A 1995 Dystopian Vision of the Web

This article, presenting a dystopian vision of the Web, was written by astronomer Clifford Stoll in 1995. A recent article discusses Stoll's 1995 piece.

(Tip of the cap to Manlio De Domenico, who retweeted Valids Krebs.)

Download Speeds and Reviewing NSF Proposals

The NSF has a helpful estimate of the download time for any proposal reviewers who might be connecting to the internet using a 28K modem. :)

The Internet of Stuff

In honor of George Carlin, the Internet of Things really ought be called the "Internet of Shit" (or possibly the "Internet of Stuff").

1981 News Report on The Internet

Long before the internet was for porn, the "two to three thousand" residents of San Francisco who owned home computers had the chance to download text from newspapers.

Anyway, watch this old news report from 1981 on electronic newspapers. It is awesome in several respects.

(Tip of the cap to Elizabeth Leicht.)

Soap makes you clean. SOPA makes you dirty. :)

And if anybody else came up with this, be it known that I arrived at it independently.

(As if I would have any other stance on this...)

Oh, and don't forget to sign Google's petition!

Community Structure, Web Cams, and Online Privacy

Here is an interesting new article about how network analysis can help invade privacy. And you know what the biggest cited culprit is? That's right: computation of community structure (which, as many of you know, is something I work on).

And, of course, I noticed when reading this that one of the linked pieces of evidence had a bad characterization of what modularity values indicate good community structure.

This is a good article, and when the author writes that ideas about network communities can be used to glean information people don't disclose, he is talking "community structure" in the technical sense. (And, yes, computing community structure can give one a very good idea about information that has not been revealed based on information in one's community that has been revealed. See, e.g. this paper of mine.)

Now I better read the final 6 pages of that Masters-dissertation draft. I keep avoiding finishing this...

(Tip of the cap to Peter Mucha.)

Internet Traffic and Michael Jackson

When I wrote my blog entry yesterday, I found myself unable to access Michael Jackson's wikipedia entry. Here is an interesting CNN.com article on internet traffic that resulted from first rumors and then reports of Jackson's death. Part of me is still weirded out by the whole thing---it's hard to think of him as gone---though the more analytical part of me is seeing yesterday and today as something that reflects the modern era more than most days.

As interesting as the article is, it's also somewhat self-serving with respect to what it says about modern versus traditional news sources: "The need of the professional media to be first with the news -- many did for a short time report the Goldblum rumor as fact -- adds further veracity. And, of course, the whole process is speeded up by the Web." Yeah, and all bloggers live with their mothers and write their material from their room in the basement.

Update: Mariano Beguerisse Díaz sent me the following article about google searches related to Jackson's death. As he reminds me, from a technical standpoint, such dynamics result from what is known as an "exogenous shock" (as opposed to endogenous dynamics that would refer, e.g., to normal search traffic patterns).

Quote of the Day

Today's quote comes from my father: "The internet is amazing."

By itself, this quote wouldn't be very interesting, but let's consider the context: First, my father is a luddite and is only just discovering the internet. Second, he doesn't go online himself. We were talking about the book "The Ascent of Man" and he wanted me to see how the author's name was spelled so that I'd be more likely to remember the guy's name. (I've heard of the book, of course, but not the author.) He had one of his office secretaries print out a page with the name---I was expecting to see the wikipedia page for the author, but it was actually the IMDB page---and that was when he uttered his comment. Maybe there is some hope after all, but there's another decade or so left to catch up... Anyway, the comment amused me greatly, given the context.

Nilpotent

Excuse the math pun in the title.

There was a power outage yesterday and I found out one of the unfortunate side effects of having my office and apartment across the street from each other. Namely, the power outage took out both places, so I couldn't just go to the other place and get things done easily. Power returned after about 1.5 hours, but I didn't have internet access at all until this morning and the mathematics mail server is still down so there are various e-mails that I might have gotten that I won't get a chance to look at until tomorrow. Se la vie. Hopefully there won't be anything that requires any action on my part. (I have various meetings tomorrow and if anybody sends me anything for those, then I simply will not be able to deal with them until after the meeting has already occurred.)

Debate over inclusion into baseball writers' association

There's quite a spat going on about the inclusion of internet journalists in the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA).

Before I make comments, here is one article that discusses stuff and names names. Here is an associated blog in which some of the issues are being discussed and the so-called "credentials" of many members of the BBWAA are being tabulated.

Recently, the BBWAA finally decided to allow membership (which eventually results in things like the ability to vote for membership in the Hall of Fame) to internet writers (in addition to newspaper writers). This should have happened years ago, but at least this oversight has finally been corrected --- well, sort of. Two notable nominees (Rob Neyer and Keith Law) of ESPN.com were the only two nominees rejected, despite their enormously high credentials and certain "luminaries" managed to get in without a problem. The "official" reason was that they don't attend enough games, despited the fact that they have written about baseball daily for something like 10 years. A fundamental problem with this so-called "criterion", however, is that most of the people who are actually in the BBWAA are not being held to anything remotely like this standard. The blog to which I linked is dissecting the list of BBWAA members ad nauseum. And guess what? Some of them write about baseball on the order of once a year or less. Basically, Neyer and Law were excluded because they're actually willing to criticize others in print. This whole thing is utter tripe. If you want an official standard, apply the fucking thing to everybody --- not just to exclude the people you don't want!

Ideally, the BBWAA will be faced with the choice of fixing this problem or becoming irrelevant. In any event, the story has really mushroomed over the past several days.

A show with everything but Gary Coleman

Back when I was still living in the United States --- you know, a few weeks ago --- I finally got a chance to see the musical Avenue Q, which I had really wanted to see ever since I first heard about.

