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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Paul Resnick lecture in Palo Alto

This morning I went to a very interesting lecture on reputation systems by Paul Resnick, Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information (where I'm an advisor. And like me Paul went to umich for undergrad, MIT for grad school.) Paul's work provides some rigorous mathematical foundations for how collective intelligence systems can be manipulated, and techniques for bounding and mitigating abuse. Important stuff that I'm certainly paying attention to... Note there were a lot of questions about marijuana legalization on the whitehouse.gov Town Hall last Thursday. ;-)

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Sonos player

Irene's got a Sonos system in her house...  I discovered a new feature this weekend, and it's pretty darn cool.

I love listening to This American Life, but rarely can free myself up at exactly 12pm on Saturday, when it airs on KQED.  So I started fishing on their website to find out how I could catch it earlier (by say, listening to the East Coast airing on WNYC) or catch it later (listening to the Hawaii airing on KIPO).  But it was really tedious and hard to figure out when it was airing where...


Sonos to the rescue...  There's a feature that allows me to search for shows by name, see if they're playing now, see when the show is playing next (across the zilliosn of stations around the nation that stream), and see what past episodes are available via podcast.  Pretty cool!