Google Webmaster Tools detecta más de mil títulos duplicados en OBM

Igual la plantilla que utilizáis para WordPress es más lista que la mía y no os pasa, pero por si acaso. Resulta ser que Google Webmaster Tools detecta (dentro de unas horas será detectaba :-) ) más de mil páginas con títulos duplicados en este blog. Aunque no creo que eso afecte demasiado a los resultados en el motor de búsqueda, queda feo y convendría arreglarlo. Y como además era cuestión de hacerle dos preguntas al señor Google, invertir dos minutos en escribir media línea de código y que me recordasen que las condiciones van entre paréntesis en PHP, pues hasta lo he hecho y todo…

La cuestión es que mi plantilla (y un buen puñado de otras) no coloca en el título el número de página cuando debería. La solución: donde antes ponía, en la cabecera,

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?> </title>

ahora pone

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?> <?php if (is_paged()) echo ‘, página ‘.$paged; ?></title>

De nada… :-)

• WordPress nuevo, tema nuevo (2008.3.31) (2)
• Shortcodes fáciles en WordPress (II) (2008.4.13) (1)
• Shortcodes fáciles en WordPress (2008.4.13) (1)
• Dos o tres cosillas de WordPress 2.5 (2008.4.1) (3)
• YSlow, un diagnóstico más (2007.7.25) (4)

Impresionantes los 'alts' de lavanguardia.es

Me he quedado sin palabras…

• Un par de accesibilidad (2007.10.20) (0)
• IBM Social Accessibility Project. A la accesibilidad por el crowdsourcing (2008.7.8) (5)
• Foco (2008.3.2) (0)
• El ‘captcha’ de Vodafone (2007.11.10) (3)
• YSlow, un diagnóstico más (2007.7.25) (4)

El snippet de resultado de búsqueda para los foros es un tanto particular...

No debe ser novedad, seguro, pero yo me entero ahora: en su afán por certificar la frescura de los resultados de las búsquedas, cuando uno de esos resultados proviene de un foro, Google no solo devuelve el tradicional ’snippet’, sino que también indica cuántas personas diferentes han escrito cuántos mensajes en el correspondiente ‘thread’ y de cuándo es la última aportación… Práctico. Ahora estaría bien que especificaran, si se trata de un blog la fecha y, a lo mejor, el número de comentarios. Todo se andará, seguro.

• Cosas que Google Reader recuerda de ti y nunca te había dicho (2008.3.17) (1)
• YouTube Insight, métricas para tus vídeos (2008.3.27) (0)
• Segundas impresiones de Google Chrome (2008.9.3) (4)
• Me han hackeado el sitio. ¿Qué hago? (2008.4.8) (3)
• Live blogging con Google Docs (2007.5.5) (1)

The French ministry of education organized a meeting entitles “L’Apprentissage des Sciences dans L’Europe de la Connaissance” that is right now taking place in Grenoble. Minister Xavier Darcos, the French minister of education, is talking and mentioned that, in France, during the last several years, physics has lost in average 5.5% of the student body a year. Several other countries report similar trends.

read more

We have today taken action to upgrade the Drupal core engine powering the JEM portal to the latest version due to security issues found on the previous Drupal 5.x series of releases.

Security announcement on the issue is available at http://drupal.org/node/318706, please report any possible problems with the website.

Los adictos a la música y al cine volvemos a estar de enhorabuena: ya está disponible el programa del In-Edit 2008, a celebrar en Barcelona del 23 de octubre al 2 de noviembre. Documentales sobre Caetano Veloso, Cachao, Celia Cruz, Joy Division, Nina Simone, James Brown, Gorillaz, Lou Reed, Patti Smith o la escena de Londres en los 60…

El pase imprecindible, el de Gimme Shelter de Albert Maysles, al que se homenajea este año en el festival. Búsquenme en el pase del día 1, si no pasa nada.

