Category: Social Studies

Social Studies

The Helpfulness of Crowds

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For the past few weeks I’ve been trying out a few of the collaborative recommendation sites that are  currently on the scene. My interest was initially piqued by an NYC startup or two, then I learned about Aardvark, now part of Google and one of the most successful of the purely crowdsourced Q&A sites.

You ask a question  and one of Aardvark subscribers is likely to have an answer. I was quite impressed that I got a quick and meaningful response about a good Spanish white wine to match with seafood.

Not all of the cloud-based oracles work this way.  Many instead rely on machine-learning techniques (decision trees, Bayesian classifiers, clustering, …) in which the mileage of your answers will vary based on the terrain of the data.

Then I learned about a mega success story from MetaFilter, a community weblog, in which two young Russian women were saved from entering the sex trade by MetaFilter members. Continue reading

Social Studies

Social Networks as Living Organisms

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Leading public health and social network scientist Nicholas Christakis spoke at TED in February.  As a doctor and public health researcher, he brings the study of social networks back to its roots as a tool to understand disease spread. One of his better known research projects shows that obesity can be contagious.

While watching the presentation, you quickly realize that visualization of data related to obesity, emotions, and friendships is more effective than tables of numbers in explaining how the power of our connections can influence our behavior.

Interesting factoid: if your friend’s friend’s friend is obese, your risk of obesity is 10% higher.

In other words, something is spreading.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, Social Studies

Multimedia Fun with SIP

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In my evolving unified communications projects, I’ve been searching for a way to switch media between voice and text. My current two Tropo apps (the headline reader and the Gov 2.0 bill browser) are voice-centric, but at times I would like to eliminate the text-to-speech part and just send the text.

This should be possible with SIP, which underlies the unified communications platforms I’ve been accessing with my X-Lite softphone.

So called “multi-modal” communications, in which device capabilities (plain cell phone, smartphone with keyboard, smartphone with video,etc.) and presence ( in meeting, on the road, in the quiet car) are acknowledged in routing and rendering decisions, is one of the important advances of this session technology.Continue reading

Social Studies

New York Senate Telecom Committee Is on the Phone

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Earlier this month, I glued together two neat apps using parts supplied by two different VoiceXML unified communications companies. The first lets me call in to a VoXMLPHP script hosted by Tropo, which then interprets my voice commands and reads news articles using their API wrappers.  The  second sends SMS headlines (using Twilio’s APIs) from my favorite news sources to my not-so-smart-phone (it’s an ancient model).

Both have their place in my work schedule.  Another idea that’s been taking root in this blog is crowdsourcing of public policy  and moving government documents to the Internet, accessible using open-standards protocols (RSS, et. al.)

Hold these thoughts.

Continue reading