ladamic's blog

Much later than other folks, watched neat demo by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg at #PdF2010 http://bit.ly/bjUkyB

Share on Facebook

In consuming many articles and talks on information overload, I hear the same thing repeated: if we can improve the way that information is filtered,  and reduce the non-relevant items from the stream of information coming at us, we can alleviate the problem of information overload. I find that quite the reverse is true. Information filtering, especially social information filtering, has gotten so good that now I truly feel that I can’t keep up. After not going to NYT, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook for a few days (or at least quickly closing the browser window if I happened to have gone there out of habit), I felt strangely removed. One person told me that Ted Stevens had died in a plane crash, and it was news to me. Today I gave in. There is something about paper writing that kicks my browsing into high gear. Arts & Letters Daily had links to articles on ugliness and tenure (separate articles), NYT most emailed list had an article on Netflix buying streaming rights, and living life with less stuff (hah!). My dad had been documenting some fascinating insect behavior on his website. Opening up my Twitter feed, just on the first page I found out that Bob Kraut had been awarded the Golden Fleece award in 1980, that there is a Social Computing conference CFP, that Twitter has bigger penetration in Brazil than the US, that danah had participated in a privacy debate at the Supernova conference, a fun comic illustrating what a PhD is, etc.  I also looked at my Facebook feed (above the fold), I don’t even have to tell you about that.

I look back on the days when I would turn my TV, computer, etc. off because the cost of searching for good stuff outweighed the benefit of consuming it. Even just a few years ago, it was a treat to get a pointer to an article or a new show. Now there is a firehose spewing interesting content all the time. Help!

Share on Facebook

It’s finally time to admit that shopping has gotten too challenging. Back in the day I could feel proud of myself for looking at the cost per ounce for a grocery store item, or using an online shopping comparison site to pick a merchant for a purchase, or even retrieving an online coupon for said merchant before completing the purchase.

But recently this has proven to not be enough. For every single store, it seems I now have to be a “member”, and even if I’m a member, I would save more if I also had their credit card. Just the negativity of declining one or both makes checkouts not as fun.

On a recent shopping trip to the outlet mall, I picked up a coupon book (I would never have known about the coupon book, except an expert shopper who was letting me tag along told me that AAA members could pick them up).There was a coupon for pretty much every store, but typically your purchase had to exceed $X in order to save $Y, or get Z% off. It seemed that the excitement of being at a place with 100 stores was tempered by the fact that if I wanted to “save more”, I would have to “spend more”, and consequently at just a few stores.

I also ran into an unexpected challenge at the Bass outlet. I was browsing their shoes. Truth is, I needed 0 pairs of shoes (I own a small number, which cover a range of terrain, weather, and occasion conditions). But I spotted one pair that I didn’t know I needed until I saw them. There was another pair I liked, but I had just bought a similar, inferior pair. So I definitely wanted the first pair, and maybe the second pair. The math the outlet presented me with was this: 50% off 1 pair of shoes, or buy 1 pair at full price and get 2 pairs free. It seemed foolish not to get both pairs + another pair for a total of $80, but I really didn’t want to go home with 3 pairs of shoes. I  haven’t had much luck buying shoes for other people, so gifting was iffy. In the end I paid $40 for 1 pair, having to face a surprised cashier who asked “Just one pair?!”.

The thing is, I still don’t know if my utility would have been greater if I had paid the $80 for 3 pairs of shoes. In another store, where my total was $50 for 4 items, should I have found additional items to get to a total of $75, so I could get $15 off?

For now I’ll just have to stick to saving money by shopping as little as possible.

Share on Facebook

What are the odds of running into an old acquaintance on the street in a foreign country?

Share on Facebook

Was asked to remove a name and (defunct) homepage url from an old web crawl I made available online. Did so. But did I have to? Was it PII?

Share on Facebook

@winteram Hah! Looking up the Barney song lyrics I found that they contain “Won’t you say you love me too?”. Must have been in subconscious.

Share on Facebook

Let’s be honest. We are not always so honest in declaring our friendship, trust and assorted opinions of one another online. I may not want to hurt your feelings, or I may think that it’s best to not write anything at all if I can’t say anything nice. Or I may be fearful that if I write something less-than-nice about you, you’ll write something less-than-nice about me. In a paper that will be presented at the Workshop on Online Social Networks, Edwin Teng, Debra Lauterbach and I examine rating behavior in different scenarios: when people rate other people, and when people rate products. When they do so privately, and when they do so publicly, and if publicly, then whether anonymously or not. We find all sorts of intriguing stuff, on data ranging in origin from Amazon to Epinions to CouchSurfing.com. Public, identified ratings tend to be more positive than ones that are anonymous or private, if there is potential for reciprocity. When A rates B publicly, this tends to be more correlated with how B rates A, than when the ratings are private. We find not only that the potential for reciprocity matters, but that ratings may even vary by age, gender, and country.

Read all about it here.

Share on Facebook

missed my chance to be on @marc_smith ’s #ICWSM2010 twitter map. http://ping.fm/55l4j. shucks

Share on Facebook

@winteram hey! nice. But why does it quote me more than you? And as often goes in reporting, some of my praise for the paper was left out.

Share on Facebook

Visualizing how physical dollar bills travel within the US by Where’s George http://shar.es/mGmts via Eytan A.

Share on Facebook