Category Archives: Fact Checking

Phil 4.26.16

7:00 – 4:00 VTX

  • Reading through (and coding) A Fistfull of Bitcoins. In the ‘duh’ department, I realize that it should be possible to pay anonymous sources using BC since they both rely on the same mechanism. So when you submit a story, you can also use a bitcoin address. It would help in tracking users, that’s for sure. If you want to associate a bitcoin address at a later time, then a more detailed biometric analysis would have to take place. Maybe a game. Also, users should be able to create a BC address alias. These would have to be unique across the system(? Is this really true?), but that’s kind of like user name, so there are issues….
  • Worked on JavaFX layout issues need to figure out how to get the grid to scale? Or maybe use anchor points. More tomorrow.
  • Sprint retrospective
  • Presented the tool. Need to add users.

Phil 4.15.16

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • Good meeting with Wayne yesterday evening
  • Tensorflow playground
  • Continuing The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent
    • Page 4: Based on the ‘like me’ framework, I hypothesized that it would be possible to demonstrate such tool-use learning at younger ages by transforming the situation. Instead of having the infant sit across the table from the adult, I had them sit side-by-side. In that way the adult’s actions could more easily serve as a blueprint for the child’s own action plans. Recent brain imaging studies with adults show the facilitative effects of seeing a to-be-imitated action from one’s own point of view (Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2006).
    • Page 5:This study was the first to show infants how to use complex tools ‘from their own perspective.’ Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the child closes the gap between the perceived and executed actions. The model becomes more ‘like me.’ 
      • Eyewitness value, photos and images all come from a ‘like me’ framework. As much as possible, we are looking out of the eyes of the witness. This high level of credibility traces all the way back to infancy. Wow. On a related note, this has implications for news reporting using VR.
    • Page 6: Evidently, young toddlers can understand our goals even if we fail to fulfill them. In another study (Meltzoff, 1995; Experiment 2), it was shown that infants did not reenact the target act if  they saw a mechanical device rather than a person performing the ‘slipping’ movements. The device did not look human and had poles as arms and pincers instead of fingers, but it traced the same spatiotemporal pattern as did the person’s yanking. Infants did not pull apart the dumbbell at any higher than baseline levels in this case. They did, however, correctly perform the target act in another condition in which the mechanical device succeeded in pulling apart the dumbbell. This makes sense, because in the case of success the object transformation is visible (it is pulled apart), but in the case of the unsuccessful attempt, there is no object transformation, only a ‘slipping’ motion that has to be interpreted at a different level.
      • Does this mean that we have a ‘wired-in’ model of the intention of others?
    • Page 7: Persistence and emotions as markers of infants’ intention—In further work, I showed 18-month-olds (N = 33) the standard unsuccessful-attempt display, but handed them a trick toy. The toy had been surreptitiously glued shut before the study began. When infants picked it up and attempted to pull it apart, their hands slipped off the ends. This, of course, matched the surface behavior of the adult. The question was whether this imitation of the adults’ behavior satisfied the infants. It did not. When infants matched the surface behavior of the adult, they did not terminate their behavior. They repeatedly grabbed the toy, yanked on it in different ways, and appealed to the adult for help by looking and vocalizing. About 90% (20/23) of those who tried to pull apart the object immediately stared at the adult after they failed to do so (mean latency = 1.74 s). Why were they appealing for help? They had matched the adult’s surface behavior. Evidently, they were striving toward something else: the adult’s goals, not his literal behavior
      • Definately a model of something… And a goal.
    • Page 7: We also conducted related neuroscience work in adults. The results reveal that neural structures known to be involved in adult theory-of-mind tasks (medial prefrontal cortex) are activated in tasks requiring adults to infer unconsummated goals in basic action tasks (Chaminade, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2002; see also Reid, Csibra, Belsky, & Johnson, 2007, for related work). This suggests a tie between the processing of action sequences in terms of goals and more sophisticated aspects of social cognition.
    • Page 7: Our adult commonsense psychology includes a distinction between the types of entities that are accorded goals and intentions and those that are not. We ascribe a goal to the archer not to the arrow that reaches (or misses) the target
      • That’s a fundamental ‘humanness’ definition that Social Trust depends on. If the inferred goals are trustworthy, then slips in behavior are discounted.
    • Page 7: I am currently exploring whether mechanical devices such as social robots can be treated as ‘like me’ based on bodily structure and/ or the type of behavior they exhibit, prompting action imitation by the infant. Preliminary results suggest so.
  • —————–
  • Updated the deployable RatingApp.exe. Asked Andy to set up a Skype meeting so I can demo.
  • Presented and deployed.
  • Made a new CSE that only points to the online Moby Dick, that can be used for query testing.

