So I am re-reading The Great Gatsby. One of the things that entertained me were the various scenes of people trying to figure Gatsby’s origin story through gossip and inference. This makes me curious. I know people similarly talk about me because they eventually ask. So review details you know about me that make little sense. What are your inferences? I’ll let you know yes or no. Plus I’ll fill in the gaps.

So I came up with a scoring system:

• Good Recommendation= 3 points
• Not interested= -1 points
• Wishlist/Queue= -2 points
• Dislike= -3 points

Would you score these differently? Why?

My reasoning goes something like this. Something I agree I should watch should equal the inverse number of points of something I know I will dislike from previous experience. Anything I am not really interested in definitely is not a win, so it should be a negative, but not too close to a dislike. Suggesting something already on that company’s records that I am interested in wastes my time because they already know I am interested in it, so lose two points.

First pass, Amazon sent me an email today saying,

Are you looking for something in our <x> department? If so, you might be interested in these items.

One item I have thought I should watch based on TV ads but not put on my wishlist yet, so I agree with Amazon, I might be interested in it. It gets three points. (3) Five items already were in my wishlist so that is negative two points each. (3 -10= -7) One item is the 6th season of a television series I have only seen part of the first season and not gotten around to completing even that so not interested and negative one point. (-7 -1= -8) Another item is the 3rd season of a TV series I where I have not watched even the first yet. If the recommendation had been the first, then I would count it as a good one so instead I’ll award halfway between good and not interested (-8 + 1 = -7) Out of eight items in the email, the score is a -7. That is just one email. I track this for a couple months and see where it goes. And do the same for Netflix.

I think this exercise points out the possibility that these “predictions” are basically nudges more to buy something.

If your Learning Management System vendor claimed they have a 90% plus correct prediction rate for whether students will fail a class, then how would you assess it? The obvious start would be track the predictions for classes but do not provide the predictions to instructors. Compare the predictions to actual results. Of course, these things are designed around looking at past results. What is the investment company statement they have to put in so they do not get sued for fraud? Oh, right, “Past success does not guarantee future performance.” So I would not rely too much on just historical data. I would want a real world test the system is accurately working.

Out of the slew of emails you get from Amazon, how percentage do you actually buy? How many do you sneer at it and hit delete in disgust that they could get it that wrong? For me, the latter is more common than the former. Certainly it is not from a lack of data, I buy more off that site than I do all bricks and mortar stores excepting groceries combined. (And that makes me re-think how I buy groceries.) Maybe Amazon has too much data that confuses it mixed with correct data. I look things I have no interest in buying such as someone mentioned having problems with a product. Though I have to question Amazon recommending I buy the camera I bought from them a couple months prior.

Netflix really is not any better. Their top 10 recommendations change weekly for me. In my current top 10, one was already rated 5 stars. Another four were already in my queue. The remaining five predicted I would like them between about 3.0 and 3.3 stars. That is out of five. There are 27 items in my queue with higher predictions than these.

Before I start tracking these predictions to gauge how effectiveness, do I even really care? Am I going to stop consuming from companies that overstate their claims? Or should I close my ears when clueless people spout the prediction buzzword? Not really. No. Guess that is what I am left doing.

I think the standard comes not from them being any good. Instead decision makers are aware of them, so they understand wanting to emulate them.

Next, a woman I only really know from conversations on Tumblr suggested a couple Helen Fisher books. I told her about Loneliness where Cacioppo says social isolation causes pain in similar parts of the brain as physical pain. Fisher talks about love occupying the same parts of the brain that cocaine manipulates.

If the below video does not work, then try Helen Fisher: The brain in love.

My response was I have done the same thing. I pointed out I watched the first three Harry Potter movies without reading the books. But, then I really was confused about the story of the third one enough, I ended up getting the books and reading them before catching up on the movies. But that is not really a good example.

So what do you do? Movie first? Book first? Both ways depending on mood?

