jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X's Growl Framework works.

jGrowl

MemeStreams is the next Google.

Chayes: I think that recommendation systems are going to be as important as search algorithms. In a recent piece of work, we came up with a list of desired properties for a recommendation system, and what we ended up doing was proving mathematically that there is no possible recommendation system that has all these desired properties. So I would have to choose which properties I am willing to give up and design recommendation systems that preserve the properties I want most.

TR: What kinds of properties?

Chayes: There's transitivity. If I trust the recommendation of person B, and person B trusts the recommendation of person C, then I should trust the recommendation of person C.

It could be that at some point somebody could go onto a social network and say, "Here are the properties that I want for my recommendation system," and a different person could go in and say, "Here are the properties that I want," and they could get two different recommendation systems.

Jennifer Chayes, on Recommendation Systems

Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda. It aims to recreate Agenda's flexibility and efficiency in a clutter-free, text-based (ncursesw) user interface with vi key bindings. Beeswax views & reports will have specifications for sections, columns, filtering, and sorting.

Release v0.2.0 is a somewhat stable base of functionality on which the remaining features will be built. Since columns and custom views are not yet included, it is essentially Beeswax with just a single hierarchical view of all items.

The concept is that you have a database of information stored as individual items. Each item is a bit of information shown on the screen with a small bullet character at the beginning. In addition, each item can have a note attached to it to hold more extensive information. Notes are stored within the Beeswax database, but are edited by Beeswax launching your favorite text editor. When an item has a note attached, there is a small musical note displayed at the beginning of the item.

The Beeswax database has no predefined structure; instead, the structure is built up in a flexible manner as you work with the data. Each item of information can be assigned to zero or more categories. Categories are nothing more than items that have other items assigned to them. In Agenda, there was a separate distinction between items and categories, but in Beeswax I've generalized it even further and removed this distinction. If an item has other items assigned to it, then it is considered a category. On the other hand, if an item is assigned to more than one category, then it itself can not be used as a category.

The relationships between items of information are highly flexible. An item can be easily assigned to several different categories and the view immediately displays the new relationships. An item can just as easily be detached from categories. As you move items through Beeswax, their relationship to each other remains highly flexible.

The best way to understand all this is to get into Beeswax and start using it!

Beeswax - Mind Your Own Beeswax

Reputation systems constitute an important institution to help sustain trust in online auction markets. However, only half of buyers leave feedback after transactions, and nearly all of it is positive. In this paper, I propose a mechanism whereby sellers can provide rebates (not necessarily in monetary form) to buyers contingent upon buyers' provision of reports. Using a game theoretical model, I show how the mechanism can increase unbiased reporting. There exists a pooling equilibrium where both good and bad sellers choose the rebate option, even though their true types are revealed through feedback. The mechanism also induces bad sellers to improve the quality of the contract.

Reputation, Trust, and Rebates: How Online Auction Markets Can Improve Their Feedback Mechanisms

Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays—some appearing for the first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

Passwords are ubiquitous, and users and service providers alike rely on them for their security. However, good passwords may sometimes be hard to remember. For years, security practitioners have battled with the dilemma of how to authenticate people who have forgotten their passwords. Existing approaches suffer from high false positive and false negative rates, where the former is often due to low entropy or public availability of information, whereas the latter often is due to unclear or changing answers, or ambiguous or fault prone entry of the same. Good security questions should be based on long-lived personal preferences and knowledge, and avoid publicly available information. We show that many of the questions used by online matchmaking services are suitable as security questions. We first describe a new user interface approach suitable to such security questions that is offering a reduced risk of incorrect entry. We then detail the findings of experiments aimed at quantifying the security of our proposed method.

Love and Authentication

In spite of its tremendous value, metadata is generally sparse and incomplete, thereby hampering the effectiveness of digital information services. Many of the existing mechanisms for the automated creation of metadata rely primarily on content analysis which can be costly and inefficient. The automatic metadata generation system proposed in this article leverages resource relationships generated from existing metadata as a medium for propagation from metadata-rich to metadata-poor resources. Because of its independence from content analysis, it can be applied to a wide variety of resource media types and is shown to be computationally inexpensive. The proposed method operates through two distinct phases. Occurrence and co-occurrence algorithms first generate an associative network of repository resources leveraging existing repository metadata. Second, using the associative network as a substrate, metadata associated with metadata-rich resources is propagated to metadata-poor resources by means of a discrete-form spreading activation algorithm. This article discusses the general framework for building associative networks, an algorithm for disseminating metadata through such networks, and the results of an experiment and validation of the proposed method using a standard bibliographic dataset.

Automatic Metadata Generation using Associative Networks

In computer science, conferences are often the primary medium of scientific communication, and conference submissions are reviewed at least as stringently as journal papers. Despite the importance of the process, not much has been written on the subject.

Reviewing Conference Papers

Where would we be without rating and reputation systems these days? Take them away, and we wouldn’t know who to trust on eBay, what movies to pick on Netflix, or what books to buy on Amazon. Reputation systems (essentially a rating system for people) also help guide us through the labyrinth of individuals who make up our social web. Is he or she worthwhile to spend my time on? For pity’s sake, please don’t check out our reputation points before deciding whether to read this article.

Rating and reputation systems have become standard tools in our design toolbox. But sometimes they are not well-understood. A recent post at the IxDA forum showed confusion about how and when to use rating systems. Much of the conversation was about whether to use stars or some other iconography. These can be important questions, but they miss the central point of ratings systems: to manage risk.

So, when we think about rating and reputation systems, the first question to ask is not, “Am I using stars, bananas, or chili peppers?” but, “what risk is being managed?”

On A Scale of 1 to 5: Understanding Risk Improves Rating and Reputation Systems

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds