The paradox of choice: Why more is less

I recently finished reading this book from Barry Schwartz, where he argues against one of the most central "axioms" of western civilization, that is, the "freedom" and happiness offered by the plethora of choices. He cites research in psychology and makes arguments that support the opinion that, contrary to the well-established beliefs, the plethora of choices has made us more inactive and less happy. The abundance of choices make it virtually impossible to identify the optimal "product" we are looking for and this will cause delayed actions and even less satisfaction with a "good-enough" alternative. What if we went to one more store? What if we had picked the alternative retirement plan? For Schwartz, key elements for happiness are the low expectations and being a satisficer rather than a maximizer in our choices. It is definitely an intriguing read and you can also watch the TED talk for this book where he summarizes many of the main points made.

Computational Social Science: Current state and challenges going forward

This interesting article from Duncan Watts captures the advancements of computational social science and its current pitfalls in a nice and compact yet comprehensive way.  I think it is a very good read for everyone that does research (or is just interested) in this field.

Crowd-funding and Scientific Research

In this article a novel take on research funding is presented.  I am not sure how it can be used and how prevalent it will become but it is worth thinking about it.  It is another example on how technology  changes traditional means of completing a variety of functionalities.

Big Urban Data

This is an article on the importance of (big) data analysis and mathematical modeling on improving the urban life.  A very interesting read!

An interesting book

I found this book to be a very interesting reading. It deals with some important aspects of statistical thinking illustrated through real world examples. Topics touched are the importance of variation (as compared to the average), the difference between causality and correlation, the group difference, the two types of statistical errors (false positives and false negatives) and the probabilistic way of thinking. I would strongly recommend it!

Divergent thinking

I found this video on changing the education paradigms extremely interesting, expressing many truths...

Is technolog driving down the cost of teaching undergraduates.

Interesting article from Washington Monthly. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0811.carey.html Any comments?

Is Algebra Necessary?

I could not keep my self from posting and commenting on this article that I read in NY Times, which expresses the opinion that we should abandon algebra since it is responsible for high school students and freshmen college students dropping out. An immediate question is where did the author find the causal relation between the statistics he gives and the drop out rates? Bypassing this "detail", it is really socking to read all the opinions expressed in the rest of the article. If a person who has acquired the title "Dr" cannot understand the importance of math in the development of critical thought and imagination to a kid, then how should we expect our students to do so? He misses the point again in another place where he asks himself "How many college graduates remember what Fermat’s dilemma was all about?"; math is not about memorizing but it is about being able to think and (re)produce things. And I clearly do not think that math is the only class that helps students. When I was in high school in Greece I had to take nation wide examinations in History, Literature, Biology, Finance, Religion studies and many other "irrelevant" subjects in order to be evaluated if I was appropriate to study engineering! Even though it was an overkill I think it helps dramatically to develop a spherical personality. What do we really want? Do we want to make things easy for students in order to be happy, but also be ignorant and incapable of thinking or do we want them to develop complete personalities? Is it really that math is hard and teachers are not doing a good job or is it that teachers in other subjects simply do not care much and keep their subjects easy? For instance, I have graded many exams in my undergrad class where students are using things such as "u" instead of "you", "r" instead of "are" etc. Closing I want to bring up one of the comments below the article: "My kids are in high school right now, and I am dumb-founded that they are still teaching students the same subjects, in the same manner as was taught when I was in school." Basic knowledge does not change, math identities do not change and so on. What should we do for this? Maybe we should teach more modern subjects such as "How to watch TV". I would like to apologize if anyone feels insulted by my tone in this blogpost; clearly this is not my intention but I simply could not believe what I was reading (and I read this article a couple of times).

How do social networks shape our lives ?

This very nice book from Christakis and Fowler, describes the fascinating story of how social networks facilitate the spread of a variety of events through people. Trends from emotions to physical appearance characteristics can flow through the social ties, whose structure can play an important role. A highly recommended book for those interested in social network analysis and its applications.

Graduate students in IS/TELE. Should we expect an increase or a drop?

According to NSF data, number of graduate students in science and engineering is increasing over the last 10 years. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf12317/ So, what we should be ready for? A drop or an increase in the number of IS/TELE graduate students?

From Euler to Barabasi

This post is a nice brief story of the network science. The major milestones of the theory of networks are underlined and new directions, possible with today's massive available data, are outlined in the TED talk included in this post. Really fascinating...

New form of social interactions

This post from the Facebook Data Team presents and quantifies a new form of ties in online social networks. In traditional social networks ties are either strong (people you constantly communicate with) or extremely weak (people you knew at some point of time but you have no communication with whatsoever). However, online social media allow for passive engagement, where people can passively follow the news of old friends or simply people the used to know or met at some point in time. Tools such as news feed or microblogging (e.g., Twitter) have realized this new form of communication. I found these data extremely interesting.

Windows 8 Start Screen

This blog post is technology specific, but has elements of how humans may use spatial arrangements, color, and grouping to find applications in the changed start screen in Windows 8.

Personalization has its dark side. Just like other information access technologies..

This is my reflection on a recent TED talk that I recommend to watch:

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Eli Pariser observed that information personalization is everywhere and it creates a bubble that shields one from the real world. What a surprise!