Phil 4.14.16

7:00 – 3:30 VTX

  • Continuing The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent
  • Page 2: Perception influences production, and production influences perception, with substantial implications for social cognition.
    • This must be a foundational element of Social Trust. I see you do a thing. I imitate the thing. I feel (not think!) that it is the same thing. I do a thing. You imitate the thing. Think peekaboo. We establish a rapport. This is different from System Trust, where I put something somewhere and it’s still there. System trust may be derived fundamentally from Object Permanence, while Social Trust comes from imitation?
    • This is(?) tied to motor neurons. From Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain: Essentially, mirror neurons respond to actions that we observe in others. The interesting part is that mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves.
      • Implications for design? Journalism is definitely built around the ‘like me’ concept that it is built around stories. IR is much less so, and is more data focused.
    • At section 3 – Experiment 1: learning tool-use by observing others
      • We have Social Trust first. Then we learn to use tools. Tools are different from, though related to the environment. They are not ‘like me’, but they extend me (Heidegger again). More later.
  • Page 3: For example, there is an intimate relation between striving to achieve a goal and a concomitant facial expression and effortful bodily acts.
    • This is like the boot loader or initial dictionary entry. Hard-wired common vocabulary.
  • Page 3: Humans, including preverbal infants, imbue the acts of others with felt meaning not solely (or at first) through a formal process of step-by-step reasoning, but because the other is processed as ‘like me.’ This is underwritten by the way humans represent action—the supramodal action code—and self experience
    • So is there a ‘more like me’ and ‘less like me’?
  • Meeting with Wayne this evening
    • Go over notes
    • Coding session
  • ——————
  • Check to see that reports are being made correctly
    • Fix “Get all rated” Numerous issues, including strings with commas
    • Fix “Get Match Counts” all zeros
    • Fix “Get No Match Counts” redundent
    • Change “Get Blacklist (CSV)” to “Black/White list (CSV)
    • Add “Get Whitelist (Google CSE)
    • Change the Sets in getBlack/Whitelist to use maps rather than sets so blacklist culling can be used with more informative rows.
  • Update remote DB and test a few pages. Ran into a problem with LONGTEXT and Postgress. Went back to TEXT
  • Went over Aaron’s ASB slides a couple of times. Introduced him to Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM).
  • Present new system to Andy, Margarita and John. Tomorrow…

Phil 4.13.16

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • One last thing from Deindividuation Effects on Group Polarization in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Role of Group Identification, Public-Self-Awareness, and Perceived Argument Quality. This is from the opening paragraph:
    • Group polarization refers to the well-established finding that following group discussion, individuals tend to endorse a more extreme position in the direction already favored by the group (Hogg, Turner, & Davidson, 1990; Isenberg, 1986; Moscovici & Zavalloni, 1969).
      • So this may require some expounding on, but it isn’t something that’s in dispute. Merging GPT with information network analytics in a way to simultaneously determine group membership while nudging for a view of a larger information horizon will require more scaffolding. But this plank is pretty solid.
      • And I like that my bibliography spans over 40 years and multiple disciplines.
  • I think I was able to put in a slot for the development of the slider functionality as it relates to a particular corpus. On a related note vector space classification is becoming a thing in NLP. In Deep or Shallow, NLP is Breaking Out in CACM, both Word2vec and GloVe are discussed. This ties back to The Hybrid Representation Model for Web Document Classification that I read back in January, where documents can be represented as clusters of vectors in an n-dimensional space. But now it looks like there are libraries. Woohoo! I do wonder if there’s a vector space analogy to chunking in this that could be useful. Maybe? Probably?
  • Starting The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent
    • Page 1: Autism has been described as a kind of ‘mind-blindness’ (Baron-Cohen, 1995) because children with autism do not conceptualize other people as psychological agents with a rich palette of mental states.
      • . What’s the influence on System Trust and Social Trust? Do groups of Autistic people polarize? Differently?
  • ————————-
  • Ok, after much flailing, I got the creation of queries correct for arbitrary PersonOfInterest. The problem is that beyond name and State, I really don’t know wht’s going to be used for a source file. So PoiObject has been generalized to handle name and state by default but everything else is optional. What was causing me all the trouble was having license_no as a ‘native’ value with a default of zero. When I made rules based on the presence or absence of this field, they couldn’t work. So much cleanup ensued…
  • Need to test the new data
    • Internal Exception: com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlDataTruncation: Data truncation: Data too long for column ‘source_url’ at row 1 – Fixed
      • Drop ‘queries’ out of provider menu dialog – Fixed
  • Need to change the queries in PoiObject that depended on licence_no. Commented out for now. Fixed.
  • Discussed geolocation with Aaron and sent out a note to the curation team for comments.

