Last week I had a meeting with my PhD advisor and we talked about my ideas on social news streams and how you could implement them using graph data bases. Of course my choise here would be neo4j. Yesterday I had my first talk in our “Oberseminar” which is a weekly meeting of all PhD …
Year: 2011
How to create animations between two vector graphics?
I am just about to prepare a talk about my current research on social news streams for social networks. As I have learned giving good examples is essential! That is why I already spent a whole day learning some basic inkscape to create some vector graphics which are supposed to visualize some of my research …
Website of GEMA hacked by anonymous group AnonyPwnies
In Germany a lot of music videos on youtube are not available because youtube and GEMA could never agree on the amount of licence fees that youtube should pay to legally stream those videos. So if I want to listen / watch to a Lady Gaga Video in Germany I won’t be able to do …
Teach First Germany – Why education is a Human right.
Today i want to introduce you to a project that is very important to me! It is called Teach First Germany and follows the model of the uk based idea of teach first (see wikipedia). I don’t know if one could really call it social entrepreneurship but I would do so! Teach First was first …
Propaganda, filtering and blocking by Facebook?
The discussions about the ethics of facebook are old and everyone knows my oppinion on their ethics. But now I discovered a youtube video shared by a Google Product Manager on Google plus that Facebook will filter out your invitations to Googleplus from your friends facebook news stream. It is not new that facebook is …
"I have no idea how to do it!" – Tim Harford's TED talk: Trial & Error and the God Complex
Finally someone stood up and said what I was feeling all my live! Tim Harford is an expert on complex systems and realized that most of them evolve by trial and error and not by some authority saying we have to do it in this and that way. He points out that this seems to …
Risks and criticisms of Google's Data liberation front
I have wanted to write about Google’s data liberation front from some time. The data liberation front is an effort by Google to make your data from Google products available to you once you decide not to use them any more. Today my former student Martin was faster in his blog and created an excelent …
Time lines and news streams: Neo4j is 377 times faster than MySQL
Over the last weeks I did some more work on neo4j. And I am ready to present some more results on the speed (In my use case neo4j outperformed MySQL by a factor of 377 ! That is more than two magnitudes). As known one part of my PhD thesis is to create a social newsstream …
Will Google plus be the Facebook Killer? What do you think?
Hey everyone! Last week I sent out over 100 invitations to Google Plus. I know some of you are still waiting to be allowed to join. But for those who have seen G+ I would love to hear your oppinion on Google Plus. Do you think it will become a serious major social networking site? …
Will Wikipedia replace scientific journals?
We all know that the review process of scientific journals is a good thing that served a certain purpose in the time it was created. In this video Jimmy Wales – well known as the Wikipedia founder – talks about the impact of new technologies and the web on the traditional concept of scientific journals …