socialtechnology.ca

Why am I getting so many registrations from Russia?

I hope that means what I think it means.  I did try to learn some Russian once, but I didn’t learn very much and it hasn’t stayed with me.  I never did learn Cyrillic.  So I am trusting that Google Translate knows what it is talking about.  Anyway, that is the question — why am I getting so many registrations from Russia.  I’d like to think that someone over there understands that I am saying something which matters.   Let’s hope so.   My thanks to all of you who have registered, from wherever.  — dpw

I will remain interested in having others do illustrations and animations for me, in return for ad revenue, but I am working on some myself, to show what I have in mind.

Most interesting to me are animations. On an old page, http://www.SocialTechnology.ca/oldpages/diagrams.html I posted “before” and “after” diagrams of social networks:

image of social network before transformation

image of social network after transformation

What I want to do is create an animation, probably an animated GIF file, to show how the “before” network is changed by some social tech tools to the “after” network.

To do this, I need to create a number of images showing successive stages in the transformation. This can be done using the Python Imaging Library to create the individual image files, then Image Magick to turn them into an animation.

So, that is one thing I am working on. I am also working on Chapter Fourteen of the online book about social tech missions to Africa, at http://socialtechmissionaryorganization.socialtechnology.ca/ — that chapter is turning out to be a lot of work, but should be interesting when finished, probably tomorrow.

I haven’t figured out or found on the net exactly what algorithms StumbleUpon uses, but I have found over the years that the correct measure for the similarity of two lists of things, e.g. websites two people liked, is the number of matches divided by the number of possible matches, which is the length of the shorter list:

Similarity = MatchCount / Length(ShortestList)

Also, looking for similar people, people with the same interests, or same kinds of page approval as you is all very well, useful for some purposes, but don’t expect to actually like or communicate well with such people.  People with too much in  common often disagree and often have communications problems.

What you really want to know are people similar to those who like and communicate well with people like you.

You may notice appearance changes, if I keep them in place.  I have been experimenting with different themes and with different bookmarking options.  I have trouble getting the latter to work.  Will let you know.

Please see:  http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8160

I have another WordPress based site for all the work on linguistics that I have been doing over the years.  It is at  http://Languages.SocialTechnology.ca/ for now, until I think up a nice unique domain name for it.

The site is for ideas, information, data, research and software relating to natural and artificial languages, including non-arbitrary ones.  It exists primarily to report on research from past decades and current work.    The header contains images representing natural and non-arbitrary languages.  For an example of an artificial language, see the illustration on the bottom of the header images page,  http://languages.socialtechnology.ca/header-images which includes a key in Esperanto, an artificial language constructed in a very arbitrary way.  The construction of a non-arbitrary universal or world language is a goal, and ways of approaching it will be discussed.

To start with, I have uploaded data in a text file which is a simple thesaurus for one-syllable words is at http://www.SocialTechnology.ca/onesylls.ths and a simple Python program which operates on this thesaurus to produce a sorted list of word pairs representing individual meanings is at http://www.SocialTechnology.ca/ths2prs.py.  A program to turn a list of word pairs back into a thesaurus is at http://www.SocialTechnology.ca/prs2ths.py.

This site is set up so that people can register, at which point they become subscribers.   They may also make comments.   I have had very recently had quite a few new registrations, and some of them make me suspicious.  One person’s e-mail address turned out to be phony.   Perhaps that was not a person at all — one recent registration is listed on spambot detection sites as a frequent poster, probably a bot.   I get at least one registration a day with a @mail.ru e-mail address.  This is very suspicious.  All of this is recent.  What is happening?  Have I done something to make my site more vulnerable to spurious registrations?  Well, at least they are not as bad as the actual comments themselves, which Akismet catches.

The Akismet plugin is a little too tough on comments, actually, and labels some perfectly good ones as spam.   For some reason almost all of the flattering comments by people who like the site ended up being called spam.  I have recovered most of them, I think.  Thank you very much.   — dpw

– dpw