I've been trying the free account this week. I've backed up 1.6 GB of data.
It took, with given interruptions of a normal work day, about 4 days to
backup this amount of Data.
I am beginning to think that the world of offline remote backups is still a
little bit away!
My colleague Gavin Bell just uploaded a great presentation about creating communities of readers out of readers of books. You can see his presentation <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/gavin/gavin-bell-from-readers-of-books-to-a-community-of-readers-oreilly-toc08/">here on slideshare</a>. He gave this talk at the Tools Of Change conference in New York earlier this month.
Shaun Edwards <a href="http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/02/22/bonus_is_the_carrot_that_leads.html">writes</a> in The Guardian today
that introducing the bonus points system to the Six Nations rugby tournament could help make it more entertaining (not that it needs much help in that regard, as it is a fantastic tournament as it is). I wholeheartedly agree. At the moment you get 2 points if you win a game, and 1 point if you draw. Under the bonus system you get an extra point if you score 4 tries and you get a bonus point if you are a losing team and you hold you opposition to a gap of 7 points or less. I think you also get more points for a win. I have only one improvement on this formula. You should get a bonus point if you are wearing green. I fear that this last rule enhancement is likely to be the only way Ireland will win the championship in the near future.
O'Reilly are hosting a Collaborative Intelligence foo camp this coming
weekend. There is some discussion bubbling out already on crowdvine at a group that has been created for this
meeting.
One of the participants, Greg Linden, says the following:
"Hi, Cass. Absolutely, this is called the pigeonhole problem and can be an
issue if personalization is done poorly.
Done right, personalization enhances discover by helping you find things you
could not easily have found on your own. Discovery in vast quantities of
data is what personalization is designed to do. The key is to make sure the
personalization reaches beyond the obvious and into the surprising. If you
do that, personalization reveals the full breadth of the data and enhances
serendipity."
and then
"Hi, Cass. Sure, I think there are things that can be done. Most of this
depends on the technique used for personalization. For example, if you
implement recommendations by showing people items that match on keywords or
from the same fine-grained subject category, you tend to get nearly
identical items and little diversity. If you use user behavior, such as what
people tend to buy together, you can often get more interesting patterns
out, especially if you tune the system to try to reach further afield (at
the risk of more spurious recommendations).
It's a great question and one that troubles all of us when thinking about
personalization. We are filtering, but trying to do it in a way that focuses
attention on interesting things, not that limits what people see.
I look forward to talking with you more about this at the conference!"
It brings to mind the idea that there exists a landscape in the search
space, and what one wants to do is avoid local minima, but explore enough of
the space to find related results that are not directly in
the neighborhood of the item of concern. This means there must be a
correspondence to the temperature of the system. Getting out of local minima
can be achieved through an annealing process.
Balancing relevance and serendipity through some
constrained minimization process, like the one set out in the information
bottleneck. How much better performance will you get out of these approaches
over simple algorithms and what will be the relative computational cost?
Does anyone know of any literature about this?
Scribd has rolled out a very nice
interface to pdf documents. It is neat and slick, but I think what it is
missing is support for getting at data or meta-data in the document. It
would be a great boon to be able to click on a table in a document and have
that tabular data open either in excel or in some online document tool.
Likewise for entities in the document that might have associated metadata.
I'm sure such support is possible and it would turn a nice tool into an
important tool.
"The modified tactical standard missile 3 (SM-3) hit the satellite at an
altitude of 150 miles (247km) while it was travelling at approximately
17,000 miles per hour."
I find this somewhat scary.
test a link guardian
So, after a little more investigation it is clear that earlier links are
broken and new links have the snap preview.
Well, I guess I am just going to have to write links as plain text until
they get this thing sorted out.
tags: vox sucks
I have been liking using vox to blog, mainly because I can email a blog post
from any email client. This significantly reduces the
effort involved in posting a blog post.
I've just discovered that vox has enabled snap previews. I don't like them.
OK, so, some people may like them, and that's OK, but I can't turn them off
on my blog. That's not good.
In addition, when I email a link the link is now broken in vox, so if I type
http://www.google.com you can see that link text but when I embed it in a link the link does not work. boo.
I also like being able to blog pictures directly from flickr, I guess I am
going to have to roll my own solution for a blog again at some point in the
future when I have some time that will allow the bloggy thing to do what I
want.
Ahh well.
tags: blog, suckiness, vox
If you are interested in the progress of my bet you can follow here:
hmm, my embedded image is not showing up here, shame, well, the link is here: http://www.bellygraph.com/graph/view/300