Phil 4.12.16

7:00 – 6:00 VTX

  • At the poster session yesterday, I had a nice chat with Yuanyuan about her poster on Supporting Common Ground Development in the Operation Room through Information Display Systems. It turns out that she is looking at information exchange patterns in groups independent of content, which is similar to what I’m looking at. We had a good discussion on group polarization and what might happen if misinformation was introduced into the OR. It turns out that this does happen – if the Attending Physician becomes convinced that, for example, all the instruments have been removed from the patient, the rest of the team can become convinced of this as well and self-reinforce the opinion.
  • Scanned through Deindividuation Effects on Group Polarization in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Role of Group Identification, Public-Self-Awareness, and Perceived Argument Quality. The upshot appears that individuation of participants acts as a drag on group polarization. So the more the information is personalized (and the more that the reader retains self awareness) the less the overall group polarization will move.
  • I’ve often said that humans innately communicate using stories and maps (Maps are comprehended at 3-4.5 years, Stories from when?). The above would support that stories are more effective ways of promoting ‘star’ information patterns. This is all starting to feel very fractal and self similar at differing scales…
  • Looking for children’s development of story comprehension led to this MIT PhD Thesis: TOWARD A MODEL OF CHILDREN’S STORY COMPREHENSION. Good lord – What a Committee: Marvin Minsky (thesis supervisor), Professors Joel Moses and Seymour Papert (thesis committee), Jeff Hill, Gerry Sussman, and Terry Winograd.
  • ———————
  • While reading Deep or Shallow, NLP is Breaking Out, I learned about word2vec. Googling led to Deeplearning4j.org, which has its own word2vec page, among a *lot* of other things. From their home page:
    • Deeplearning4j is the first commercial-grade, open-source, distributed deep-learning library written for Java and Scala. Integrated with Hadoop and Spark, DL4J is designed to be used in business environments, rather than as a research tool. Skymind is its commercial support arm.
    •  Deeplearning4j aims to be cutting-edge plug and play, more convention than configuration, which allows for fast prototyping for non-researchers. DL4J is customizable at scale. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, all derivatives of DL4J belong to their authors.
    •  By following the instructions on our Quick Start page, you can run your first examples of trained neural nets in minutes.
  • The word vector alternative is from the Stanford NLP folks: GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation. The link also has trained (extracted?) word vectors.
  • Testing the behavior of query construction and search results. Fixing stupid bugs. Testing more. Lathering, rinsing and repeating.
  • Some good discussions with Aaron on inferencing and toxicity profiles. Basically taking the outputs and determining correlations with the inputs. Which led to a very long day.

Phil 4.11.16

7:00 – 3:00 VTX

  • Make MOLST appointment today
  • Working on the outline
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology. Done! Meaty.
    • Page 907: While the relationship between human-like trust and outcomes is stronger in most cases, system-like trust still matters (see Figure 2). This may be because, in part, Facebook is a tool that helps one do social networking. I think this is important. When a tool has high system trust in a social context, it disappears, while the social aspect comes to the fore. This is true even if the tool is performing hidden tasks that influence the social interaction. This is related to relevance and pertinence, I think. As long as the social cies are presented in a way that feels pertinent (and is reliable?), it’s trusted explicitly as a system and implicitly as a player in the social interaction.
    • Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves
  • ——————————-
  • TODOs in GoogleCSE2 buildQueryObjects() and buildNewQueryObjects():
    • Modify to take SmartTerm Object
      If there is a valid term, then create the query with po.getNamePermutations()
  • Finished. Building a new (small!) set of people to test with
  • Discussed how order affects search results with Andy. Need to think about that
  • Had an idea about running overspecified queries that return nothing, then backing off term by term until a hit. Running through the permutations that have very small numbers of hits looking for common hits might be a good way of getting good results?

