Hello World

Human Rights and Network Analysis

2008-09-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

A Big Hard Sun

2008-08-31T12:27:00.001-07:00

One of the first movies that I saw in New York City was "Into the Wild". The movie was pretty, and I loved the soundtrack. I went with a friend I met online because I had yet to make any friends outside of work at any events, galleries, or coffee shops I ended up frequenting.

For the movie's soundtrack, Eddie Vedder remade "A Big Hard Sun" (original, remake). I've developed an association between this song and my first few months in New York -- a period of insecurity, confusion, exploration, and yes, research.

I bring this up today because as I am now into my last few weeks in Toronto, I keep wondering about who to see, what to do next, and what I'll miss most. Vanessa recently arrived in Afghanistan, Ray I haven't seen in months now, I don't attend social network meetings at IBM, and there's a few people I met back in October or November who I have never seen again. The perfect example is having American Thanksgiving with four Asian girls studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in downtown Manhattan.

"I study merchandising, what about you?"

"Oh, I'm a mathematician. I do social network analysis, looking at marketing trends."

"... I see..."

Needless to say, I never saw those four again.

And yet with all the people I miss, I have reconnected with old friends like Marcin, Alie, and Rawi... I'm with my parents every day, and I visit my sister's grave. I even started a new software project, programming it at the Starbucks on Yonge and Bloor -- a coffee shop that has now seen me develop three major software projects over the last three years.

I've been very reflective these last few weeks. One of my high school buddies recently asked me, "What makes someone successful?"

I'm thinking about what this question even means. One thing I've learned over the years is that "success", however you define it, often entails a lot of sacrifice. When I was in high school, I would have defined "success" as "traveling the world for work"... Now that I think about my current situation, where I started by living in Toronto, then Nairobi, then New York, and now moving to Oxford, I can see that even though I've managed to reach my goal of residing in a lot of neat places, I've had to say goodbye to a great many friends, join -- and leave -- social circles, and then spend my Sundays reflecting on my life while listening to MGMT.

Do I have any regrets? Definitely not, but I sure would like to bring everyone with me when I move. We can turn that Yonge-Bloor Starbucks into a big ship and live on it while travelling the world. At least the bathrooms will be nice.

dorkbot Toronto

2008-08-28T22:31:00.000-07:00

Today I finally attended another dorkbot event, a few months after my first. Before I go into details of the event, I want to say it was a complete pleasure doing this in Toronto. In NYC, you get used to events like these, while I've been having trouble finding them in Toronto. My only criticism is that even after promoting the event to a dozen people, no one wanted to go.

But this isn't for everyone, I guess...

Anyway, dorkbot-Toronto is much more artistic (in terms of "pure art") than what I've seen in the past, but I can't complain. I showed up to be challenged and immersed, and so I was. Three artists presented, including Kelly Jazvac and Atom Deguire. Kelly focused on her work with vinyl, while Atom showed photos from his work around Europe, where he'd use tape and physical objects to modify benches, walls, and galleries. Visit his site, as I don't want to misrepresent his views here... All I can say is that it reminds me of a more abstract and arguably less political Banksy.

The first presenter, and one which I want to focus on the most, is Kristen Peterson, who also runs Drawing Research. I can talk most about her work because in some ways it's the most mathematical. Illusions aren't new, but I really like her approach... I left the meeting wondering if there's some sort of mathematical order behind what she does. The illusions depend a number of drawings / illustrations. At the right angle, they merge together and convince you that they're actual objects, and this is a wonderful way to challenge your senses. Even Kristen brought up the intersection of planes in her presentation -- the illusions really freak you out because two dimensional objects obtain a three dimensional quality to them.

... But then I couldn't help and think about how you can potentially "encrypt" information this way. For example, go to kristenpeterson.ca and click on Artwork and then on YYZ. You'll automatically see the illusion, where the bars seem to go into and beyond the wall. Very impressive, very Escher-esque, very cool!

Now here's what I'm all excited about. Say that instead of evenly-spaced bars, Kristen actually created a bar-code scheme that travels into the distance. Could a barcode reading pick up this information? It technically wouldn't work anywhere except when looking at the illusion correctly... Maybe this is impossible for traditional barcode scanners, but newer ones (such as the type you can install in an iPhone) should be able to do something similar.

