Social networking workshop wrap-up

Last week I attended the HarambeeNet Workshop on Social Networks in Education at Duke University. There were approximately 40 other academics and researchers at the NSF-funded workshop which focused on using social networks and related topics to encourage broader participation in computer science. It was good to see some old friends and make some new ones and enjoy the beautiful Duke campus.

There were a number of excellent presentations and lots of new information. I took some notes and occasionally tweeted, but what I thought was fantastic was using Ning for sharing links, slides, and other resources (sorry, but you can't access the link apparently without a password). Ning allow you to have something like your own private Facebook space.

The biggest thing I took away from the workshop was the desire to integrate some social media into my intro to computing and web development courses. There's so many neat things you can do, like analyze tweets for spam, look for Wikipedia edit wars, and build networks from blog links. I'm hoping to develop some creating CS1 assignments in this area which I'll likely talk about here in the future.

Our keynote on Friday was Jon Kleinberg who is probably best known for his HITS algorithm. Kleinberg recently taught an interdisciplinary course on networks at Cornell and wrote a book with David Easley on the topic: Networks, Crowds, and Markets. After hearing Kleinberg's presentation, I'd love to offer a similar course at Harding.

It was also interesting talking to Ben Shneiderman who worked as an expert witness in the Apple vs. Microsoft case when Apple tried to copyright the GUI. While riding from the airport to the hotel, Shneiderman shared with me that what pushed Jobs to start litigation was when Windows 2 introduced overlapping windows; Windows 1 only had tiled windows which apparently didn't upset Jobs. Shneiderman also presented at the workshop his push for Technology-Mediated Social Participation and a visualization tool for networks using Excel: NodeXL.

Fav5

We just completed our first week of 16 for the fall semester. Only 15 more to go! ;-) And with that, my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Microsoft has recently released Photosynth to the public. This technology was developed jointly by Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington a few years ago. It takes photos from various view points and synthesizes them into a 3D object when can be rotated. Warning: leaving your browser pointing to a Photosynth page will use up 50% of your processor (at least it did for me), slowing everything down.
   
   
   
   
2. The Internet Archive, Library of Congress, and a few other partners are going to archive many of the government's websites at the end of the Bush administration. In the past this has been done by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), but they decided it wasn't worth the effort this time around. I'm glad someone else thinks it is.
   
   
3. After less than one year, Yahoo Mash is no more. Wonder how many people are losing a year's worth of social interaction? Someday the same thing is going to happen to MySpace or Facebook, and there are going to be revolts in the streets.
   
   
4. Some interesting research done by facesaerch reveals that individuals usually google Windows and Linux on weekdays and Apple on weekends. Does this mean we "work and suffer with MS and Linux" during the week and "relax with Apple on the weekends"? Or are people just more interested in vegetation on weekends? ;-)
   
   
5. Internet Explorer 8 Beta is available. Like many others, I've made the switch to Firefox, mainly because I liked the add-on features. Apple's sly Safari install didn't convince me to switch. But I'm very tempted to give IE 8 a try. Has anyone tried it out yet?
   

Neo4j

I attended an interesting technical talk with the Proto Team yesterday down in Santa Fe Complex. Emil Eifrem of Neo Technologies shared with us their open source Neo4j project, a high-performance graph database that is implemented in Java.

A graph database is very different from a relational database; rather than storing data in tables of rows and columns, data is stored in a graph data structure (nodes, relationships, and properties) which is obviously a more intuitive model for networks. Such a database is ideal for storing RDF, social networks, co-authorship networks, etc. Although relational databases can be used to represent graphs, answering queries like "Who are all the friends of everyone who likes ice cream" requires many joins to be performed which takes a lot of processing time.

Emil noted that although everyone he talks to says they know what a graph database is, they practically don't exist. Wikipedia doesn't even have an entry entitled graph database, and the database article doesn't mention them at all (graph databases are distinct from the network model). Here's some slides that give a good overview of graph databases and a survey paper by the same authors.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. According to a RAND study, the US is still tops in science and technology. According to the report:
   

   The United States accounts for 40 percent of the total world's spending on scientific research and development, employs 70 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners and is home to three-quarters of the world's top 40 universities.
   

   How long will we remain #1? Not very if we continue to make it difficult for foreigners to study here. Americans are just not majoring in technical fields like computer science like they used to.
   
   
2. Someone has actually made a play about the publicly released AOL search queries from 2006. The play focuses on User 927, one of the "anonymous" users whose queries ranged from innocuous to downright deviant. hmmm.... I think I'll skip this one.
   


3. Just this week, an Illinois public official dropped his requests to force MySpace to unveil the creators of several "defamatory" profiles that spoofed his identity. Stinks having web-savy enemies.
   


