Blog #5

Meaning

Heidegger's web of meaning is a view that states that we know an object less in its form than in its relation to other things - they derive "meaning" per Heidegger in the same way that a person would describe how a thing acquires purpose. Heidegger's "meaning" is the sum of our understanding of an object in the context of what that object is for not just what the item is. He puts forth that the identity of an item is meaningless without some understanding of its role in the world around it.

Weinberger

Weinberger associates this with his understanding of metadata and his "third order of order." The contextual information that describes the significance of a piece of data is Weinberger's third order of order. The tags and links we associate with ideas and units of information to make them easier to find are an externalization of our understanding of the significance of the data - not just a reference card, but a new piece of information that actually represents the meaning of a thing.

Musical diagram

I don't typically identify with music on a cognitive emotional level - other than associating certain songs with memory (and not necessarily for any good reason) I identify with music solely on the basis of a sort of content-independent reading of the character of the music, attitude with which it is delivered, then develop an appreciation of the music largely based on my emotional state at the time. In other words, I sort of roll with the song. "Come Together" by The Beatles is a good example - for all intents and purposes, that song is about absolutely nothing, but it has a mean groove to it which has been bridging generations since it came out.

Therefore, selecting a song that has some sort of meaning to me is a bit difficult - there are a few songs that have just stuck with me over the years due to their delivery and some of their tonal characteristics. There are a few songs that make me feel nostalgic for purely emotional reasons, and a few that just plain get stuck in my head. I'm going to just have to pick one that falls into both categories:

"Low Rider" by War. My understanding of the song would be pretty difficult for any computer to make any sense of, as every bit of data about it is associative, save for a small number of physical characteristics of the song itself. The computer would need to understand human nature - the degree to which nostalgia affects our perception of the quality of an item, the degree to which nostalgia is formed based on the completeness of our memory of the events associated with the item, etc. It would also need to understand my own personal associations related to the cultural linkages of various forms of media, the identifiability of the song's signature over loud background noise, the historical playlist data of the radio stations that I listened to in my area in the 1990s, and the fact that my one great adventure in life (so far) with my best friends took place while listening a few CDs, two of which that song featured on.

Steep demands from a handful of silicon atoms.

Blog Post #4

The most important common point I've seen between the Web 2.0 & Web Squared documents and Weinberger is the notion of liberating the second order of order...

Web Squared makes a big deal of the "sensor net" and how this data is being used to re-order other data - from world maps built using Flickr geotags to the information shadows of commercial media. Weinberger talks about collecting this information not only from passive user input but also active user input - from de.licio.us to the vast, constantly in flux pool of knowledge contained in Wikipedia. O'Reilly covered the value of both deliberately user-contributed data and the passive data in his "What is Web 2.0" article: not only through deliberate sources like Flickr and Wikipedia but also passively in the form of Google's Pagerank.

All three documents have in common a fascination with Wikipedia - not only that it works at all, but in that it actually works quite well.

"Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other, ...is already in the top 100 websites, and many think it will be in the top ten before long. This is a profound change in the dynamics of content creation!" (O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0?")
"On paper, it sounds like a terrible idea. Build an encyclopedia by letting anyone create or edit an article, even anonymously. Yet four years after its launch at the beginning of 2001, Wikipedia had more people reading its pages than the New York Times' Web site did... its shape, freed from the two dimensions of paper, better represents the wild diversity of human interests and insights." (Weinberger, "Everything is Miscellaneous" pp. 99-100)

At its guts, both the O'Reilly articles and "Everything is Miscellaneous" are concerned with the transformation in the character of human interaction with human information - from the old order of words stored in physical paper with a form of scarcity dictated by the crude laws of Newtonian physics to the new order of data-driven reality, transported in a more Einsteinian and Turing-based world where everyone can have access to a copy of anything that exists if the economic factors are right.

Blog Post #3

Time

I guess what I was really talking about managing and ordering in the last post was time. I've always managed that poorly. My perception of time has always been partitioned by "job." Too many tasks in the same day and it starts feeling like more than one day.

I've noticed a lot of people have no problems with getting a ton of different things done in a day, so clearly perception matters a great deal when it comes down to managing time.

Somebody who viewed time in parcels could far more easily decide to reserve a little bit of time every day or at least every week to work on unfinished projects - and would probably have the time to do it because they'd be better at avoiding procrastination as well.

I've never had much success with itineraries but I understand they work well for a lot of other people - split the day into hours, parcel up jobs by how many hours they'll take or just reserve time for the sort of job that can be left unfinished (you don't want to leave cooking dinner unfinished), group the most "sacrificial" tasks near areas that there are likely to be overlap (like commute time might cut into your TV watching or leisure reading time) and then stick to the new schedule religiously.