Here is part of wikipedia's description of the musical:

The show is largely inspired by (and is in the style of) Sesame Street: Most of the characters in the show are puppets (operated by actors onstage), the set depicts several tenements on a rundown street in an "outer borough" of New York City, both the live characters and puppet characters sing, and short animated video clips are played as part of the story. Also, several characters are recognizably parodies of classic Muppet characters: for example, the roommates Rod and Nicky are versions of Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, and Trekkie Monster is based on Cookie Monster. However, the characters are in their twenties and thirties and face adult problems instead of those faced by pre-schoolers. The characters use profanity, and the songs concern adult themes

I enjoyed the show very much! The show-stealer was quite clearly the rendition of "The internet is for porn" by Trekkie Monster (with help from some normal people). It was slightly different than the recorded version, and the differences were pretty cool. Trekkie Monster is my favorite character, though it's really too bad that they didn't have a "Do you know what else starts with 'P'?" line... Or maybe a bit of a play on a certain line from The Music Man...

One thing I found out after going to the show was that the "Gary" of the 'normal people' is actually Gary Coleman. This, of course, makes the line about Gary selling all his stuff on eBay even funnier than I thought it was before; in fact, it makes it bloody hilarious! As far as I can tell, the real Gary Coleman has never actually appeared in Avenue Q (which is a shame, because that would be awesome).

Class Warfare as seen using Social Networking Sites

Courtesy Arcane Gazebo, here is an article on class warfare as seen using the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace.

I am a member of both, but I am what would be called a 'passive' member. If someone contacts me, I'll respond, but otherwise I don't typically log in very often. (I'll often go months at a time without logging in.) However, I have gotten back in touch with old friends by virtue of have profiles on these services, so they do offer some excellent benefits.

Moreover, they offer some really bloody cool social networks stuff to study. I currently have students studying this stuff, although aside from a SURF report, we don't have any articles on online social network sites yet. However, stay tuned...

Pleasure e-mails

This week has been a busy week.

I set up several SURF students, worked on finishing up a paper (which we should submit very soon -- maybe as early as Monday), did some numerical runs for the archival version of the dimer chain paper (currently in progress, with an estimated submission time of mid July), engaged in some media sluttage, and sent tons of e-mails.

Between dealing with all this stuff, I think I sent more than 40 e-mails on at least three different days. However, very few of them were so-called pleasure e-mails, which is a meme I accidently started at dinner a few months ago. This, by the way, is what this post is really about. ("This is a song about Alice.")

Anyway, my nice little slip of the tongue (ugh... that could be interpreted multiple ways) became a bit of a meme in our crowd. I guess that's just the way things work.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

First of all, I am stealing this idea from Gazebo.

One of the things I study is real-world networks, and one of the major issues is how they are connected, which includes the even harder problem of how to navigate them when you don't know their structure. This field started with a brilliant sociology experiment by Stanley Milgram. Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz were inspired by this experiment in their pioneering small world networks paper that appeared in Nature in 1998 (and was the subject of Duncan's Ph.D. thesis). This area of research has absolutely exploded since then, and I am one of the participants (though not one of the centrality players---though I do know some of the main people pretty well and have co-authored a couple papers with one of them and had another of them on my thesis committee), so I was obviously very excited to see Gazebo's blog entry. More recently, there was an e-mail version of Milgram's experiment (by Duncan Watts, Dodds, and I think one other person) and, of course, Jon Kleinberg recently won the Nevanlinna prize partly due to his research on network navigation.

As Gazebo writes, here are the rules:

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Click the random article link in the sidebar.
3. Open a second random article in another tab.
4. Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second.


This is exactly the problem of network navigation, with the wikipedia network as the graph one is trying to navigate between one randomly chosen node to another. As with the Milgram and Watts experiments, we are using local information, though with one advantage---we can work both forwards and backwards. (We can't necessarily use backward links, but we can use the information obtained on the end page, which is much more extensive information than the information about the target that was given in the Milgram and Watts experiments.)

Thus, assuming a path exists (which a priori need not be the case, though it clearly usually will be) we want to find one of the paths of minimal path length. This is a hard problem. :)

My starting point was (1) Yvonne_John_Lewis and my target page was (N) Smethwick (UK Parliament constituency). N refers to the fact that this is the N'th page, so I will need N - 1 hops to get there.

I first found a path for which N = 8, but if I were a little more careful, I could have found N = 7 (I'll explain below) and I bet a couple other shortcuts could be found.

Here's what I did (with reasoning included):


2. England (because Lewis is a UK singer and I need a UK parliament constituency)
3. Parliament of England (because I need a UK parliament constituency)

note: parliament of UK didn't seem to be there; that's the one I really wanted

4. Parliament of the UK (that's what I ideally would have done with 3 if the link were there)
5. British House of Commons (perhaps I could have gotten here right from England?)
6. List of Parliamentary Constituencies in the United Kingdom (ok, so this is presumably on this website)

the one I want is in the West Midlands; why in bloody Hell is this not shown on the list of the constituencies in the West Midlands that are tabulated on this website; it should be here!!!! (ok crap, I just checked on the wikipedia entry I want that this was abolished in the 1974 elections... fuck! I should have been working backwards!!!!!)

7. List of former United Kingdom Parliamentary constituencies
8. Smethwick, my goal, so N = 8


I subsequently found a link directly from (4) to (6), reducing things to N = 7. (I checked and there is currently a link from England to British House of Commons, which have gotten me to N = 6.)

Anyway, thanks Gazebo for a very cool time-waster!