All of a sudden, you have an illusion that actually gives you information... Say a website URL, or a secret message.

Anyway, my point is: this was a lot of fun. Everyone in Toronto should go to a dorkbot meeting.

Anime!

2008-08-27T10:06:00.001-07:00

One of the things I've tried to do these last few months is get into anime. It's cool, and I like it, but I generally don't watch a lot of movies. Back in New York I got into a habit of putting movies on while I worked on other stuff. In some ways, it's a great strategy to pick out good movies, as you only stop working and watch the movie if it's grabbing your attention.

... The down side is you miss a lot of nuances and details.

Anyway, I digress. This week I watched Cowboy Bebop and Princess Mononoke. I also tried to watch Metropolis for the second time in my life... That is to say, both times I failed miserably: I rent the movie and end up falling asleep. The movie is cool and the Art Deco feel reminds me of both Bioshock and Atlas Shrugged. The problem is I rent it at inopportune times, and end up passing out from being too tired.

... And now it's onto manga. There's a copy of Zombie Loan waiting for me two meters away. Yes, I read manga for teens -- but how else am I to practice Japanese?

Tikhonov Regularization (in Graph Theory)

2008-08-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

... post at dis-order.net/. Implementing algorithms is fun, usually... Not always, though. :) This time it was great, and what's even better, the work is completely useful for my research!

Skydiving!

2008-08-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

Back when I was 14 years old, I decided I wanted to go skydiving, but was too young. At 16, I was technically old enough but for some reason I didn't go. 18... 20... The years went by. Finally, the day arrived today, and what a sweet ride!

First, some context is useful. Alie (who took all the pretty photos below) and Marcin (who's in some of those photos) have been dating for... Uhh... A number of years (Six? Seven?). Alie decided to surprise Marcin with a gift of skydiving. Some might say that asking your significant other to jump out of a plane at 13,500 feet on your anniversary isn't sending the right message, but hey, we like to think it's Love, with a capital "L". And plus, it's way cooler than a gift certificate.

Skydiving is an interesting experience... Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to describe the emotions. While some people are afraid, Marcin and I (or other hardy Polish people like us :) ) felt a bit indifferent. Or maybe we were so scared we were numb... Nah, we think we were just extremely brave. We wouldn't back down from the jump, so thinking of fear wasn't really an option.

The day sarted off a bit cloudy and we waited a while before it was clear enough to jump. The little plane we were in was packed with a dozen people, and was constantly climbing at about 45 degrees -- well, I didn't bring my protractor on this flight, but it was steeper than any other climb I've ever done. At 6,000 feet a few guys jumped out, making faces as they left. Clearly this wasn't their first jump. A few hundred more feet and we were in the cloud cover, unable to see a thing.

... And then we broke the ceiling. Err, the cloud ceiling, that is. Now we were maybe 9,000 feet above Ontario, staring at clouds in all directions. This is a typical view out of a jumbo jet, with rolling clouds any direction you look. Only difference this time was that we knew we'd be falling through them. I wish I had pictures, as this was one of the most beautiful feelings I've had (in a plane, and in general!), knowing you won't only be seeing a beautiful, artistic, natural formation -- but you'll be falling through it and screaming your butt off at over 150 km per hour, as well.

Yes, our first jump was such that we actually fell through the clouds. Though, you're falling so fast the clouds just zoom past as you try to breathe and look around you. And how does freefall actually feel? Somehow, it feels like nothing at all. The initial "hop" off the plane is the slowest and fastest thing I've ever experienced -- you think very little, and it's over in about a second... This is when your speed is slowest (think back to high school physics and it makes perfect sense), and you're just floating there, weightless and confused at the fact that you're completely alone (or with an instructor named Kevin) 4 kilometers up in the sky.

Before you know it, you're hurtling towards the ground and Kevin is tapping you. Ah, you can now spread your arms and breathe. The realization that you're falling has hit you, but you're still senselessly dumbfounded at the horror and glory of freefall. You can move your arms around to twist and turn in the air, taking in the beauty of the ground below you and clouds coming right at you.