Phil 4.8.16

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • Here’s the new link for Microsoft Cognitive Services
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
    • Page 906: Among the five factors, social presence correlated the highest with humanness for both Facebook (0.48) and Access (0.56). Also noteworthy is that for Access, the correlation between humanness and animation was high (0.51), whereas for Facebook it was not (0.31). Further, dynamism correlated somewhat higher with humanness for Access (0.39) than for Facebook (0.23). These interesting differences show that each technology likely has a general humanness that finds its basis in different factors
      • This leads me to believe that ‘humanness’ is not exactly what they are testing here. Responsiveness can be used to discriminate between different types of tires (WRT cornering), and I don’t think anyone would call one tire more or less human than another. I think this also applies to the animation test. Social presence though makes a lot of sense.
      • It did just strike me that partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM – [XLstat’s definition and tutorial) would be a *great* way of evaluating trustworthiness and credibility cues. This should be part of the research part of the study?
    • Page 906: Our study 2 findings raise a related question: instead of considering humanness a general construct measured with three items like we did, could one theorize humanness as a second-order construct that is reflected by specific first-order factors that are components of social presence, social affordances,and affordances for sociality? Researchers exploring such a second-order construct could integrate it into a nomological humanness network.
      • Hah! See my second comment for the previous quotation.
    • Page 907: Researchers should try to determine differences between these respondents and those who ranked one or both technologies at or above the midpoint. Researchers could also perform a cluster analysis to identify groups with common responses to the humanness items of which a group with low humanness scores might emerge. It could be that the humanness factors identified in study 2 are more or less important in indicating humanness based on cluster membership. It could also be that results from study 1 about the importance of trust type might differ by humanness cluster.
      • This could also be a component of trust/credibility analysis.
    • Paper structure thoughts
  • —————————
  • Set the persistence.xml to point to the Talend DB
  • Created the DB
  • Added users
    • Phil
    • Aaron
    • Margarita
    • Andy
    • John
  • Need to figure out how to come up with a list of names/terms/CSEs to start evaluating
  • Need to test fully functional app, then package and deploy
  • Need to have VTX get a SemRush account
  • Conference Call with John, Margarita and Andy about setting up the Crawl for this weekend. John will get back to me with some known bad actors
  • Need to associate search terms with an optionalString element
  • Monday’s TODOs in GoogleCSE2 buildQueryObjects() and buildNewQueryObjects():
    • Modify to take SmartTerm Object
      If there is a valid term, then create the query with po.getNamePermutations()

Phil 4.7.16

From Communications of the ACM’s Kode Vicious column: To understand the first downside, you should find a friend who works on compilers and ask if he or she has ever looked inside gcc (GNU C compiler), and, after the crying stops and you have bolstered your friend’s spirits, ask if he or she has ever tried to extend the compiler. If you are still friends at that point, your final question should be about submitting patches upstream into this supposedly open source project.

Yup.

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
    • Page 894: trust is most often treated as a psychological construct (i.e., trusting
      beliefs). As a psychological construct, trusting beliefs exists apart from any attempt to measure it (Schwab, 1980). Yet knowing what the construct means helps one to measure it properly. Hence, the trusting beliefs construct will influence its components. Third, we used reflective first-order factors because we did not seek to explain variance in trusting beliefs.

      • So trust can be measured using inferential models? As an influence system maybe???
    • At 6.2. Study 2: Methodology, page 903. The second study is more related to the credibility cues that people use to determine the humanness of an interface. Not sure if it’s relevant to what I’m working on, but it is interesting to see how they include the second study which follows up on the open questions from the first.
  • In the paper above, they use something called partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). SmartPLS is a system that uses this, and there’s a presentation on YouTube that shows how it’s used to predict shadow banking. Need to look into this some more as a way of predicting outcomes based on behavior.
  • ———————–
  • Sent an email to John and Bob about using the new CSEs
  • Set up the rating app so that Andy and Margarita can use it to create the json characterization. Had a hell of a time getting the executable jar built. The artifact builder in Intellij doesn’t synchronize with the dev process. I was not including jars that were required and getting a “Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again” error on execution. I wound up having to delete the artifact, commit, create a new artifact and then create the jar and executable.
  • Sent the Rating app as a zip. Not sure if the filters are letting it through. Hey! It works!
  • Sent Aaron a rant on what I’d like to get the db up and running. Done! Yay!
  • Finalized REST discussions with Jeremy

