Stephen Baker’s Take on Life and Technology.

I recently came across Stephen Baker’s book via the Wall Street Review. This note on splogs got me interested:

A splog, though unreadable, is seeded with words that will attract Google ads. A computer-user may be annoyed at finding himself staring at a screen full of gibberish but click on an ad anyway, allowing the robot blogger to harvest revenue. This sleight of hand has the Numerati hard at work getting their software to distinguish between a blog and a splog. Mr. Baker gives a helpful sketch of the math involved, each blog reduced to a vector in a space of several dozen dimensions.

The problem of splogs, is one case study, through which Baker shares the positive side of the "Numeratis". So what/who is a Numerati anyway? According to Baker:

They’re members of a global elite, and are busy analyzing our every move. They’re rummaging through mountains of data, looking for patterns of our behavior so that they can predict what we might want to buy, who we’re likely to vote for, what job we’d do better than our colleagues. Some are even matching us with potential lovers…

Baker, through his book, uncovers the "numerati cult", who they are, the positives, negatives, and the unknown. Overall, his attempt is to share what these Numeratis mean to, well, a non-Numerati. Yahoo!, Google, and IBM appear to feature prominently, so do many Numeratis.

Elsewhere, both positives and negatives highlighted:

The Corner Office:

The "Numerati" are an evolving class of quant-humping, algorithm experts who will be playing an enormous role in shaping our society, our economy and our lives. They are the types who founded Google and Yahoo but they are going beyond simple searching to manipulating and massaging the tremendous mass of data that we generate from Web clicks and cell phones.

Sentimine:

I have already ordered my copy…How could I resist when we’re mining the blogoisphere for sentiment and about to test our own home-grown splog detector?

Bacon Rebellion:

…“The Numerati,” a class of math experts who quietly orchestrate the massaging of the zillions of bits of data about us. We generate the stuff every time we use our cell phones or search Google, use a grocery loyalty card or whisk through a toll booth using a Smarttag.

ThinkOR:

I think it is great that operations research is getting some publicity with The Numerati. However, there can be such a thing as a bad publicity. Is it just me or does it seem to everybody (OR folks) that this book is casting us in a rather negative light?

Michael Trick:

This is a book primarily about what I would call data mining and clustering, so there are wide swathes of the “numerati” field that are not covered.  But for a popular look on how our mathematics is used to characterize and predict human behavior, The Numerati is an extremely interesting book.

I hope to see this book influence, and promote the positives. The target audience are the non-Numerati’s. But still, this has piqued my curiosity, ordered.

Kai-Fu Lee, from Google China presented the keynote at SIGIR. The theme was centered around — “Can a multinational Internet company succeed in China?”. Many of the presented ideas are applicable to the Indian market as well.

Internet in China, now:

• Largest Internet market, with over 250 million users (200 million in the US)
• Broadband penetration is 86%, mainly through ADSL
• Internet cafes quite popular even in small townships

Google’s strategy over the last three years:

• Starting 2006, learn about Chinese users
• 2007 and 2008, build the best Chinese search engine
• Launch products designed by Chinese engineers

Hopefully, market share will follow. To show that this isn’t that simple, Kai-Fu presented a detailed analysis, as summarized through this table:

Using this background, Kai-Fu shared a few additional characteristics of Chinese users.

On new users:

• Internet is more an entertainment source, less an informational source
• Since users pay by the hour in Internet-Cafes, they love the concept of directories. In one user study, he mentioned a user questioning Google’s design with the question — “Did you forget to design rest of the page?”
• More of an emphasis to Universal Search
• Winning on metrics did not reflect on increase in market share

On users in general:

• Time spent on a result page is 10 seconds in the US. Kai-fu suggested it’s much higher in China, about 30-60 seconds. Most of these users are supposedly exploratory and curious, and click on more search results. Many of the queries are also informational, rather than navigational. To support this behavior Google used window pop-ups on search result click.
• To support informational needs of users, Google has turned their zeitgeist into a directory product in China.
• To alleviate the problem of misspellings, Google is branding “g.cn” as their official domain. Chinese users, apparently have problems spelling even “Google”. Query suggestions are also turned on by default.
• Much of the useful content on the Web is in English, mostly in the health verticals. To make such content available to Chinese users, Google is aggressively pursuing the content translation problem. Kai-Fu hinted that as the Web matures, this could be an important differentiation across search engines.
• To be more relevant to Chinese users, Google has developed new applications. One such application is “SMS Greeting” search. Kai-Fu revealed that in the Chinese culture SMS messages are replacing “greeting cards”. China supposedly has one of the highest SMS traffic around the New Year. Such niche applications can be useful for overall branding.

Kai-Fu finally ended by sharing that many of these directions helped Google increase market share from 14% in 2006 to about 25% in 2008 within China. We will have to wait to see if multinationals make further inroads in China. Time will tell.

Elsewhere on the keynote:

• Google in China and Africa
• Greg Linden: Kai-Fu Lee Keynote
• Name-not-available

ICWSM 2008 promised to be a great event, and from what I hear, went well above expectations. Select videos are now available online, courtesy videolectures.

Closing remarks from Eytan:

• 180 attendees
• 103 submissions, 23% acceptance rate
• 946 cups (43 gallons) of coffee ;) — in the coffee (consumption) capital of the world
• Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens (video)
• 2009, 2010 plans well underway
• More data: spinn3r (Kevin Burton) , Boardtracker (Ron Kass), TREC
• Eytan plans to be less active within the community next year. His contributions will be missed.

Within just two years of its inception, ICWSM has turned into the most prominent cross-disciplinary conference for social media.  Kudos to everyone behind this.

(via Matt)

I noticed there isn’t a listing of oldest engineering schools (colleges) in India ranked by established year. Here’s an attempt to draw one up:

My alma mater from Bangalore is one of the oldest!
This list is still not complete (at least till I compile the earliest 10). If you can help complete the list, please do let me know.