The perfect document preparation system has yet to be invented, and I’ve tried many over the years, starting with TJ6. It’s surely impossible for any one system to be best, given the range of documents most of us have to produce: letters, memos, resumes, scientic papers, dissertations, books, etc. Microsoft Word is great for many of these, but like many, I’ve concluded that LaTeX is still the best for academic papers or large, complex documents. I think this graph attributed to Marko Pinteric says it elegantly.

That LaTeX is so widely used is remarkable, given that it has been more that 25 years since it was first released and it was based on the somewhat arcane Tex. But LaTeX has its problems too, and one of them is remembering all of the commands to generate the many symbols that we like to use to make out papers seem more profound.

Detexify is a neat Web service that lets you draw a mathematical symbol with your mouse, interprets the result, and shows you what LaTeX command to use to generate it.

It works pretty well! You can look at the source code — mostly in ruby — on github and contribute. Or you can volunteer to help train the system on new symbols.

(via Hacker News)

The US DoD has announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th DARPA director. From the DoD Press Release:

“Prior to this appointment, Dugan held several key positions in industry, most recently as president and chief executive officer of RedXDefense, LLC, which she co-founded in 2005, a company that develops defense against explosive threats. She has also served in senior executive positions in several additional companies in roles ranging from global sales and marketing to research and product development.

During her first tour at DARPA from January 1996 to May 2000, Dugan received the program manager of the year award for her leadership of the “Dog’s Nose Program”, which was focused on the development of an advanced, field-portable system for detecting the explosive content of land mines.
…
She has participated in wide-ranging studies for the Defense Science Board, the Army Science Board, the National Research Council and Science Foundation, and currently sits on the Naval Research Advisory Committee and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Science and Technology Panel. Dugan earned her doctorate in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Virginia Tech. …”

FaceBook is changing how it manages privacy starting today. After reading last week’s post on the FaceBook blog, More Ways to Share in the Publisher, and a followup note on ReadWriteWeb, A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options, I thought I understood: Facebook was sharing more but only for people who have made their profiles public. From the official FaceBook post:

“We’ve received some questions in the comments about default privacy settings for this beta. Nothing has changed with your default privacy settings. The beta is only open to people who already chose to set their profile and status privacy to “Everyone.” For those people, the default for sharing from the Publisher will be the same. If you have your default privacy set to anything else—such as “Friends and Networks” or “Friends Only”—you are not part of this beta.”

But the New York Times has an article, The Day Facebook Changed: Messages to Become Public by Default that clearly says more is coming (emphasis added):

“By default, all your messages on Facebook will soon be naked visible to the world. The company is starting by rolling out the feature to people who had already set their profiles as public, but it will come to everyone soon. You’ll be able each time you publish a message to change that message’s privacy setting and from that drop down there’s a link to change your default setting.

But most people will not change the setting. Facebook messages are about to be publicly visible. A whole lot of people are going to hate it. When ex-lovers, bosses, moms, stalkers, cops, creeps and others find out what people have been posting on Facebook – the reprimand that “well, you could have changed your default setting” is not going to sit well with people.”

But it will come to everyone soon! That’s a big change if true. There will be blood.

I hope that there is come clarification soon from FaceBook. I, for one, am left confused.

Wired’s Threat Level has another example of how social media are being used by Iranian citizens trying to promulgate their cause in Google Maps Track Iran Protests.

“As the protests in Iran continue for the second week, a Google user named Xárene Eskandar is following the activity on a Google Maps page, logging the events each day as they’re reported.

The latest map from Wednesday tracks events by the hour and shows the movement of special forces vans and military helicopters as they close in on protesters, as well as the location where protesters have reported seeing or hearing gunshots.”

This is not your father’s Macbook.

The new Scientist reports on a recent paper by CMU psychologist Don Moore that shows that people prefer advice from confident sources even when they have a poor track record.

Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.
…
In Moore’s experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.
…
Describing his work at an Association for Psychological Science meeting in San Francisco last month, Moore said that following the advice of the most confident person often makes sense, as there is evidence that precision and expertise do tend to go hand in hand. For example, people give a narrower range of answers when asked about subjects with which they are more familiar”

Why aren’t we better at recognizing cover-confidence? There must be some evolutionary fitness in this, at least for humans. There can be a big penalty in indecision or vacillation. I wonder if we will see the same phenomenon in systems of cooperating autonomous agents?

Here’s the paper:

Joseph R. Radzevick and Don A. Moore, Competing To Be Certain (But Wrong): Social Pressure and Overprecision in Judgment, 21st Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science, May 2009.

Overprecision in judgment is both the most robust and the least understood form of overconfidence. Overly precise judgments claim more certainty than is objectively warranted. In this paper, we investigate whether the competitive social pressure of a market contributes to overprecision among those competing for influence. We find evidence that markets do indeed exacerbate overprecision. This evidence comes from two experiments in which advisors attempt to sell their advice. In the first experiment, advisors must compete with other advice sellers. In the second, advisors and decision makers are paired. Overprecision exists in both studies, and it helps advisors’ sell their advice. However, the market also exacerbates overprecision. We discuss the strategic implications of these results.

There will be a bar camp in Baltimore on Saturday, 20 June 2009 at the University of Baltimore. Bar camps are unconferences — ‘open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants”.

Here’s how the Baltimore Sun described it:

“Organizers have scheduled the event on June 20 at the university’s Thumel Business Center. Following the BarCamp format, the event will have no pre-set agenda. Instead, attendees who show up that morning will determine the day’s program by suggesting and voting on topics. Such events usually attract artists, designers and people who work in technology and the Web. BarCamps got their start in California four years ago, and are now held all over the world. For more information, visit twitter.com/barcampbmore, or contact Mike Subelsky, an organizer, at mike@subelsky.com. Additional information about the BarCamp model can be found at www.barcamp.org.

At last year’s Baltimore BarCamp was focused on social media — see the blog post by UMBC ebiquity alumnus Dr. Harry Chen.

For the past five years UCSD has run a student datamining contest sponsored by FICO, the decision management firm famous for developing the FICO credit score. The details of the 2009 datamining contest were released last week with results due on 15 July.

“This year’s contest consists of two classification tasks based on e-commerce transaction anomaly data. The first task is to maximize accuracy of binary classification on a test data set, given a fully labeled training data set. The performance metric is the lift at 20% review rate. The second task is similar to task 1, but provides a couple of additional fields that have potential predictive information.”

The contest is open to all full-time undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs. A total of $8,000 in prize money will be awarded in various categories.

(spotted on Hacker News)

Who says that Twitter is not useful? The Boston Police Department is on record as promising to use twitter to alert us if and when the zombie apocalypse starts. You might want to check for #zombie before you go out the door in the morning.

This one is going into the ebiquity research archives.

John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?, American Association of Wine Economists, AAWE Working Paper No. 36, April 2009.

“Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.”

It puts a new spin on the concept of eating your own dog food.

While we can use Twitter for news or reports on unfolding events from the field, it’s a noisy channel. As usual, Randall Munroe captures it well. I especially like its highlighting how Twitter’s search page lets you know there have been dozens of new matching tweets since you searched a moment ago. It seems that the flu-related tweets are arriving faster than anyone can read them.