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September 06, 2008

Rose Marie Garrett
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Well, this has been a busy month.  Rose came 2 weeks early, weighing in at 7'6 and 20 1/2 long.  She and Mom are doing really well, and we're slowly getting used to having a 4-person family. 

I've been able to wrap up a bunch of projects over the last 3 weeks, and am possibly going to get a bit of a break this Fall term. This next term will be the first break in a while without extensive school responsibilities. I've been doing the full-time work, full-time school gig for years, so it'll be great to slow down and enjoy weekends at home instead of at the library.

I recently purchased a 2nd-hand 2G iPhone.  I'm incredibly impressed with the device.  The combination of a Unix sub-system, an awesome display, and WiFi (I don't have a data-plan) make it an incredibly compelling package.  The screen is quite usable for reading.  I read a lot while we were in the hospital with Rose, as the combination of public wifi and lots of time burping a baby were a good combination.

Of course, the hamstrung OS / Apple restrictions are very frustrating. I don't understand why they couldn't have made it operate as a USB drive, similar to their older iPod line.  I jailbroke mine to enable loading on a book reading software, and have been loading of Project Gutenburg texts. Only by jailbreaking, and SSHing into the os as root did I really understand that they have a genuine *nix box.  The idea of running Apache on my phone is just very cool. 

Now if I can just get the keyboard to buzz a little bit on each keypress, I'll be a happy camper.

Posted by Nathan Garrett | 0 comment(s)

You can use the Peerworks technology
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During introductions, several people mentioned that they had read our project description at Peerworks and seemed interested in that technology. 

You are welcome to try out this technology!  We're interested in getting more users to give us feedback.  We'll probably be starting a more public test period around the beginning of October, and more user experience could really help.  

You can request access to our test system, Winnow, by going to the login page.   I'll have Winnow email you a link that lets you set up a a account.  

What can you do with Winnow?  It is an "aggregator" like Google News (except of course not as well crafted).  It aggregates the posts from thousands of blogs and news sources.  You can add more of these if you have favorites that aren't already in our list -- and it's fine to add them even if they are already there, we detect duplicates.  

But there are way too many items from thousands of sources -- many thousands a day.  So Winnow lets you winnow them down to just the ones you are interested in.  You can pick existing themes (we call these "tags") and Winnow will just show you the items that fit that theme.  Plus, you can be adventurous and create new tags that reflect your specific interests. 

One example of a tag is the one I created for the previous version of this course in the Fall of 2007.  I called it "Open knowledge" and it produces this RSS feed.  (My apologies to those who aren't familiar with RSS.  If you get an account on Winnow you can look at all the same items there.)  

Winnow is actually another example of population thinking.  You define a tag by giving Winnow a set of examples of what you want (and some negative examples of what you don't want if necessary) and Winnow learns its version of your concept from those examples.  This turns out to be more flexible and sometimes more accurate than a filter based on keywords.  

So anyway, if you are tempted, go Winnow and request an invitation!  

Posted by TNDY 402I Networks, Discourse, and the Growth of Knowledge - Jed Harris | 0 comment(s)

September 05, 2008

test
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test

Posted by IS346 - Social Technologies - Sonya | 0 comment(s)

September 04, 2008

A great example of population thinking
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Jackie Elam asked me to provide some background information on population thinking.  I will pass on some more analytical material later but I wanted to note a terrific example that just fell into my lap today. This example takes a bit of explanation, but stay with me, we end up looking at some cool movies (not of Clay Shirky, either).  If you want all the background and details, look at this article, more extensively documented with this technical paper and videos

Stanford University has been working on robotic helicopters for many years.  (They also have a great research program in robotic cars.)   Flying a helicopter is a hard problem because as expert pilot Garett Oku says "The helicopter doesn't want to fly. It always wants to just tip over and crash".  The Stanford team created robot helicopters that solved that problem -- they could fly reliably.  However the team couldn't program their robots to do the complex acrobatics that human pilots can -- manuvers with names like  traveling flips, rolls, loops with pirouettes, stall-turns with pirouettes, knife-edges, Immelmanns, slappers, inverted tail slides, hurricanes and tic tocs.  

Further the team "realized that even defining their goal was difficult." There's no formal definition of "flying well" -- it is "whatever an expert... pilot does at an airshow."  This is the same as complex gymnastic manuvers, diving moves, etc. -- good performance can only be defined by the judgments of expert practitioners -- until now.  Like many real categories, even the experts can't describe a perfect tic toc, but they know it when they see it, and they pretty much agree.  

So the Stanford team realized their robot had to learn its complex manuvers by "watching" the expert pilot put a helicopter through the manuvers.  The pilot (Oku) flew a manuver multiple times and the researchers recorded each time.  The learning software found the similarities between the multiple instances of the manuver and developed an "ideal" version of the manuver.  Then it could try to perform the "ideal", but due to wind, control variations, etc. its actual performances would always be imperfect.  