Phil 4.5.16

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • Had a good discussion with Patrick yesterday. He’s approaching his wheelchair work from a Heideggerian framework, where the controls may be present-at-hand or ready-to-hand. I think those might be frameworks that apply to non-social systems (Hammers, Excel, Search), while social systems more align with being-with. The evaluation of trustworthiness is different. True in a non-social sense is a property of exactness; a straightedge may be true or out-of-true. In a social sense, true is associated with a statement that is in accordance with reality.
  • While reading Search Engine Agendas  in Communications of the ACM, I came upon a mention of Frank Pasquale, who wrote an article on the regulation of Search, given its impact (Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness, and Accountability in the Law of Search). The point of Search Engine Agendas is that the ranking of political candidates affects people’s perception of them (higher is better) This ties into my thoughts from March 29th. That there are situations where the idea of ordering among pertinent documents may be problematic and further that how users might interact with the ordering process might be instructive.
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
  • ————————
  • Added the sites Andy and Margarita found to the blacklist and updated the repo
  • Theresa has some sites too – in process.
  • Finished my refactoring party – more debugging than I was expecting
  • Converted the Excela spreadsheet to JSON and read the whole thing in. Need to do that just for a subsample now.
  • Added a request from Andy about creating a JSON object for the comments in the flag dismissal field.
  • Worked with Gregg about setting up the postgres db.

Phil 4.4.16

7:00 – 2:30 VTX

  • Happy perfect square day.
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
    • Page 833: Ability/competence is the belief that a person has the skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable them to have influence in some specific domain. Benevolence is the belief that a person will want to do good to the trustor aside from an egocentric profit motive. Integrity is the belief that a person adheres to an acceptable set of principles.
    • Page 833: It is not as clear, however, whether technologies have volition or can make ethical decisions without being pre-programmed to do so. Because of this issue, some researchers have developed alternative trust belief constructs that do not assume technologies have volition or ethical decision making capability. For example, Lippert and Swiercz (2005) use utility, reliability, and predictiveness, and Söellner, Hoffman, Hoffman, Wacker, and Leimester (2012) use performance, process, and purpose to represent technology-trusting beliefs.
    • Page 833: We adopt McKnight et al.’s (2011) conceptualization of system-like trust in a technology’s reliability, functionality, and helpfulness to measure trust in technology because these three attributes were directly derived from, and are corollaries to, the human-like trust attributes of integrity, competence, and benevolence
  • The discussion on affordances started me thinking about SERPs again. This is kind of related but almost more basic – how users search within documents using find: The Myth of Find: User Behaviour and Attitudes Towards the Basic Search Feature. and the documents that cite (WRT document triage, etc) are also pretty interesting looking.
  • ———————————
  • Starting up the computers after the weekend at work today, and Skype For Business doesn’t let me log in. Says my email address is bad. And it’s not.
  • Got the PoiOptionalStrings object integrated and running.
  • Realized that I need to have a generalized ‘OptionalContent’ class. generalizing from above.
  • Need to see how JQL works with all this new stuff now.
    • Fancy JPQL query of the day: 
      @NamedQuery(name = "PoiObject.getFromOptionalStrings", query = "SELECT p from poi_object p, IN (p.optStringSet) os WHERE os.name = :name AND os.value = :value"),
    • Should I be doing this as a template? If so, what does the table get named?

