Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the we-prefer-to-say-'borrow' dept.
XiceeX writes "Wired has up a story about HP, as part of a larger drive to figure out how ideas ideas 'infect' large groups of people, scientifically proving what most people already knew: bloggers steal their ideas from other bloggers."
straw men, yay!
by
moral+kiosk
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The title of this Slashdot story, as well as most of the comments, have missed the point.
I spoke with Lada Adamic Wednesday, and she gave a talk on this and several other of her research directions. They are not out to determine whether people plagiarize. They are interested in information flow within complex networks. That is to say, if I want to find good information, where should I look? The typical answer has been "those who agglomerate".
It is no surprise to the HP group or anyone that some information sources are simply aggregating agents. But if your area of research is information flow in complex networks, this type of study contains many insights. For example, a common question is "what information nodes are important?". This study seeks to look beyond the naive answer "high-degree nodes" and attribute some importance, in an informational sense, to lower-degree nodes that act as sources for the network.
The iRank scheme mentioned several times in the article, which I read, demonstrates this thrust. A scheme like PageRank will almost always rank most highly the aggregates, because they are highest-degree in terms of backlinks. But who is to say that such a ranking is optimal? If you care about quickly scanning much information, it probably is. But if you care about seeking more detailed or perhaps more well-informed sources of information on a topic, iRank may well be a closer-to-optimal scheme.
The comments regarding this story have been a straw man excercise if i've ever seen one on Slashdot. HP doesn't spend its research money to find out that some information sources gather information from many others and distribute it widely. It does spend its money to find out more about how complex networks operate and how the flow of information can be analyzed and exploited to improve query responses in those networks.
-- It's so much more attractive / inside the moral kiosk.
Slashdot Mirror
Look! I'm linking to a blog in a discussion about blogs!
Isn't that ironic?
No, in fact it is not.
I spoke with Lada Adamic Wednesday, and she gave a talk on this and several other of her research directions. They are not out to determine whether people plagiarize. They are interested in information flow within complex networks. That is to say, if I want to find good information, where should I look? The typical answer has been "those who agglomerate".
It is no surprise to the HP group or anyone that some information sources are simply aggregating agents. But if your area of research is information flow in complex networks, this type of study contains many insights. For example, a common question is "what information nodes are important?". This study seeks to look beyond the naive answer "high-degree nodes" and attribute some importance, in an informational sense, to lower-degree nodes that act as sources for the network.
The iRank scheme mentioned several times in the article, which I read, demonstrates this thrust. A scheme like PageRank will almost always rank most highly the aggregates, because they are highest-degree in terms of backlinks. But who is to say that such a ranking is optimal? If you care about quickly scanning much information, it probably is. But if you care about seeking more detailed or perhaps more well-informed sources of information on a topic, iRank may well be a closer-to-optimal scheme.
The comments regarding this story have been a straw man excercise if i've ever seen one on Slashdot. HP doesn't spend its research money to find out that some information sources gather information from many others and distribute it widely. It does spend its money to find out more about how complex networks operate and how the flow of information can be analyzed and exploited to improve query responses in those networks.
It's so much more attractive / inside the moral kiosk.