The SmartS Club

As the second highest authority - the pope - is now fiddling with social media and feels competent to give advice (see " you don't have to be brain-dead to give advice " and the comment "but it helps"), it might be good to step back, look at all the soc-med-mess, take a deep breath and ask yourself: is this what I wanted to get involved in, am I gaining something? Anything? Am I wasting my time? There are studies in abundance showing how much intellectual potential is blocked by wading through the net in search of information, people and networks. Since most of the air-brained blog-posts out there were written with the hope to get attention, build a following, and to get heard: written to build a reputation, it looks a lot like a big room full of kids yelling, jumping, kicking and scratching to get noticed. But while they all scream their lungs out - this information-inferno is just numbing. This is where intelligent filtering sets in. We look for conten...

If you are about to wallow in a moment of tearful self-pity, I highly recommend enhancing the experience by this little sound-track: "Why me?! - Again!" - enjoy.

While some are wondering why scientists appear not to appreciate tools like Twitter to communicate , there is more proof for the value of the meta-information that can be plucked from the stream of micro-utterances. Roughly two years ago we speculated about possibilities to extract (useful) crowd-information. Increasing mentioning of umbrellas/rain - together with localization -, for example, could give valuable input to the weather forecast. As we put in 'Meta Mining':"If the noise of individual utterances will be systematically analyzed for overlying macro-structures and for phase-transitions from the purely random to the organized, there will be more information gained than individually and knowingly put in. The sheer boundless chatter of Twitter and alike corresponds to the cells, the web is the organism." We were encouraging to step back and look at structures rather than the individual tweets. In a recent report in "The American Journal of Tropical Medi...

As I sit cheek-to-cheek side-by-side with my wife, we both working on our very own projects at our very own computers and she starts telling me about some coding-trick she just discovered, I hiss "could you, pleeze!, let me work on my stuff - I am busy!!" - and as she glances over she sees that personalized ad on a financial website I just sift through: some voluptuous, smiling girls and the line "looking for an exciting date?". AHA! You are busy, huh? Damn! What can I do about the Ads google pushes there? Oh, she is not stupid, types the same URL in her identical browser and at the position where I have that click-for-chicks-Ad she gets a cute little advertisement on health-food. :/ I reload my site. "time for nature - discover marokko" - ha! She reloads "investment-strategies", I "cars"…. and on we go, fortunately diving deep into randomness. So, obviously, our privacy-settings are good enough to feed us not-so-personalized adv...