Ali Sohani › Likes

"Our work in building large-scale reputation systems suggests that it may be possible to build such a system on two pillars: a system of incentives for authors of papers and reviews alike, and a content-driven way of measuring merit and attributing rewards. The reputation of people as authors would depend, as usual, on their publishing works of high measured value. And crucially, the reputation of people as reviewers would depend on their ability to be early reliable predictors of the future value of a work. Thus, two skills would be required of a successful reviewer: the ability to produce reviews that are later deemed by the community to be accurate, and the ability to do so early, anticipating the consensus. This is the main factor that would drive well-respected people to act as talent scouts, and to review freshly published papers, rather than piling up on works by famous authors. Reviews would be ranked by reputation, thus diminishing irrelevant comments, as Amazon has shown it is possible to do." - Björn Brembs from Bookmarklet

Thanks: http://pirsa.org/08090036/ - Eric Jain

See also: http://www.jwz.org/doc... - Paul Buchheit

Gaming the game (game theory) explains the burn out. The system acquires friction and dilution by combatting the gaming of the rules. (the rules are no game) - Cliff Gerrish

"BitLet, whose client-free torrent downloader we first mentioned on DownloadSquad two years ago, have been hard at work on a new project. Their torrent-powered streaming video service is now available for a public preview." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"Tribler, on the other hand, is a desktop application that allows you to search for and stream just about any format your computer is capable of playing. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux - a Ubuntu .deb is provided as is the source code." - Mike Chelen

Over Easter, I have been working on a paper as below. if you are working in related areas, happy to speak. I am specifically interested more in the last bit i.e. Finally, the Internet itself is evolving and hence we discuss the evolution of the Internet and the topic of Overlay networks. We are interested in exploring the scenario of a future energy network as an overlay network to the Internet when entities (devices and people) begin to communicate at and to trade energy without human intervention. The paper - The role of the Internet in future energy networks: Decentralization of Energy networks and insights for Smart Grids from Peer to Peer and Ubiquitous computing discusses the impact of the Internet on the Smart Grid domain. We first provide an overview of current state of the Intelligent energy networks (Smart Grids) and then discuss the impact of the Internet on Smart Grids. The Internet has a tendency to push intelligence to the edge of the network (i.e. to decentralize...

I truly encourage this, would love to discuss this with you... - Ali Sohani

"Push, shout, or politely excuse yourself all you want, but those slowpokes in your way just won't budge. A new study shows a long-neglected reason why: Up to 70% of people in crowds socially glue themselves into groups of two or more, slowing down traffic. What's worse, as crowds gets denser, groups bend into anti-aerodynamic shapes that exacerbate the problem. The study may be a boon to urban planners. Crowd physicists already understand the effects of bottlenecked entrances, dueling streams of pedestrian traffic, and even "turbulence" in shoulder-to-shoulder mobs. In the past 15 years, this work has led to decent mathematical models that architects, city planners, and pretty much anyone dealing with crowds can use to make their spaces safer and more flock-friendly. Trouble is, the simulations treat people as independent particles—ignoring our love of sticking in groups and blabbing with friends." - John G Bell

Take a picture of a puzzle in a newspaper and this iPhone app solves it. - Robert Scoble

Excellent work - good job guys. - Rahul Vohra

"Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users." - Ivan Zuzak from Bookmarklet

it's exciting! - Sets Turan

"...we're now ready to show off -- and get feedback on -- the gadgets.realtime set of APIs. These APIs will let Google gadgets hosted in different user's browsers communicate with each other. The first API, gadgets.sharedstate, is available on the new Talk Developer Sandbox. With this API, you can share an object between instances of a gadget, and be notified in realtime when the other instance modifies it. More APIs and UI improvements to allow gadgets.realtime gadgets to be used on orkut and iGoogle are in the works and coming soon." - Ivan Zuzak from Bookmarklet

Vijay, my chess skills are weak, I'm sure you'd make short work of me :) I'm happy just giving people another way to play! - Moishe Lettvin