Phil 4.1.16

7:15 – 4:15 VTX

  • Had a bunch of paperwork to do for my folks. All handled now?
  • Continuing What is Trust? A Conceptual Analysis and An Interdisciplinary Model. Done
    • Disposition to Trust. This construct means the extent to which one displays a consistent tendency to be willing to depend on general others across a broad spectrum of situations and persons
      • a general propensity to be willing to depend on others.
      • does not necessarily imply that one believes others to be trustworthy
      • only has a major effect on one’s trust-related behavior when novel
        situations arise, in which the person and situation are unfamiliar
      • Disposition to Trust has two subconstructs, Faith in Humanity and Trusting Stance
        • Faith in Humanity means one assumes others are usually upright, well-meaning, and dependable.
        • Trusting Stance means that, regardless of what one assumes about other people generally, one assumes that one will achieve better outcomes by dealing with people as though they are well-meaning and reliable
      • Because Faith in Humanity relates to assumptions about peoples’ attributes, it is more likely to be an antecedent to Trusting Beliefs (in people) than is Trusting Stance. Trusting Stance may relate more to Trusting Intention, which, depending on the situation, is probably not based wholly on beliefs about the other person.
    • Institution-based Trust means one believes the needed conditions are in place to enable one to anticipate a successful outcome in an endeavor or aspect of one’s life
      • This construct comes from the sociology tradition that people can rely on others because of structures, situations, or roles  that provide assurances (Affordances???) that things will go well
      • Institution-based Trust has two subconstructs, Structural Assurance and Situational Normality.
        • Structural Assurance means one believes that success is likely because guarantees, contracts, regulations, promises, legal recourse, processes, or procedures are in place that assure success
        • Situational Normality means one believes that success is likely because the situation is normal or favorable. (I think that this comes from very primitive parts of our brains. It can be observed in many animals and may be one of those things that separates infant and adult behavior. If you trust too much, you are likely to get eaten..?)
          • Situational Normality means that a properly ordered setting is likely to facilitate a successful venture. When one believes one’s role and others’ roles in the situation are appropriate and conducive to success, then one has a basis for trusting the people in the situation.
          • likely related to Trusting Beliefs and Trusting Intention. A system developer who feels good about the roles and setting in which they work is likely to have Trusting Beliefs about the people in that setting.
    • Trusting Beliefs means one believes (and feels confident in believing) that the other person has one or more traits desirable to one in a situation in which negative consequences are possible.
      • We distinguish four main trusting belief subconstructs, while recognizing that others exist.
        • Trusting Belief-Competence means one believes the other person has the ability or power to do for one what one needs done.
        • Trusting Belief-Benevolence means one believes the other person cares about one and is motivated to act in one’s interest.  A benevolent person does not act opportunistically.
        • Trusting Belief-Integrity means one believes the other person makes good faith agreements, tells the truth, and fulfills promises
        • Trusting Belief-Predictability means one believes the other person’s actions (good or bad) are consistent enough that one can forecast them in a given situation
    • Trusting Intention means one is willing to depend on, or intends to depend on, the other person in a given task or situation  with a feeling of relative security, even though negative consequences are possible
      • Trusting intention subconstructs include Willingness to Depend and Subjective Probability of Depending.
        • Willingness to Depend means one is volitionally prepared to make oneself vulnerable to the other person in a situation by relying on them.
        • Subjective Probability of Depending means the extent to which one forecasts or predicts that one will depend on the other person.
      • Trusting Intention definitions embody five elements synthesized from the trust literature.
        1. The possibility of negative consequences or risk is what makes trust important but problematic.
        2. A readiness to depend or rely on another is central to trusting intention.
        3. A feeling of security means one feels safe, assured, and comfortable (not anxious or fearful) about the prospect of depending on another. Feelings of security reflect the affective side of trusting intention.
        4. Trusting intention is situation-specific.(???? why? Examples?)
        5. Trusting intention involves willingness that is not based on having control or power over the other party. Note that Trusting Intention relates well to the system development power literature because we define it in terms of dependence and control.
    • Another limitation relates to Whetten’s (1989) recommendation that Who and Where conditions should be placed around models.  Whereas we have assumed that the model applies to any kind of relationship between two people (Who) in any situation (Where), this may not be the case. Empirical research is needed to better define the boundary conditions of the model.
  • Starting Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology, also by D. Harrison McKnight
    • Page 881 (Basic?) Social Trust: human-like trust constructs of integrity, ability/competence, and benevolence that researchers have traditionally used to measure interpersonal trust.
    • Page 881 (Basic?) System Trust: system-like trust constructs such as reliability,
      functionality, and helpfulness
    • Page 881. First, we hypothesize that technologies can differ in humanness. Second, we predict that users will develop trust in the technology differently depending on whether they perceive it as more or less human-like, which will result in human-like trust having a stronger.  influence on outcomes for more human-like technologies and system-like trust having a stronger influence on outcomes for more system-like technologies. (Cite Kate Bush Deeper Understanding 1989)
    • Here’s the beginning of a thought: What is self-trust? Just thinking about it, it seems to be a sense of the reliability of my future self to do what my present self desires. That’s different from Social Trust, which in the literature is more about integrity, competence and benevolence. It seems closer to system trust in that reliability and functionality are more significant. There are things that I trust that I will do tomorrow: Get up, go to work, exercise if the weather is good enough. But there are also things that I can’t trust myself to do. My future self will almost certainly eat more calories than my current self desires. My grocery shopping behaviors are based around this lack of trust. There are items that I do not bring into my house because I know that they will get eaten (I was going to write that I know that my will is weak around chocolate, but that’s not really it. Or at least, that’s not all of it, or maybe even most of it..). Because (interactive?) information technology is more like a self-amplifier, I wonder if what we think of system trust can be thought of as the trust in ourselves, but the part of ourselves that is more reliable and trustworthy. A search tomorrow will work as well as a search today. Maybe better. And the effectiveness of that search reflect somehow my ability to interact effectively with the external world? This is starting to sound a lot my point of view that living a life in prolonged contact with a compiler changes you in profound ways.
    • So what would that mean? I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis to change search results from focusing on pertinence to revelation. This does not mean that the ‘Ten Blue Links’ need to go away. But it does imply that peripheral information could be just as important, so that a less casually polarized worldview might be developed.
  • Finishing up the CSE version control setup – need to write up the process for confluence – done.
  • Since I need to be able to now read in the Excella data, I was going to look to Gregg’s ontology as a way to determine the table structure. But it’s way too big and nested. In a Person’s description includes a reference to a complete organization, activities, charges, arrests, and it doesn’t even have room for nice things yet (will we have co-authors?). Anyway, To avoid this, I’m going to have basic person characteristics with an associated  StringMaps, NumMaps and DateMaps. Anything that’s not recognized as a column gets added to that. Need to see how persistence will work with that in some testing first.
  • Got the code working. JPA 2 says you should be able to build a map entirely without annotations, but I couldn’t get it to work. Modified JsonLoadable so that it goes through the Json Object and anything that is not a member of the current class is added to HashMaps of PoiOptionalStrings. It should be very straightforward to extend to number and date types. Probably worth doing?

