"social software" entries

Four short links: 3 June 2015

Filter Design, Real-Time Analytics, Neural Turing Machines, and Evaluating Subjective Opinions

How to Design Applied Filters — The most frequently observed issue during usability testing were filtering values changing placement when the user applied them – either to another position in the list of filtering values (typically the top) or to an “Applied filters” summary overview. During testing, the subjects were often confounded as they noticed that the filtering value they just clicked was suddenly “no longer there.”
Twitter Heron — a real-time analytics platform that is fully API-compatible with Storm […] At Twitter, Heron is used as our primary streaming system, running hundreds of development and production topologies. Since Heron is efficient in terms of resource usage, after migrating all Twitter’s topologies to it we’ve seen an overall 3x reduction in hardware, causing a significant improvement in our infrastructure efficiency.
ntm — an implementation of neural Turing machines. (via @fastml_extra)
Bayesian Truth Serum — a scoring system for eliciting and evaluating subjective opinions from a group of respondents, in situations where the user of the method has no independent means of evaluating respondents’ honesty or their ability. It leverages respondents’ predictions about how other respondents will answer the same questions. Through these predictions, respondents reveal their meta-knowledge, which is knowledge of what other people know.

Four short links: 28 May 2015

Messaging and Notifications, Game Postmortem, Recovering Robots, and Ethical AI

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 28, 2015

Internet Trends 2015 (PDF) — Mary Meeker’s preso. Messaging + Notifications = Key Layers of Every Meaningful Mobile App, Messaging Leaders Aiming to Create Cross-Platform Operating Systems That Are Context-Persistent Communications Hubs for More & More Services. This year’s deck feels more superficial, less surprising than in years past.
When the Land Goes Under the Sea — As it turns out: People really despise being told to not replay the game. Almost universally, the reaction to that was a kernel of unhappiness amidst mostly positive reviews. In retrospect, including that note was a mistake for a number of reasons. My favorite part of game postmortems is what the designers learned about how people approach experiences.
Damage Recovery Algorithm for Robots (IEEE) — This illustrates how it’s possible to endow just about any robot with resiliency via this algorithm, as long as it’s got enough degrees of freedom to enable adaptive movement. Because otherwise the Terminators will just stop when we shoot them.
The Counselor — short fiction with ethics, AI, and how good things become questionable.

Four short links: 17 April 2015

Distributed SQLite, Communicating Scientists, Learning from Failure, and Cat Convergence

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 17, 2015

Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus — clever, he used a consensus algorithm to build a distributed (replicated) SQLite.
When Open Access is the Norm, How do Scientists Communicate? (PLOS) — From interviews I’ve conducted with researchers and software developers who are modeling aspects of modern online collaboration, I’ve highlighted the most useful and reproducible practices. (via Jon Udell)
Meet DJ Patil — “It was this kind of moment when you realize: ‘Oh, my gosh, I am that stupid,’” he said.
Interview with Bruce Sterling on the Convergence of Humans and Machines — If you are a human being, and you are doing computation, you are trying to multiply 17 times five in your head. It feels like thinking. Machines can multiply, too. They must be thinking. They can do math and you can do math. But the math you are doing is not really what cognition is about. Cognition is about stuff like seeing, maneuvering, having wants, desires. Your cat has cognition. Cats cannot multiply 17 times five. They have got their own umwelt (environment). But they are mammalian, you are a mammalian. They are actually a class that includes you. You are much more like your house cat than you are ever going to be like Siri. You and Siri converging, you and your house cat can converge a lot more easily. You can take the imaginary technologies that many post-human enthusiasts have talked about, and you could afflict all of them on a cat. Every one of them would work on a cat. The cat is an ideal laboratory animal for all these transitions and convergences that we want to make for human beings. (via Vaughan Bell)

Four short links: 3 April 2015

Augmenting Humans, Body-Powered CPUs, Predicting the Future, and Hermit Life

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 3, 2015

Unpowered Ankle Exoskeleton — “As we understand human biomechanics better, we’ve begun to see wearable robotic devices that can restore or enhance human motor performance,” says Collins. “This bodes well for a future with devices that are lightweight, energy-efficient, and relatively inexpensive, yet enhance human mobility.”
Body-Powered Processing (Ars Technica) — The new SAM L21 32-bit ARM family of microcontroller (MCUs) consume less than 35 microamps of power per megahertz of processing speed while active, and less than 200 nanoamps of power overall when in deep sleep mode—with varying states in between. The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body. (via Greg Linden)
Temporal Effects in Trend Prediction: Identifying the Most Popular Nodes in the Future (PLOSone) — We find that TBP have high general accuracy in predicting the future most popular nodes. More importantly, it can identify many potential objects with low popularity in the past but high popularity in the future.
The Shut-In Economy — In 1998, Carnegie Mellon researchers warned that the Internet could make us into hermits. They released a study monitoring the social behavior of 169 people making their first forays online. The Web-surfers started talking less with family and friends, and grew more isolated and depressed. “We were surprised to find that what is a social technology has such anti-social consequences,” said one of the researchers at the time. “And these are the same people who, when asked, describe the Internet as a positive thing.”

