The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0 —Accelerando, a post-cyberpunk novel by Charles Stross A good read, and Creative-Commons-Released-For-Free-Download. Aside from a too-explicit-for-my-puritan-tastes S&M scene near the beginning, […]
Monthly Archives: August 2005
Accelerando
26-Aug-05Extracting Semantics from Folksonomy?
25-Aug-05So, we have some really nice folksonomies out there now. And they’re really good for humans. But what can machines do with them? Can we use del.icio.us to further the sisyphan goals of the semantic web? More specifically, I was talking to HaoChuan tonight about how one might automatically use a folksonomy to populate an […]
Learner Language Modeling at NICT
22-Aug-05About a month ago, some researchers from NICT (Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology) came to visit ISI and give a series of short presentations on their work. Among those presenting was Emi Izumi, a woman who is involved in research very similar to mine. She, and a few others over there, have […]
i heart my apartment
16-Aug-05Ahhhh. Moved in on Sunday (thanks Jeff, Bassam, Yuko, Ben!). 10 minute commute to work. (wow. just wow). I no longer need to fear walking around at night after reading about the weekly armed mugging published in the USC DPS Crime Alert restaurants abound 2 minutes walk to Cafe Brazil (pricey, but their weekend slow-roasted […]
Ithaca HOURS
11-Aug-05This is really neat. Ithaca, New York, has created a micro-economy by printing their own fiat money called HOURS . Given that the county’s average hour of labor is worth $10.00, they tie their currency to this rate. Only local companies pay using HOURS, and only local stores/businesses accept HOURS as currency, so the money […]
If you derive your cuisine from famous chefs, then you have no cuisine; and if you derive what you call your culture from famous artists … then you do not really have a culture. interesting thought, that true “culture” springs more from the common man than from the elite.
craziness of late
09-Aug-05Visitted an immigration attorney yesterday morning, to see what legal bumps we might encounter for the upcoming marriage in december, and subsequent applications for permanent residency and/or citizenship. While our situation is on the more typical side, I felt the high price of an official legal opinion was a worthy exchange for the security-of-mind that […]