I discovered The Gender Genie from LaughingMeme, which led me to Moshe Koppel and Shlomo Argamon’s algorithm, described in Nature and the New York Times Magazine. The Koppel-Argamon algorithm analyzes the text and guesses the author’s gender. (90) The algorithm was very simple, so I implemented it as a Perl module — Lingua::EN::Gender. I [...]
Going through some old notes, I found some other references to both Marc Smith and Joshua Tyler. Marc wrote about Netscan in, “Tools for Navigating Large Social Cyberspaces” (Communications of the ACM, April 2002, pp51-55). Joshua has a paper from when he was at Stanford entitled, “When Will You Read And Reply to My Email? [...]
Two articles in recent days highlighted social scientists at Hewlett-Packard (Joshua Tyler) and Microsoft (Marc Smith). Tyler, 25, studies the rhythms of composing and answering e-mails, work that he started while pursuing a master’s degree at Stanford. Smith has been studying USENET newsgroups, and his team at Microsoft has developed software called Netscan. (8Y)
I’ve been an e-mail user for over 10 years, and a mailing list and USENET user for just about as long, so I have strong beliefs about proper mailing list etiquette. That puts me in an interesting position as a participant in the Blue Oxen Collaboratories. On the one hand, these collaboratories are supposed to [...]
purple v0+1i is now available, both as part of the official PurpleWiki distribution and on its own. Now you too can have cool purple thingies on your blog! (8J)
PurpleWiki v0.9 is now available. Chris Dent‘s announcement covers the basics. A few words on how we got here, and where we’re going. (83) The Wiki Experiment (84) When we launched Blue Oxen Associates last December, we made Wikis a core part of our infrastructure. We had two reasons for choosing Wikis. The [...]
A few weeks ago, Chris Dent posted a brief history of Purple Numbers, noting, “This is likely full of errors as the story as I’ve heard it is incomplete and I was unable to check some things because the network path to California was busted while I was writing.” His account is pretty good, but [...]
Ross Mayfield observes that, when there are sudden news events, bloggers continually revise the same post rather than make new post after new post. He notes that this is very Wiki-like behavior and is not how blogs are supposed to be used, citing Dave Winer’s essay, “What Makes a Weblog A Weblog?”. (7U) This [...]
Today’s Los Angeles Times published, “Army of Extreme Thinkers”, which compares DARPA’s great successes with some of its unusual failures: (7O) But the price of success has been an equally impressive record of scientific kookiness. And now, in a darker era of amorphous terrorist threats, even some of its staunchest supporters are feeling a [...]
Penelope Eckert, Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, gave a talk entitled, “Language and Adolescence,” this afternoon at the PARC Forum. Eckert explained the role that adolescent language played in developing peer social order, and dispelled complaints that teenagers were hurting language by using it irresponsibly. Her theories are based on extensive ethnographic studies of junior [...]
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