At the Unreasonable Mansion

Arrived in Boulder, in Daniel's car, accompanied by his dog. 

Neat setup, had dinner, talked to a few other folks. Its going to be fun!

Funnily enough, dont feel too tired after the 1.5 day journey. Perhaps the breaks in between helped! :P

With or without you

Another rest stop.

The bus driver told us 10 mins and then the bus would leave with or without us.

Well, he was true to his word.

The bus set off without 4 passengers!

Somewhere in the front, there were apparently 2 passengers missing: their belongings were strewn across the seats. A boy and his mother. Nearby passengers flagged this to the driver, who pointed out that they had been warned.

Then another passenger pointed out that the father of 2 boys (minors) on the bus was also missing. The boys (9-11) would have no one to look after them during the journey and esp when it stopped at Denver. This time, the driver took the bus around and we picked up the 4.

Overall, I think this particular driver wouldn't be winning Mr Popularity with this lot of passengers anytime soon...

Long after everyone had settled down, the indignant murmurs continued, with some passengers even wanting to report the driver for kidnapping to the cops! (this is the US) Mostly, the indignation was about the "10 minutes" promised - while the bus started off again only after 7-8 mins...

Eventually, I think the worst for the driver is a telling off from somebody at Greyhound (apparently, the 4 passengers abandoned at the rest stop had called Greyhound)

Anyway, we got to Denver at 7 pm (no passengers missing - although some passengers luggage was missing - having been left behind in Kansas City!)

we aint in kansas anymore

rest stop at the last bit of kansas. lots of wizard of oz memorabilia.
had a subway.

kansas city

stopover for half n hr in kansas city which i used for a bfast of
orange juice n french fries. hoping my checkin luggage is travelin
with me on the same bus!

off to st louis

just boarded the bus for st louis finally... at a time i should have
been boarding the bus FROM st louis :P

a few observations about greyhound:
/buses r comfortable with ac reclining seats
/organization around the buses is a shambles
/no signs or schedule info at stations. delays guaranteed. general confusion
/lack of cleanliness at stns seems exaggerated. seem ok.
/large stations but v inefficient system. no wonder chinatown buses r
doing well with only a fraction of greyhounds resources.

walking with kings

the missed connection landed me with a 6 hr layover in the music city
... nashville.
walked downtown. saw fort nashville. posed with elvis. saw the orig b
b king cafe.

was v interesting despite having luggage to lug around.

so far hv met a bunch of interesting charcters on the hound. Lawrence
of Alabama elementary school teacher n farmer. David the artist with
30 jobs ..frm savannah. orlando frm miami manager of hookah cafes.

enjoying day journey to nashville

v pleasant. not so full bus. good route. even started out reading the
rough guide to usa on my kindle. may have a 6 hr stopover in
nashville. hope something interesting there. meanwhile had an orange
chivda n chocs!

atlanta to nashville

as suspected missed my connection to st louis. now on abus to
nashville where i am to catch an evening connection to st louis.

other people in the same boat as well.

back to charlotte

bus finally started...
thought i was on my way to atlanta finally ... got on the bus n dozed
off... woke up back in charlotte. apparently something wrong with the
bus... driver decided to swap buses. so after a further delay at
charlotte i was away.

got to atlanta finally at 6 30... maybe missed my connection to st louis?

already late

my first greyhound trip n the bus is late... waiting round for the
atlanta bus to show up....

funny thing is there is no wrtten communication at any greyhound station.

Leaving towards Unreasonable

Am boarding a Greyhound tonight on a long journey to Denver, Colorado, where I shall join the team at Unreasonable Institute. Excited! 

Also, apparently, I am making history: I am the first fellow ever in UR's history to arrive by bus :P 

Also, in another first, this is my first initiation into Riding the Hound. 

I have been warned: But hey, I've been a regular long distance bus traveler in India -  can't get a better education than that! 

Can handle uncertainty - check

Can handle random schedule changes - check

Can keep an eye on luggage at all time - check

(not that I have much to keep an eye on!)

Can sit for hours in tight cramped spaces - check

Can rough it when needed - check

All my bags are packed and I'm ready to go. No jet plane, but a hound...

ANOTHER change of tone

Well, turns out there's not much funny about the IIM FPM! :P ...
Also, I am traveling about at present, so have decided to convert this
into a travel log of sorts.

