Once in a while, you get an e-mail sitting in your inbox that looks just like 90% of the spam that infests your virtual mailbox, but sounds interesting enough to open and appreciate the new creative heights spammers climb to entice their victims. Only to find that it’s not really spam, it’s just someone or something you haven’t thought about in a long time.In my case, it’s actually pretty cool – some academic publishing house is letting me know that a paper I wrote two years ago (and I’ve since happily forgotten) for a research project got published in a book as a collection of studies. I don’t even really remember what the project was about, only that I did the graphical and UI part of the test program we wrote.
If you’re interested in the area of computerized document searching (a la Google) and some of the latest research on “the last 10% of search accuracy Google won’t touch” (according to our professor), this might be of interest to you; and if you don’t feel like paying $130 for one of what looks like over 200 volumes of text on fuzzy logic, I found the PDF archived in the bowels of the CS department at Berkeley, for your viewing pleasure.
Not so much for bedtime reading:
We present a framework system for evaluating the effectiveness of various types of “ontologies” to improve information retrieval. We use the system to demonstrate the effectiveness of simple natural language-based ontologies in improving search results and have made provisions for using this framework to test more advanced ontological systems, with the eventual goal of implementing these systems to produce better search results, either in restricted search domains or in a more generalized domain such as the World Wide Web.
Happy reading!
I’d like to say that my room is organized, neat even. I’ve spent a good chunk of change getting various pieces of furniture and equipment to refacilitate this supposed cleanliness: shelves, CD racks, drawer organizers, velcro strips for cables, etc. A few of these things work, but most fail due to the simple fact that people have a lot more stuff than it is depicted in those ads selling these items. When bookshelves are designed to look good half empty, trying to stuff a shelf full of heavy tomes of knowledge tend to result in an unnatural sag that can be corrected by having the books in the shelf below prop up the droopy middle.
But I hate dusting and vacuuming. The areas of the house that I frequent are free of dust; it’s the places that I don’t go which gather motes, and are often the subject of reprimands by girlfriend and parents alike. So instead of cleaning the place myself, I did the next next next next best thing to hiring a maid, which is buying one of those iRobot Roomba vacuums.
(For those who aren’t familiar w/ the little red machine, it’s a squat little robot that runs around the house vacuuming floors, automatically detecting walls and obstacles as well as avoiding falling off high places)
Everybody knows Uno – that game you played as a kid with a huge stack of cards (remember trying to shuffle that thing?) with a bunch of friends, where you take turns stacking cards on top one another following rules on value or color, and the player who discards all his cards wins. Simple, intuitive, and Draw 4 Wilds ensured kids developed early rivalries.
It eventually fell out of favor for more sophisicated card games that employed more strategy and probably involved money as well (and if you’re a dork like me, you bought and played with Magic: the Gathering cards). Eventually, the only time you ever played this clever little game was with your 7-year-old cousins.
For some reason, people I know chose to go back to their Asian mother countries this year; maybe it’s a good time to get reacquainted with what they left behind years ago, and getting in touch with one’s roots is never a bad thing.
Personally, I don’t care too much for most of Asia – I probably left Hong Kong too long ago to reminiscence about the city and to have kept any of my friends from long, long back. Like most of Asia, Hong Kong is an overcrowded, hyperurbanized, dirty place with a large percentage of its populace barely scraping by attending low-paying jobs so that tourists like me can go back and exclaim how far an American dollar goes.
When I moved over to my new host Site5, they provided me with some pretty detailed statistics on visitors courtesy of AWStats, one of those free open-source stat trackers. There’s a ton of stuff available: visitors broken down by page, by country, by browser, whether it’s an actual visitor versus a net search engine spider, etc. It’s encouraging that stats are going up each month, but that’s probably from natural longevity and minor search engine presence.
What I did find interesting, though, was from the snippet above: two full months after I’ve completely stopped updating an older version of the site, its RSS feed is somehow still viewed more than the new and arguably better feed. Furthermore, there are still…things….scounging through the v3 archives, whereas the nobody really cares about the v4 archives.
(the gallery2 thing is a picture-viewing piece of software I set up for my friend and am hosting on this site, he uses it to link his full-sized images from his SLR camera, which I’m assuming is also full-sized)
Not sure what’s happening here, but I’m guessing that spammers are actually subscribing to the v3 RSS feed and are automatically posting messages when they detect new entries. As you probably don’t recall, I had some trouble with spam comments at the end of v3′s life – a bit surprising considering the code running it is custom and common comment-spambots weren’t compatible, so it might have been manually entered, and with all the HTML links stripped out no less – but I’ve been ok so far w/ v4. Then again, v3′s been indexed by search engines for a good 9+ months, whereas this is still relatively new.
Ah, spammers: skewing statistics, one blog at a time.
Ah, the internet, where events happen and chain reactions are set in motion without the inconveniences of modern life. Recently, it seems like fame and notoriety gained from the global network cross over into real life quite easily and rapidly, from the likes of The Million Dollar Homepage to the case of the Stolen Sidekick. Traditional rules don’t apply when it comes to the web.
Combine that with a William-Hung-esque “fun to laugh at” appeal, and you’ve got a pretty funny movie clip that created unintentional stars of its main characters. Chances are you’ve already heard of the Bus Uncle on YouTube; it features a teenager tapping on an older man’s shoulder in an attempt to quiet his boisterous cell phone usage, then having the old guy spend 6+ minutes berating the teenager on his, of all irony, lack of etiquette.
