Steven Pemberton gave a talk at FXPAL today where he talked about the virtues of declarative programming, and specifically about XForms. He cited some interesting statistics about the incidence of errors as a function of the size of the program, including the observation by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month that the number of bugs increases as L^1.5. So the way to increase the reliability of code is to reduce the amount of code that has to be written to achieve a particular result. Declarative programming, Steven argues, is an improvement over its predecessors (high-level programming languages, and interpreted programming languages) because declarative programming focuses the programmer’s attention on the application logic and dispenses with worrying about the “fiddly bits.”

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Panels at academic conferences are often worth attending because they are not as well represented in the proceedings as paper presentations. There is the aspect of a good performance, as well, that can make the experience entertaining, provocative, and (perhaps) even informative. For the conference organizers’ perspective, then, the issue is how to create engaging panels. Ingredients that should be considered include controversial topics and articulate, provocative performers.

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A new issue of JoDI has been published. It includes

• an article on browsing web sites in ways designers didn’t anticipate (Exploring Out-of-turn Interactions with Websites),
• a study on longitudinal database use (A Longitudinal Study of Database Usage Within a General Audience Digital Library),
• an article that describes how a combination of  an object-oriented database and a full-text index improved performance for named entity extraction from historical texts (CONDITOR1: Topic Maps and DITA labelling tool for textual documents with historical information ), and
• an article that describes text mining for building ontologies (Text and Web Mining Approaches in Order to Build Specialized Ontologies).

This is a regular issue that follows three themed issues of JoDI, covering topics such as spatial hypermedia, social information retrieval for learning, and user-generated content for digital libraries. These, and many other, issues may be found in the JoDI archive.

Miles Efron’s latest blog post about humanities computing reminded me of a breakout discussion we had at the BooksOnline’08 workshop about expectations of humanities scholars with respect to computation. I don’t remember everyone who was at that table, but we talked about the need to build tools for specific analyses, and how that might take someone several months to do. My take is that while we cannot (and should not) expect researchers in the humanities to create complex systems (we don’t even expect some CS types to do it!), a certain proficiency with scripting should be a desirable (if not required) part of any Masters’ program, along side philosophy and ancient languages.

It doesn’t matter if students learn how to use perl, Ruby, Groovy, or some other language du jour; what’s important is that they gain  the problem-solving skills and the confidence to apply them to problems that interest them. Modern programming languages can be much more expressive, and modern computers are more forgiving of unoptimized code, making it easier to get stuff to work. Giving students the ability to express themselves in a new medium should improve both the scholar and the scholarship. And this applies to iSchools, too.

Impact of academic research is often measured through citation counts. Arguably, this is a more sensitive measure than just the number of publications, or even the number of publications in prestigious journals. Innovative work often gets published in venues with mixed reputations because prestigious journals and conferences may reject ideas that don’t fit well with the orthodoxy the discipline. In its heyday, for example, the ACM Hypertext Conference rejected Tim Berners-Lee’s paper on the World Wide Web because (among perhaps other reasons) that work contracted then-established standards of what makes interesting Hypertext research.

Thus it is useful to measure the citation counts of papers to understand their impact on the field. Traditionally, this has been the purview of librarians and citation indexes, but the proliferation of publication venues, and the desire to recognize work that was not published in the mainstream (or perhaps not officially published at all, as Daniel Lemire points out) makes the task of collation difficult.

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Over the last few weeks we have been sad to see our great crop of summer interns leave. Yesterday, my intern, Kathleen Tuite, left, and also, coincidentally, Slashdot picked up a project related closely related to her graduate work. Check out the Building Rome in a Day website to see videos of point cloud models for landmark buildings. The system her colleagues at the University of Washington built makes these models from millions of photographs found on Flickr.

Also check out a very early version of Kathleen’s cool Photocity game that complements the Building Rome in a Day work. The game encourages people to take photos that will help fill in point cloud models, so the photos collected as people play her game will improve the Building Rome in a Day  results. Conversely, her project involves managing many more photos than an average Photosynth so she will be borrowing and building on the technologies developed by Sameer Agarwal, Yasutaka Furukawa, and the rest of the Building Rome in a Day team.

Not content with reading about Cranfield experiments that defined the modern approach to information retrieval, William Webber is now looking to Ancient Rome for inspiration. Actually, he was just looking for images of the original Yahoo! home page, back when it was a directory rather than a search engine. He settled for an image from a 1998 article, but he can do better than that. The Internet Archive has a bunch of snapshots of the Yahoo home page, dating back to 1996.

The Internet Archive is a wonderful thing, and I am certain it’s good for many hours of procrastination. Here, for example, is the first capture of FXPAL’s home page, from mid-1998, complete with the spouting geyser of our ideas. Interestingly, of the seven people who have home pages listed on that site, four are still at FXPAL, but with considerably less hair.

Of course the past didn’t change much (and still doesn’t), so archiving it is straightforward. A bigger challenge is how to archive modern dynamic sites that are all loaded at run-time through javascript, Flash, or Silverlight. How will the Wayback machine handle the list of today’s world leaders, for example?

Over the life of this blog, we’ve been tweaking its appearance and functionality to make it easier to find information and to make it more user-friendly. In addition to the standard tags and categories, we’ve added lists of popular posts, recent comments, a way to share links to posts via various social media sites, etc. Recently, we’ve improved the way author pages are organized.

In the spirit of user-centered design, we’d like to know which features people find useful, confusing, unnecessary, missing, etc. If you have any suggestions for improving the usability of the site (sorry, improvements to the quality of posts are out of scope, but topic suggestions are welcome!), please let us know!

The SDForum Virtual World SIG (which I co-chair with Bob Ketner of The Tech and Eilif Trondsen of SRI-BI) will feature a look at Nokia’s augmented reality work next Monday, August 24, in Palo Alto. Details and directions are here.

Kari Pulli, Research Fellow and Radek Grzeszczuk, Principal Scientist at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, will present an inside look at some of their augmented reality work and speculate on possibilities for both near- and long-term.

Location
Pillsbury Winthrop Office Silicon Valley
2475 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1114
(http://www.pillsburylaw.com)

Online
Online media to be linked from
http://www.virtualworldsig.com at time of event.

Agenda
6:30 PM Registration and Networking
7:00 PM -8:40 PM Presentations

Lucky me. I a few months ago I won a ticket to Google I/O by posting a comment on Techcrunch.

Google gave each attendee an Android phone; the new ones are due out this August. The phone came with a one-month SIM card from T-Mobile, including 3G connectivity. It initially looked like a cheap iPhone: the touchscreen doesn’t respond well while scrolling web pages (I still don’t know if it’s a bad hardware or slow software, or a combination), the soft-keyboard is slightly too small and suffers from the same problem as scrolling pages.

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