Another tap on the back, and you know the parachute is about to open. Slam, rip, zoop, and now your speed has been reduced significantly. You expect your body to keep falling, and in fact, your mind does keep going -- this part almost feels like an out-of-body experience for me, where my brain keeps falling and look back up at the rest of my body. Those harnesses work, dude!

And so you float to the ground in your parachute. While this doesn't quite compare to the surprising and confusing experience of freefall, looking around at the ground, at the clouds, at the horizon, and anything else you can discern is still a surreal experience.

Plop! and you're on the ground, butt-first, muddied pants and all. It's over, less than ten minutes later... And you want to get right back in the plane and do it all over again.

What's Up With Wojo?

2008-08-18T13:09:00.001-07:00

A number of people have reminded me that I haven't posted much here in August, so it's time to write an update. For better or worse, there's not much news to report... Japan was a great trip, and Vanessa and I hung out until last the middle of last week. I'm now getting into the swing of things.

So, for those of you curious about my life, here's what I'm up to...

Research

I decided to take August and September off and work on my own projects and explore my own interests. I'm working on a number of papers with old friends from Toronto and elsewhere. Nice, fun research... No major deadlines yet! The work is both qualitative (international development and sociology) as well as quite mathematical (algorithms and statistics). I'll post here if anything major happens.

Business Ideas

Yes... I've been ranting about business for a few weeks now, and finally have taken the first step to doing something. I'm looking into revolutionizing e-mail. I won't say much more yet. But e-mail me if you want to chat about some ideas.

Revisioning FMM

FMM is still moving forward. I presented on the site in Japan, we've launched a book recently, and are now looking for more partners and volunteers. I'm exploring what we'll be up to next, and will be attempting to do that "next thing" before I leave for England.

Culture (and Comics)

Reading lots of comic books... And regular books, too! Just finished reading The Watchmen and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and am now reading The Dharma Bums. Also brought back a dozen issues of manga from Japan, which I need to start reading (in Japanese!).

While not as serious as my reading, I'm also exploring my music tastes and art galleries in Toronto. Will be writing about this soon, too.

Sports!

So Michael Phelps is doing well in the Olympics. Did you know I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer when I was 12? Well, maybe it's a good thing I didn't pursue that career option... :) But I am getting back into sports. I'm hoping to run a 10K race in the next few weeks -- definitely before I leave Toronto. I was going to start swimming today, too, but showing up at the community centre was a bit of a downer: I was the only one under 70 years of age, and well, 70 year-old swimmers are sloooow. I promptly left and bought a membership at a gym, and am going to start swimming there tomorrow.

Catching Up, Socially

Finally, I'm just hanging out in Toronto and visiting friends and family. You know, before I leave forever... Well, until December 21, anyway, which is when I'm coming home for the holidays!

So that's what I'm up to...

iCommons Summit '08

2008-08-02T22:42:00.000-07:00

Faithful readers of my blog are likely aware that I am currently in Japan. I spent last week in Sapporo at the iCommons Summit '08. Like every year, the summit attracted lots of entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers.

It was a fun time -- I won't go into details on Japan until I return, but if anyone is interested in the conference, there was a summit blog. Just for archival purposes (I like to keep all my work on one site), two articles: one on multilingualism online and another on open government.

Update: more material, this time as a final overview.

Why I Love Linux

2008-07-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

... ever since I got my Macbook and have been using OS X, my life feels a little different. Just last week, I had to pay for software, and this made me feel a bit uncomfortable. No, I don't steal software licenses -- I've been using Linux for the past two years and got used to just downloading free and open source software.

I won't try and convince you that Linux is something you should try. I've had many of these discussions and the fact that we promote it through Five Minutes to Midnight is enough for me.

Instead, I'll just say this: setting up an FTP server on Ubuntu is so easy it makes me smile. In fact, I set up two today, just for kicks. Thank you, ProFTPd, for making my file transferring easier today.

Linux Journal - August 2008

2008-07-22T22:16:00.000-07:00

For the past year, I've been subscribing to the Linux Journal, and the August 2008 issue is one of the best I've seen for any magazine. This issue is devoted to "cool projects" (on Linux).

