Tag Archive for 'Economist'

My Favorite TED 2010 Talks So Far

Published on March 14, 2010 0 Comments
  • Up to now this is my favorite。大厨 Dan Barber 似乎有一张谐星的脸，言语表情之中都让人期待下一句会不会又是一个大包袱。这也是一个关于如何做 presentation 的好例子，有意思的个人经历+简洁的结构安排+引人惊讶的数字，通过生动诙谐的语言来展开，听众都会喜欢这样的沟通方式。关于内容，这是介绍生态渔业的全新理念。Dan Barber 站在一个大厨的角度，告诉听众到底怎样的食物才味道鲜美，同时也引申到怎样的关系才是健康可持续的。因为产出这样食材的农场主人不是大厨，不是鱼类专家，而是 an expert of relationship。
  • James Cameron talks about curiosity and the ability to imagine. 听这个演讲让我想起最近看到的另外两个quotes：
    布林评论谷歌退出中国

    I’m an optimist. I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information. I think a lot of people think I’m naive, and that may well be true, but I wouldn’t have started a search engine in 1998 if I wasn’t naive.

    罗素评论古希腊的原子论者

    The atomists thought the world is easier to understand than it is, but without this optimism they would not have had the courage to make a beginning.

  • 诺贝尔经济学奖得主 Daniel Kahneman 介绍实验经济学的新进展。
  • Photosynth 项目的负责人 Blaise Aguera 介绍新的 Bing Maps。
Category: Brain Tags: , , .

[In Data] 一些中文 Twitter 用户的 Follower Similarity Index

Published on February 18, 2010 8 Comments

In an ongoing research project, we consider Twitter, the social network service, as a market, in which people produce and consume information by tweeting and following others. Let’s say user A and user B are two frequent tweeters. One interesting question would be “how similar” is the information contained in A’s and B’s tweets. One way to solve this question is of course do a semantic analysis of the two’s tweets. Another way, as we propose, is look at their respective followers. Presumably everyone has a preference on what kind of information she consumes, so her following someone should tell that, to some extent, she likes the one’s tweets. Therefore we can predict that if A’s and B’s tweets are similar, then they should have followers of similar preferences; inversely if A’s and B’s tweets are quite different, then the followers they attract should have quite different preferences.
We define Followers-Similarity-Index (FSI) of A and B as

For fun, I computed the FSIs for the following Chinese twitter users @flypig, @junyu, @turingbook, @mozhixu, @glif, @williamlong, @DashHuang, @Stefsunyanzi, @virushuo, @WangShuo, @xiaolai, @zuola, @wglxh, @wangpei, @gaojiamin, @ag108lau, @arthur369, @mranti, @songshinan, @hecaitou, @duanzi, @isaac, @shizhao, @luoyonghao, @jaqi, @jason5ng32, @maoz, @izlmichael, @roseluqiu, @livid, @onlyswan, @aiww, @fzhenghu, @zhangfacai. There are 34 people and hence C_{34}^{2}=561 combinations. I used the data collected at 0:00 Feb 17 CST. Below are the 561 computed FSIs sorted.

Category: Brain Tags: , , .