"Google is looking for ways to make sure its engineers have ways to get their ideas up the food chain before they take them somewhere else." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

But when will they find the next adwords? - Ben

"On Google Maps, we try to label important places directly on the map tiles. But sometimes, it seems more helpful to just click on a point and ask "What's here?". Now you can do exactly that with an option we've added under the right-click menu. When you click on "What's here?", we give you the most relevant result representing that location, whether it's a specific address, a natural entity, or a place name." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

Its possible now to extract exact lat/lang a feature which was so missing till now. When will they be able to exchange location with mobile google map? - Roni Segoly

"Last week I wrote a post in which I opined a bit about Facebook search. In it I wrote: Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it....No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago - bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges. If only I had waited a few days, I could have pointed to Fred's piece in Wired, out this week. He profiles the ongoing feud between the King of Search, Google, and the upstart, Facebook. In his piece, he writes: For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's... more... - arnaldostream from Bookmarklet

FTA: "I think it's a major strategic mistake to not offer this information to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I'd argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to "organize it and make it universally available."" - Apparently this guy... more... - LANjackal

"Sherpa uses a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic Engine for Interest Evaluation) that automatically learns a user’s favorite locations and lifestyle behavior. If a user eats out more than they shop, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores. When you launch the Sherpa application on your phone, it assigns you a random number that’s stored at Geodelic’s data center. That number is used to reference you and all of your preferences that the app gleans from your searches, so there’s never a need to input anything manually. And the GENIE tech means the more you search, the “smarter” the application gets — with just a few clicks on your phone, Geodelic’s technology yields location information that’s instantly customized to you, but for which you may not have been looking." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Google has unveiled the Android 1.5 NDK Release 1, a toolkit that gives developers the ability to call into native code from Android applications. Using this kit will mean that programmers--in tandem with the existing Android SDK--can create apps with faster performance when necessary, as opposed to running the entire time from within the Dalvik virtual machine: good news for owners of the T-Mobile G1, as well as anyone interested in the just-announced HTC Hero" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

Might be. Real-time systems hurt "time" and "energy", but when the way to gain information and knowledge has changed from "one-way" to "interact", we do need a realtime platform; real-time makes us consume information too fast, information becomes "history" when it's been consumed; being "too fast", we become less sensitive to information and it might cause we are "sensitiveless" to taking action, and "taking actions" change the world:) - K.D.

Storing everything on the Internet permanently (not just Twitter tweets) wouldn't be too difficult for some large corporations and government agencies. It's probably being done already. Data mining that collection with automated knowledge discovery systems that are capable of learning and self-improvement is the more interesting question. - Sean McBride

LinkedIn is one of those sites where it always feels like there's value but I just can't really seem to find any. Plus their interface is just FUBAR. Navigation on a social site shouldn't be that awkward. - Bryan Zirkel

There are sites like VisualCV already trying to do that, in essence to capture the market, moreover Job Portals are adopting Social Networks too, I believe LinkedIn team works more on their software architecture to make it scale up on massive network connections then it's UI, I think they gonna soon catch up on UI side too. Moreover LinkedIn treats every professional like same, while... more... - Ali Sohani

Oh dear, Mike. - Leo Laporte

I still use RSS and Twitter. In fact, I sometimes use RSS to keep track of Twitter people. - Dan Foley

I'd like to compile a list of classics - say a top 30 that could be read as a way of getting a good overview of the key ideas. If you have two or three favourite papers that don't obviously already appear here, could you please add them below? What I'm most looking for is the gems - papers that really have a high payoff per unit time spent. Learning of underappreciated gems would be especially helpful! - Michael Nielsen