This is a pretty big deal to me, someone who isn't very focused on hardware development but loves programming. Why? First, this issue provides information on how to use the Wiimote as an input device. This isn't anything majorly new, but it's nice to have a step-by-step guide.

Secondly, there's an overview of Bug Labs' Linux computer, which is a basic cellphone-sized computer which you can attach other modules to, allowing you to build new gadgets and even swap them as the software is running. If you have a few hundred dollars to spend, this is a great way to start fooling around with gadgets -- or so I read.

A more familiar face in the magazine is gumstix, which provides very small computers with various components, such as Bluetooth, wifi, USB connections, and so on. This is very similar to Bug Labs, and in fact the costs are about the same, too.

Finally, there's E-Ink, which one can use for low-power displays. This is very promising, though the prototyping set costs $3000, which I imagine is a bit steep for most

The great thing about these tools is how it may be possible to use them and build completely new gadgets. For someone like me, who isn't well-versed in hardware development, this is a great opportunity to get involved in actual prototype development rather than just making graphics and writing code on my laptop.

Even better is the fact that companies like Bug Labs are starting to really promote and focus on the idea of open hardware. I'm curious to see how long it takes for people to start playing around with this. Hopefully I'll get into it too, sometime soon.

Note: click on image for credits.

Scanning the Web for Diseases

2008-07-22T22:12:00.000-07:00

From www.dis-order.net.

Let's start with two over-simplifications. There's a lot of information on the Web... And, it's hard to analyze it. Indeed, regardless of which field of study you work in, the Web probably applies to you -- whether you're an economist studying auction systems, a computer scientist looking at technical infrastructure, or pretty much anything in between.

One very relevant application that tries to solve this problem for health practitioners is HealthMap. Funded by Google, it's a perfect example of the intersection between data mining and public policy.

HealthMap: An Overview

HealthMap scans various health sites and news directories, constantly looking for news related to health and diseases. It does this by scanning the actual text of the articles and, using a text classifier, tries to categorize every article into (1) a specific disease, and (2) a specific region. This is much harder than it sounds, as the software needs to know the difference between a team of American doctors studying a new outbreak in England, and a team of English doctors studying a new outbreak in America. While this is easy for humans to do, computers are often quite terrible at telling the difference.

Once this information is collected and synthesized, the site displays information on outbreaks as a Google Maps mashup, making it easy to check where outbreaks are happening and what is going on in specific regions.

An overview of the technology is provided in a recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

The great thing about this is that using open source web crawling tools like Nutch, WVTool for text analysis, and Weka for model generation, you can build prototypes of HealthMap-like tools in several weeks. Of course, the accuracy of your classifiers and mapping articles to specific regions and diseases is often the hardest (and most important!) part.

The Challenge of Unstructured Data

HealthMap is a great response to the deluge of data that people and organizations have to deal with on the Web. Collecting data, analyzing it, and making it accessible is a major challenge in almost every field of study. Another example of a response to this is Issue Crawler, which allows one to explore political discussions online.

The main difference between these approaches and tools like Wikipedia and Who Is Sick? is that the latter use distributed networks of people to collect and organize information. I imagine that one great opportunity in the next few years will be combining the use of such "people power" with machine learning to build web services that help us deal with all this information and data.

Data Inaccuracies in Polls and Surveys

2008-07-21T21:27:00.001-07:00

From www.dis-order.net.

Salon.com published an interesting article yesterday by Paul Maslin and Jonathan Brown, discussing an inaccuracy in the standard approach to political polling. They say that phone surveys only focus on landlines, which ignore people who only have cell phones. They have a fairly detailed discussion on why this is the case, and how much this can affect polls -- essentially, as the number of people who only use cell phones increases, polls can become less and less accurate. This is especially true since a specific type of demographic owns cell phones and avoids land lines (younger, more technical people), meaning the polls can become quite biased (and thus inaccurate).

Alternatives to Political Polling

So the first question that comes up is, "Are there alternatives to phone calls?" Even with the rise of the Internet, political polling is still very dependent on random phone calls. The basic problem is getting a random sample -- you can't do that with e-mails or site visits. So never trust those CNN or Fox News polls.

