The issues of gender in this domain clearly haven’t been solved in the interim, so instead of synthesis and analysis, you get a list of topical links (a couple of which are more recent than 2008):

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Advice to men: “Learn to shut up and listen.”

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The most fascinating and perhaps most important of the links I had curated was reference to Corinna Bath’s warning that the semantic web may be gendered. Like the first phone books that listed the names of husbands in each households, the architects of such curations carry their biases into the rules the machines will use to create this knowledge. It also reflects cultural biases that have persisted over the life of digital artifacts, meaning the machines will reflect gender biases in the content they find, “learning” misinformation.

Coverage of reports like this one from 2005 and this one from 2007 in some key demographics are both reflective of imbalances of adoption and over-generalizing in documenting bias. This is what machines see, too.

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Code like a girl

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Dennis Howlett conducted a series of interviews with women in leadership, motivated by a McKinsey report on advancement of women. This was two years before Clay Shirky’s rant about women not self-promoting themselves enough.

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Among top tech blogs, few of the writers are women, but that doesn’t mean women don’t write and contribute heavily to the tech blogosphere. Orli Yakuel compiled a list of top technology blogs written by women.

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The apparent closing of the gender gap is based on changes in work force, not pay—More qualified women are in higher positions demanding higher pay, but that doesn’t reflect equity with their male peers. This is problematic because it helps propagate the myth that gender issues have been resolved.

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Most organizations have to battle the problem of siloing, where small groups within the larger organization become isolated. Women are most likely to participate in cross-group communication, which is just one of the reasons gender inclusion is vital to the long-term success.

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Across all genders, there is a tendency for people to counteract traditional gender stereotypes when trying to impress someone during a negotiation:

Men’s strategy of behaving in a more conciliatory fashion apparently succeeded in producing a positive impression in the counterpart’s eyes. However, the women’s strategy of behaving more assertively failed to create a more positive impression. Instead, women who behaved more assertively, were judged more negatively.

Is that one of the reasons there are still few women corporate leaders in Silicon Valley?

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Women are pretty good at science

Yet, academics are in bad shape, particularly in science, when it comes to creating female leaders. Too few women scientists achieve leadership positions, due largely to gender roles and chasing women away from science“>non-supportive culture. Just last fall, the Journal of Applied Psychology claimed to show a gender bias existed in letters of recommendation for faculty hires (in psychology).

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The establishment of a dominant demographic for brands and marketing may also lead to the elimination of gender as a marketing focus.

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A few organized efforts to support and promote women include: Girls In Tech, the BlogHer network, and WITI (Women in Technology International).
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This just in: Women aren’t men.

Though taking a back seat to Chicago, my love of the Colts is motivated mostly by their quarterback—who I saw play as a high schooler in New Orleans and spent four years trading for first-round picks to draft in my fantasy football league—and the better part of two decades I have spent living in this state. It apparently isn’t a strong enough love to look past the potential impact of their half-hearted effort in the final two regular season game.

Losing does not lead to titles

In the 43 years of Super Bowl seasons prior to this one, the title teams have gone 68-18 in their final two regular season games. The losing teams are almost as good, at 65-21. Fifty of those 86 clubs won their final two; only three Super Bowl teams have gone 0-2. So, it is relevant to note that two of the teams playing in the conference championship games—the New Orleans Saints and the Colts—came into the post-season with a losing streak.

Broadening the search to include all 443 playoff teams, we find that just 32 clubs ended the season with back-to-back losses. Those teams had 20 home games to their advantage but combined for a 21-31 post-season record, winning just 5 road games. There was one titleist in the bunch, but we have to go back to Super Bowl II to find the Green Bay Packers.

NFL Playoff Teams Who Finished the Regular Season 0-2:

• Tampa Bay 2007
• Dallas 2006
• Cincinnati 2005
• Minnesota 2004
• New York Jets 2004
• Philadelphia 2004
• Atlanta 2004
• Oakland 2001
• Minnesota 2000
• Detroit 1999
• Miami 1999
• Miami 1997
• Pittsburgh 1996
• New York Giants 1993
• Denver 1993
• San Francisco 1993
• Washington 1992
• L.A. Raiders 1991
• Houston 1989
• L.A. Rams 1986
• New York Jets 1986
• Seattle 1984
• New York Giants 1984
• Dallas 1983
• Dallas 1982
• Atlanta 1982
• Denver 1979
• Minnesota 1978
• Buffalo 1974
• Washington 1972
• L.A. Rams 1969
• Green Bay 1967

NOTE: Prior to 1975, home-field was not determined by regular-season finish. The playoff field expanded to 10 teams (with first-round byes) in 1978 when the NFL started playing 16-game seasons. In 1982, the NFL strike forced a 16-team post-season bracket. In 1990, the NFL expanded participation again to allow 12 playoff teams, and in 2002 the league realigned to a, 8-division format.

I type this not yet knowing the outcome of the games today. Both the Saints and Colts are hosting their opponents and statistically favored to win. By virtue of winning the previous week, they also busted the myth that resting starters leads to rust (sometimes it does, usually it does not). That was never the key gripe, at least for the Colts, who decided a chance at a perfect season was meaningless compared to the chance of suffering a key injury before the playoffs. This is a question of whether champions are built from losing streaks.

