managing your PDF of research papers

Do you have dozens of PDF files from your favorite scientific articles scattered on your harddrive? Do you also try to desperately organize them by renaming and archiving them in folders? But like the piles of printed articles on your desk, you can't keep up with all the new papers you download, and despite all your efforts it has become impossible to find that one article.

I was just told about this awesome program called Papers for the Mac. It manages your research papers on your computer in a way that you will not believe. It makes so many tasks like searching and organizing your citations and PDFs of research papers extremely easy.

Papers contains everything you need to get your favorite articles in your personal library. Importing PDFs that you already downloaded before is easy, you match them using your favorite online article repository like PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science, etc. and all the metadata is automatically added.

It won the Apple Design Award. It's simply amazing. Check it out.

Live Blogging Chris Anderson's talk at PARC Forum

Today Chris Anderson (of the Long Tail book fame and Wired) is giving a talk at PARC. Here are my live notes:

being away from the medium carried a cost.
- can't be too tall or too short

long tail distribution
- outcome of network effects, preferential effects
- word of mouth, tend to amplify

distribution channel limits
- most effective use of the channel - example: blockbuster
- only a small # of entities pass thru that filter

But the internet has an infinite shelf-space.
- [what about limited attention?]
- first time, we actually have data that can measure what people really want. Since consumers can choose instead of the middlemen / distributors choosing for us.

3 rules of long tail
- if you can lower cost of distribution, you can offer more stuff / variety.
- more variety means the ability to satisfy more minority taste, and address more granular markets
- “vanishing point of relevance away from me.”
- there is a lot of room at the bottom and all of the most interesting things come from the most unexpected places.


The new growth market
- rhapsody
total inventory: 4.5m tracks, walmart 55k tracks
- netflix
90k dvd, blockbuster 3k
- amazon
5m books, 100k barnes and noble

total sales
- rhapsody, netflix, amazon, have sales of 45%, 25%, 30% respectively not in the traditional market

A market for diversity out there

long tail ablation division
1997 budweiser
2007 products micro-brew,
- shift in our culture toward more discriminating tastes
- more affluent - more discriminating

one size fits all to one size fits me

just in time sales - bar codes - shipping in smaller units
- more variety but no more inventory costs
- more information technology, allowed them to figure out where to stock glutton-free beer “redbridge”

5 mistakes
- it's the end of blockbuster. No, It's just the end of the monopoly.
- you can make money in the long tail. people create things other than for money.
- long tail is full of crap. (sturgeon's law) absolutely true. but it doesn't matter
production quality is not the point; people care about relevance more than quality.
- say's law: the hits are becoming more important than ever.
- surrounded by curves that have long-tails [sourceforge example] log-log scale plot
something special about the power law
you have a test everytime you plot
[long known]

Joe kraus - the focus has been on dozens of milliion markets, now millions of dozens

next book: free
- we don't have good economic theory about free
- king gillete, invented the cross-subsidy model for razors
- king of free!

the future, circa 1954
- it is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy electrical energy in their homes too cheap to meter.
- trojan nuclear plant, portland, oregon.
- thought experiment: too cheap to meter is right.

how to waste transistors
- c:\> command line
- alan kay, xerox parc, we should waste by drawing icons, GUI, democratize PCs
- honeywell kitchen computer, recipe card management
- make technology cheaper, more ubiq., easier to use
- all you can eat web hosting, yahoo! webhosting, feb 6, 2008.

IT establishment has not internalized the notion of “free”.

Waste bandwidth
- stuck in broadcast mode
- lonelygirl15, everyone loves raymond, only reason why this happened is because there is no standard on YouTube.
- surprising things are going to emerge.

for the first time in history, complexity is free
- econ 101: in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost

storage price (per GB)
- 2002, yahoo $30 year for 25MB
- 2004 offers 1GB for free
- 2007 offers unlimited free
webmail is done.