One alternative is using a prediction market. These act just like stock markets, but people buy and sell shares in a specific event -- you then make a profit if the event takes place, and lose money if it does not.

What is exciting about prediction markets is that, with enough people participating, they aggregate individuals' knowledge and can provide a reasonably accurate probability around a specific event. In fact, markets have been known to provide better predictions than those of experts. A lot of major companies, such as Google, HP, Best Buy, and many others, are using these now, and one can get a good overview by exploring Google's work, and Wolfers' and Zitzewitz's paper.

So how accurate are these markets for the upcoming elections? Well, the Iowa Electronic Market pretty much shows a 50-50 split on the 2008 Presidential race, while Intrade.com gives Obama a 2-to-1 lead. Of course, not everyone participates in these markets, and I'm sure it is easy to argue that Obama supporters (read: younger, more technology-friendly people) are more likely to use sites like this.

Is This Cell Phone Problem An Isolated One?

When reading newspapers or magazines, people often feel more comfortable with numbers than they do with qualitative or subjective discussions. This is a major problem -- yes, numbers do not lie, but the definitions used to get those numbers can often be misleading. The way surveys are designed, and the way "random" samples are chosen, can often bias results quite a bit.

One area where this is a very big problem is poverty measurements. Poverty is often defined with regards to how much of a family's income is spent on food and shelter. International comparisons, however, are murky -- the way you define baskets of goods (e.g. nutritional requirements, staple foods, etc.) can change quite a bit between countries. One of the biggest criticisms of surveys focusing on poverty has been that they are household surveys -- people without homes are often missed. Indeed, finding such people can be very tricky in the first place.

Oftentimes, running surveys and collecting data is extremely difficult. A great overview of this, in an international development context, is Martin Ravallion's "How Well Can Method Substitute for Data? Five Experiments in Poverty Analysis". Statisticians, mathematics, and other researchers are constantly trying to find new analytical tools to make models and analysis more accurate, but bad data can rarely be fixed after it has been collected.

In general the important thing is to critically analyze the definitions and methods used in surveys and polls. The best piece of advice I ever got on this issue was that numbers and methodologies tell stories just like words do, and it is important to read between the lines.

YouTube, Viacom, and Data Concerns

2008-07-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

I recently started another blog on data analysis at www.dis-order.net. I'm going to post those articles here too, so I can keep everything in one place. Sorry if there's anyone out there who reads both!

Over the last few days, Viacom and Google have been in the news quite a bit due to their trial. Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion due to the amount of copyrighted material being posted on YouTube (which Google owns).

The Associated Press reports, "U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips."

The EFF has statements from both sides.

While such legal issues aren't my specialty, I wanted to write about it because of the political ramifications of such a release of data. Also, the limitations behind data anonymisation are concerning here, even though Viacom says this data will be "anonymised" and not used to target specific individuals or users.

As far as I understand, Google will be handing over approximately 12 terabytes of data, in a database that includes when a video is played, each viewer's user name, and also their IP address. At this point, both sides have argued that a user's IP address cannot lead to identification of a specific person.

IP Addresses and User Names

If nothing is changed within the database, Viacom's lawyers will be able to see individual user names that watched videos. I imagine it will be easy for them to also find out who posted the videos, either by simply visiting the site or making a few basic assumptions about the data (e.g. "The first person to watch a video is likely to be the one who posted it.") that can be empirically tested.

While this process will not compromise everyone's privacy, there will be users who can be tracked down through the information above. There are a number of ways to do this:

People with obvious user names. Some users use their real names, while others are building brands around their user names. For example, if you knew what videos lonelygirl15 watched, you can probably guess who watched them. The same is true for many other YouTube users. Furthermore, a great deal of users also post personal videos, and made accounts without ever expecting to have their viewing patterns analyzed by lawyers. Now if I see that User123 watches Colbert Report videos on YouTube, I can check if he or she posted personal videos (say, from a trip to Costa Rica or playing beer pong) and easily track that person down.

IP address contain geographic information. In sparsely populated areas, your IP address can't be connected to you specifically, but can narrow the list of potential people by quite a bit. If you live in New York City, you might be okay.

