Interrelativity

Interrelativity: musings about interrelatedness

  • Platforms for Knowledge Re-Presentation: SlideShare and Scribd

    As a remote "participant" at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week, I was eager to utilize various online channels for enriching my experience of the knowledge, observations and insights shared by the presenters at the event. During the conference, I watched some of the keynotes on the web20tv LiveStream; now that the…

  • Serendipity Platforms, Unintended Consequences and Explosive Positivity at Web 2.0 Expo

    The keynotes on Day 1 of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco exposed a number of common threads, perhaps best summarized by a quote attributed to Tim O'Reilly by conference co-chair Sarah Milstein: We're trying to maximize the surface area of serendipity. The official theme of the event is "Platforms for Growth", and all…

  • There’s no data like more open data

    When I was working on natural language processing and speech recognition systems in the 90s, one of our mantras was "there's no data like more data", i.e., all things being equal, the accuracy of recognition tends to increase with the addition of more labeled data. The Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania was…

  • The further commoditization of Twitter followers

    A few months ago, I wrote about the commoditization of Twitter followers, after discovering a number of automated, semi-automated and manual strategies that people – and non-human systems – were employing to artificially boost their Twitter follower counts. My earlier discovery was sparked by noticing some unusual numbers in the profiles of some recent followers…

  • Violent communication, emotional contagion, genocide and eliminationism

    Last night, I watched a disturbing show on PBS, Worse than War, "the first major documentary to explore the phenomenon of genocide and how we can stop it". Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, narrator of the film and author of the book upon which it is based, argues that contrary to common conceptions of irrational and spontaneous…

  • Be Impeccable With Your Word: Confrontation vs. Condescension and Intimidation

    I’ve had a number of opportunities recently to reflect on don Miguel Ruiz‘ first agreement: be impeccable with your word. Amid public conversations at the recent Coffee Party kickoff meeting, private discussions about reviews of academic papers and proposals, and listening to an interview about the science of wisdom, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for…

  • The Coffee Party: Political Conversation vs. Confrontation

    I attended a Coffee Party kickoff meeting at SoulFood Books, Music and Organic Coffee House on Saturday. Approximately 40 people subdivided into smaller groups to discuss their hopes and fears about the state of the union. Amid the largely liberal perspectives voiced by several participants, I was delighted to discover an unanticipated diversity of opinions…

  • Some highlights from CSCW 2010

    CSCW 2010 – the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work – is the first CSCW I've missed since 1998. I tried following along remotely via the Twitter #cscw2010 hashtag, which may have been the next best thing to being there … but it was a distant second. I was glad to read a few…

  • Applying the One Percent Doctrine to Climate Change

    I remember hearing an NPR Fresh Air interview with Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of It's Enemies Since 9/11, shortly after the book came out in 2006, in which he explained that the title came from a statement made by [then] Vice President Dick Cheney about the Bush…

  • Clinical Wisdom: Knowledge, Experience, Compassion, Creativity and Honesty

    NPR's Scott Simon (@nprscottsimon), host of Weekend Edition Saturday, is one of my favorite mainstream media players … and with over 1.3 million Twitter followers, I know I am not alone. Simon Says, his weekly essays, are among the most insightful and provocative segments I hear on the radio. In this week's essay, The Kindness…