More ETech: Ray Ozzie "Building Bridges"

I missed Ozzie's talk, and Rohit tells me I should have because Ozzie's apparently very successful demo featured Microformats, an initiative that CommerceNet sponsors. In the talk transcript, Ozzie says:

I have a concept development team that works for me. I went to them a month ago, gave them rough concepts, and gave them challenge: how can we jam things together in a browser?

I have a concept development team that works for me. Hmm. I need me one of those.

From O'Reilly ETech: "Hunch Engine"

I'm in a function room at the Grand Hyatt Manchester in San Diego for O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies Conference, the people who brought you "Web 2.0" and many other desperately hip ideas that they constantly remind you of.

I just caught the tail-end of a talk about the Hunch Engine by Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem Corporation. The basic ingredients are a visualizer on some solution space, with a parameterized multi-demandingly clustering algorithm, and a random solution generator. Then a user (or users!) guide the system towards results they like better by click in the visualized space or fiddling with some sort of parameter control panel. Combinatorial chemistry approach general-purpose optimization. Guided evolution of search algorithms? Something like that.

I know that sounds like gibberish. It was pretty cool, though -- I guess you had to be there. Or you need to have seen some of the old Artificial Life environments and imagine using this to not breed screen critters, but to (say) choose a company name or design a wallpaper pattern.

Non-biological DNA

I really have gotten out of the habit of posting. I'll try to get back to it. Two topics I should be able to write about every day are: 1) CMU Prof. K. Carley's course on Dynamic Network Analysis (I'm taking it this semester); and 2) ideas about WowBar.

As a teaser for the DNA (that's Dynamic Network Analysis, remember) course, I'll mention we've been asked to come up with some new measures for identifying key nodes in a meta-network. A meta-network is a social network graph (where nodes are people, aka "agents") enhanced with additional node types such as task or resource. I've got three node-centric measures I've been thinking about, which I will call:

1. Coverage (node-centric sum over shortest path distance to all other nodes)
   
2. [type] 2-Reachability (count nodes of given type reachable in two hops)
   
3. [type] Orientation (ratio of edges to nodes of given type vs. other types)
   

More on those tomorrow, maybe.

Feed Your Head

I've just read John Markov's What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry which begins with Doug Englebart getting into place at SRI, looks-in on the creation of Stanford AI Lab and Xerox PARC, and ends after the first few meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. Some people I know (Dennis and Jim, for instance) figure prominently in the book. I always knew they were famous, I just didn't know what for.

Buy the book for the titilating details -- sex and drugs, yes, but also how much the first Alto cost.

OK baby, we can skip the saran wrap!

Our friends at EducatedGuesswork are discussing the news that the FDA is considering approval of an at-home AIDS test. At issue is whether people can handle the truth without counseling, false positive rate, and such-like.

All that misses the point. The unmet need that a fast "oral fluid" HIV antibody test satisfies is screening prospective sex partners. Here, handsome -- let me take your glass to the kitchen to freshen-up your drink.

Believe me, *I* can handle the truth that maybe *you've* got AIDS. The question is: do social conservatives, who think AIDS has its good points (such as discouraging promiscuity), run the FDA?