Blog Post #2 - Weinberger Prologue, Ch. 1

Prologue

Most important concepts

Weinberger attempts to illustrate through the example of the Staples Prototype Lab the importance of availability of information for a user. He also the extreme structural difference between information availability in the physical world vs the digital world. Finally, he includes the pitch line or hook of the rest of the book - that the structure of information availability shapes the content and character of the information itself - and how we use it.
“The physical limitations that silently guide the organization of an office supply store also guide how we organize our businesses, our government, our schools. They have guided—and limited—how we organize knowledge itself. From management structures to encyclopedias, to the courses of study we put our children through, to the way we decide what’s worth believing, we have organized our ideas with principles designed for use in a world limited by the laws of physics.”
(Weinberger)
I think it's also worth noting that these ideas are limited and organized less by the actual laws of physics than the perceived order of the physical world, which is shaped by cultural values as much as actual observable physical laws.

Applicability

I've written a semantically-informed search engine before, and the concept of creating a store frontend which puts products in “every different category in which users might conceivably expect to find them.” ties into that ideal neatly; Amazon and Netflix both produce recommendations on the basis not only of the shopper's preferences, but also by association - a sort of semantic database where items are given relevance by their association. A system that knows how users group items together knows in a way what an item actually is, by association. A system like this could use a semantic engine like the one I built for the purpose of searching news stories to associate products to categories and even (with some guidance) invent new categories. If a significant subset of the individuals who purchased a shower curtain also purchased a new shower curtain, curtain rod, curtain rings, bathmat, soap dishes, etc. then the system could label this common associative group and bring it to the attention of the individuals running the storefront system. The proprietors could then label this group "new bathroom" or something similar.

I spend a good deal of time trying to keep the projects I have going at any given time organized and trying to put in time in all of them and still have a life. I tend to review what I've done regularly and try to put in a little time in every one of these projects at least every 3-4 weeks, but the "order" I've chosen doesn't really work very well for me. The projects are too disparate - two versions of Visual Studio, a couple of web servers, two different academic papers and a creative writing project plus all of the various homework assignments and extracurricular work-related activities that come up. I think the best strategy for minimizing the disorder in this would be to pick one or two and just finish them, thus minimizing the amount of time I spend juggling them.

---

Chapter 1

Most important concepts

Weinbergern loves the concept of miscellaneity perhaps too much; I find the concept of a sort of battle against the miscellaneous to be the most important point in this chapter. Order may not reflect the natural state of the world but it is the preferred means of human interaction with reality - we as a species have advanced from the small pack unit living and dying with the seasons solely by reorganizing both the physical reality of the world around us and our perception of it.
The quote below about photos of Aunt Sally makes a valuable point about the weight of the data we produce in modern life exceeding our capacity to organize it. This is especially problematical from the perspective of preservation - how can we save the significant portions of this information if we cannot find it?“When you have ten, twenty, or thirty thousand photos on your computer, storing a photo of Aunt Sally labeled ‘DSC00165.jpg’ is functionally the same as throwing it out, because you’ll never find it again.”
“The real world, though, limits the amount of additional data we can supply: Staples has to keep the product information labels on the shelves small enough so they won’t obscure the product; a manila folder’s label can’t have more than a few dozen characters on it without becoming illegible; and if previous students have already highlighted every other sentence in your textbook, the marks you make won’t add much information at all.”
(Weinberger)

Chapter 2

I didn't get to chapter 2 as I've still not gotten the book yet... The other two books have arrived, naturally.

Blog Post #1

Part one

I think the most important thing I got from the Web Squared article was the idea that converging information shadows can create a consolidated image of a concept. If you collect enough anonymized information you can not only de-anonymize that information, resolving it to the entity the information is about, but you can form an understanding of the the entity or idea from contextual cues.

Data mining and metadata mining can produce a more comprehensive picture of an individual's life than the individual could voluntarily provide, can tell you more about a location than a hundred tourists who visited on vacation, can explain more about a concept than anything short of an expert on the subject. The metadata becomes semantic information, explaining the character of the entity - when Netflix creates a category for you, it's really more thoroughly defining your tastes than you would probably be able to articulate. You like surrealist goofy 80s coming-of-age comedies? Netflix knows this, based on your ratings, even if you don't.

I'm interested in the production of intelligent agents - expert systems tuned to the individual which know what you like and aggregate information for you, pointing out the things you'd like. Eventually a system like this could be tied to an augmented reality technology, whether realtime (via some sort of monocle device) or offline (giving you a summary of the stuff you saw or missed during the day that is of greatest interest to you). This is something I'd like to eventually be involved in creating for a living.

Part two

The most exciting web-enabled application I've seen this year has got to be the Wolfram Alpha Android app. Here we have an application that can solve complicated problems from spoken input.

The last three questions I asked it - out loud no less, requiring no keyboard output - were "What is the average distance from Earth to the Andromeda galaxy?", "What is four miles of water column in atmospheres?" and "what is twenty thousand leagues in cubits?"

All of these would be difficult questions to answer in hand-math, essentially impossible questions for most people to solve as head-math and hard to find the answers to using conventional search technologies. And yet using spoken word data (through a web-informed speech recognition engine) it discovers what I have said, then with a mathetmatically-weighted semantic search engine, combs through its vast collection of numerical data and comprehensive knowledge of unit conversions to provide me with a meaningful answer... most of the time.