Folksonomies

The term folksonomy refers to a decentralized approach to classification or classification by the folk if you will. Read this paper for some details. Given the amount of data generated on the web each day one would need an extremely fast and scalable technique to classify data. Automatic classification a la data mining/machine learning techniques are deployed more for small scale structures, if at all. A manual decentralized approach is what is popular for the internet today. Actually, I should restrict myself to the social networking parts of the internet. Take the bookmarking website del.icio.us for example. Each user has a list of bookmarks. S/he tags each bookmark with some keywords describing them. The user can now retreive links based on keyword searches. Not only that, this simple feature of adding metadata allows the various links listed on del.icio.us by various users to be classified, ranked etc. This can be used to study various aspects of the social network formed by the users of the website. As a result, not only is the data being classified, but so is the user. And this can be a primary tool for a web services company seeking to provide a personalized experience. A customer at Amazon.com for example, who also has an account at 43things (a company with amazon as the only(?) investor), can get a more personalized service based on his goals listed at 43things. The same applies to Yahoo! and Flickr and possibly Google and Blogger. Here is a paranoid but funny view of how things will end up if user generated metadata continues to increase.

Electronic Sky

Last night was the night of the Milk Moon. That's the name given to the full moon for may 23rd 2005. I haven't seen the moon as low and as big as it appears here in Tucson. The keyword there is low. The moon can be seen pretty close to the horizon. Its appearing bigger than when its further up in the sky is just an optical illusion. When its closer to the horizon, there are other objects in view, trees for instance, that are a really small in comparison and the moon looks really large as a result. When its up in the sky there's nothing to give us that perspective. I was trying to look for other characteristics, like latitude/longitude, that would  change the view of the moon, but couldn't really find much. But I did find a pretty cool astronomy related website. Its called the Electronic Sky and is still in its infancy, but promises to be good.

Road vs Rail

As urban areas grow, efficient transportation becomes more of a challenge. Patterns of growth among other things probably play the largest role in determining the kind transportation that would suit a given region. Cities need to plan for growth by appropriately building the required transportation infrastructure. In the US, any such proposal for building infrastructure is put to vote. There is an ongoing debate in many cities in the US, where residents are choosing between rails and roads. Rail makes sense for densely populated areas, roads make sense otherwise. But I guess the problem lies with the definition of "dense". Obviously density has to be studied on a case by case basis and cannot have a general threshold value. But thanks to the politics involved, people on either side of the debate paint a black and white picture. As a result there are so many biased views, and its hard to see what the real issues are.

West Wing

Thanks to dvd collections I can now watch TV shows without actually following them on a weekly basis. The last show I can remember that I actually followed on a weekly basis was picket fences when I was in my teens. Anyway, I am now in the middle of the first season of West Wing. Its an interesting setting for a TV show - the US president's office. And they sure do make it look like an interesting place with intelligent people. It comes across as a very busy place thanks to some nice camera movements and spurts of fast paced dialogue. Very refreshing style. The writers seem to use real events to inspire some of their stories. I was surprised to see Kargil mentioned in one of the episodes. The writers also seem to have a tendency to use the words "okay" and "i know" rather excessively. It gets a little irritating after a while. And they had to introduce a romance thread into the whole thing. So if you can endure those two aspects of the show, its pretty entertaining.

CBFC

Thats the Central Board of Film Certification in India. More commonly known as the censor board. This is the equivalent of the Motion Pictures Association of America in the US. The function of these entities is to certify films, as the name suggests, to educate audiences about the kind of content they are about to watch ie provide enough information to the individual so s/he can decide whether or not s/he will be comfortable watching it (and for parents to regulate what their kids watch). The CBFC, however chooses to play mom for everyone in India, and indulges in censorship instead of certfication, hence fondly known as the censor board. If you visit the CBFC website you will see that they list censorship as their main function. So the name really is a misnomer. And this kind of censorship is actually part of the constitution. There seems to be some form of debate now as to the function of CBFC, which I believe is mostly falling on the deaf ears of the Indian Govt. Here is an article that explores this issue for films with sex/erotica etc. which I think applies to other censored material too. The process of certification itself has become a bit more liberal in recent years. Films which would have defintely got an "A" rating from the CBFC now get the "U/A" rating. Unfortunately, instead of using this to explore new content film makers are using it for gratuitous skin show in the same old "formula" movies. Its probably a little early to tell though. Maybe things are changing slowly.