My thoughts…

• Some movies made no sense to me, so I went back to read the book, and watched the movie again. The 2nd time around, the movie made much more sense. So often I try to read the book first, so I can enjoy the movie without feeling lost.
• Some stories seem not that interesting. Why invest 10-20 hours reading a book when I can just watch a 2-3 hour movie?
• Books allow me to give my own visual identity to characters, places, and things.
• Watching the movie gives a director’s visual identity to characters, places, and things.
• For me, movie first or middle relies on the director’s visual identity instead of my own. I guess it depends on whether I like the director’s take over my own?

Anyway, I also showed her Goodreads as she was interested in what I thought about a book. (I have not read it. But maybe it can hook her up with friends who have?)

Oh, and it is rather intelligent to call others smart. It feels nice.

A few weeks ago, I noticed one my categories displays in the left menu there are unread posts, but the main window displays there are none. It took a week for me notice on the right side the list of feeds in the list also shows there are unread posts. Two views say there are unread but the one that shows the titles or previews of them says there is nothing. WTF?

Even stranger, the category does not appear in the Organize section, so I cannot just move the RSS feeds to another category.

Apparently Feedly users have complained for 4 years about the category. And even worse, many of the solutions appear only temporary. Whatever they change restores itself later.

Today, I put together another clue. The problem category is called “blogger-following.” Google Reader displays it as “Blogs I’m following”. Blogger actually owns/creates these in Google Reader when I subscribe to them using Friend Connect. This also adds them to the Blogger Reading List on my dashboard. Feedly picks up these subscriptions from Google Reader.

I think making changes to these in Feedly updates Google Reader. However, Blogger will change it back. I tried removing blogger-following from the feeds. However, a logout and login restored those changes. I think because Friend Connect is authoritative to Reader who is authoritative to Feedly, the fix has to be upstream of Feedly.

However, unsubscribing in Friend Connect did not really do it. (At least through a logout and login.)  When Feedly pulled the data from Reader again, the unsubscribed feed came back.

Apparently Feedly relies on Google for authentication. So, I cannot just Revoke Access for Feedly to my Google account to do #1 below now.

So there are a couple potential ways to approach fixing this.

1. Do nothing. Google Reader dies on July 1. That should remove Reader, the man in the middle. Without Reader there, Feedly ought to no longer know about Friend Connect based feeds.
   Pro: Least amount of work. Con: Six weeks is a long time. Unknown whether that will actually work.
2. Unsubscribe in Friend Connect. I subscribed to a blog through Blogger and confirmed new posts showed up in Reader and Feedly. I removed the subscription in Blogger by going to Settings to the right of Reading List. I clicked Settings to the right of the blog to remove. Finally, I clicked “Stop following this site.” When I refreshed Reader and Feedly, this blog disappeared. Of course, any I want to continue to read need a direct subscription in Feedly.
   Pro: Not sure. Con: I will longer publicly support friends. Very cludgy to stop following these.

 Probably wait and see.

Facebook is the new chainletter forwarding medium. The share button allows people to very easily and simply pass along anything. Often this is before they do anything to verify the information. Before anyone I know who reads this comments, I have been guilty of it too. I like to think it rarely happens.

Almost as long as I have been online, I have fought back against this kind of misinformation. When I see factual claims, I try and verify them. My GoogleFu is strong because of researching things I read or hear to confirm, deny, or better understand. If claims were false, then I left a comment. Initially I wrote in my own words detailed explanations on why something was in error. Then as I got lazier, I quoted places like Snopes who probably wrote better explanations anyway and linked back to the source.

These days at my laziest, I just post a link to the source.

Usually, I received a comment back in thanks. Sometimes it hurt feelings for me to have sent these comments. People have even stopped talking to me over getting a comment. The interesting ones involve me being called a liar or mean. So I pull back for a while and try not to hurt feelings. Eventually, I will resume responding.

Something I really should remember is people love their biases and these shares are part of solidifying them. I probably ignore the things with which I agree. By trying to correct them, I am fighting against cognitive dissonance and am not going to win.

