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kevinghim · 10 years

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Interest Dashboard Launch - Follow up

A month ago, we released the first iteration of the our Interest Dashboard. This is a very ambitious project, interpreting and representing back to the user an analysis of their tasks and interests. Many online services already make some representation of this back to a user, (think of Amazon’s suggestions) but I cannot think of anyone who does this with the broad scope that the Firefox Interest Dashboard does, and at the control of the user. Rather than something like Amazon suggestions, when I looked at my Interest Dashboard, I was more reminded of a scene from You are what you eat where I was confronted with my intake of the Web.

Anyway: it's often hard to understand the scope of the project and the current and planned features without the full product vision. And there were a couple of misconceptions that we evidently helped create last week which I would like to clear up.

First: we stated in our FAQ that data is stored in the client. That is the case. A few commentators noted that the Privacy Notice states that you may (with your express consent) share your data with other websites. The FAQ is correct, the data is stored in the client because this functionality is not yet enabled in the add-on. At such time as we have the functionality available, we will update the FAQ and sure sure to notify users of the add-on. We felt the best approach was to be transparent with the privacy notice about the direction we will go, but be very clear with the current FAQ (we felt this was a better approach than updating the privacy notice with the release). We do expect the user to be able to share their intention with Websites in the future, and as we make clear, this will be with the user’s express consent. That is in the future.

There were two other misapprehensions about the launch last week which I would like to clear up. I read at least one comment where a user stated they had cleared their browser’s cache but still saw data in the Interest Dashboard. This is fairly straightforward: the dashboard is constructed from the browser’s history, not what is in cache. Also, one commentator noted that some reviews had been removed from AMO (some are preserved here). This was actually news to us too, and on checking in with the AMO team, we understood these reviews were removed by members of the AMO community for violating their guidelines for relevance.

The last point that I read in the discussion was about whether or not Interest Dashboard would exacerbate the Filter Bubble problem. It’s an excellent point, and one we think about quite a bit. In fact, I believe we can help address the issue. The Web should not seduce the user into bad or repetitious habits. A first step here (just as in You Are What You Eat) is to be presented with what you consume (“What gets measured, gets managed”).

But this raises the principle question we'd like to answer through this experimental add-on: whether it's possible to have a user-centered recommendation system. I use the word “recommendation” loosely because not everything we get recommended online needs to be in a form of an advertisement. We intend to build this recommendation system by first providing users transparency into how an interest categorization works - this is the current state of the Interest Dashboard. We are also intensely focused in providing in-depth analysis of the user’s long-term interests and dynamic short-term interests. Most recommendation systems, including ads, only focus on the short-term intent of the user in the hope of converting the user down the purchase funnel.

Shortly, we hope to connect the user's long and short-term interests, with their explicit consent, to a piece of content that they might find interesting. The connection part can be done several different ways: 1) use content crawler and index them by categories or 2) partner up with an aggregation service. In the case of the latter, we can either get a daily massive dump of indexed content or use an API to send the user's interest category that will return a matching piece of content. We are internally experimenting with these options before we release it as a feature on the add-on. That's a long way to explain a part of the experimental feature is reflected on the privacy notice.

A content recommendation system is certainly not for everyone and there are some bad examples of how companies can abuse personal data. We want to counter the bad actors by providing choice.

If the user wants it, we can provide a platform based on what/how/when the user wants. We're hoping the Interest Dashboard is the beginning of this exploration. But this is a sensitive area. Ideas and advice are always welcomed, as is scrutiny. We are serious about what we are building, and the only way it will be adopted is if it is trusted, and it will only be trusted if it is scrutinized. Please, keep the scrutiny coming.