Usage patterns. Remember when AOL released "anonymised" search queries of a few hundred thousand users? Based on the terms that were put into the search engine, a news agency was able to track down specific users based on this data. A similar issue occurred when researchers de-anonymised Netflix data by comparisons to publicly available information on IMDB. The same can be done on YouTube. What's worse, one can easily use social networks based on comments, favourites, feeds, etc. to build a community-level view. Using this information, you can find clusters of users who are sharing or watching illegal content.

In my final year of university, I did a project focusing on community identification on YouTube and was able to build a basic crawler that found communities of users that would share anime clips. These were communities that were not formally organized, but could be found by analyzing comment patterns under each YouTube video. I won't go into the math, but it's very easy to do. This method might not find a specific individual, but can definitely find groups of friends (say, from your local high school) or fan clubs... Viacom could easily use a similar approach to track down groups of people who regularly view illegally uploaded content.

The Anonymity Myth

Suppose Google modified its database so that: (1) user names became a set of random characters, (2) so did IP addresses. This is often what people do when releasing data -- it's what AOL and Netflix did, for example.

Unfortunately, the last two methods above can still be used to track individuals down, because they depend on the underlying social network of the website, and the video content as well.

To really anonymise the data, one would need to randomize the underlying network structure as well. This would get rid of community structure and make it harder to track down groups of people with similar interests or backgrounds. Since Viacom is allegedly not interested in such information (and by the judge's ruling, is not allowed to search for it even if it wants to), getting rid of links and scrambling the network structure is fair game.

Modifying the video content would be trickier. Viacom is trying to make the argument that illegally posted videos are more popular on YouTube than legal videos. To label a video as "legal" or "illegal", one would need to watch the content, and there is no technology that exists to do this automatically (if there was, then Google should just use that and get this lawsuit over with).

To get over the problem of content comprising users' privacy, one option is to have Viacom submit a list of videos they feel contain illegal content. Google can then scramble all the video IDs and return a list showing which scrambled IDs represent illegal content, as judged by Viacom. This will ensure that Viacom cannot visit YouTube and track down who posted those videos or connect their data with other databases (say, check if users posting videos are also commenting elsewhere, or participating in other sites). While this process may sound tedious, Viacom will need to label data in such a way for the company / team / group / lawyers they hire to actually analyze the data.

In the End, Does It Matter?

What bothers me most about all of this, however, is that if Viacom simply wants to prove that illegal content is more popular than legal content, can't they use simple view statistics, or have Google calculate the number of unique viewers per video? I imagine that's more than enough information to draw such a conclusion.

Clearly, there's more behind this than meets the eye. Viacom initially wanted to see YouTube's source code, arguing that YouTube might be treating illegal content in a different way than legal content. Luckily the judge didn't feel that the company's source code was as relevant in this discussion.

We'll see what happens with this data, and how it is analyzed...

1, 2, 3, 4...

2008-07-16T17:37:00.000-07:00

What's better than a famous Canadian singer?

... A famous Canadian singer singing a remake of her song on Sesame Street!

And what's better than a Canadian singer singing a remake of her song on Sesame Street?

... A famous Canadian singer singing a remake of her song on Sesame Street and teaching children about the number four. Yes, that's two squared!

I love it.

And here's the original.

... And I promise, my next post won't consist of YouTube videos!

The Day the Earth Stood Still

2008-07-05T13:23:00.001-07:00

Ooh, a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Here's the original:

And here's thew new one:

I must say, I'm excited!

Goodbye New York, Hello Toronto

2008-06-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

And so today we finally arrived in Toronto... Back home. On Sunday, when The Edge plays retro music until 2 am (something I've listened to since early high school)... Two days before Canada Day (and my birthday)... Oh, so many memories!

But I leave New York with lots of new memories as well. I won't be cheesy. No, I can't do that. I'm feeling nostalgic, but that's all I will say.

I'll definitely write a reflective piece on New York, but hope to do that once I actually finish working at IBM (July 25 -- yay for telecommuting). Thanks to this whole Internet thing, I get to be in two places at once!