• 25 partituras de película (2005.9.28) (1)
• Worldtaximeter ¿Cuánto te va a costar el taxi? (2008.1.24) (3)
• Warner se va de last.fm (2008.6.7) (0)
• Un millón doscientos mil álbumes, a ocho dólares el album… (2007.10.20) (1)
• Tendremos videojuego barcelonés… (2008.9.22) (0)

Aplicación de demo de Microsoft Touchless

Interesante movimiento el de los Microsoft Office Labs (aunque, la verdad, no me acaba de cuadrar la parte de ‘office’) con el lanzamiento, en abierto (Microsoft Public License) del Touchless SDK, un kit de desarrollo de software que permite a los usuarios crear y experimentar aplicaciones ‘multitouch’. El ‘paquetito’ contiene documentación y DLLs para los que quieran jugar con el SDK (con Visual Studio 2005, 2008 o la gratuita Express Edition).

Touchless no es el colmo de la sofisticación. Ni siquiera “cutting edge”. Es un motor tirando a sencillo que explota técnicas no muy avanzadas de reconocimiento de imágenes para buscar objetos “llamativos” en las imágenes capturadas por la webcam y usarlos como marcadores que luego se utilizarán para interactuar con la aplicación de turno. No debería costar mucho, por ejemplo, poner un par de objetos brillantes en los extremos de mis gafas y controlar un juego de coches inclinando la cabeza hacia los lados y alejándome o acercándome a la pantalla… Pero poner al alcance de todos los desarrolladores ‘Visual’ la librería, por poco que se lo miren, debería dar pie a más de una aplicación interesante e innovadora.

Con un poco de suerte, la cosa seguirá avanzando por estos derroteros y dentro de unos meses una aplicación podrá ver si sonrío o no, o reconocer gestos hechos con las manos, y habremos dado un pasito más en el camino de la interacción persona ordenador…

Vía.

• Zoomii.com, estanterías para Amazon (2008.6.20) (0)
• Web móvil y otras cosillas… (2008.4.2) (0)
• Una pregunta para usuarios de iPhone y iPod Touch (2008.4.6) (5)
• Roland overdose (2008.4.1) (1)
• reacTIVision, programa tu aplicación ‘multitouch’ (2008.1.7) (0)

Flexible, autonome Verhaltenskontrolle: Erlernen und Adaptation von Sensormotorischen Raumrepräsentationen
Keynote by Martin Butz (COBOSLAB, University of Würzburg) at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: FGWM

Evaluating Tools of the X-COSIM Semantic Desktop
Presentation by Thomas Franz at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: FGWM

Hypothesis: PIM benefits from information linkage and information reuse across PIM application.
Method: Using RDF and Semantic Web technologies.

X-COSIM provides the X-COSIMO ontology:
Among others, X-COSIMO defines contextual information in a formal representation for context, the contextual ontology includes concepts such as email, attachment, sender, recipients. Attachments e.g. contextualizes information object, while sender and recipient contextualizes agents in the systems.

Evaluation:
Does an X-COSIM enabled desktop provide better support for PIM tasks than a conventional one?
Better means: increased effectiveness (absolute time spend on each task), increased efficiency (goals reached: distance of mouse movements, number of window switches, …), increased satisfaction (questionnaire, ratings, interview).

• 18 participants: 3 graduate students and 15 Ph.D.s students; none of them used the semantic desktop before.
• Introduction (to the scenario, to the dataset, get acquainted to the system), observation, and feedback phase.
• Scenario: Real data select from the organizers of the Night of Computer Science in Koblenz (more than 140 emails, 44 files, 40 files via eMail, …)
• Tasks: (1) organization tasks (familiarization: all emails in one folder and participants had to create a folder structure), (2) lookup tasks (baseline: re-finding information; baseline as this feature was not expected to be of greater benefit in contrast to others), (3) multi-item tasks (evaluation), (4) document-driven collaboration (evaluation), (5) information collation (evaluation)
• Evaluation Wizard: guiding the user through the evaluation; presenting the lookup tasks, …, and questionnaire. The wizard tracked the execution time for each task.

Results: Semantic desktop can improve PIM.

Implementation: Runs on KDE with Thunderbird. download now

Presentation by Andreas Hotho at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: KDML

The social bookmarking system BibSonomy has to deal with a lot of spam; which hamper the quality of search results and navigation. This talk focuses on detecting users as spammer, making all their posts invisible in the system. This decision is based on their tagging and personal data such as eMail etc. The authors present a framework that allows for automatic classification of spammers.