If the Colts should beat the Jets, it should be deemed more amazing than just a favored team advancing. They would become one of just a handful of clubs to ever struggle down the stretch and still wind up playing the final week for a title. Should they lose, however, I hope that those facing similar December decisions in the future will rethink the value of throwing away chances to win games. It is arrogant to believe you can purposely turn success on and off like a lamp.

UPDATE: Want proof the Internet works? Lollicode responded to this blog (see comments) and addressed these issues less than two hours after I posted this at 4:50a. Awesome. Follow @twitscooptrends for trending alerts.

Lollicode’s Twitscoop (http://www.twitscoop.com) is arguably the best tool for showing what is trending on Twitter. It leverages the mathematics of financial markets to crawl hundreds of new tweets every minute, extracting the most interesting new words people are posting. The results are displayed in a dynamic tag cloud that moves as the terms change in popularity (There are some widgets to integrate the dynamic cloud into websites). Twitscoop also keeps tabs on its own list of trending topics … different from the one Twitter shares through its search API.

For example, Twitter is currently showing the top trending items as Jim Cramer, #sxsw, Diddy, Daily Show, Austin, John Stewart, Watchmen, Syracuse, Red Nose Day, and Goodnight. Twitscoop’s list: ticketmaster, echo, overtime syracuse 6th, game overtimes, 4th, triple, stewart cramer, henrie, george clooney, and edenfantasys. The differences reveal a greater sense of now in the collective answer to Twitter’s prompt question, “What are you doing?”

On page 66 of the book, I note:

What makes Twitscoop so influential and useful, however, is not simply the fancy web work and computation. Twitscoop has its own Twitter account, which it uses to broadcast the more interesting changes in public chatter as they are detected. I’ve found that I am much more likely to go and explore the site when I’m first prompted that something interesting is going on there. Now, whenever I want to check whether some repetition in my personal information stream has become widespread, I visit Twitscoop to look for the terms in its cloud.

Something interesting and a little disturbing happened to that @twitscoop account recently. On March 10, presumably as part of the current redesign of the site, Lollicode appears to have injected automation into their information stream. Instead of this:

followers now get this:

Not only does this reek of the impersonal, it also feels noisy. I believe there are people who will find the immediacy of the trends changes to be constructive and desired, but I’m not one of them.

Before the 10th, I felt connected to whatever human was manning the account, as if that person were taking some active role in the filtering of what was interesting. I clicked on the links provided, all pointing back to Twitscoop, on a regular basis. I don’t do that with the “new hot trend” tweets.

There are two suggestions I can make to remedy the impersonal nature of new use for the Twitscoop account:

1. Create separate accounts—Digg (or an evangelist of Digg) has several accounts tied to different areas and levels of interest. I follow @digg_2000, which only posts when an item reaches the magic plateau of 2000 diggs. While some of this information is “old” news by the time it is posted here as a tweet, most of it is unique to that community and adds value to my Twitter stream. Similarly, someone tied Twitter to a Dow Jones stock market feed that reports when the index rises or falls by 50, 100 or 200 points. Twitscoop could easily create some special trending accounts with similar throttles. I would probably subscribe to one that groups the trend changes in fives.
2. Add context to the automation—Currently, Twitscoop is posting their new trends tweets in a form of: “http://bit.ly/pbf3R – trending term (new hot trend).” Boring. Unhelpful. With all of the great use of algorithms by Lollicode, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to turn this into a form of a retweet, taking a sample human-written tweet and using it as the alert. As in, “♺ @msrez: thinks the Ticketmaster web site sucks, and just wants a fair way of purchasing an MJ ticket. — http://bit.ly/pbf3R.” Certainly, there would have to be some intelligence added to the automated selection, perhaps in the form of trending terms within the subset of tweets about the main trend. However, I would be much more interested to read some context to the trend rather than just get a single word or phrase as a prompt.

Either way, the current form of automated posting would stop on the @twitscoop account.

There is some irony to this article, of course, since a number of people will be notified of its existence by an automated tweet in my own Twitter stream using Twitterfeed. I’m clearly not against automation as a rule. One definite benefit to the current approach is research; it would very easy to track changes in trends at a granular level simply by mining the @twitscoop tweet stream. I would love to see that information provided in a different delivery format, however, and return @twitscoop to the humans.

Yearbook Yourself lets you create yearbook photos from your past.

Yearbook Yourself is an interactive ad for shopping malls that allows you to upload a photo and re-imagine it as a yearbook photo in selected years between 1950-2000. Taubman Centers, a national mall owner and operator, partnered with Colle+McVoy in Minneapolis to create the innovative tool. Yearbook Yourself is offered both online and in the physical malls, with the focus on the teen fashion market.

The context of both time and region are important. Each year is accompanied by a brief description of fashion of that period and an appropriate soundtrack. You begin the process by selecting your gender and a specific mall from which to draw your threads and hairstyle. I chose Woodfield Mall, which was the closest such structure to my childehood home until I was a teen.

