Darwin Anniversary January 31, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in Collaborative filtering.add a comment
Commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species are being held around the world and the list of events is on the Darwin On Line site.
For some reason the events being held at Carleton University in Ottawa aren’t listed there. Yet the lecture series for the week of Feb 9-13 has an impressive array of speakers, including Dan Dennett.
Ex Libris Recommender January 23, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in CISTI, Collaborative filtering, Data Mining, General, Recommender, Recommender service.add a comment
It’s gratifying to learn from Richard that the library product and solutions vendor Ex Libris has developed a recommender for scholarly articles named “bX”. The announcement says:
bX is the result of years of collaboration and research conducted by leading researchers Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Which bodes well for its credentials! bX data-mines log files from link resolvers:
The bX service derives its recommendations from the analysis of tens of millions of transactions performed by users from research institutions worldwide and captured through a large-scale aggregation of link resolver usage logs.
So it probably uses only Collaborative Filtering rather than a hybrid (content-based) scheme. It probably doesn’t use citations either.
Not having seen a link resolver log, I don’t know if there’s user-identity information to be found there beyond the IP address. If there isn’t that could muddy the waters somewhat. Librarians (with the same IP address) often act on behalf of a wide variety of end-users which could lead to rather meaningless serendipity in the recommendations.
The blog for future announcements is here: http://bxbeta.blogspot.com/
Nortel’s Demise January 15, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in Collaborative filtering.3 comments
I worked for Nortel (Bell Northern Research) for 13 years. At least 6 of these years rank among the best in my career (actually, my work right now ranks as the best, and I’m not just saying that because my employer might be reading my blog). The BNR Computing Research Lab had an amazing bunch of bright people – it was a real privilege to work with them. You’d hear the same testimonials about the BNR design group “Design Interpretive”.
So everyone is mourning Nortel’s demise into bankrupcy and offering post-mortem explanations. Here’s mine: the beginning of the end was BCE’s divestiture of Nortel on Jan. 26 2000, which was the culmination of John Roth’s “internet gamble” (viz. Nortel’s acquisition of the IP router company Bay Networks).
At the time, this move by BCE- to dump its remaining 38% ownership of Nortel onto the stock market – was touted as desirable both for Nortel and BCE. Nortel was to unteather itself from the schackles of a bureaucratic, stodgy telephone operating company, to be nimble and agile as “internet companies” need to be….
But it was pretty clear, even at that time, that this pact with Wall Street was a pact with the devil. No doubt there were significant rewards for senior managers and executives who were big shareholders, but at the cost of slavery to the quartely bottom line and hence to the ability to plan and execute for the long term.
If BCE had remained the princpal shareholder for Nortel, I think it wouldn’t have experienced the tsunami of the dot-com bubble-burst and also (probably) wouldn’t be suffering from the consequences of subsequent accounting scandals.
Ventilated Prose January 14, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in Collaborative filtering.add a comment
Almost 2 years ago, I noted the invention of Live Ink as a (supposedly novel) method to make reading easier. Maarten van Emden’s recent essay, attributes the idea of “Ventilated Prose” to Buckminster Fuller (examples are in his book “And It CameTo Pass – Not To Stay“) and reports his experience with this method as an aid to writing.