I hope that we all understand that some kind of tunnel vision is a back side of any information access technology that attempts to help one funding a needle in a haystack. Card catalog and simple (non-adaptive) search were steps in this direction. When you search in a classic library catalog for books you only see books relevant to your query. It's already a form of tunnel vision. Without library catalog search functionality you would have to browse the shelves and have chances to encounter some nice books you were not aware about. Wouldn't it be nice to keep finding book this way? But alas, we all use search instead of digging into the library stacks. Search shields you from mostly irrelevant stuff it and make your work more efficient. Loosing some gems on the way, but making many new things possible.

Nice to see that people like Eli finally can recognize that personalization makes another step into this direction. This is a sign that recommender systems area is coming of age and going through the same process as user modeling went about 10 years ago - recognizing problems associated with personalization. In user modeling area the problem of one-shot uncontrolled personalization has been discussed at length and a number of suggestions of controllable, transparent personalization was made. I guess, time to focus on that for recommender systems. Recognizing back side of every technology is vital to make it better!

Redefining the goals of a PhD program/degree

I found the opinions expressed in this article extremely interesting and true. The extreme specialization offered from PhD systems today makes their outcome interesting and relevant to a very small part of the general crowd. I truly believe that in iSchools the barriers across disciplines are indeed less strict but maybe we need to put even more effort. Definitely there are many challenges that we need to account for, for the reformation discussed in the article, but this article is a start to stimulate more thoughts and to motivate taking actions towards this direction.

Let's pick our ballot at random next time!

In this interesting article, it is shown that a parliament would govern a society more efficient if some of the legislators were elected "randomly". These randomly selected legislators are not politicians but just civilians (that most probably satisfy a set of criteria). The paper provides a golden rule for the number of independent legislators taking into account the size of the parliament as well as the elected percentage of each party in the parliament.

It is surprising that adding randomness in a social system boosts its efficiency. In the same direction it will be interesting to see if adding randomness in an online social system/network helps it achieve its goal. E.g., for twitter, if we randomly follow some people does this increase the entropy of the information we obtain from the "tweets" ? Online social networks suffer from a large number of issues (e.g., spam, multiple accounts, etc.) that add challenges to similar studies and/or approaches to boost the efficiency of the underlying system.

Wikipedia vs. the Universal Decimal Classification

This is an interesting graphic comparing Wikipedia's social classification and the Universal Decimal Classification.

Trouble Brewing for the iSchool at Seattle?

I regularly read a blog from/for library school students known as HackLibrarySchool, and found this posting today. Hmmm?

Speak up! Advocating for the UW iSchool
Heidi Kittleson 02/03/2011 at 6:12 AM

For those of you who don’t know, I attend the Information School (iSchool) at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. And while I, like most students, have had both positive and negative experiences in my education (you have or can read about them here or on my blog), I want to take a moment to express my deep concern for the future of the iSchool and the irreplaceable service it provides through its students, faculty and staff.

Washington, like many other states, has been dealing with a severe budget crisis. Since 2009, the University of Washington (UW) has lost 30% of its state appropriation — $132 million — and I have just become aware that after another round of proposed funding reductions, UW will have lost 50% of its state appropriation in just 3 years.

Last week the student leaders of the iSchool received an email from the iSchool’s dean – Harry Bruce. In the email, he attached both a letter the UW interim president, Phyllis Wise, sent to the legislature and press, and the budget reductions scenario worksheet. Reading the email and the attached documents left me shocked and horrified. On the list of possible actions as a result of the proposed reductions is this:

“Consider consolidating the Information School with another college and significantly reduce course and degree offerings.”

This. Cannot. Happen. It cannot happen for the ‘simple’ reason that there is not enough money for it to exist on its own. The iSchool recently began its centennial celebration. Although it has changed names, locations on campus and has evolved through the lifecycle of the Information Revolution, throughout its nearly 100 year history, its mission, vision and impact on Seattle, Washington and the Pacific Northwest have only expanded during that time.
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Read the rest of this post at http://hacklibschool.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/speak-up/

Curation is the New Search is the New Curation

You might find this item of interest: http://j.mp/icRgD0

In it, the author argues that Google's PageRank algorithm did away with curation as the underlying principle of search. Now, like any algorithm, it has been gamed, making it less relevant. The alternative is curation but this time by crowds (e.g. deli.co.us or trunk.ly).

KM and the return to the Memex

The recent issue of the Communications of the ACM (vol. 54, no. 2, February 2011)includes several articles of interest to this community.

"Still Building the Memex" by Stephen Davies is a review of the data models underlying Personal Knowledge Bases (PKBs). Beyond the expected discussion of mind-map, hypertext systems, and note-taking applications, I was intrigued by a discussion of data provenance, which tracks the source of the external knowledge included in the PKB and allows for filtering based on the source of the information.

"Structured data on the Web" by Michael Cafarella et al. reports on two research projects developed by Google for data mining and crawling the Deep Web.

An editorial by David Roman speculating on the end of print publication of the Communications is complete with the obligatory to-the-barricades quote that "digital media will free Communications from the constraints of print" and is supported by a news item by Gary Anthes on the launching of ACM's new digital library, the first major revision of the presentation of the magazine's archives in 10 years. One of the new options for user interactivity is the feature for the creation of "shared binders", which is a cross between a realization of the Memex "trails" and the tradition of sending out reprints of one's articles to associates.