desma 258 blog
Thursday, May 20, 2004
"NEW YORK (AP) -- Before helping to launch the criminal information project
known as Matrix, a database contractor gave U.S. and Florida authorities the
names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists --
sparking some investigations and arrests."
The full story is here.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Oh, Yes! Retrieval!
Great, I'm also interested in some creastive and aesthetic ways to represent relations between different kinds of data, e.g. query and documents, terms and documents, etc. I've been working on probabilistic retrieval, expecially with Binary Independent Retrieving (BIR) model, which is implemented in Xapian, an open source project. You might take a look at:
http://www.xapian.org
Friday, May 07, 2004
i mentioned in class that i'm inerested in a formal/aesthetic manifestation of relations between pieces of data. i've discussed working with adam fure (one of the other architecture peeps in the class). we'd like to get together with a couple of 'hard core' information people, such as information scientists and/or statisticians. i know a couple of you are doing work in probabilistic (sp?) query retrieval, and this seems pretty cool. my feeling is that a group of more than four or five could become unwieldy.
you can email me too: maxxis@ucla.edu
Thursday, May 06, 2004
just to throw in various project ideas. here is one i was thinking about a while ago but never did. see http://www.circusabsurd.com/Osman/portfolio/cVirtualMuseums.html
When I was thinking for database project idea earlier, it seemed to me that you either find a previously untapped source of data, or an imaginative new way to present existing data, or a combination of both. I can't think of other approaches right now. Well I suppose you can also deal with the processes of databases - collection, archival, query, representation - which I guess is what I'm planning to do with a database that destroys its own data.
I think the font size of the blog should be reduced, by the way.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Ok, I asked about starting the blog, so I'll post first. I have a vague idea of wanting to do something ethnographic and working with those data, say interviews or asking people to write or draw or explain something. Two things I'm thinking of are Osman's self-portrait #2 where he asked five different people to describe him in five words, and a student art project where visitors to LAX were asked to draw a map of Los Angeles as best as they know it (unfortunately I don't know more details).
Anyone find this approach interesting? Would love to hear more about what people are thinking. Hoping we get some dialogue going here -- I've used a blog in another class, and it's a great way to hear from everyone, including people who don't speak up much in class...
