Thank you, everyone for a wonderful 2010! We’ll be back in January. Happy Holidays!
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Archive for the 'fun' Category
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I did not e
xpect to find myself celebrating this week; the North American tradition of Thanksgiving never sits very well with me. My uneasiness stems from the awkward history of European land acquisition on this continent. It isn’t a very nice story when you get down to the details, and I’m a little too ashamed of this dark past to be in the mood for a big party. That’s just me. However, I recognize the importance of being thankful.
So to my surprise, I’m counting my blessing right in step with a large portion of the people right here in North America.
Why?
F
irst of all, Professor Ali Miri invited me to speak at Ryerson University’s Undergraduate Computer Science Department awards ceremony last week. That was, hands down, the most positive experience I’ve had since the beginning of time. I’m still smiling. Amazingly, after the event it wasn’t just the professors or the closeted APL aficionados who came out of the woodwork to further the discussion. The students were engaged!
What? Really! No shit.
At the very least, I am thrilled that I could keep one 20-something woman in a white Hijab smiling and nodding for 45 minutes while talking about array programming languages…. Wow. Life is good…. It made my day. Heck, it made my month.
Secondly, you might have noticed that we posted a Happy Birthday APL post. Well, fine readers, you sent that thing flying all over cyberspace and our blogsite received the highest number of visitors yet. This was totally unexpected to me; the only reason I remembered the date, is because Roger Hui posted a reminder on one of the APL forums.
That, Folks, is the power of cyber team work. You rock! The Jedi live!
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
I really had a fantastic time in New York. Before the trip, my executive producer Barry Pearson gave me some sagely advice. Don’t forget you’re visually talented. He’s talking about what Ken Iverson once called, all that art school.
The truth is I can become unstitched by the way a ray of sun hits a single leaf and then spend hours taking photographs trying to catch it. Light can be elusive and as such, presents a great challenge.
So, with Barry’s advice in mind, I spent a good afternoon in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden chasing beams of light.
Indeed, I cannot resist saying, the squirrels are very friendly!
Evil Plan Part 2 involves inventing a clever and fun business model to fund this operation and make everyone who is not a part of it jealous.
I think I’m on to something. The timing is perfect for a collective cybernetic media strategy based on, guess what? Stories, of course!
Are you lost? You might be. Here’s some homework. Jinnean Barnard illustrates the power of unharnessed social media in A Recipe for Collective Outrage.
Let’s put some reins on this beast, shall we?
Despite my initial trepidation, I participated in Fast Company’s The Influence Project. These group contests aren’t very sophisticated in that they rely on the cult of personality as well as popularity to drive participation; which, to me feels…. well, like SPAM. My feeling or perhaps my hope, is that we will evolve as humans in this area and come up with smarter games.
Having said this, after locating and seeing my photo among the 32,955 others, I felt differently. I saw myself as a small part of the world’s biggest team. Awesome. That’s the power of visualization; an image can change how you think and feel about something.
Anyway, if you care to read between the lines, the following article has a little something for everyone interested in interpreting and visualizing data…
Unlike Crimson Hexagon, most social media monitoring companies rely on two common solutions: keywords and semantics. Both, says Centurino, only offer non-specific positive or negative portraits of public opinion and are severely limited. Keywords analysis depends upon an expansive library of definitions (“It’s like Cirque du Soleil contortionism” he says); and a semantic approach (that is, the analysis of phrases and expressions) requires a language model that recognizes sarcasm, snark, abbreviations, and an endless amount of Web slang.
Harvard-Developed Tool Measures Real-Time Public Opinion on Social Media
There is nothing on this planet that transports me more quickly to the early APL days than the sound of Jim Brown’s voice. I think I can speak for more than myself when I say, as children, we loved Jim! I think I have picture of a pack of us as wild-eyed munchkins assaulting the poor man in some lake, most probably in the state of New York.
So when I found this little clip on the APL97 video tapes, I couldn’t resist sharing. Enjoy. A minute and a half is all there was…
Good golly! An award winning geek show created by Chuck Lorre (Two and a Half Men) and Bill Prady (Gilmore Girls)?
The Big Bang Theory
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