However, to accomplish that feeds take the same data, apply criteria, and report a prediction of value to the user. That’s fantastic stuff. You know… Fantasy.

Someone has to decide how to produce the signal out of all the noise. Probably that is a quant or a wannabe who teases out of the data the important predictions. So unless you are beholden to someone like Anil, you want to be able to manipulate the data by looking at something like a dashboard to build feeds.

Not everyone is like me, I get that. Simple users want a magic number or an easy indicator of what is going on. Think of an alert that a site is going to break in 15 minutes. Power users like me want to know if components of those web sites are going to break 15 minutes from now. You know, so I can go fix it. But I would not mind being able to allow others to subscribe to my feeds where appropriate.

I’ve never had a problem taking dashboard data and projecting from them trends. A good one, like Yaketystats will even graph the prediction lines for me. I often work with the data to see how this line changes in order to get a sense if the prediction has biases built into it. But then, I enjoy being hands on and manipulate the graphs to see what I want to know. Predictions are only as good as the algorithm. Any why should we trust other’s when we can build our own? I could see YS with alert feeds for directors and above letting them know about upcoming milestones. It would be great for them, but that high level view is not so interesting to me. I want the details and build the things that produce the signal from the noise.

Red can draw attention. So maybe if someone is going through a bunch of highlights to pick just one, the one with the bright red team could be selected over others. To really know, someone would need to go through the draft highlights and identify all the opposing teams in all the clips. Then compare the prominent color of shirts verses the predominance of the color. Next would be to experiment by having people select clips and see whether they pick red jerseyed players getting beaten over others.

Probably what would be found is no significant difference in red being selected over other colors. This would be consistent with red cars not really getting significant more speeding tickets than other cars.

Oh… And her complaint could be just confirmation bias. If she believed people do not respect her university’s football team, then any time they were portrayed in a negative light would confirm for her this belief.

I look forward to seeing what she does in the future.

If the video below does not work, then try this link Risking Redefinition : Rebeka Geer at TEDxUGA.

Well, I do use Pinterest some. I don’t spend massive amounts of time on it like I hear some of my female friends do. The only somewhat exemplary board I have is Teeshirts I Own. When people ask where I get any or all of my shirts, I can just point to the board. I use a browser bookmarklet to pin the shirts I buy to the board. The bookmarklet ensures a link to the web page source.

Curating a collection of digital stuff is where Pinterest excels. Well, that and sharing the board (aka the collection) with others.

Anyway, rumor is there are not many guys on the site. Before about a year ago, maybe 3 out of a hundred contacts I had were guys. I just did the math and out of 300 people I am following (304 following – 4 non-people), 43 are male. That is about 14 in a hundred male. A sample size of one is not very good, so don’t take that as the real population.

Google sent me an email saying something was going to expire in a month because of inactivity. I needed to click on a link and verify my information. You know, exactly the same kind of things a phisher would wrote.

I spent half an hour looking at the HTML to verify the links and the headers to see if there was anything suspicious. Eventually, I decided it was legitimate. But even then I was still very careful. Few people I know would be this careful because they would not know how.

Sadly, in the many years where phishing attempts have become so common, few people care enough about changing their bad email practices that contribute to end users becoming victims.

If you have not seen anything about IBM’s Watson, then start with NOVA’s Smartest Machine on Earth. Even better, here is Day 1 of Jeopardy.

If the below video does not play, then try Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all.

Fast forward to the past Friday. I had seen something about a local manufacturer in the weeks prior and stopped to say hi to the owners. Something that surprised me was that they have multiple sites around the state and how that hurts them. Of course, then it drifted into politics, how he likes the automatic spending cuts because Congress is incompetent. I made the mistake of trying to explain how it is in the best interest of Congress not to solve any of these issues. He was particularly offended that people like him who give so heavily to our house member could be thought of as “Kingmakers”. Even worse, I never really got to explain the Baha’i Faith’s elections, the style system I would replace US elections.