Will be posting periodically from various places in the US (some
random, others not. All posts, however, will be random).
Most of the time, will be using my kindle to post. So brevity shall be
the soul of wit from here on...
:)

Change of Tone

I'm back.
I've decided to bring this blog back. Except that there is going to be a change in tone. From now on, it's going to be more "observational humour" - if not my own, then contributed by folks at IIM still in the program.

I am moving

I am relocating to my micro blog at my homepage

Interesting as it has been to write long(ish!) posts on here, my new job does not give me time to do the same anymore. Besides, I have kind of bought into the whole Less is More philosophy.

So cya all at http://www.myshk.in/blog

An Update

I have been guilty of not thinking too much about the repercussions of my initial findings in Wikipedia's network analysis, covered by my doctoral work. This was a natural consequence of a very interesting project called "The Copenhagen Wheel" that I was collaborating on, with the SENSEable City Lab at MIT. However, I believe it is important that I carry forward the train of thought I had begun with my findings from Cebuano Wikipedia. Towards this end, I have been running the same process on the revision history dataset of the Bosnian Wikipedia. Why Bosnian? Well, apart from being relatively easy for me to process on the fly, I was genuinely curious as to how volatile external conditions would affect the interaction network structure. As it stands, I believe the structure is remarkable similar to that of the Cebuano Wikipedia. I am not sure whether this is entirely a good thing, as far as my expectations go. Differences would have been interesting! BUT I need to do some more analysis to find out for sure. Will post up the results soon.

...oh, and 2010 is here!

Social Computing

“Social computing is the use of technology in networked communication systems by communities of people for one or more goals.”

In the spirit of social computing itself, the above definition was agreed upon by a consensus building process at the Social Computing Group & Transliteracies Project at the University of California. As with a Wikipedia article, ‘Social Computing’ definitions are malleable – they may change with time, with technology and its new application, within changing socio-cultural contexts, in sync with the society that defines them. While the term ‘social computing’ has more than one definition, and is constantly evolving in context and scope, it is useful to begin with the very roots of the concept:

Social computing begins with the observation that humans are profoundly social.

From birth humans orient to one another, and as they grow they develop abilities for interacting with one another ranging from expression and gesture to spoken and written language. Different fields of scientific enquiry, ranging from sociology to anthropology to philosophy have addressed the large issue of how these diverse interactions shape - and are shaped by – our perception of - knowledge of - reality. Technology – such as today’s computer tools - may be seen to act as an intermediary, as a moderator, as an enabler, as a tool. Fundamentally though, the process by which humans ‘make sense’ of the world, construct knowledge of the world around them and within them, is social in nature. This activity through which collective human actions organize knowledge has often been referred to as ‘Social Information Processing’ – It is the creation and processing of information into ‘knowledge’ by a group of people. One particular characteristic of this activity is the emergence of what has been termed as ‘collective intelligence’, from the information processing power of networked social systems. This ‘collective intelligence’ emphasizes that as a whole, the networked social system creates its own ‘knowledge’ in a way that no single isolated unit within it could, and proceeds to collectively act on it (Levy, 2001). Tribes of hunter-gatherers, nations, and modern corporations all act collectively with varying degrees of intelligence. And, from some perspectives, even collections of bacteria, bees, or baboons can also be viewed as collectively intelligent (Bloom 1995).

From this perspective, Social Computing research focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people (“wisdom of the crowd”) in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. In recent times, the social potential of computer networks has come to the fore through the rapid development of such network applications as wikis, blogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, and online collaborative editing suites that encourage people to engage in collective resource-building, action, and work. People are interacting more often and in more ways than ever before in human history (Malone 2004). These developments of the last decade have aroused tremendous interest in this field. Are we seeing merely an amplification, an acceleration of activities that have existed since time immemorial, or are we witnessing the birth of something completely new? Is this an ancient phenomenon now occurring in dramatically new forms, or is it something fundamentally different? As the underlying technologies continue to advance forward, it is more important than ever for us to understand collective intelligence at a deep level so we can create and take advantage of these new possibilities.

