- The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics
Quote: "The gist of the idea is that people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed (which is why it’s sometimes called the observer effect). Those workers at Western Electric didn’t build more relays because there was more or less light or because they had more or fewer breaks. The Hawthorne effect posits that they built more relays simply because they knew someone was keeping track of how many relays they built."
(categories: apple nike data stats health hawthorne-effect observer-effect metrics ) - fever again (tecznotes)
Quote: "There are three steps: you start with a small seed application on your own server, you make it world-writeable so that it can modify itself, and then you link it to a paid account on the Fever website. The complete application is pushed to your server without your intervention, and you’re off to the races. I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen anything quite like this before: usually PHP/MySQL software is more like Reblog or WordPress, where you unpack the thing as a complete unit, install the database and so on yourself, and do your own configuration."
(categories: installation ux design whille-you-were-out ) - Snarkmarket: Compress Into Diamonds
Quote: "Google, I want you to give me a button labeled “Compress into diamonds.” When I click that button, spin your little algorithmic wheels and turn my reader into a personalized Memeorandum. Show me the most linked-to items in the bunch, and show me which of my feeds are linking to them. And take it a step further. You’ve got all that trends data that reflects the items I’m reading. Underneath the hood might very well be data about the links I click on in those posts. Use that information about me to compress my unread items into diamonds I will find uniquely wonderful."
(categories: google rss googlereader feeds aggregation attention )
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Links: 6-23-2009
- Flip Flop Fly Ball
Cool baseball infographics.
(categories: baseball visualization infographic charts art sports )
Links: 6-21-2009
- Exploring the 2010 Web
Summarized: it’s 1) real time, 2) mobile, 3) decentralized, 4) made out of pre-made blocks, 5) social, 6) smart and 7) made from hybrid parts.
(categories: socialmedia 2010 web future realtime social ) - ongoing · The Internet’s Payload
Quote: "…And by the way, I’d rather have the text of Clay’s speech than the video. For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn’t just written, it’s usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks. Plus, it’s smaller and cheaper to ship around. Plus, it’s searchable. Plus, it works on more devices. (I acknowledge that only the first of these is fundamental; but that alone would be enough)."Totally agree, in fact I looked for the transcript link (doesn’t exist) on the Ted / Clay Shirky talk he mentions in this blog post tonight before reading this post, doesn’t have one.
(categories: blogging communication text )
Links: 6-20-2009
- ongoing · On Carving Your Initials
Quote: "If you have some ideas and energy and courage, the world is waiting for you to carve your initials on it… But please think hard about where."
(categories: speech convocation life work )
Links: 6-19-2009
- Please Enjoy – The Work of Ji Lee
50 random people in NY don’t know the difference between a browser and Google.
(categories: browser google video funny sad ) - Information Is Overrated – Forbes.com
Quote on twitter: "When I’m jonesing for a quick hit of information or entertainment, I know it’s there for me, demanding no commitment, attention span or involvement in plot. But, alas, it’s not gonna change our world. "
(categories: twitter informationoverload )
Links: 6-15-2009
- Hunch: Cred, Banjos and Badges
Some original / unique thinking about status levels and reputation. The personality badges are really interesting.
(categories: status reputation socialsoftware )
Links: 6-8-2009
- Twitter / Tim O’Reilly: OH: "God was able to creat …
Quote: "God was able to create the world in 6 days because he didn’t have an installed base". So true.
(categories: development productmanagement ) - tiara.org » Blog Archive » Tumblarity and Quantified Stand-ins for Social Status
Tumblarity is a quantified metric: a number that stands in for more complex social phenomena, like popularity or status. Tumblr helpfully includes leaderboards to make it extra-easy to compare Tumblarity with your friends, rivals, and frenemies, causing tech dorks pundits to complain about the “popularity contest” aspect of the feature.
(categories: metrics points socialsoftware status reputation socialmedia ) - tiara.org » Blog Archive » Foursquare, Locative Media, and Prescriptive Social Software – Part One
Foursquare gives you points depending on when, where, and with who you check in, and keeps a weekly leaderboard of high scorers in each city. In this instance, I get 5 points for checking in at a new venue (don’t ask where the 22 points comes from; I didn’t check in anywhere last night after midnight [Edit: apparently this is a bug that’s since been fixed]), and I’m told that Jay A. is the Mayor of The Grind, which means he’s checked in there more times than anyone else in the last 60 days.
(categories: social socialsoftware status reputation scoreboard games ) - tiara.org » Blog Archive » Status and Attention
Thesis: People contribute more to content sites like YouTube when they receive positive attention, and a lack of attention causes people to uploading less content and, in some cases, to stop contributing altogether.
(categories: attention reputation status social media psychology ) - Twitter / Tim O’Reilly: New from O’Reilly: Using G …
Quote: "… bit by bit, the Internet OS is becoming a reality."
(categories: cloud internet-os google-app-engine )
Links: 6-7-2009
- Burton Brewery Brewery corner Parker & Heath St. Boston, Mass. on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Cool art.
(categories: boston beer brewery art flickr poster advertisement ) - Figures of Speech – Teach a Kid to Argue
Logos is argument by logic. Ethos, or argument by character, employs the persuader’s personality, reputation, and ability to look trustworthy. Then there’s pathos, argument by emotion.
(categories: parenting psychology debate kids thinking ) - Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
(categories: health politics government insurance economics medicine )
Links: 6-6-2009
- IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize
Short discussion of some of the collaborative filtering techniques used by the Netflix competitors including nearest neighbor and latent factor models.
(categories: machinelearning clustering collaborative_filtering search netflix ieee ) - The Atlantic Online | June 2009 | What Makes Us Happy? | Joshua Wolf Shenk
His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.
(categories: psychology happiness health research harvard adaptations choices )
Links: 6-5-2009
- Apache Mahout – Taste Documentation
Taste is a flexible, fast collaborative filtering engine for Java. The engine takes users’ preferences for items ("tastes") and returns estimated preferences for other items. For example, a site that sells books or CDs could easily use Taste to figure out, from past purchase data, which CDs a customer might be interested in listening to.
(categories: mahout java algorithm mapreduce machinelearning apache recommendation collaborative_filtering collectiveintelligence )