How to detect Spammers: Checking all their tags and, possible, the bookmarked sites. Spam posts are identified if:

• Tags describing a web page do not fit to the content of the site.
• Tags and/or topic of a post are not interesting for the system.

Problems:

• Subjective notion of what is spam
• No cross-check; noise
• Only two classes: spam or non-spam
• Maybe identification of spammers to not granular enough, rather flag posts as spam
• User may have several accounts

Features:

• Profile features (digits in name, digits in mails, length of the names, mails)
• Activity features (time between registration and first post, number of tags per post - spammers use more, …)
• Location features (number of users in the same domain or IP address)
• Semantic features (automatic tag from spamming software “$Group” can be used to make tags public in some bookmarking systems, blacklist of spam tags, co-occurrence of information as “a spammer shares resources with about 18 other spammers, but only with 0.5 non-spammers”)

Classification algorithms: SVM (best), J48, Logistic regression (worse), and Naive Bayes

Presentation by Victor de Boer (Human-Computer Studies Laboratory; University of Amsterdam) at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS

The authors present a tool (SiteGuide) that supports amateur web-users to design web pages: Helping them to select and organize information for their pages. User input a set of example sites that are similar to their intended website. SiteGuide scrapes and analyses the sites and captures their commonalities in a web site model. From this, SiteGuide generates a site for the users. In addition, the system can provide the difference of a draft site of the user to its internal model of the example sites.

Escribir un correo borracho, complicado con las goggles de GMail

Más de uno (y más de una) se arrepiente de haber escrito en algún momento algún correo cuando el nivel de alcoholemia era demasiado alto. Para evitarlo, en los “GMail Labs” hay un nuevo experimento, “Mail Goggles” (GMail Labs, diría que solo está disponible en versiones anglosajonas) que te lo pone algo más difícil… Después de activarlo, nos vamos a la configuración de GMail y le decimos (i) cuándo queremos que se active la protección (por defecto, las noches de los viernes y los sábados, por qué será…) y (ii) el nivel de dificultad que nos queremos imponer (la captura corresponde al nivel cinco, el más difícil). A partir de ese momento, cada vez que le demos al botón ‘enviar’ en un ‘momento peligroso’ tendremos que pasar la prueba de fuego. Y con una copa de más, la verdad, contestar en un minuto las cinco preguntas de la captura de pantalla no me parece del todo trivial (aunque un par de niveles de dureza más no habrían ido mal, diría yo)…

Dirá el avispado lector que más fácil que contestar las preguntas es desactivar el filtro (por no hablar de las maravillosas calculadoras que tienen los ordenadores) pero, por favor, no nos agüen la fiesta, que a todos los ‘geeks’ del planeta nos ha hecho mucha gracia :-). Todos los detalles.

• Hotmail 10, GMail 2.9 (2007.8.14) (2)
• ¿Usuario de GMail? (2008.8.20) (0)
• ¿”Tag clouds” automáticas en GMail? (2007.11.15) (0)

Presentation by Mirjam Köck at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS

Motivation: eLearning has become very popular, but still simple approaches of implementing adaptivity dominate. Computational intelligence is under-represented. The authors focus on challenges such as the autonomous knowledge acquisition, autonomous pattern identification at run-time, and expression of patterns in rules.

Adaptive learning guidance includes

• navigation through learning materials
• Guiding communication and cooperation activities (suggestion communication partners, contact persons for questions, …)
• …

Approach: Using communication and collaboration activities (rather than contents/ tags) are used as input for the user models. Identify groups of learners based on communication and learning behaviours (observing the style of learning, the level of activities, activity pattern).

Collecting information such as the user’s online time, actions related to communication (read, write, update, delete), user’s current knowledge, learning activities (time needed for test, time spent on content before taking tests, performance of tests), content of communication items

Relations of interest: How is a user’s time spent on communication related to the learning curriculum?; does the knowledge state influence communication?; what is the degree of similarity between a user’s activity level in the communication area and content area?; …

Promising Technologies: Artificial Neural Networks (can discover activity clusters, can adapt components e.g. change weights, do not depend on continuous human intervention; but: blackbox-syndrome, missing explanation capability, rule extraction is difficult); Combined Neuro-Fuzzy Approaches, Bayesian Networks (combination of domain knowledge and data; derivation of causal relationships) -> Combination allows using Neural Networks e.g. for learning and making the hidden sector of Neural Networks more visible.