4. Matt Cutts confirmed that the file extension of your web pages is very important to Google. The Googlebot will not crawl pages with extensions for binary content like .exe, .dll, .tar, etc. (at least not yet). Matt gives an interesting example: a URL ending with "/web2.0" will be rejected by Googlebot, but "/web2.0/" will be accepted.
   


5. Just for fun: try the Bird Flocking Behavior Simulator. The Java applet models the flocking behavior of birds (blue and green flocks). You can place obstacles in their path (left click), give them food (right click), and add predators (red birds which eat the blue and green birds). I had a little fun trapping several of them inside a barrier. (Yes, I do have better things to do with my time. )
   
   
   

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. This is why I'm not an early adopter: HD DVD will be joining Betamax as another technology that lost a format war. Sorry, Microsoft, but this time Sony is on the winning side. Anyone want a $50 HD DVD player? Cheer up... maybe the Micro-hoo thing will still work out...
   


2. Building and deploying a 5000 pound spy satellite: $100 million. Destroying the same satellite because it never worked: $60 million. Watching all that tax payer money explode in space: priceless.
   


3. An interesting study has been done by Peter Gloor at MIT. He mines Google for the web graph associated with the name of a political candidate or a company and uses it to predict election results and stock prices. I wonder about the effectiveness of this technique though since it can easily be corrupted by individuals creating frivolous links and because Google does not report all the backlinks it is aware of.


4. Microsoft has just made a brilliant move: they are now giving away development tools like Visual Studio and SQL Server to college students. This is an excellent way to get universities to adopt MS tools since the financial considerations are now a mute point.


5. It seems that my students aren't the only ones tempted to copy-and-paste from the Web. The Wall Street Journal reports that plagiarism on social networking sites is on the rise:
   

   In a recent survey of more than 400 online daters commissioned by Engage.com, 9% of respondents said they copied from another person's profile; 15% suspect their own words were stolen.

   
   

Fav5

It's been a few weeks since I posted a Fav5, but it's back. My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Google has just released the Social Graph API. The API will potentially make it much easier to port social graphs from one social network to another.


2. Here's a quote I like to see:
   

   "Technology workers remain among the highest paid employees, especially those with management experience and hard-to-find skills."
   - Dice Holdings CEO Scot Melland

   Now if we can just narrow that gender gap a little in the IT field.
   


3. Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for $31 a share. I don't think this is going to pass muster, but if such a deal did take place, Google would seriously need to watch out.
   


4. In an interview with VentureBeat, Marissa Mayer (Google’s leading VP in search) discussed the possibility of using social networks for searching the Web.


5. A few weeks ago I was talking about Googlebombing in my search engine class. Philipp Lenssen writes that although Google has supposedly figured out a way to diffuse the bomb, a search for dangerous cult shows the Scientology website first. I don't think this is technically a googlebomb since a large number of people didn't jointly conspire to create such a link; I think intent is an important criteria in creating a googlebomb.
   

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. If you use MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking systems, you will appreciate this diagram of your social network.


2. Kevin Newcomb at Search Engine Watch has compiled a list of the most significant search-related events of 2007. Any of my students looking for a seminar topic for the spring... here's a great place to start!
   


3. According to a recent article in InfoWorld, Java is the next Cobol... used in many businesses internally but outdated by newer web programming languages like Ruby on Rails, PHP, AJAX, and Microsoft .Net.


4. Perl 5.10 has just been released. It's the first major upgrade to the language in 5 years. Some new items: smart match operator, switch statement, more powerful regexs, state variables, and more.


5. And finally, be careful next time you hit reply-all on that email. It's been estimated that interruptions at work and information overload in general cost the US economy $650 billion in 2006.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Facebook has recently decided to allow search engines like Google to crawl their member pages to make them accessible to a much larger audience. For those that don't want their profile exposed to the world, Facebook provides an opt-out. This is a good move by Facebook that will likely draw in more members, and it will certainly be useful to social networking researchers.
   


2. While on the subject of Facebook, have you seen the Friend Wheel? It creates a graph of your friends and connects your friends who are friends with each other. A really dense graph means your friends are very cliquish. A sparse graph would mean you have friends from a very broad range of people. Looks like I'm somewhere in the middle:
   
   


3. The first Semantic Robot Vision Challenge was held in late July. The competition required robots to locate objects in a room by first utilizing the Internet to search for pictures of the objects. For example, if the robot had to find a pencil, it would first search Google Images for pencil and then, based on the results, attempt to locate something similar in the room. I've tried teaching Ethan what "sleep" is using a similar method, but he hasn't yet been able to locate it anywhere in his room.
   


4. An interesting paper popped up in arXiv this week: Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal. The authors conclude:
   

   There are a number of excellent arguments in favor of changing the scientific publication system to an open access model. The open access citation advantage is not one of them.

   Why doesn't making a paper OA increase its citations? The authors admit in the introduction:
   

   ...in a well funded field like astrophysics essentially everyone who is in a position to write research articles has full access to the literature.