Thankyou, everyone, it's good stuff! Keep them coming in. - Michael Nielsen

"Here's a NBC News clip from 1994. In it, correspondent Tom Brokaw interviews a pair of executives: Sun Microsystems's Eric Schmidt and Microsoft's Bill Gates. The topic? "Something called the Internet." We know. Awesome. Anyway, our favorite bit is when Tom Brokaw asks Gates: "Are a lot of people just getting on to the Internet because they feel like they have to get on the playing field, so to speak?" "Well, it's very hip to be on the Internet right now," says Gates -- 12 years before Twitter was founded." - Brad Williamson from Bookmarklet

I almost got on it :] in 1992 ... but they told me i would need some "browser" first, so i let it go .. damn the domains i could have registered! :] .. then, i was on Pegasus(?), America Online, text based BBS - Bulletin Board Services ..... well heck, will have to wait till the next, 3rd industrial revolution - 1. steam/machines - 2. internet - 3. what is it going to be? ... i think... more... - pb:

Exactly! I think some people have written off Wave because the front end stuff is, well, unpolished. But it's the server technology that's the important part of this product. It can have a million different interfaces to the functionality - all working together. - invariant

Looks like Zoho gets it. This is not just about a particular branded service, it's about enabling new capabilities in the fabric of the web that any web application can exploit. - Robin Barooah

"Web site FilesOverMiles shares files directly between your web browser and the person you want to share with, cutting out the web server as a middleman for instant, uncapped* peer-to-peer file sharing between two users. Using FilesOverMiles is simple. Like any other file-sharing site, you start by choosing the file you want to share. The difference is that rather than immediately starting to upload the file to a FilesOverMiles server, the webapp simply creates a unique, private URL that you give to the person you want to share the file with. Email or IM that link to the person of your choice, and when they visit that URL, their browser will immediately begin downloading the file directly from you. That also means an extra layer of privacy, since your important data will never end up on someone else's server." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

The great thing about Wave is it doesn't really compete with anything (other than SMTP). It does force people that could be considered competition with Google, to use Wave to stay competitive. Google will be the back-bone of most of the web if they keep this up. They'll power Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter, along with Microsoft and the Enterprise. - Jesse Stay

The problem with document standards and protocols that have many players is that they have to be kept very simple (SMTP) with limited innovation for them to work. I doubt there ever will be fully supported, complex standard (html, odf/oxml) as all the players can't keep the same pace between themselves or the standard. If everybody supports everything identically, the software must have... more... - Jemm

Increasingly even casual gaming is becoming more in-depth and graphically intensive. If the iPhone offers everything the Pre and Android do, PLUS experiences like this, do the other platforms have a chance? - invariant from Bookmarklet

Google is adding more tools for advertisers and getting away from doing just text ads. Interesting! - Robert Scoble from Bookmarklet

Diversification is the way, these companies are now planning to increase revenue and reduce risk. Advantage is their bank account, already holding pile of money to invest in and fetch out returns, if done calculatedly. - Ali Sohani

I believe there are always trade-offs involved, and this is merely a transitional period of technology saga we are in, as soon as migration is going to end, technology in parallel will be addressing the coming issues continuously and will become mature and secure, as we know it happens all the time, during every adoption of change - Ali Sohani

Photosynth is cool. - Robert Scoble from Bookmarklet

Photosynth is totally cool. I want to get a bunch of photographers in my area to converge on my city hall and snap a lot of photos for building a synth of it. - Chris Charabaruk

Online image editors are in a rage these days. Everyday, you hear about the release of a new online photo editor that claims to be the next big thing. - Mahdi Ebrahimi from Bookmarklet

"The individuals works, partly to make money, of course, but we should also realize that the individual who is doing a worthwhile job is working because he *feels* he is accomplishing something worthwhile… Those people you work with that are working only for money are not making any real contribution. I want to emphasize then that people work to make a contribution and they do this best when trying to achieve and are able to use their own capabilities to the greatest extent. This is basic philosophy which we have discussed before—Management by Objective [http://bit.ly/14akZ} as compared to Management by Control." – David Packard, The HP Way, http://bit.ly/7jVJ - Nivi