george tziralis thought log

May
14th

Wed

We charge for our services, just to secure your attention.

— How would you receive such a selling argument?

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Apr
26th

Sat

With the exception of advertising, the vast majority of Web 2.0 services are proven to remain viable only under external funding, in exchange of prospects for future profitability, which often never comes.

— please comment/correct/upgrade.

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Apr
21st

Mon

a short promo to askmarkets.com, more to be found at the official blog :)

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Apr
20th

Sun

Comments and search added

While I’m definitely a fan of the uber-simplistic and sexy approach to blogging by tumblr, there clearly exist some basic functionalities that are missing and tumblr has been late to add. And, as I haven’t been serious enough to create a personal website including a Wordpress /blog yet, I’ve just added commenting using disqus and ajaxed search using this hack. So, all your comments are welcome by now (to the older posts, too!) :)

P.S: What about trackback? Any roundabouts?

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Apr
7th

Mon

kind-of twitter addict lately according to Robert Scoble

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Mar
4th

Tue

lifestreaming today, part II: 18.30-…, Open Coffee Athens Meeting IX

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lifestreaming today, part I: 12.00-14.00 teaching data mining, introductory lecture

update: cancelled, tune in next tuesday, same time and place

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Feb
27th

Wed

a Course by Blog

I’m teaching the course ‘Information Extraction Algorithms’ (well, pure data mining in practice) at the post-graduate program ’Applied Mathematical Sciences’ of NTUA’s School of Applied Mathematics and Physics.

I’m strongly considering the idea of employing a blog to serve at the core of the learning process. The class is held at a pc-lab, so it came somehow natural to me to create a blog where I admin and all students author.

The target? Except from posting lecture notes and publicizing assignments or announcements, I feel that a blog could evolve as the greatest of tools to foster conversation among students and finally enable a really educative experience, powered by the students themselves. The plan is to accept assignments by public posts, instead of filing them out of sight, and motivate each student to comment on the works of others, while learning by the comments received by herself. The concept looks simple and clear, however I have yet to find any similar references (any links would be really appreciated!). Let’s see how it all goes.

I also plan to stream live the whole course (it’s all in greek, though, apologies), while I’m looking for a wiki wordpress plugin to enable collaborative notes’ keeping during the lectures (any ideas?).

The feedback during the introductory lecture today, while we were creating the wordpress blog on the fly and assigning author rights to all students, was really hopeful: “It’s cool, it looks like facebook…”

cross-posted from a Course by Blog

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Feb
25th

Mon

Prediction Markets most popular topic in Collective Intelligence FooCamp, held a couple of days ago at Google, with an awesome list of attendees (coverage here and here)

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Feb
19th

Tue

It is possible that the many, no one of whom taken singly is a sound man, may yet, taken all together, be better than the few, not individually but collectively, in the same way that a feast to which all contribute is better than one supplied at one man’s expense. […]
There is this to be said for the many. Each of them by himself may not be of good quality; but when they all come together it is possible that they may surpass—collectively and as a body, although not individually—the quality of the few best. […]
Provided the mass of the people is not too slave-like, each individual will indeed be a worse judge than the experts, but collectively they will be better, or at any rate no worse.

—

Aristotle on Collective Intelligence, Politics, circa 334-23 BC.

a bunch of Aristotle quotes here, hat tip to Cass Sunstein

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