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Category Archives: computer science

Tracking Browsing History

26-Jun-11

I’ve long wanted a way to track/store (and later search?) my browser history. Why do modern browsers throw any of this away? I estimate I consume far less than < 50M of html per day (flash videos, large files excluded) I want to be able to search over this, and gather stats about my browsing […]

Ranking Algorithms for My Feedreader

20-Mar-11

I have been using a home-brew Feedreader for the last 6 years or so. It’s a river-of-news style aggregator, that ranks posts in order of “interestingness” rather than date, with the most interesting entries that I haven’t seen yet at the top. Interestingness is derived via my click interactions: if my feedreader shows me an […]

Visualizing Command Line History

13-Mar-11

So, after documenting how I save a timestamped log of my bash file, I got curious about what kind of analyses I could pull out of it. (caveat: I only started this logging about a month ago, so there aren’t as many data points as I’d like. However, there is enough to see some interesting […]

Saving Command Line History

12-Mar-11

I’ve never been satisfied with the defaults for the way linux & osx save command line history. For all practical purposes, when we’re talking about text files, we have infinite hard drive space. Why not save every command that we ever type. First, A Roundup of What’s Out There Here’s the baseline of what I […]

Authority, Influence in Social Networks [tentative thoughts]

29-Jan-11

I spent the day fiddling around with twitter and buzz, to see what signals I have at my disposal. Eventually I’d like to get some metrics that quantify a few different aspects of human relationships: Global influence (how much influence does this user have upon the world). This is pretty straightforward. Local influence (how much […]

On Microblogging and Feedreaders

31-Oct-10

I’ve been hearing more and more, “I don’t really use my Feedreader any more, I keep up to date with news and interesting links via Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook”.

So, now I’m wondering: can I extract and distill this interesting stuff from microblogs?

I can has consciousness?

28-Nov-07

Conversations at work recently have turned again and again to consciousness and self-awareness (what, you thought “Android” was just a phone? ;) ). Now, I’m not going to belabor the point with discussions of artificial intelligence and yet another amateur’s resummarization of Searle’s Chinese Room[1]. Instead, I’ve been thinking about self-awareness in groups of humans. […]

What we can learn from Folksonomy

24-Jun-06

Outward-facing Questions: The great thing about delicious and folksonomy is that it creates an ontology as an emergent biproduct of individual self-serving efforts (that is, personal bookmarking). I’m wondering if we can take a similar tact to solve other AI problems. Inward-facing Questions: What is the best way to represent the evolution of a tag’s […]

Finished the Dissertation Proposal

19-Jun-06

Ahhh, I’m done. Now, don’t that feel good. 71 pages on building a computational model of language learner errors. Phew, now to sleep.

Consuming

12-Jun-06

Talking to a friend last week, an interesting idea came up: We don’t just consume information, information also consumes us. My attention is a scarce resource, and different ideas, media, schools of thought, compete for it. (This is what makes multidisciplinarity hard). It makes me think twice about metaphors for learning that compare research and […]