   So, if everyone has paid access to everyone else's papers, there is no OA advantage. I don't think anyone would have thought otherwise. The problem is, most disciplines are not well-funded enough to provide everyone paid access to the literature, and hence the OA movement. So the conclusions reached by the authors seem trivial to me. Am I missing something?
   


5. Is Apple the next Microsoft (monopolist)? Dan Frakes doesn't think so.
   
   

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Have you heard of MyDeathSpace.com? It archives the MySpace page of those who die. A little morbid, but interesting nonetheless.


2. American Airlines doesn't like it that Google allows others to compete for the words "american airlines" when they do a search. I'm siding with Google on this one.


3. Some Wikipedia entries were edited by users on CIA and FBI computers about topics that the FBI and CIA probably know more about than anyone else. Wikipedia says it violates their neutrality guidelines. I say give me a break.
   


4. There's an interesting article in Information Week about the future of web search technologies.


5. Who would have guessed? Swapping votes over the Internet is legal.
   

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 events, articles, or items of interest:

1. Researchers at Harvard have developed a robotic fly which could some day be used for spying, detecting harmful chemicals, or just annoying families out picnicking.


2. What comes next after Vista? Windows 7.
   
   
3. Here's an interesting article about Luis von Ahn's latest foray into utilizing humans for AI. The reCaptchas project is brilliant, but what caught my eye was a new game he is developing called Matchin' which enlists humans to rate the attractiveness of people's photos. The results could be used to make image archives searchable by attractiveness. Sorry bon Ahn, but I think this has already been done.


4. A new search engine called Lexxe is using natural language technology to answer user's queries (think Ask Jeeves). I tried the query "why should I use lexxe instead of google?" and got my answer on the first result. Not bad.


5. Becky finally joined Facebook this week. I'm a little jealous though because I've been on there for several months, but she already has more friends than I do. Just a thought, but why does Facebook limit you to just "friends"? What about "casual acquaintances" or "person I saw on the bus"? I guess it's up to me to invent the next Web 6.0 social networking site.

Fav5

1. On Wednesday, Google released Google Gears (beta), a browser plug-in that allows you to run web applications whether you are connected to the Internet or not. The small plug-in contains three components: a web server, an open-source database SQLite, and browser extensions for running JavaScript code in parallel. More about it here.


2. On April 27, Estonia relocated a Soviet-era memorial, the Bronze Soldier, which honored an unknown Russian soldier who died fighting the Nazis in World War II. Missionary friends of mine who live in Tallinn, the capital, emailed me about the ensuing riots and unrest the incident caused. (I’ve been to Estonia on three occasions, teaching Bible classes and working as a camp counselor.) Some background: Estonia was once begrudgingly part of the Soviet Union, but since gaining their freedom in 1991, there has been a lot of tension between the resident Russian (30%) and Estonian (70%) populations. Relocating the monument was essentially seen as a slap in the face to the Russians.
   
   What my friends didn’t tell me was that there was also a large scale distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) attack on several Estonia websites, including several government sites. At the peak of the attack on May 9, fifty-eight websites were shutdown at once. An interview with Jose Nazario, a security researcher, sheds some more light on the DDoS attack.
   


3. Congratulations to ACU (a sister school of Harding’s and the alma mater of three of my family members) for being mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article on social networking: At Some Schools, Facebook Evolves From Time Waster to Academic Study
   

   For the past year, Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas has funded two research projects that use social-networking site Facebook to examine student retention trends, in part because the school noticed its students were already spending so much time on the site, said K.B. Massingill, executive director of the division that funded the research. A group of undergraduate students also studied faith-related conversations in Facebook and MySpace and presented their findings to what Mr. Massingill called an unusually well-attended faculty session. "We filled up the room," he said.
   

4. All good things must come to an end, including Battestar Galactica. There are very few TV shows I like, so it’s sad this one will be ending after next season. I’ve really enjoyed the show for the most part. I think they really messed up recasting Starbuck as a woman, especially one that is so annoyingly self-destructive, but the idea of a robot race hunting down their creators lends to a ton of creative plots and twists. My hope for the final season: focus more on the sci-fi aspects and less on the nutty Apollo-Starbuck relationship.


5. I’m planning on teaching a course on search engine development and web mining next spring when I return to Harding, so I spent some time this week examining a book that is in progress called Introduction to Information Retrieval. One of the book’s authors, Prabhakar Raghavan (Yahoo! Research), was one of the main speakers at the WWW2007 conference a few weeks ago.
   
   Inspired by some of the concepts in chapters 19 and 20, I created a few new Wikipedia articles: adversarial information retrieval, web search queries, and focused crawlers. It’s kind of fun creating new Wikipedia articles- it’s a little like putting a flag in the ground and claiming ownership.