In early August I thumbed through a copy of The New Yorker idly wondering which article I’d like to read when the name “Glen Whitney” popped out. A close friend of mine from graduate school is named Glen Whitney. Could it be the same person? Sure enough, with the article called Math-hattan, it had to be! The article talks about his efforts to create a math museum and describes the math tours he is currently giving of Manhattan.

The museum itself is still in the planning stages, but the exhibit Math Midway gathered a lot of press during its tour this summer. I love the picture of Glen riding the square wheeled tricycle that’s part of the exhibit. (Before looking at the pictures, how did they succeed in making the ride smooth?) Like the  Bay Area Mathematical Adventures series, this exhibit is great outreach. I hope eventually it will come west.

In graduate school, I found Glen’s enthusiasm for many things, particularly for mathematics, inspiring and infectious. It is great to see him so successfully pursuing this dream.

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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On Wednesday, I spoke about “From Photographs to Models: the Geometry of Image-Based 3D Reconstruction” as part of the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures (BAMA) series. I felt immensely honored to be asked to speak given the caliber of past speakers. Last night I felt even more honored when I discovered the high caliber of the students I was speaking to.

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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.

I’ve been going through some of the analytic Twitter tools/sites listed in oneforty. It’s a mixed bag, as should be expected, with some nice tools. In this post, I’ll talk about TweetReach, TweetStats, and Twitoaster; the rest will have to wait.

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At Daniel Tunkelang’s suggestion, I revisited Google Squared, having written about it when it was first released. At the time, I tried a couple of queries (not a formal evaluation), and found some useful results, and some bogus ones. This time, I re-ran the same queries as before, and compared the results with my saved queries. For the query ‘airplane accidents’, the new results were considerably worse. For the query ‘acts of terrorism’, there were no initial results, but when I put in some instances (WTC attack, Oklahoma City bombing, Khobar towers, marine barracks) I got back a similar list to the one I had constructed in June.

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Social media: a bigger game-changer than the Gutenberg press? More popular than porn on the Internet?

Socialnomics has collected some very persuasive stats into this beautifully designed dynamic-text video, “Social Media Revolution.” It’s worth watching in HD, full-screen mode (you’ll need to click through to YouTube for that though). Also, some YouTube commenters take issue with a few of the stats – so I wouldn’t necessarily use this for source material. I think it’s true in essence, however.

Yesterday, I attended a talk by Evgeny Morozov about the way that governments (but particularly authoritarian ones) have embraced social media for the purposes of disinformation and control. The typical assumption that the availability of communication technology increases dissenters’ ability to communicate and  to organize is rooted in the example of the fax machine and copier that were used in the USSR to distribute Samizdat (self-published) works. The devices are different these days, but the same equation is assumed to hold: connectivity x devices = democracy. Last summer’s post-election riots in Tehran, with the attendant Twitter narration, were taken in the same spirit.

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OK, it’s a sonnet, not an ode, but still. Making Light is one of my favorite blogs, run by science fiction editors Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden; it has a rich subject range and a great community of commenters. I also enjoy its commenters’ tendency to break into verse at the least provocation. Google Wave (which Jeremy discussed here) was the topic of a recent post titled “Panhandling for invites” in which Abi Sutherland offers this delight:

The sea has depths in which no net is cast,
With trackless kelpine forests where great squid,
Like Sasquatch in his mountains safely hid,
Dance dreaming with the fishes swimming past.
And human interaction is the same.
Beneath an email surface lies the deep:
Unmodeled work and social patterns creep
And spread in ways existing tools don’t frame.

Go here to see the whole sonnet.

An e-mail exchange with an old friend caused me to reflect on research in HCIR a decade ago: in the Hypertext conference series there was a lot of churn and innovation around ways to represent structure, about literary hypertext, and about novel interaction techniques that allow people to express information seeking intent in interesting ways. Much of that cottage garden research was swept away by the steam engine of the web, for better of for worse. The demands of scalability led to the abandonment of all sorts of niceties (such as link integrity, for example), including a rich model of interaction. SIGLINK, ACM’s SIG on hypertext, renamed itself SIGWEB in an attempt to stay relevant. The main impact of all that research seemed to be the idea that you could click on blue-underlined text to do something.

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