Prospect: Improve adaptation; reducing human efforts to ensure quality and up-to-dateness of model data; semi-automatic pattern recognition, classification and evaluation at run-time; predication of behaviour based on correlations; integration of CI approaches into popular learning environment (Sakai; see also Stephan Weibelzahl)

Presentation by Thomas Fischer (University of Jena) at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS.

Mashups extract and combine data, functionalities, etc. from different websites into a single integrated tool.

See also Why Mashups = (REST + ‘Traditional SOA’) * Web 2.0

Presentation by Stephan Weibelzahl (National College of Irland) at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS.

Stephan Weibelzahl developed HTML-Tutor, an interactive learning environment which offers an introduction to HTML and publishing on the Web.

Most system in academia remain at the prototype level with poor usability. This is acceptable as prototypes are vehicles to provide proof of concepts of an approach. However, in the long run scientists need to demonstrate the effects and impact of adaptive systems. Consequently, we need to start taking usability criteria into account when developing and evaluating scientific software. The authors aim at analysing the effects of usability on adaptation.

An adaptive peer finder is presented. The system is based on the adaptive learning system AHA! by de Bra and Calvi.

Further Readings:

• AHA! website: Adaptive Hypermedia for All
• The Design of AHA!

Presentation by Sirko Schindler (University of Jena) at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS (collaboration with Andreas Nauerz). (see paper)

Treemaps were proposed by Johnson & Schneiderman in 1991. The author propose adaptive treemaps - displaying different treemaps to different users - to improve the navigation in web portals. To test several algorithms, the author developed a prototype, which is embedded into the IBM WebSphere Portal.

Presentation by Arne Koesling at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS

Focus: Introduce Adaptability into regular Learning Management Systems (LMS) - introduce sophisticated rule systems (policies) that allow all stakeholders (learners , teachers, system admins) to adapt the system for their needs.

Policies are statements that define the behaviour of the system and are intended to guide decisions and actions. There are also known as business rules. For example: “New customers have to pay in advance, regular customers are allowed to pay after delivery” or “point all users to the basic material, if they enter the course the first time and notify all tutors”. Policies are dynamic, declarative, reusable, have a well-defined semantics, and allow for reasoning.

The author chose Protune as policy language, which additionally supports negotiations, explanations and integration with external sources (see concrete examples in Protune on the w3.org website).

Presentation by Andreas Nauerz (IBM, University of Jena) at Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS (see paper)

Focus: Improving accessibility of web portals. Company web portals (Enterprise Information Portals) often include immense corpora of contents, which are hardly ever used by the user as selection and navigation is often too tedious. Main concepts of the authors have been integrated in the IBM WebSphere Portal.

The author propose a complex user and context model (date, time, location). The user model reflect the user’s interest and preference: Information from static profiles (native language, home country, working location, age, …), the user’s interaction behaviour (pages and portlets they work with, tags users apply to resources); and the user’s social networks are used to derive knowledge on the user’s needs. For example, the user model includes information on the tagging, rating, and commenting behaviour of users: Tagging and rating behaviour are analysed to understand interest and preference of single users and entire communities. The static data is entered by the user, while more dynamic data is extracted from the user interaction using web usage mining.

Based on the user models two main services are provided:

• Content adaptation: navigation and page layouts (improve accessibility of contents that users frequently use; make more content accessible but adapting its structure/ layout and make its relevance obvious to the user)
• Content recommendation: based on background information, related content, or activities of experts and similar behaving users (make recommendation of new material, which relevance is not obvious to the user)

Three independent context profile are created: (1) travelling, (2) office, (3) at home: User activities during are only stored in the respective context. For example, activity during travelling do not influence the user modelling for office work or at home.

Tags can be associate to web pages, documents, fragments of pages (very granular). They can be typed by the users or their semantics can be automatically extracted by calling respective back-end services.