Four short links: 3 March 2015

Wearable Warning, Time Series Data, App Cards, and Secure Comms

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 3, 2015

You Guys Realize the Apple Watch is Going to Flop, Right? — leaving aside the “guys” assumption of its readers, you can take this either as a list of the challenges Apple will inevitably overcome or bypass when they release their watch, or (as intended) a list of the many reasons that it’s too damn soon for watches to be useful. The Apple Watch is Jonathan Ive’s new Newton. It’s a potentially promising form that’s being built about 10 years before Apple has the technology or infrastructure to pull it off in a meaningful way. As a result, the novel interactions that could have made the Apple watch a must-have device aren’t in the company’s launch product, nor are they on the immediate horizon. And all Apple can sell the public on is a few tweets and emails on their wrists—an attempt at a fashion statement that needs to be charged once or more a day.
InfluxDB, Now With Tags and More Unicorns — The combination of these new features [tagging, and the use of tags in queries] makes InfluxDB not just a time series database, but also a database for time series discovery. It’s our solution for making the problem of dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of time series tractable.
The End of Apps as We Know Them — It may be very likely that the primary interface for interacting with apps will not be the app itself. The app is primarily a publishing tool. The number one way people use your app is through this notification layer, or aggregated card stream. Not by opening the app itself. To which one grumpy O’Reilly editor replied, “cards are the new walled garden.”
Signal 2.0 — Signal uses your existing phone number and address book. There are no separate logins, usernames, passwords, or PINs to manage or lose. We cannot hear your conversations or see your messages, and no one else can either. Everything in Signal is always end-to-end encrypted, and painstakingly engineered in order to keep your communication safe.

Four short links: 11 February 2015

Crowdsourcing Working, etcd DKVS, Psychology Progress, and Inferring Logfile Rules

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 11, 2015

Crowdsourcing Isn’t Broken — great rundown of ways to keep crowdsourcing on track. As with open sourcing something, just throwing open the doors and hoping for the best has a low probability of success.
etcd Hits 2.0 — first major stable release of an open source, distributed, consistent key-value store for shared configuration, service discovery, and scheduler coordination.
You Can’t Play 20 Questions With Nature and Win (PDF) — There is, I submit, a view of the scientific endeavor that is implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the picture I have presented above. Science advances by playing 20 questions with nature. The proper tactic is to frame a general question, hopefully binary, that can be attacked experimentally. Having settled that bits-worth, one can proceed to the next. The policy appears optimal – one never risks much, there is feedback from nature at every step, and progress is inevitable. Unfortunately, the questions never seem to be really answered, the strategy does not seem to work. An old paper, but still resonant today. (via Mind Hacks)
Sequence: Automated Analyzer for Reducing 100k Messages to 10s of Patterns — induces patterns from the examples in log files.

Four short links: 2 February 2015

Weather Forecasting, Better Topic Modelling, Cyberdefense, and Facebook Warriors

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 2, 2015

Global Forecast System — National Weather Service open sources its weather forecasting software. Hope you have a supercomputer and all the data to make use of it …
High-reproducibility and high-accuracy method for automated topic classification — Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is the state of the art in topic modeling. Here, we perform a systematic theoretical and numerical analysis that demonstrates that current optimization techniques for LDA often yield results that are not accurate in inferring the most suitable model parameters. Adapting approaches from community detection in networks, we propose a new algorithm that displays high reproducibility and high accuracy and also has high computational efficiency. We apply it to a large set of documents in the English Wikipedia and reveal its hierarchical structure.
Army Open Sources Cyberdefense Code — git push is the new “for immediate release”.
British Army Creates Team of Facebook Warriors (The Guardian) — no matter how much I know the arguments for it, it still feels vile.

Four short links: 28 January 2015

Note and Vote, Gaming Behaviour, Code Search, and Immutabilate All The Things

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 28, 2015

Note and Vote (Google Ventures) — nifty meeting hack to surface ideas and identify popular candidates to a decision maker.
Applying Psychology to Improve Online Behaviour — online game runs massive experiments (w/researchers to validate findings) to improve the behaviour of their players. Some of Riot’s experiments are causing the game to evolve. For example, one product is a restricted chat mode that limits the number of messages abusive players can type per match. It’s a temporary punishment that has led to a noticeable improvement in player behavior afterward —on average, individuals who went through a period of restricted chat saw 20 percent fewer abuse reports filed by other players. The restricted chat approach also proved 4 percent more effective at improving player behavior than the usual punishment method of temporarily banning toxic players. Even the smallest improvements in player behavior can make a huge difference in an online game that attracts 67 million players every month.
Hound — open source code search tool from Etsy.
Immutability Changes Everything (PDF) — This paper is simply an amuse-bouche on the repeated patterns of computing that leverage immutability.