“round down” - if the unitary cost of something is approaching zero, treat it as zero and sell something else.
- how are you going to compete with free?

a taxonomy of 'free':
- cross-subsidy (razors)
- ad-supported (media)
- “freemium” (upselling; old model: give away 1% to sell 99%; new model: give away 99% to sell 1%)
- “digital economics” (underlying cost of manufacturing and distributioin dropped near zero)
- “labor exchange” (consumers create something of value in exchange for free goods or services, GOOG-411 train their algorithm on voice recognition)
[our MT work, Luis von Ahn]
- gift economy (wikipedia)
understanding it here is a big deal of the last decade

Every abundance create is a scarcity of attention and reputation
- attention, traffic, ads
- reputation, links pageranks, traffic to ads
- attention economies

redefine the business you're in:
- Prince - free inside - prince's new album in the Daily Mail
- RyanAir - flew for 5 euros - make money from cargo, ads, car rental, sandwiches, gambling (like free drinks in las vegas)
- second life - being in the game is free - land in it is not

business model
scarcity - ROI model
abundance - we'll figure it out

rules
scarcity - everything is forbidden unless it is premitted
abundance - everything is permitted unless it is forbidden

social model
scarcity - paternalism (we know what is best)
abundance - egalitarianism

decision process
- scarcity - top down
- abundance - bottom-up

Management style
- scarcity - command and control
- abundance - out of control

------
Q: environment? disposable culture?

Blind 5yr-old genius pianist

She can play pieces after just hearing them once.... Amazing.

Augmented Social Cognition

Add to any service

handmade vegetable musical instruments

YouTube film about Taiwan

Nice Review of MacBook Air

There is a nice review of MacBook Air over at cnn.com:

"And while the MacBook Air's specs are inferior to those found on the cheaper MacBook, they compare more favorably when you look at other ultraportables, where a price premium is always exacted. For instance, both the Sony VAIO TZ150 and Toshiba Portege R500 cost hundreds more than the MacBook Air and feature slower CPUs and half the RAM as the Air."

A bit later:

While most hardware vendors offer a choice of mobile broadband options, Apple continues to offer none, which is disappointing for a system so clearly meant for life away from home and office.

...

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MacBook Air is the lack of a user-replaceable battery. While most laptops will be obsolete before their batteries wear out, we are sensitive to the desire to occasionally carry an extra battery for extended field use.

Top 5 Research Challenges for Information Visualization

Georges Grinstein at UMass just asked me what the top 5 research challenges are for the field of information visualization. I thought I'd blog my response here that I wrote up in 15min:


Georges:

About 5-6 years ago I wrote up an article that was going to be published in a software engineering magazine about challenges in Visualization, and then they pulled the special theme after I submitted it. I wonder where that article is now....

In any case, briefly here is my updated list off the top of my head (in no particular order):

- Integration with data sources: This remains to be one of the major challenges that never seems to go away. It's just too damn hard most of the time to transform the data into a format that visualization tools can understand.

- Integration of interactivity with analytic algorithms: Most of the time visualization is still run with command lines in batch mode. it's still too hard to ask the 'what-if' questions. This was what my visualization spreadsheet system was trying to solve.

- Working together with social analysis of data sets: Most of the time visualization exists in a context where the data is being analyzed or consumed in a social setting. It's not create a pretty picture and then stop and done. It exists in a social setting where there is a lot of different annotations by different people and different ideas being tried. Think ManyEyes here or Data360....

- Perceptually or cognitively too hard to understand: Much of visualization is designed not for the masses, but rather for the specialist. A challenge is to design visualizations that can be easily consumed or laypeople can be easily trained to use. Think about treemap being used on SmartMoney.com. How many have really learned to look at it? That's a crucial question to study.

- Design Research: I call this one the "Beyond-Tufte problem". How do we get beyond having geeks and gurus tell us how to design visualizations? We need a rigorous HCI design research approach to visualization that encompasses ethnographic studies, user-need analysis, iterative design, and real evaluations beyond cute lab confirmation studies.

--Ed

Will the MS/Yahoo deal work?

NYTimes had a great article on the potential implications of the Yahoo/MS deal. Moreover, it suggests that MS move are indicative of market forces that it is responding to, and these market forces in Silicon Valley forces technology developers to look way beyond the battle for search engine dominance.

US Gov't funding on basic research

Lots of concern about the basic research funding in the US, especially because it has become a political issue that is being kicked around by both the congress and the president.

