Some Web site dies, another becomes a classic. If you ever have to use gnuplot, the classical scientific plotting tool, then the gnuplot tips (not so Frequently Asked Questions) page is really a must. It has also improved recently.

If you use gnuplot and have never seen this page, go now!

I just noticed the ICKM2005 Call for Papers.

The second International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM2005) will be held at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in the Westin Charlotte, North Carolina on October 27-28, 2005. The conference will bring together academics, researchers, developers, practitioners, and users in the areas of knowledge management and information processing. It will serve as a platform for networking, exchange of research ideas, practical applications and best practices. Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished work on all aspects of information and knowledge management. Specific topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

Following some requests I got about the paper Slope One Predictors for Online Rating-Based Collaborative Filtering, I decided to make available a technical report which actually gives some SQL and PHP code: Implementing a Rating-Based Item-to-Item Recommender System in PHP/SQL.

I can’t find these on my blog anymore, so I’m reposting them. I complained earlier that JavaScript is poorly documented. My friend Scott Flinn gave me some useful links that are hard to come by (Google doesn’t find them quickly for me):

If you need DOM documentation for XML (XHTML in Gecko
is treated as pure XML), you will find it here:

• http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/
• http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/domref/

A few other useful links are here:

• http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/

However, a found another good site: http://www.xulplanet.com/references/objref/

Paul Graham has another beautiful essay where he gives lifelong advice:

Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

That’s interesting. Notice that he is actually saying to not set long term goals. Well, I’ve given up on those a long time ago since I can’t seem to stay on one straight line for more than a year anyhow.

He is saying to just look at what is in front of you, and work on what has more potential.

Then, when people ask you what you where you want to be in 5 years, you just make up a story or do as I do: just say you have no idea!

Here’s a quote touching on something very important for me: people tend to try to reproduce structures they know to work in the “real world” into the eWorld. So, they create electronic management systems that are like real management: hierarchical, centralized and rigid. No, no and no! When will they learn that such things never win in the end?

What worked? Please look at what worked! Email and the Web. These are the things that worked… look at them!!! Both of these things have very minimal models of how people work. Look at google: it doesn’t assume much at all about your work process. Look at amazon: their main goals are fewer clicks and less structure.

I don’t want an electronic management system to tell me how to work. In fact, just stay away from monolithic tools: give me some simplistic tools (like a hammer) and let me work!

The general theme is that less management is better, and that individual learners could write all of their posts, assignments and papers from their own site, and these could be directed to each class as web feeds. The classes would aggregate the feeds from all the studens and instructors. The beauty of this kind of system is that each student keeps all of his/her content, and it does not get locked away in an inaccessible archive of a centrally controlled LMS.

From a post by Harold who was writting about a post by James Farmer…

Today, I was invited to Ottawa by Apollo Systems Research Corporation which is a little company they describe as a Financial Engineering Laboratory. I think this is an accurate description. What I saw was a group of very smart and talented people working on very exciting problems.

In cooperation with a private hedge fund, Apollo has identified significant opportunities in applying rigorous mathematical methods to problems in finance. Apollo is developing a Financial Engineering Laboratory (FEL) which provides an interactive environment for the systematic development and evolution of high-performance trading strategies. These strategies are based on analytical techniques originating from systems science, soft computing and artificial intelligence. They are designed to achieve very high returns on investment and low volatility by trading without the bias of human emotions.