Analysis

[technical pointer, to self]

Software for the Analysis of Interaction Sequences

GSEQ (General Sequential Querier) is a program devised for sequential analysis. It reads compiled SDIS files and provides a variety of sequential statistics, including tables of lag frequencies, chi-squares, and adjusted residuals. Several kinds of data modifications are permitted, including recoding, lumping, chaining, time-windowing, and removing of behavioral codes. GSEQ can export results for further analyses using SPSS, BMDP, SAS, ILOG, etc. Users interact with GSEQ by a specific command language.

Didn't even know this field existed.

On the other hand, can't say I'm delighted by the notion of "buy the book, then buy the software" as a way of learning anything about a field...

Temporality of Political Science

Via Crooked Timber and a discussion of the "best political science and political philosophy papers of the last ten years" (a fascinating discussion, since my poli-sci is fairly strong around the 17th century, but not so good in the 20th), What Time is It

Irritatingly, the article appears to be cut off by a server error.

Starkly put, political time is out of synch with the temporalities, rhythms, and pace governing economy and culture. Political time, especially in societies with pretensions to democracy, requires an element of leisure, not in the sense of a leisure class (which is the form in which the ancient writers conceived it), but in the sense, say, of a leisurely pace. This is owing to the needs of political action to be preceded by deliberation and deliberation, as its "deliberate" part suggests, takes time because, typically, it occurs in a setting of competing or conflicting but legitimate considerations. Political time is conditioned by the presence of differences and the attempt to negotiate them. The results of negotiations, whether successful or not, preserve time: consider the times preserved in the various failed attempts to deal with the secession crises prior to the Civil War. Thus time is "taken" in deliberation yet "saved." That political time has a preservative function. is not surprising. Since time immemorial political authorities have been charged with preserving bodies, goods, souls, practices, and circumscribed ways of life.

Extortion comes online

I periodically wondered what would happen when the Mob went online:

That's a fine server you have there. Very pretty. I see you've got it all--SSL, PHP--gosh, what can you serve with server like that these days? Couple thousand pages a second? It would be a real shame to see a distributed denial-of-service attack hit that server. Fortunately, Guido here is an expert in preventing those denial-of-service attacks, and for a strictly nominal fee, he'll be glad to help provide it.

Now, via Volokh I am astounded to discover that it's actually happening.

Online betting sites fight cyberextortion

Online gambling sites are fertile territory for extortionists. Many of the approximately 2,000 sites are vulnerable to hacking attacks and have little legal recourse because Internet gambling is illegal in the USA, security experts say.

Most [extortionists] issue ultimatums in e-mail messages in the days leading to major sporting events, such as the Super Bowl. Often, threats are issued after an attack, demanding that American currency be sent to a Western Union office.

It seems that the particular point of vulnerability is the fact that gamblers want to place their bets immediately before the event--so that it's possible to concentrate an attack on a very small time window. (That, combined with the fact that these gambling organizations are a little shady, providing an illegal service to Americans, means that it's hard for them to get legal or enforcement relief.)

I'm reminded of the historical threat of a "run on the banks," or the stock market panic, when everyone decides to access certain financial resources all at once.

Uniting sociology and history

...sociologists have been content to leave the succession of events in time to the historians some of whom as their part of the bargain have been prepared to relinquish the structural properties of social systems of the sociologists. But this kind of separation has no natural justification with the recovery of temporality as integral to social theory: history and sociology become methodologically indistinguishable. -Giddens (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory. Quoteed in The Rhythms of Society (Young and Schuller, ed), pg. 5

Besides this notes own merits, I tend to think that this is a shot in what seems to be a greater battle, one in which the various observational social sciences find more value in crossover than in separation. My work pulls in bits of sociology, psychology, organizational behavior, and occasionally anthropology.

Google does temporality

Google put up its 2003 Zeigeist in late December, but that doesn't stop me from commenting today.

I like seeing different sorts of patterns in different contexts, and the query charts are a great example. I begin to see patterns, or at least a few detectable notions: things like anticipation, sudden events, and retrsopect.