Digital detective: Photo clues lead to camera's owner

Getting into a cab in NYC, someone finds a camera, and then devotes time to finding the rightful owner....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080125/ap_on_hi_te/missing_camera_quest;_ylt=AgdS8MP4KfZ20LCZXFpU5vgDW7oF

Move over iPhone. Here is a real phone that multitasks

Salon: Where is the real bottom in the market?

One must wonder why the rest of the world have reacted the way it did about the latest financial crisis. Salon had an interesting analysis:

"In reality, the crisis is both a credit crunch and the bursting of the housing bubble. ...

As a practical matter, our only real hope for avoiding a deep recession or worse depends on loans and investments from abroad -- some major U.S. financial firms have already gotten key cash infusions from foreign governments buying stakes in them -- combined with export earnings as the dollar continues to weaken. But this is something no politician wants to admit, especially in an election year. So we're going to go through weeks of posturing about stimulus packages of one sort or another, and then see enacted the big fat bonanza of a temporary tax break that will likely have little effect. That, perhaps along with a few more rate cuts by the Fed. The presidential candidates will be asked what should be done about the worsening economy, and they'll give vague answers. None will likely admit the truth: We're going to need the rest of the world to bail us out."

Wired: How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle

"email's real value isn't in communicating with Kuala Lumpur but with Betsy in the next cubicle. The most productive workers have the densest intracompany email web.

This shouldn't surprise us. Email makes it quicker and easier to reach your colleagues — you don't have to interrupt them, and messages are easy to process. But email doesn't stop you from wanting facetime, too. Just the opposite: By enabling us to maintain productive business relationships with more people, it encourages more face-to-face contact. "

NYT: high levels of mercury in Tuna found in sushi restaurants in NYC

Given that most sushi places probably get their tuna from similar sources --- the ocean --- I'm a little worried:

``No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those
found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three
weeks," said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and
occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in
Piscataway, N.J.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/dining/23sushi.html

Onion: cutting school costs by not teaching past tense

This is simply quality journalism at its best!


Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs
NOVEMBER 30, 2007 | ISSUE 43•48

WASHINGTON—Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions, and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.

A part of American school curricula for more than 200 years, the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education.

....

Social Sensemaking involved in figuring out latest Apple announcement of MB Air

I think it is really cool that people on the Web are collaboratively figuring out puzzles, like the potential of an announcement of a new Apple product.

"Unlike past years, when rumors abounded with little confirmation, the Macintosh rumor community this time put together pieces of the mysterious laptop puzzle from clues left around the Web -- and may have even tricked Apple into showing its cards a bit early."

Good uses of information visualization

Anyone knows my past research will know me as a researcher in information visualization, but the reality is that there has been very few good information visualization techniques that really work. One of those is the SmartMoney Map of the Market visualization app that looks at the performance of the stock market, and gives you at a glance the performance of different sectors of the market.

NYTimes is one of the few news outlets that really does a good job with their graphics, and recently the director of their graphics dept. gave a keynote address at the Infovis2007 conference, and I found many of their visualizations to be very interesting and informative. One of these visualizations is the words and speeches visualization they created on President Bush's addresses.

don't name your kid "Sam Adams"

Another five-year-old on the no-fly list: meet Sam Adams - Boing Boing


Ted Adams -- the publisher of IDW comics -- named his little
son "Sam Adams," a good, solid patriotic name. It's also a name
on the TSA's no-fly list, and the five-year-old has spent his
young life being harassed by airport security goons who think
he's a terrorist.

....

Subject: This wouldn't have happened if they'd named him Thomas Paine

How bad could school be?

Mexican boy glues self to bed to avoid school
Mon Jan 7, 5:23 PM ET
MONTERREY, Mexico (AFP) - A 10-year-old Mexican boy glued his hand to his bed to avoid going back to school after the Christmas break, authorities said Monday.

"I thought if I was glued to the bed, they couldn't make me go to school," the boy, Diego, told AFP. "I didn't want to go, the holidays were so much fun."

"I remembered my mom had bought a very strong glue," he said of the industrial strength shoe glue he used to stick his hand to the bed's metal headboard, where he stayed stuck for two hours.

His mother Sandra Palacios was unable to free him and called paramedics and police to help. Diego watched cartoons while they worked to unglue him, eventually using a spray to dissolve the chemical adhesive.

"I don't know why this happened. He is a very good boy," said his mother.

Diego eventually made it school a few hours late.