Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, March 17, 2003

-- Comment()
Spell-Check Crutch Curtails Correctness: "How do you degrade a good writer's work to that of a lesser scribe? Try the spell-check button." [Google Technology News]

Books about networks -- Comment()
After receiving a pointer to the book Tipping Point, I browsed Amazon for books on network-related topics as reading for my essay on weblogs.

Amazon listed many book with fine reviews, so it is difficult to choose the ones to read. Here is a list of some interesting ones:

Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts
Small Worlds by Duncan J. Watts
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks by Mark Buchanan
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin

I'm not interested in marketing, so the book on Idea Virus is perhaps ruled out. Have you suggestions or comments about the rest of the books?

Island-mapping for weblogs -- Comment()
The Trusted Blog Search by Micah Alpern is a nice example of an island-mapping tool for weblogs. I congratulated Micah on Friday, and received a pointer to the discussion of power law distributions and their applicability to weblogs. As suggested by Micah, this framework may offer an elegant description of the A, B, C classes of bloggers.

Micah also suggested the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell as a useful source of ideas. Have to look this up: "[...] a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does."

The power law distributions have connections to the concept of self-organized criticality, where Per Bak was one of the central investigators. I studied this area a bit in my master's thesis on cellular automata. One problem in power laws is that the distributions are difficult to verify. Sometimes the data gathering method affects the results. A phenomenon shows a power law distribution in the hands of one researcher, and lacks that kind of distribution in the hands of another researcher.

In any case, weblogs are an interesting area for both research and development. There is a lot of potential in weblogs. I hope this technology will offer a new kind of collaborative media for ordinary citicens, for knowledge workers, and for decision-makers. We have to see if these different communities can coexist in the same medium.

Web and NCSA Mosaic 10 years ago -- Comment()
On Wednesday, 21st April, 1993 the NCSA Mosaic 1.0 browser was released, and the web really got wings. I had been keeping a mathematics-related Gopher service since 1992, and during the summer of 1993 I converted the service to the web format. I wrote an essay of this in 1997: "I started in 1992 by offering a list of interesting and useful Gopher links. This service was used about 200 times each day in the end of 1993. In fact, the usage was more frequent than I anticipated. There seemed to be a real need for a mathematics information service, and moving to the Web system made sense already in 1993."

In the same essay I discussed a possible standard for mathematical documents: "Currently there isn't any universally accepted standard for publishing mathematical documents on the Web. This is one of the biggest problems of using Internet for scientific communication. Some possible solutions are PostScript, Adobe Acrobat (PDF files), HTML with GIF images for equations, or TeX/LaTeX." I went on to discuss the MathML standard. Today the situation of web-based mathematics standards is, unfortunately, not much different.

-- Comment()
Open source courseware: "I have spent most of this weekend wrestling my course materials into the proprietary courseware framework that our university has [...] Why isn't there an open-source courseware package that's as easy to use and customizable as something like Movable Type?" [mamamusings]

-- Comment()
Versioning CC licenses: "We are in the process of versioning the CreativeCommons licenses, so check out the discussion and please participate." [Lessig Blog]

-- Comment()
E. B. White. "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time." [Quotes of the Day]

Nice quote on a day after the elections.

Weblog analysis by communities -- Comment()
Seblogging: Weblogs as knowledge management tools: 'If you want to apply Weblogging and personal Webpublishing as a tool for "organizational change" you might want to choose "groups" or "communities" as your unit of analysis.' [Serious Instructional Technology]

So, perhaps there is something to the idea of weblogs as islands: 'The diversity (or the lack of it) in weblog communities will be an essential factor in the success of weblogs. Too much winnowing caused by, e.g., dominance by a few weblogs will kill the community. Thus measuring the referrals and making it easy to find out the "popular" weblogs may ultimately cause the whole system to collapse. It would be more useful to have tools for finding original thoughts and viewpoints on the interesting current subjects.'

-- Comment()
The challenge of converting leaders: "How many people does it take to make a difference? In the last century, it required 1000s of followers behind a committed leader. Companies needed to get big to survive. But today, a much smaller group can use the tools of the 21st Century to make effective change. How many does it take? I think that 10s of people can do it, effecting a Tipping Point that moves thousands, without an apparent leader. I think we shall begin to see if things have changed that much and just how many it takes to really change things." [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Elections is Finland -- Comment()
Yesterday we had Parliamentary Elections in Finland. The voting closed at 8 pm, and the result was available a couple of hours later. (I was watching Minority Report on video, so I checked the results a bit late, at half past 11 pm.) The Finnish Parliament has 200 seats, and the results were: "[...] the opposition Centre Party will become the largest group in the new Parliament, with 55 seats to the 53 of the Social Democrats. Both parties improved their number of seats, with the big losers being the moderate conservatives of the National Coalition Party, who will lose six MPs and slide down to 40 seats."

The candidate I voted was elected to the Parliament. However, many of the parties had harnessed celebrities as candidates, and this seems to have been a successful tactic. This is not so good for the functioning of democracy, I think.

Anneli Jäätteenmäki of the Centre Party will be first to try to form a government. It will be interesting to see if Finland will have a woman both as the President and the Prime Minister. Also, the number of female MPs will increase by one to 75 out of the total of 200.