#firefox #interestdashboard #personalization

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kevinghim · 11 years

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World Cup 2014 Final Draw

Some thoughts on the live World Cup drawing from a couple of days ago. Argentina definitely has the easiest group in Group F. They'll win the group and face either France or Switzerland. France hasn't been playing well and Switzerland is seeded too high. So, the road the the quarterfinals is pretty easy for them. Brazil has an easy draw, but will face a tough team (Spain or Netherlands) in the round of 16. Group of death #1 is Group G. USA might not come out of that group. Group of death #2 is Group D. But the winners of that group will have an easy road to the quarters, which will probably be England and Italy. Korea has an easy draw, but if they get through, they'll have to face the winners of the group of death #1.

Here's my initial predicted bracket results of the World Cup: http://games.espn.go.com/world-cup-bracket-predictor/2014/en_gb/entry?entryID=58645

#worldcup #world cup 2014

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kevinghim · 11 years

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Wedding Crunchers

The guys at Rap Genius have come up with a pretty cool statistical analysis tool on the phrases that appear on the NYTimes wedding section. You can measure the frequency of specific phrases in the newspaper's wedding announcements since 1981.

Bluntly put, it's mission is "What do the world’s most self-important people think is important?"

I gave it a spin on some topics that I was curious about:

1) Are people getting married later? Yep.

2) Are weddings taking place in traditional single faith ceremonies or interfaith and spiritual ceremonies? As suspected, interfaith and spiritual ceremonies are increasing.

3) JDate or Match? JDate.

4) Immigrant waves: 1st wave (Smith, Johnson, Miller, Brown, Jones) vs. 2nd wave (Irish, Italians) vs. 3rd wave (Jewish) vs. 4th wave (Chinese, Indian, Hispanic)? Rapid increase in the 4th wave.

What can we conclude here? We're getting married later, finding more partners online and becoming increasingly non-traditional.

Try out some of your own queries here: http://www.weddingcrunchers.com.

The app is inspired by Google's Ngram Viewer which displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years.

#nytimes #nyt #wedding #statistics #rap genius #ngram

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kevinghim · 11 years

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The Sports Gene

Some interesting and devastating running and genetics facts from the book "The Sports Gene." I haven't read it, but plan to.

Slow kids cannot become fast adults, no matter how hard they practice (that's me)

If you're tall, hot weather is not your friend: Short marathoners have the advantage because of the high surface area relative to volume allows the body to cool faster (like me)

Not all Kenyans are good distance runners: Descendants of the Kalenjin (a tribe in Kenya's Rift Valley) make up 12% of the population but account for the vast majority of the country's distance runners

Lighter legs will give you an advantage: Putting four pounds of weight around a runner's ankle makes the runner burn energy 24% faster

The odds of being a genetically perfect endurance runner are 1 in a quadrillion

http://www.businessinsider.com/16-revelations-about-sports-and-genetics-2013-8?op=1

#running #genetics #marathon #thesportsgene

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kevinghim · 11 years

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Garmin Activity Explorer Heatmap

I didn't realize this but Garmin Connect has a feature called Running Heatmap. Stuff like this makes a map/UI geek like me salivate. Great job Garmin and great job runners! Running heatmap for 8/15/13:

If you expand the map out to the entire US, you'll find which cities are the most active or healthy. Informally, SF, LA, NYC, DC, Boston, Dallas, Seattle, SD, Chicago, Denver, Phoenix and Atlanta seems to be most active. Here's the heatmap for 8/2012-8/2013.

Of course this needs to normalize the data for population size. A few die-hard runners can skew the heatmap over a year. Again, it's informal. What's interesting is larger urban cities (LA, NYC, DC, Boston) are more active than smaller cities (Denver, SLC, Portland) with greater access to nature. One can surmise that running, seemingly solitary, gets spurred on by community and competition. Reminds me of a great TED talk by Nicholas Christakis in which he describes how real-life social networks influence our behavior and the communities we choose to belong to. http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks.html

What would be further interesting is to find out how the different types of variables (weather, major marathons, news events) affect the heatmap.

#garmin #heat map #maps #healthy

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