As a way to end my time in New York, I visited a few more sushi places. These are: Sushi Yasuda, Ginger (3rd Avenue), Kami Sushi (2nd Avenue), Monster Sushi (23rd Street), and Yakinuku (around Astor Place). All I have to say is: Sushi Yasuda was the best sushi I have ever had... In my life. Period. No question about it.

Note: click images for credits.

What I Write (and Read)

2008-06-24T13:11:00.001-07:00

I'm having a lot of fun with Wordle right now. Put in some text and it'll map it out for you. Aesthetically pleasing, and a little informative.

So here's what I've been blogging about this year...

And here's what my del.icio.us account says about me...

Brooklyn Bridge

2008-06-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

Rockefeller Center

2008-06-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

Friends!

2008-06-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

Visiting in New York.

Research Wrap-Up

2008-06-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

The Networks in Political Science conference, which took place this past week, was probably my last major deadline before moving back to Toronto. I'll be doing that in two weeks, though first will be entertaining a few guests before that happens!

The conference was a nice interdisciplinary get-together, with political scientists, computer scientists, sociologists, statisticians, and other types of researchers showing up. There were workshops on dynamic networks and statistical models for graphs, and presentations on everything from data collection to theoretical models of human behaviour.

What makes me happy about the conference is that I finally have a detailed overview of what I do, and it's publicly available! Thanks to a 35-minute talk I gave called "Mining Political Blog Networks", you can see my slides either as a PowerPoint Presentation or a PDF.

Another interesting note with regards to my work is that I wrote an article for iCommons, focusing on data visualization using collaborative and open source tools.

And this coming week? Hopefully taking it a bit slower!

In Boston...

2008-06-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

Learning Japanese

2008-06-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

I'm heading to Japan in late July for the iCommons iSummit conference, and then hanging out in Tokyo for a bit. In order to prepare, I'll be trying to learn some Japanese.

I remember blogging in Spanish, Polish, and French a few years back, as a way to reinforce those languages. Unfortunately, Spanish was never really something that caught on, but the other two are doing fine. Now it's time to try and add Japanese to the list, and I'll document my progress on here.

To start, I bought Japanese Demystified. While books from stores aren't necessary (I love the idea of learning a language for free), I often find myself in coffee shops or trains, and it's good to have something in print.

Aside from that, I'm all up for trying free resources. I'll finally test out the Live Mocha Japanese lessons. Also, I'm looking forward to listening to a few podcasts. Doing a search yielded the following results:

In addition to the above, there are free dictionaries and Wikibooks.

I'm also curious about LingQ, but not sure how much of their content is free.

Edit: my friend Sacha posted a follow-up post on her blog with more resources. Thanks, Sacha!

Note: click on photo for credits.

One Crazy Week Down...

2008-06-06T23:45:00.000-07:00

... and one more to go. Thank goodness for the weekend! Three paper deadlines passed this week at work, two for CIKM 2008 and one for NIPS 2008. Next week is the Networks in Political Science (a different NIPS), and I'll be working on a presentation for this during the next few days.

What's on my mind?

2008-06-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

I've fallen behind in my blog reading, so I spent about two hours today catching up on everything. Unfortunately, two hours isn't enough time but it's all I can really afford at this stage. There's a couple of themes that are really speaking out to me, both from these posts and just in general over the last few weeks, and I wanted to document them. Note that there's no particular order to the themes below. Notice any major themes? :)

The economy. First, inflation and the general state of the economy. I'm not too worried yet, but the trends are pretty interesting. The discussions on an oil bubble. More focused discussions on food prices, the Consumer Price Index, and related topics have been coming up quite frequently in the blogs and newspapers I read. I think there's quite a bit of sensationalist stuff, but we'll see what happens. Not stockpiling any food, yet!

Web 2.0, business, and charity. Again, discussions on problems with monetizing web 2.0. No opinion from me at this time, but the non-profit initiatives are really cool. A cool tag for some business models and ideas in this realm: cognitive surplus.

Technology, Politics, and Public Policy. Both in terms of new fields like nanotechnology, but also 'traditional' technologies like the internet... Network neutrality in Canada is becoming a big deal. A related issue is hacktivism (sort of!) and emerging threats.

... Lots to think about!

Note: click photos for credits.