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Random Thoughts

Working Out

I’ve been working out at least 3 mornings a week since late February. The only exceptions have been weeks I’ve had my Vertigo issues.
I was at the health club at the hotel this morning, and Esther Dyson caught me in on her camera. Just in case someone didn’t believe I was at the gym, no names (insert skeptical wife’s name here).
Here I am slightly more awake at the meeting.

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meshforum2005 Random Thoughts

Social Network Analysis

Valdis Krebs is speaking on Social netowrks analysis. Picture here. Valdis showing diagrams that are examples of Social Network Maps. Here is an example from his site. Now Eszter Hargittai is talking about the links between and among Political Weblogs. Sunstein’s theory  (link courtesy of Eszter – thanks) is that there should be little interlinkage between blogs of different political pursuasions. The opposite theory is there is a conversation between the sides of the issues. They did a 120 size sample. Today’s sample is 41, did full text and blogroll analysis for three separate weeks, Before the DNC and RNC, during the week before the election, and march 13-19 2005.

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Random Thoughts

Yellow Arrow

MeshForum is showing Art projects in between speakers – the current one is Yellow Arrow, which is a kind of tagging project where yellow arrow stickers and unique IDs are used to tag and point to items in the physical world. The tags can be referenced online.
Tags are sent with cell phones and text messages. If you find a tag, you can send the number and get information about the tag back to your cell phone via text message.

It has similarities to the Grafedia project.

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meshforum2005 Random Thoughts

Meshforum – intro discussion

Here at Meshforum, watching Dr. Anna Nagurney doing an excellent overview of what Networks are.
She’s explaining all the networks around us, from transportation to web traffic, to water and power, to the Romans and the ‘flow problem’ they had with too many chariots at a given time of day.
Network analysis power is that it can show connections we may not have known were there.
There are classic examples like the Shortest path problem, maximum flow problem, minimum cost flow (Find flow pattern for transportation that minimizes the total cost from shipping to destination).
Other examples for these 3 examples – ex maximum flow – are things like shortest path to exit a building – same theories apply to genome sequencing and storing books in libraries.
She’s giving great examples, I can’t type this fast 🙂
I will link to her slides when they’re available.

Talking about transportation routes – the huge number of possible paths to work for example.

Talking about Braess’ Paradox. […(from that link) author provided an example of a traffic network in which travel costs increased when a link was added to the network]. She gave an example where adding a road to make more choices for commuters ends up increasing time of travel for all travelers…
Also relevant to the Internet – adding networks can make things worse for everyone – that’s interesting – I need to learn more about this.

Concept of Supernetworks, which she’s written books about.
Discussion of supply chain and social networks – better relationships might lower transaction costs.

Interesting – some of this work might be helpful to this project at NYU’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response regarding enhancing medical response in a time of crisis.

Update: My public Flickr photos for MeshForum are here.

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Random Thoughts

Test post from MeshForum – using keywords

Jack Vinson has just showed me how to add Keywords to my blog, which Technorati and other sites should understand as “tags.”