Now as promised, some cool pictures:

So here we see a clear example of population based concept learning.  We start out with a bunch of named concepts.  Each concept has a clear definition in the minds of an experts, but the expert can only give us a "population" of examples to explicate the concept.  Then our robot takes that "population" and finds the "ideal type", but once again when the robot wants to explicate its ideal type, it ends up generating a variety of imperfect examples due to its inherent performance limitations.  

If we tested multiple experts, they probably would each have somewhat different but similar "ideal" definitions.  Similarly if multiple robots learn the definitions from lots of examples they will probably end up with slightly different "ideals" but will usually agree in practice, for example when judging a competition.  

Update:  Here's the basic idea again, this time in "tech speak" extracted from the paper.  This is partly for amusement value and partly an illustration of a very different way to encode the concept:

...one can... have the expert demonstrate the desired [behavior]. .... Unfortunately, perfect demonstrations can be hard (if not impossible) to obtain. However, repeated expert demonstrations are often suboptimal in different ways, suggesting that a large number of suboptimal expert demonstrations could implicitly encode the ideal trajectory the suboptimal expert is trying to demonstrate.

Note that this slightly misses the key point of population thinking.  The writers assume that there is an optimal demonstration -- which would imply that there's an ideal version of the manuver out there somewhere.  But actually the population of examples is fundamental, and the "ideals" are constructed as summaries of those populations.  

Posted by TNDY 402I Networks, Discourse, and the Growth of Knowledge - Jed Harris | 0 comment(s)

September 03, 2008

Followup on our first day
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 It was really great to hear everyone's introductions.  It's clear we have a lot of great experience to work with.  I'd like everyone to write a couple of paragraphs summarizing their introduction and either send it to me or put it on a wiki page, whichever you find more convenient.  I will put the emailed introductions onto wiki pages.  (I'll also email this request as I know most people are not yet on the Conversation.)

 I've uploaded a PDF of my presentation.  I added our two new students (John McCormick and Sumonta Kasemvilas) to the list in the slides. 

First day presentation

 The video of Clay Shirky is viewable on this page.

 I was a bit confused about our speaker schedule. The next three weeks are already set:

  • Stephanie Takemoto and Pattie Dillon Sobczak will talk on 9 Sept about online communities, gaming and education. 
  • Dean Terry will talk on 16 Sept about "Conversations in Place; Research, Collaboration & Art in the Emerging Mobile Space".  This is a public talk so others can attend if interested.  I'll post an announcement.  
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick will talk on 23 Sept. about the future of academic publishing.  

Also on 9 Sept we'll wrap up the introduction to the Claremont Conversation, and I hope we'll be able to make some progress forming teams. 

Posted by TNDY 402I Networks, Discourse, and the Growth of Knowledge - Jed Harris | 0 comment(s)

Case Study Presentation Groups
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Group 1: 10/14/08. Anaga Ojo, Mike Silva, Christian Ogwo, Ryan O'Connor. Case Study: Medtronic

Group 2: 10/14/08. Kulman, Ken , Chike, Arthur and Yernur. Case Study: UPS and HP : Value creation through supply chain partnerships.

Group 3: 10/28/08. Venay Sehgal, Renay Sehgal, Rondalynne Mcclintock, Joanne Adeyemi, Nagla Alnosayan. Case Study: Meg Whitman at EBAY

Group 4: 11/11/08. Tang Kuo-Lun, Omonigho Palmer-Ikuku, Tom, Pimpaka Prasertsilp. Case Study: Charles Schwabb

Group 5: 11/18/08.Jill Wegrzyn,Samuel-Ojo,Joseph Windolph,Scott Wood. Case Study: Adobe Systems

 

Posted by IS328-F08 - Ben Schooley | 0 comment(s)

There's another blog out there
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Not sure if I'll be using the CCO site for blogging purposes, but in the meanwhile here's the URL for a blog that I publish, aimed at higher education administrators (with a focus on alumni relations):

 

Alumni Futures

Keywords: alumni blog shaindlin alumnifutures

Posted by Andy Shaindlin | 0 comment(s)

September 02, 2008

Assignment 1: September 2
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1. What are some of the most significant challenges that CIO's face? What are some valuable strategies for overcoming these challenges?
2. How can frameworks (such as Porter's 5 forces) be used to analyze organizational IT challenges and needs? What are some important considerations when applying these frameworks? 

Posted by IS328-F08 - Ben Schooley | 5 comment(s)

September 01, 2008

Trial by error
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I'm hoping my profile finally uploaded.  Could someone be kind enough to respond to this entry so I know I've got this working?  Thanks!

Posted by Michele Harris | 0 comment(s)

August 29, 2008

Test
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This is a test

Posted by The Nature of Inquiry - Shawn Williamson | 0 comment(s)

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