After you upload a face-forward photo of yourself, you can browse through the years and see yourself in different yearbook photos. Once you find the picture you want, you can save it to a group yearbook and invite others to add their photos to the mix as well.

Some of the older yearbook photos look eerily like my dad (even having used my Mii avatar instead of an actual photo). I appear to have put on a little weight around the turn of the century, but that ’88 hair could actually be mine.

Yearbook photos through the decades

Welcome to all the incoming students for the IU School of Informatics. Have a great semester.

Twitscoop: A real-time aggregator of tweet content

Twitter just announced improvements in performance, sparking rumors of an impending return to normal API limits of 70 requests per hour per account. While IM integration and the very useful Twitter tracking have not yet been restored, this is happy buzz that makes new application releases even more exciting.

Twitscoop uses an automated algorithm to generate an aggregate picture of the latest chatter in the Twitter channel. It scans hundreds of tweets every minute to extract keywords being used more than normal. This is turned into a tag cloud and a phrase list to give viewers an idea of what people are talking about. Where TweetScan has been most useful to batch and archive specific keywords, Twitscoop is the most advanced tool for understanding what is happening in the moment.

There has been a lot of positive press about the value Twitter offers in reporting news (or rumors) quickly. The short message length and many ways to interact with the service help make microblogging a first option for quick commentary. Given the rapid spread of information in networks, it doesn’t take long for key hubs to find and transmit such late-breaking messages to the masses. What that dispersion of information does not do, however, is aggregate several such topics into one view. Twitscoop does.

Twitscoop does some other interesting things, too. The tool allows you to search for conversations by username, something for which I haven’t found much use yet. Twitscoop does have a Twitter account, naturally, and seems to be sending out interesting phrases as they become hot topics. One of the better features is a mouse-over action with the phrase lists that reveals some examples of specific tweets and a chart showing instances of the topic in the last 24 hours.

Also cool: you can open the web page and let the tag cloud update on its own. Like Twittervision and other visualizations of the public timeline, this allows you to “watch” the Twitter channel. Unlike a Google map with locations of specific tweets, however, Twitscoop focuses on the aggregated message and the collective wisdom of all members using the service. You can capture specific moments and tweet them from the web site.

TweetScan—which isn’t a direct competitor, but simply in a similar area of development—does have a second-generation API, a more and more common thing for third-party applications to provide. I don’t see one yet on Twitscoop, but there is a mountain of interesting visualizations to be mined once it opens the data flow a bit.

BTW, I first learned about this service on Twine, another very interesting information community I need to blog about in the near future. (If you want invites, I’ve got plenty.)

One of the attractions of an Informatics degree in a new program is the ability to apply it to academia or industry. There is more financial relief in the latter, potentially at a cost of personal control over projects and location. There is more freedom in academia, but at the cost of dollars and increased political bureaucracy. I come from a family of educators, so there is also a genetic attraction to being a professor. Whether or not that decision keeps me at a university, the future of education will remain an important issue for me.

“Drivers of Change” (source: KnowledgeWorks Foundation)

One of my buried blog drafts contained a pointer to an interactive map itemizing the factors that are likely to influence public education in the next decade. The map, commissioned by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, is divided into five elements—a two-dimensional space listing Drivers and Impact Areas, and the factors classified as trends, hot spots and dilemmas.

Created by a range of experts and analysts, the map is a forecast of the future, and each element on the map represents forces that could affect learning in the next decade. Many of these forces can work in tandem, and they could also appear seemingly unconnected. Nothing is definite. We don’t encourage debating with the forecast, but rather encourage you to explore the map, think about what you’ve seen, and use the map and its interactive features for group and online discussion. Think of the map as a catalyst for conversation.

…

Public education in the United States is at a critical crossroads. The knowledge economy and globalization continue to challenge the basic industrial-era assumptions upon which most public schools, curriculum, and evaluation mechanisms are based. New interactive digital media are diffusing rapidly, even in lower-income communities, fostering a youth media culture that is crashing into schools and educators like a tsunami, raising issues of privacy, pedagogical relevance, and equity. Student performance is inconsistent across the country and average U.S. performance indicators lag disappointingly behind those of other countries.

Source: KnowledgeWorks Foundation

You can also download a PDF version and request a paper copy, which takes about three weeks to receive.

To facilitate the conversation, KnowledgeWorks also has a forum you can join and a library of resources to assist in deeper research. Futurist Eric Grant also maintains an interesting blog, discussing such things as the change in conversational tools and predictions that in 10 years half of high school classes will be taught online.

This is directly relevant to both informatics and parenting. Carter left public school largely because of a failure by the local institution to adequately address or even brainstorm about the issues and trends KnowledgeWorks identifies. I was particularly attracted to the End of Cyberspace and Strong Opinions drivers, which hint at the seemingly contradictory forces of increased personalization and fewer boundaries. I want to put one of the paper posters up on the wall of the new Ph.D. lab as the IU School of Informatics as inspiration and context for the work I do.

A video explaining the interactive map

Check out the online map. What trends most interest you?