Author Archives: Michael Griffiths

Tools for Research

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It seems that there is a large opportunity to apply modern technologies to academic articles. Take a data sources such as arXiv.org, and apply text analytics and quantitative algorithms to relate and rank articles. In academia, word choice tends to be more precise than ordinary speech, so entity extraction should have a higher success rate. Furthermore, format is mandated, which both makes entity extraction easier and allows interesting statistics to emerge. For instance, in-text citations allows one to find out how many times an article is referenced (superior to simple the bibliography), what text the article is cited to support, and so on. One could use that to create a document map of the article; who is cited where? Given the demarcation into sections in journal articles, simply knowing who’s most often cited in introductions for a particular field is useful. Furthermore, the time-based nature of academic progress provides a number of interesting analyses for research. In short, the avenues for interesting research are almost endless – you have vast quantities of data, in a more than unstructured format, with the potential upside of both making research dramatically easier and potentially building a machine knowledgebase. Pity there’s not enough money in it.

Asking Knowledgeable Questions

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From the Stuff I’m Thinking About category: what’s the relationship between asking questions and having knowledge? Is one more important than the other? While I would say that the skill of asking questions is more difficult to build, and more useful, than simply having domain knowledge, it also seems to be true that it is impossible to ask good questions without sufficient domain knowledge. Consequently, that seems to imply some dialectical process between asking questions and answering those questions – whereby answering questions builds domain knowledge, and enables one to ask new (and better) questions.

Education seems to emphasize the latter – domain knowledge – while actually supressing the former – asking questions. The universal questions tend to be “Will this be on the test?” as opposed to “What questions do knowing this allow us to ask?”

Shoddy Journalism

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My God, more shoddy journalism in the tech industry. Randall Kennedy writes that Microsoft may drop Internet Explorer – after IE8 – in favor of a new rendering engine like WebKit (which Safari and Chrome use) or Gecko (Firefox). This sounds reasonable – or at least not outright absurd – unless you either know anything about Internet Explorer or are capable of using Google; in which case, a simple search (for “ie8 new rendering engine”) will lead one to a post on the IEBlog (which itself references a post on A List Apart). Both posts make it very clear that Microsoft embarked on writing a new rendering engine for IE8. In other words, Microsoft already has its “new rendering engine” and has no need to adopt something like Gecko or Webkit – not to mention the support nightmare that would inspire. Given how easy it is to dismiss the premise for Mr. Kennedy’s article, it’s difficult to take it seriously – or see it as anything more than mere shoddy journalism.