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  • 1 min read

Lake Wobegon and Politics

Have you ever heard a politician or pundit say, with self-assurance, America is a Right of Center country. Think Newt Gingrich.

Right of Center. How do we determine the center?

Isn't this a lot like Lake Wobegon, "Where all our children are above average "?

I'm just sayin'…

  • 1 min read

RSS feed for for twitter

A simple question that for some reason does not have a simple answer:

"I want to follow someone's twitter feed using an RSS reader, where is it?"

Well it seems that for some reason Twitter has quite hidden it but as a public service I will share the results of my research with you.

You will find it at:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=username

So, for my twitter feed it is:

<https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=pitosalas>[  
](<https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=pitosalas>)

Of course, users of BlogBridge have a much easier time and have many more options. With BlogBridge you can subscribe to a person, to a list, or even to a general Twitter query, like "Object Oriented Marketing".

Watch this brief video to see how you would do it in BlogBridge:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSo5sC3kN3Q]

  • 1 min read

MapReduce Patterns and Examples

Great review article:

"In this article I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting. This framework is depicted in the figure below." (from Highly Scalable)

Worth reading if you are interested in how Hadoop and friends might apply to the problems that you are trying to solve: "MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases"

  • 1 min read

What I want to see in Spotify

As you know, I am a big big fan of Spotify. Lately I've been playing with the Last.FM integration. It's a handy way for me to see what new music or artists I might like to listen to. I've discovered plenty of new music that way, it's great.

What I would like is to be able to ask Spotify (or Last.FM) for a 'radio' station which plays music that I might like to hear. This feature exists but it doesn't suit me because it would jump from a raucous rock piece to a quiet jazz piece to a strange folk piece. Generally I play music based on a general mood I am in or want. Quiet Jazz in the morning and upbeat stuff (load) when I am washing dishes. You get the idea.

If you work for Spotify, what do you think?

  • 1 min read

Selling course notes: a market solution

Should it be ok for students to take notes during a class and turn them into a marketable product that they make money on?

If I am teaching the same class again this year, students could buy the course notes and potentially do better, or learn more. That's a good thing, right?

However is it fair to me? After all these students are becoming multi- millionaires by reselling my work, my intellectual property. Yeah right.

One professor has an amusing solution to this dilemma, but I think it still misses the point;

Precisely. Besides which, I've figured out a much more fun solution to the problem: I'm going to buy some of these note sets and outlines being sold for my classes. I'll go through them and find all the mistakes. And then I'll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick. (from Professor Bainbridge.com)

  • 1 min read

Superbowl Social Media

Here's a really interesting article about how the Superbowl used Social Media to enhance the experience:

"An exclusive, in-depth look into the Super Bowl’s first ever social media command center, the folks who ran it, and how the convergence of technology and people created the ultimate online Super Bowl experience." (from Why the Super Bowl's Mission Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown)

The article goes into each of the four missions/goals they set out:: Safety, Service, Capture the experience, Amplification. Interesting that safety is number one. What they say:

"With an anticipated 150,000 visitors to descend on Indianapolis, a main focus of the social media command center is to ensure public safety. They will monitor social media channels for traffic situations, parking recommendations, and anything that could be considered suspicious behavior or malevolent. Additionally, should a crisis situation present itself, the command center will disseminate information for Homeland Security and public safety command centers." (from Why the Super Bowl's Mission Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown)

And thanks to Melissa for pointing me to that article. Melissa is VP Engineering at Awareness who gets very high praise int he article:

"Awareness, Inc.€“ After test driving many different social monitoring systems, Raidious chose Awareness Inc's Social Media Marketing Hub for publishing, monitoring and analyzing conversation streams. Raidious chose Awareness, Inc because of its capabilities and user interface…" (from Why the Super Bowl's Mission Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown)

  • 2 min read

Elections: Hand counts are NOT the gold standard

There is always a good deal of controversy surrounding elections and in particular, whether an election is 'fair' or not. As I have been working on a project with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation I've been exposed to this from time to time.

This controversy arises in many different guises. There is a group that is absolutely against using computers in any way shape or form to run elections. Given that we need to count the votes of some 200 Million people in this country alone, it seems far fetched to try to do that without a computer involved anywhere.

Others say that the act of looking at a ballot and determining the votes cast should only done by people, working in well organized teams with carefully designed procedures. They refer to this as the 'gold standard ' of counting, the only way to be really sure that we are counting votes correctly.

That is not quite as far fetched. But also not self evident. Here comes a study that tries to rigorously measure the error rates of hand counted ballots. They say:

'"It is probably impossible to completely eliminate errors in hand counting of ballots," Byrne said. "However, there are new auditing methods that capitalize on advanced statistical procedures that can help ensure that final election results better match what is actually on the ballots. It is important that we become aware of the limitations of current methods and develop alternative ways to improve the accuracy of election results."' (from Rice University)

The bottom line result that they found was that "Hand counting of votes in post election audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent." You can easily recall recent elections that were decided by less than 2 percent, right?

Bruce Schneier (a highly respected cryptography and security expert) says:

"All voting systems have nonzero error rates. This doesn't surprise technologists, but does surprise the general public. There's a myth out there that elections are perfectly accurate, down to the single vote. They're not. If the vote is within a few percentage points, they're likely a statistical tie. (The problem, of course, is that elections must produce a single winner.)" (see Bruce Schneier's Blog)