Seb's Open Research
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Wednesday, July 23, 2003
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Clustering in the margins
Reading the paper that Clay introduces below strengthens my sense that the people who pioneer group-forming practices are those who have a marked interest in something that is not generally shared by the rest of the population. Consider the top Meetup topics in the Music category to see what I mean.
Odd Associates with Odd. At least that's the conclusion in a paper about social clustering in Club Nexus, a service for Stnaford University's online population, written by Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar.
Because the users of the service left such a rich metadata trail, they were able to test a number of assertions about social congres that had previously been made only as generalities. In addition to uncovering the expected gross patterns (power laws, clustering, small worlds networks, low hop-counts between people, etc), they were able to make refined observations about what sorts of affinities correlate with high clustering (the higher the listed ratio is above 1, the stronger the correlation with social clustering):
We found further that, in general, activities or interests that are shared by a smaller subset of people showed stronger association ratios than very generic activities or interests that could be enjoyed by many. For example, raving (1.64), ballroom dancing (1.61), and Latin dancing (1.49) showed stronger association in the social activity category than barbecuing (1.20), partying (1.18), or camping (1.11) [...]
In sports in particular, multi-player team or niche sports were better predictors of social contacts than sports that could be pursued individually or casually. Among water sports, synchronized swimming, diving, crew, and wake boarding were better predictors than boating, fishing, swimming or windsurfing. In the land sports category, team sports, in particular women's team sports such as lacrosse and field hockey were better predictors than soccer (often played casually as opposed to in a competitive college team), tennis, or racquetball. [...]
We observed that niche book, movie, and music genres were more predictive of friendship than generic ones. Gay and lesbian books, read by 63 users, had a ratio of 4.37, followed by professional and technical, teen, and computer books. In contrast, the general category of 'fiction & literature' had a ratio of 1.09. I {heart} Lada Adamic. I {heart} FirstMonday. Read the whole thing. [Corante: Social Software]
 7:25:02 AM
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Tuesday, July 22, 2003
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Rene Descartes. "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." [Quotes of the Day]
7:56:27 AM
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Enemies of learning
Charles Feltman's Enemies of Learning (2-page .pdf) is a quick survey of personal factors that make it harder for us to approach the unknown. A few of the "enemies" that George picked out:
- Our inability to admit that we don't know
- The desire for clarity all the time
- Inability to unlearn
- Lack of trust
(via elearnspace blog via thought?horizon)
7:37:21 AM
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Monday, July 21, 2003
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Dijkstra and thinking out loud
 In the piece on personal knowledge publishing I wrote last year, I pointed out that the late computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra gave us an early example of the art of knowledge-oriented blogging. Here's a nice article on him and his approach to thinking out loud.
Over a 40-year period that began in the early 1960s, Dijkstra wrote prolifically on timely and compelling topics: from his experience of the evolution of universities on both sides of the Atlantic from the post-WWII era to the beginning of the 21st century; to meditations on the science and art of teaching; to incredibly rich and detailed accounts of his own intellectual methods (don't miss EWD 666: "A problem solved in my head," which contains the endearing aperçu: "Goldbach's Conjecture -- I had never thought that I would ever use that!")
Like entries in a modern weblog, many of the informal pieces collected in the EWD archive were never published in any traditional sense. Instead they were copied (and later photocopied), numbered sequentially from EWD 0 (sadly lost to history) to EWD 1317 ("From van IJzeren's correspondence to my aunt & uncle," written a few months before his death in August 2002) and circulated from the greedy hands of one computer scientist to another like Eastern European samizdat or fourth-generation copies of the Lions books.
The end of the article offers a great quote from Dijkstra on the struggle to accurately observe and steer one's own thinking:
"The need to get some sort of verbal grip on your own pondering will by sheer necessity present your ponderings as something in which, as time progresses, patterns will become distinguishable. Once you have established a language in which to do your own pondering, in which to plan and to supervise your reasoning, you have presented a tool that your students could use as well, for the planning and supervision of their reasoning."
I completely agree with Chalmers who writes about that quote:
Geek that I am, I find this passage incredibly touching. It's the combination of Dijkstra's searing integrity and his humility and willingness to make a complete ass of himself, by actually standing up and pondering aloud in front of his students, for their sake, that gets me every time. I wonder if the success of the scientific method does not depend on exactly this combination of integrity and humility? Dijkstra doesn't just advocate it. He models it.
9:25:34 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:13:15 PM.
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