Cold-medicine induced altered mental-state yesterday gave me an interesting idea:
Right now all the mapping companies (mapquest, yahoo maps, google maps) use NavTeq to gather data. Once (if ever) cell phone usage data tied to GSM becomes public (a la MIT’s Mobile Landscape), I wonder if you can aggregate data of people going from point A to point B, and lookup solutions to the travelling salesman problem.
Similar to the concept of emergent garden paths in landscape architecture and the wisdom of crowds, let’s let public agreement decide the best way to go from one place to another.
What do you think?
More interesting reading:
Wikipedia on the Wisdom of Crowds
IAWiki on Emergent Architecture
I came to the realization that while MediaWiki worked, it was hideously industrial-strength for my purposes. Ditched it in favor of MoinMoin. MoinMoin has turned out both snappier (especially when I run it from a mac ;) ) and easier to customize/hack. There’s a handy conversion tool to port MediaWiki data to MoinMoin format, but it was a bit disappointing–crashy, memory-leaky, and most of the time didn’t get the syntax right. But it worked, at least.
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinQuestions
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MediaWiki
A friend of mine’s recent hard drive catastrophe finally got me around to implementing a decent, cron’ed backup implementation for all the stuff I don’t store in my svn server (mp3s, photos, and other media just don’t change enough to merit the overhead of checking them into a VCS).
RSync would work well, you’d think… Except that I have all this stuff on a fat32 drive (for the rare boot back into windows). And RSync does NOT play well with fat32, and I’m finding.
mote@server1 /media $ rsync -av -e “ssh -l mote” server2:/fat32/data/media/test_dir /media/test_dir
receiving file list … done
created directory /media/test_dir
rsync: failed to set times on “/media/test_dir/test_dir”: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: mkstemp “/media/test_dir/test_dir/.1.txt.3FfWKE” failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: mkstemp “/media/test_dir/test_dir/.2.txt.IT6nr2″ failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: failed to set times on “/media/test_dir/test_dir”: Operation not permitted (1)
sent 56 bytes received 212 bytes 21.44 bytes/sec
total size is 22 speedup is 0.08
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(1173)
Google brings up this blog entry dealing with similar troubles. It suggests some rsync workarounds, and looking into FullSync (supposedly rsync with a solution to the fat32 headaches) .
Unison (slick but crashy from what I hear) is also a possible option. (Feature comparison for rsync and unison)
UPDATE:
for a quick get-rsync-working thing, “rsync –rvt” works while “rsynv -av” don’t. It’s that damn “-a” that was causing the problems. I’ll still look into unison, though.
Mindy has just let me know that put down the deposit for her wedding gown this afternoon. Wow, it finally feels really, really real!
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
CALICO 2006 ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM
Online Learning: Come Ride the Wave
Hosted by
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, Hawaii
May 16-20, 2006
Preconference Workshops: Tuesday, May 16 - Wednesday, May 17
Courseware Showcase: Thursday, May 18
Presentation Sessions: Thursday, May 18 - Saturday, May 20
Use CALICO's on-line proposal submission form at
http://calico1.modlang.txstate.edu
or click on CALICO 2006 on the homepage: http://calico.org
You will need to register on the site ("Proposer registration")
before being able to submit.
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: OCTOBER 31, 2005
All presenters must be current members of CALICO by the time of the
conference and are responsible for their own expenses, including
registration fees.
The Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) is a
professional organization dedicated to the use of technology in
foreign/second language learning and teaching. CALICO's symposia bring
together educators, administrators, materials developers, researchers,
government representatives, vendors of hardware and software, and others
interested in the field of computer-assisted language learning.
For more information or if you have questions or problems, contact
Mrs. Esther Horn
CALICO Coordinator 512/245-1417 (phone)
214 Centennial Hall 512/245-9089 (fax)
601 University Drive http://calico.org
San Marcos, TX 78666 e-mail: info@calico.org or ec06@txstate.edu
Attended a thought-provoking seminar last week given by Robert St. Amant on
Physical Metaphors for Problem Solving.
seminar thoughts
Metaphors shape the way we interface with machines. they can be useful (in exposing intuitive interfaces), but also can be wrong/halfmapped. For example, on computers, we use “windows” as metaphors–but while some of our uses of GUI windows are in keeping with this metaphor (”open”, “close”), other actions are not (you don’t “look through” GUI windows. But you do “drop things” into them).
image schemas:
- mental pattern that provides an archetype for forms of interaction with the environment (metaphorical or real)
- they encapsulate specialized interrelational logic/representation
- a sizable subset of cognitive scientiests are pretty sure image schemas are the Language of Thought (e.g. Piaget)
- cognitive linguists, in particular, have developed Image Schema theory a lot. They say it does a very good job of explaining why people say what they do
- “most work in image schemas have been using them as post-hoc explanations for why people say things the way they do”. no work has been in using them to predict actions or to represent new knowledge.
- the major gains in using image schemas are
- generalization: chess problem-solving tactics apply to war problem-solving tactics, and vice versa
- robustness of representation: humans look at the world this way, it helps for consistency of interaction if we can get computers to look at the world this way too)
- This is where St. Amant’s work comes in. Cognitive linguists have made fine catalogs of different schemas, and he is using those schemas to create an actual language for knowledge representation purposes (much like Cyc has done for commonsense reasoning).
- Tangent:
- tangent question:how is this different from typical logical representation of reality /commonsense reasoning a la cyc?
- it looks like, as he creates these schemas, he’s just being explicit about using image schemas to codify–whereas with Cyc, they still create these using these schemas, but more subconsciously(?)
- Question to self: they are using chess and war-games a lot, as application. I can understand war games because of military funding… but why are they doing Chess? It seems like Go would be a much better application area for this!
- System evaluation work: not much done yet, as the project is still not very mature. There are a couple of metrics we could use to evaluate the system:
- how good is the expressive power?
- how good is the predictive power?
- how good does generalization work? this is what it comes down to. does this abstractified/metaphorical representation help with generalization for solving problems with this stuff?
- or, how closely does this representation fit with the way that humans represent knowledge? (can you use this abstract knowledge to instantiate situations in different fields (chess, war), and see if human experts are good at processing, or remember instances of this?)
- note that context defines schema. Looking at a room:
- a seminar attendee views a room as a location
- a fire marshall views a room as a container (one that can only hold X number of people)
- a painter views a room as a set of surfaces
- Note: schemas as they are now seem biased to represent nouns rather than verbs. The schema ontology reflects this. This could be an artifact of the things they are used to represent.
Related Wikipedia links:
neat! my fiance has started blogging her dissertation research… it is such a joy to be marrying a woman who is technologically literate, intellectually curious, and academic in areas completely orthogonal to my own academic bent. what a sucker am i… after four years of dating, i read a blog post, and i find myself infatuated all over again…
Dude, Portuguese Fado has got to be the most meta music on earth.
I’ll most likely be incomunicado for the next week. Will be in Lisbon, Portugal, presenting at the Eurospeech conference. Look me up if you’re in the area ;)
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877