If the below video does not work, then try Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim.

Who has two thumbs and regularly disables Sharepoint’s overflow: hidden CSS to re-enable the scrollbar? Me…

A coworker asked a good question, which is, “Any easy/lazy way to make it automatic-like?”

My response was a Greasemonkey script should do the trick. Okay, so, how to make it happen?

Pretty sure like me, my coworker uses Chrome. This is good, because in 2009 Chrome acquired native Greasemonkey script support. They are treated as Extensions. I like this because there is one place to look for the scripts rather than a separate queue like I am familiar in Firefox’s Greasemonkey plug-in.

So I found some pages on writing Greasemonkey scripts. What I wanted to do looked easy enough. Which, of course, meant I spent a few hours stumbling around the Internet confused why it did not work. In the end, I wrote this <filename>.users.js did the trick:

// ==UserScript==
// @name Sharepoint Scrollbar Fix
// @namespace http://sharepoint.oursite.com/
// @description Removes the overflow:hidden which is buggy in WebKit browsers
// @include https://sharepoint.oursite.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
document.body.style.overflow = “scroll”;

From my research WebKit browsers have an issue with overflow:hidden going back years. Chrome and Safari are WebKit browsers. (Guess I could have saved myself time just using Mozilla.) Using either overflow:scroll, overflow:auto, or even removing overflow brings out a second usable scrollbar.

Probably GM_addStyle is a better approach, but this one worked first.

Protocols matter. Most of the time I spent confused was solved by having http in the @include address when the Sharepoint site uses https.

Testing it was interesting as Google does not allow just downloading from anywhere on the Internet. So uploading it to my web site was not a good way to get it into the browser. Just open up Extensions and drag and drop the file in there. It prompts to make sure you are. In the end, it is much more efficient that way.

Conclusion: Pretty easy to create and test. Very lazy fix. The information online about making one is not great.

Any coworkers who want to use it, I added it to the Content area on my site.

The opposite of good is not evil. It’s indifference. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. — Rudyard Kipling

Crowns do queer things to the heads beneath them. — George R.R. Martin

Digiphrenia – how technology lets us be in more than one place – and self – at the same time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds – home and battlefield – simultaneously. We all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed. — Douglas Rushkoff – Present Shock

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one – million – year – old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?. — Richard Feynman

While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream. — Isaac Asimov

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it. ― Mark Twain

We must be the change we want to see. ― Mahatma Gandhi

Thanks to friends who posted quotes. Geoff, Janice, Luther. Also, Goodreads has a quote of the day email which are linked there as a reference.

  Team D2L has 4 schools in sweet sixteen! Go #marquette, #arizona, #msu, #osu! @desire2learn

He is excited because four universities who are clients of his company are in the major NCAA basketball championship contest. If only four are Deseire2Learn customers, then that means the other twelve are not. That made me wonder what are the Learning Management Systems used by these sixteen schools?

1. Louisville : Blackboard
2. Oregon : Blackboard
3. Michigan State : D2L
4. Duke : Sakai
5. Wichita State : Blackboard
6. La Salle : Blackboard
7. Arizona : D2L
8. Ohio State : D2L
9. Kansas : Blackboard
10. Michigan : Sakai
11. Florida : Sakai
12. Florida Gulf Coast : Angel (Blackboard) and Canvas in 39 days
13. Indiana : Sakai
14. Syracuse : Blackboard
15. Marquette : D2L
16. Miami (FL) : Blackboard

Looks like the breakdown is:

Blackboard 8
Desire2Learn: 4
Sakai: 4

This is an interesting grouping. I kind of knew Sakai tended to be the product of choice for well off schools with the money to spend on customization. So, schools with strong athletics probably are more likely to have something like Sakai. Of course, I expect Canvas to be better represented too as it is hot of late. While Moodle tends to be favored by really small schools without a budget, I still figured it would have some representation (really just FGCU).

Which LMSes will be involved with those in the Final Four?