We have a little spam problem on the blog. Not the kind that you can filter out, however. (We had that too, but we filtered it.) Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a lot of traffic pointing to a spam comment (which we had removed) on a post from last year. Whereas the post received fewer than 30 views in the previous year, it was now getting several hundred hits a day. What happened?
I suppose I’m a Mac. I have an iPhone, a MacBook and an active iTunes account. Even though I’m not a PC, I do want Windows Phone 7 to be every bit as good as Microsoft claims it will be.
Since the launch of the iPhone, the iOS has really defined what a smartphone UI is. This leaves Apple in a unique position to dictate the evolution of a new class of consumer electronics. Apple does many things well, and those things tend to get refined over time. Like any company, they also tend to ignore or gloss over their weaknesses. Android phones have forced Apple to address various hardware deficiencies by introducing models with desirable features. Thus far, there have been very few challenges to the iOS itself. I suppose multi-tasking would be an obvious exception. But even then, the basic premise of an application centric UI remained unchanged. After all, “There’s an App for that”.
Windows Phone 7 might be just the competition that the iOS needs.
The BooksOnline’10 workshop to be held in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference in Toronto this fall will include keynote addresses by James Crawford (Google Books) and by John Ockerbloom (University of Pennsylvania). It will also feature the following papers, which will ultimately appear in the ACM Digital Library.
I’ve had occasion to perform genealogical searches for my family as well as for others. Genealogical searches can be rewarding, but more often than not you wind up with nothing. So when starting on such searches one expects that little can be found; only one’s optimism determines whether to continue searching.
This weekend, my optimism paid off. Probably.
Frequently, particularly when searching for work related to possibly novel research ideas I or others at FXPAL have had, it is not easy to determine when to stop searching. This dilemma comes up any time anyone is searching for something we are not sure exists. After doing N searches, and finding nothing, how certain can we be that it isn’t there?
An unusual example of an existence search came up as I was doing background research for my review of N. David Mermin’s book Quantum Computer Science that was recently published in ACM SIGACT News. As part of the review, I wanted to give a sense for the extent that Mermin’s thoughts and writings have influenced scholarly and popular thought on quantum mechanics. I thought I remembered that he was the originator of the “Shut up and calculate” interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I wanted to fact check before putting it in my review. Would this search be a hard or easy one?
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This recent XKCD cartoon made me think of Miles Efron’s project on language change and information retrieval. Perhaps the tools he develops will help scholars in the future parse what we declaim to our tweeps.
If you work for a small or medium business, someone in your office needs to buy things. Paperclips, computers, mailing envelopes, office furniture, etc. If you work for a small or medium research lab, someone in your office needs to buy these same things, but someone also needs to buy more unusual stuff. Twenty pounds of modeling clay. A Sony Aibo. Make that two. Lots of different types of video encoding software and hardware. Stuff like that.
At our research lab, I am often the person who does the actual purchasing of the strange items. If I’m buying a computer from HP, I expect the process to be pretty straightforward. If I’m buying industrial laser elements from Bob’s House-o’-Lasers, I expect complications. Reality is often the other way around. Since I’ve been doing this since the mid 1990’s, I’ve seen how technology has often made it easier and sometimes much harder to buy things, use things, and deal with problems. I’m going to describe a few examples in this and later posts. Just a warning that my bias is somewhat anti-technology – I joke that I’m a neo-luddite.
After a round of price reductions, Nook has now joined Amazon Kindle in offering a software application to read books on Android devices. I take this as more evidence in support of my earlier assertion that dedicated book reading hardware is not useful for customer who also carry other devices such as smart phones or tablets, and that multi-purpose devices will win out in the not-so-distant future.
I was excited to see annotations mentioned in the description of the updated Papers app for the iPad, but was disappointed in the execution. They added two kinds of annotations: text notes and highlighted passages. While both are useful for active reading and appropriate given the characteristics of the device, the implementation left a lot to be desired.
Some journals ask reviewers not to reveal themselves. A review process in which the reviewers are anonymous, unless they choose not to be, makes sense. But why shouldn’t reviewers be free to reveal themselves if they wish?
Twice, I have received non-anonymous reviews. In both cases, receiving the non-anonymous review was a thrill. Both reviewers were researchers I highly respected, and their positive opinion of my work meant a lot to me. In one case, the reviewer asked the journal editors to forward a signed review. In the other case, the reviewer sent me e-mail directly with the review attached. That review, while positive, had many excellent suggestions for revisions. Receiving the review more than a month prior to receiving the packet of reviews from the journal enabled us to get a head start on revising the paper, which was the reviewer’s stated reason for sending it to us directly.
I do not know why some journals prohibit reviewers from revealing their identities. Continue Reading