The militant wing of the Visualization Brigades recently published its manifesto, shown on the right. The War on PowerPoint is escalating, and at this pace, threatens to overtake the War on Drugs in the near future. What are we to do? Is minimalism the most effective way to convey information, as Tufte preaches? Or is Tufte’s argument backed by nothing but his personal sensibilities, rather than hard evidence? An upcoming CHI 2010 paper (one of the CHI 2010 best paper award winners) argues that elaboration is not all bad (or perhaps that not all elaboration is bad).

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In the aftermath of the recent SXSW event, Alexandra Samuel wrote on the HBR blog about five unsolved problems facing Social Media. She enumerated contact list overload, search overload, information overload, brand overload, and apathy overload. It’s not clear to me, however, whether these are pressing issues, and whether universal solutions to them would constitute an improvement over the current chaos.

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On Friday Netflix canceled the sequel to its Netflix prize due to privacy concerns. The announcement of the cancellation has had a mixed reception from both researchers and the public. Narayanan and Shmatikov, the researchers who exposed the privacy issues in the original Netflix prize competition data, write “Today is a sad day. It is also a day of hope.”

The Netflix prize data example is probably the third most famous example of de-anonymization of data that was released with the explicit claim that the data had been anonymized. These examples differ from the privacy breaches discussed by Maribeth Back in her post on ChatRoulette or the issues with Google Buzz discussed as part of Gene Golovchinsky’s post “What’s private on the Web?” . Those examples made sensitive information available directly. In the case of the following three de-anonymization attacks, the data itself was “anonymized,” but researchers were able, with the addition of  publicly available auxiliary information, de-anonymize much of the data.

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(Please be aware that some ChatRoulette links may contain mature content.)

Dear me. All those folks doing naughty things on ChatRoulette, secure in their Net-anonymity, may suddenly meet a rude awakening: Chat Roulette Map, a new Google Maps mash-up, maps users’ chat image to their location, based on IP address. Last week, it also showed users’ ip addresses.

Note that Chat Roulette Map has just added a new pop-up window when you first load the page:

Welcome To Chat Roulette Map
(snip)
We’d like to advise maine.edu to stop using
student’s names in their hostnames.

We’ve decided, at least for the time being, to
hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable
information was found in some entries.

No, you think? It’ll be interesting to see how this warning window evolves over the next few weeks.

Hillary Mason of bit.ly wrote a nice summary of some key issues raised in the recent Search in Social Media 2010 workshop. (For other commentary, see Daniel Tunkelang”s post and our pre-workshop comments.) Hillary asked several important questions, that break out into two main topics: what and how can we compute from social data on one hand, and what are the implications of those computations. Aspects such as computing relevance, how to architect social search engines, and how to represent users’ information needs in appropriate ways all represent the what and how category. We can be sure that adequate  engineering solutions will be found these problems.

The second topic, however, is more problematic because it deals more with the impact that technology has on the individual and on society, rather than about technology per se.

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I had fun watching the Superbowl, and it was interesting to see a great defense contain a great offense. It was also fun to explain what was going on (on the field) to some attendees of our CIS2010 workshop who were more familiar with the other football. I hope they enjoyed it too!  But of course the Superbowl is not (only?) about football: there is the half-time show, and the ads. The most striking thing about the halftime show was that The Who are still sort of functional as a musical group. Who would have thunk it?

Some of the ads, however, have me a bit worried. In particular, there were two — the Audi and the Google — that triggered the latent George Orwell in me. Is it really a good idea (no matter how tongue in cheek) that the government have the power to coerce individuals’ behavior as shown in the Audi ad? While I am all for recycling, the mere premise that recycling should be motivated by threat rather than incentive strikes me as both perverse and subversive of our rights.  I guess I am not the only one with a negative reaction: Jeffery Goldberg calls it Gorewellian, while an eco-energy blog laments the Nazi allusions and the disservice to the green cause.

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Last Wednesday Jeremy and I participated in the SSM2010 workshop organized by Ian Soboroff (NIST), Eugene Agichtein (Emory University), Daniel Tunkelang (Google), and Marti Hearst (University of California, Berkeley).  It was a full day of panels, discussions and poster presentations on a variety of topics related to search, to social media, and how to combine the two. In an earlier post, I wrote about one way that we can characterize the space, and Daniel did an excellent job of summarizing the workshop, which was also cross-posted  at BLOG@CACM.

I am still trying to digest all that I learned during the day, but I can say that one of the challenges was live-tweeting the event. I was one of several people who tweeted about what was happening in the panels and about the issues that were raised. Over 500 tweets were sent and resent with the workshop’s hashtag by people at the event and elsewhere. It was interesting to see other people pick up some of the topics and comment on them. In particular, several of my twitter friends who are not part of the SSM research community had commented on the tweets, and retweeted certain aspects of the discussion.

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I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately about search engines, algorithmic openness, and spammers.  I suppose this was all prompted by a blog post recently on the Meaning of Open: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html

In this post, it is claimed that openness is good: open systems, open source, open data.  This claim is held forth as true…for everything except for search algorithms.   In the case of algorithms, the secret sauce must be kept exactly that: secret.  Spammers would otherwise have too much power.

That claim makes me want to play around with a little thought experiment.  What if the search algorithm were indeed fully open?  What if everyone in the world knew exactly how rankings were done, and could modify their web pages so as to adapt themselves to whatever the ranking function is.  In short, what if everyone were number one?  Continue Reading

DarwinTunes bills itself as a “test tube for cultural evolution.” It’s an online experiment being run by researchers at Imperial College London. We often talk about the evolution of social media or cultural memes – but is that just a metaphor, or is it really evolution?

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The next talk in the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures series is this Friday. Robert Bryant, the current director of MSRI, will speak on “Rolling and Tumbling—The idea of Holonomy.” It sounds like a fun talk; he’ll illustrate his talk with “everyday and some not-so-everyday toys.”

I’ve posted the slides from my Bay Area Mathematical Adventures talk last month on From Photographs to Models: The Mathematics of Image-Based Modeling. I blogged about that experience here. I had hoped to post a link to the video at the same time, but it isn’t ready yet. I never feel that a talk is fully captured from just the slides, especially one that was designed to be interactive. I will post a link to the video once it is up.

I’d be tempted to go to Bryant’s talk except that I’m singing that night. Two FXPAL folks, Bill van Melle and I, sing in the 40 voice Bay Choral Guild. We have concerts Fri, Sat, and Sun at various Bay Area locations. Come if you are in the area and would enjoy a concert of festive Baroque choral works performed by our excellent group together with an outstanding group of soloists and musicians!