Research on Social Computing is by its nature, interdisciplinary. Along with the broad canvas of sociology, psychology, anthropology and cultural studies, social computing researchers have been studying the dynamics of interaction mediated typically by computer tools such as:

* Authoring tools: e.g., blogs

* Collaboration tools: e.g., wikis, in particular, e.g., Wikipedia

* Tagging systems (social bookmarking): e.g., del.icio.us, Flickr, CiteULike

* Social networking: e.g., Facebook, MySpace, Essembly

* Collaborative filtering: e.g., Digg, the Amazon Mechanical Turk, Yahoo answers

* Social Information Aggregation: e.g., scratchmysoul.com

While these tools and the ‘knowledge’ artifacts they have helped produce (large, complex encyclopedias to diverse, fine-grained folksonomies) are certainly impressive, it must be remembered that although computers are often used to facilitate networking and collaboration, they are not always required. For example the “Trictionary”, a collaboratively generated 400-page trilingual English/Spanish/Chinese translation wordbook, in 1982 was entirely paper and pen based, relying on neighborhood social networks and libraries. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19th century was done largely with the help of anonymous volunteers organized by help wanted advertisements in newspapers and slips of paper sent through the postal mail. That having been said, it is notable that modern societies, with information and communication technologies, are vastly better at collective cognition than earlier ones. The degree of organization, and its precision, which we take for granted would have been astonishing for even the in- habitants of the most advanced societies of previous centuries. Historians have explored some of the technical and institutional underpinnings of these organizational revolutions (McNeill 1982; Beniger 1986; Yates 1989), but at a deeper level we have little idea of the mechanics, or why what we do works (when it does work!), and what role information and communication technologies play. On large scales, market economies, corporations and other bureaucracies, scientific disciplines, and democratic polities all have something of this collective information-processing character. Knowing how they accomplish this would be deeply rewarding, and, if that understanding can be used to make them work better, of profound economic and political importance. A frontal assault on this problem, as represented by one of those grand institutions, is unlikely to succeed (though, as Shalizi, 2007 points out- it may be a magnificent failure!) Fortunately, social information processing also occurs in much humbler institutions, such as tagging systems and collaborative filtering, where issues of data collection and even experimental manipulation are much more manageable, and where we might hope to learn more, before tackling the fundamental problems of social science.

The research focus of my thesis, therefore, is predominantly on the ‘social’ aspect of social computing, and on the interplay between social interactions and technology, rather than the technology alone.

Conference Time

My papers at both AMCIS 2009 and PACIS 2009 have been accepted. It's always nice to receive external validation and constructive feedback for one's ideas. I was really impressed with the depth of some of the reviewers' analysis: Really a lot of time and effort had gone into them. As a result, I got some interesting insights on the papers, and can possibly incorporate these in my next work.

Apart from the utility of the comments, I have of course got a sudden 'happy adrenalin' rush because of 2 acceptances on the trot (I seem to recollect a particularly funny phdcomics strip about this a while ago!) and am really looking forward to hobnobbing with some of the big names in my field at the conferences, getting more ideas.

And of course, free food!! :P

This is a very important time for yours truly, as some things are ending and others are beginning.

The going in April has been good so far. I have got some incredibly detailed and helpful reviews for my paper on Small Worlds in Wikipedia from AMCIS. I have in mind a more in-depth and comprehensive article, which I hope to get around to putting to paper shortly ( new things!) , using some of my results and the new feedback from the conference.

The old things that are ending might well include my time at IIM Calcutta, as I make my transition from a PhD student into _____ .

I guess by May, the blank would be filled.

A Resolution

Much inspired by PhizzleDizzle , I also am setting an ambitious but attainable deadline.
1 April is the date by which I shall have finished the first version of my Thesis.


So there then, there it is, in writing. Hopefully now, schedule pressure will act its magic.

An Update

I have not been posting regularly for the past few weeks, on account of feeling the whooshing sound of deadlines going by.
Thankfully, I have been able to meet the dates for the PACIS 2009 and AMCIS 2009.
I already had a fair number of things to say about Collaborative Knowledge Creation in general and Wikipedia in particular, based on the findings of my longitudinal network analysis studies of different language Wikipedias. (Abstracts uploaded here )
I will put up the full papers shortly, as soon as the review process concludes.

Meanwhile, here's one of the visualizations from my network analysis of the interaction graphs of Cebuano Wikipedias. More shortly (one more deadline coming up the hill!)