Uno de los efectos positivos que le veía uno a la moda esta de los ‘netbooks’ (sean Eees, Aspire Ones, MSI Winds o lo que sean) es que iban a popularizar Linux (quien le quiera dar la lectura, un poco más malintencionada, de que limitará las ventas de Windows, que lo haga, desde luego): 300 euros por el ordenador con Linux, 350 por lo mismo con Windows… como para pensárselo. Más aún si tenemos en cuenta mi propia experiencia con el Aspire One: para lo que lo quiero, aún no se me ha pasado nunca algo que me hiciese pensar en Windows: tiene su navegador, su cliente de mensajería instantánea, su OpenOffice y, con un poquito de trabajo, Gimp y Skype. ¿Qué más voy a querer?

Pues va a ser que no. Como mínimo, parece ser, para el caso de las ventas en Estados Unidos de los MSI Wind, las tasas de devolución de los modelos Linux cuadriplican las de Windows. Sorprendente, insisto, al menos para mí. ¿Tiene el usuario medio tan asumido que un ordenador tiene que tener “aspecto Windows”? ¿O quizá haya otros factores explicativos? Habrá que mantener los ojos abiertos. Vía.

• Habemus Acer Aspire One (2008.8.2) (11)
• Y gira (2005.12.9) (5)
• The Star Wars hub (2008.6.27) (0)
• Roland overdose (2008.4.1) (1)
• Queridos Reyes Magos… (2008.1.5) (3)

Keynote Alexandros Paramythis Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS

Current focus of Alexandros Paramythis:

• Adaptation on the basis of collaborative user activities
• Meta-Adaptivity
• Evaluation of Adaptivity (see also Stephan Weibelzahl)

Focus of the talk: Is the research community on user modelling and adaptivity still relevant and (if so) in what ways?

Netflix Prize: The competition on improving Netflix’s accuracy of the prediction by 10% gives as insights in the maturity of the community. It was not possible to make the improvement of 10% immediately, indicating some level of maturity. But still the community is not yet mature enough as a 10% improvement is still consider realistic (in contrast to more mature communities such as the database researchers).

Web 2.0 paradigms: Brining user participation and contribution to Web 2.0 content. The emphasis is on social behaviors/ online ways to connect with people with similar interest. Two aspects: (1) creating social graphs (networks) summarizing relation between people and (2) creating tag clouds to summarize relations between concepts (expressing people’s interest via their tags). Both structures can get unwieldy - so the challenge is to filter and adapt these structures. Researchers are starting on personalization of tag clouds and social networks now.

Are adaptive hypermedia different to adaptive systems? Is this really an important question to ask? Or should we no longer distinguish these two fields?

Some under-explored adaptivity topics are: (1) social dimension of users; (2) collaboration/ cooperation; and (3) user activities.

How does user profile change in Web2.0? Are we (in academia) aware of approaches in industry? There is almost no cooperation between academia and industry although the latter came up with several defacto standards:

• DataPortability initiative: “Data Portability is the option to use your personal data between trusted applications and vendors.”
• OpenSocial (promoted by Google): “OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”
• OpenID: “OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.”
• APML - Attention Profiling MarkUp Language: “APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers.”

Adaptivity in Ubiquity: We have to address new adaptive scenarios. Also here industry has contributed already: see e.g. IBMS emotion mouse; see Geotagging

Ubiquity in adaptive eLearning: Computer have turned into tutors almost as good as human instructors. But mist learning takes place outside the classroom. We can not easily observe these learning processes; adaptive system do not support these informal and hidden learning processes.

Security Concerns: Some adaptation algorithms are to weak (see Amazon … case). We can strengthen the algorithms and/or increase the investment required for significant effects to the system’s adaptive behaviour.

Quality: Adaptation quality is an illusive goal as it is hard to define it (harder than e.g. interaction quality). Moreover, the success of adaptation often depends on the application domain and the overall experience of the user. Thus, evaluation adaptation is difficult (see Stephan Weibelzahl). We need to isolate adaptation from the other components to measure its impact without the influence of other aspects of the system (e.g. the user model or user interface).

The adaptation and user modelling community is a rather closed community. Access to publication is limited due to copy rights. Moreover, researchers tend to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Industry is completely ignored although they already widely use their defacto standards like OpenID … We should become aware of this and start to considering existing industrial approaches as well as start collaborations between industry and academia.