Phil 3.31.16

7:00 – 4:00 VTX

  • Starting on What is Trust? A Conceptual Analysis and An Interdisciplinary Model.
  • Starting to set up the key and sitelist repo
  • It turns out that you can export xml configuration of the CSE and the annotations for that CSE. From webapps.stackexchange.com:
  • We can only have a total of 5k annotations. That’s not a problem – yet.
  • All the files are set up and transferred. New search engines are 
    ONLY_COM = "cx=006834724223295726872:k0pebqyqa8m"
ONLY_EDU = "cx=006834724223295726872:gded1dvdt94"
ONLY_GOV = "cx=006834724223295726872:ydjrxqpedqq"
ONLY_ORG = "cx=006834724223295726872:lsgxnigrfme"
ONLY_US = "cx=006834724223295726872:dw0n0_hai6s"
  • Found a more credible source than boardactions.com (possibly just for New York state? But it has VA records..). Anyway, not only does it have a nice listing, it also has a pdf of the relevant board order. Which means we can build a good legal languagge model. Very nice: http://w3.nyhealth.gov/opmc/factions.nsf/physiciansearch?openform
  • Need to rethink the PoiObject class to be more general.

Phil 3.23.16

7:00 – 4:00 VTX

  • Continuing The Law of Group Polarization. Slow going. Mostly because there is so much good stuff.
    • Overall, I’m arguing that viewing Group Polarization through the lens of Connectivism, we can see how networked communities are often driven into bubbles and that property can be used to evaluate the trustworthiness of an information source. This has implications for design at different levels of abstraction.At the UI level, it implies that giving a user more interactive control over the makeup of their news feed can inform them about the range of diversity in views about a particular topic and where their feed falls on that spectrum. Because this implies the presence of a larger group, it it is possible to provide the user with the means (through direct manipulation) to interactively adjust the makeup of their news feeds and expose them to more trustworthy sourcesAt the document level, it imples that a mix of lexical and link analysis should be sufficient to allow for indexing a document on a trustworthiness scale.At the network level, it implies that the relationships of documents within a network should be sufficient to place documents on a trustworthiness scale.
    • Page 182 – And when one or more people in a group know the right answer to a factual question, the group is likely to shift in the direction of accuracy.
      • This is the effect of the Star Pattern. So how does someone find the right answer?
    • Looking around for automated ways of doing Delphi Method
    • Page 184: Group polarization has particular implications for insulated “outgroups” and (in the extreme case) for the treatment of conspiracies. Recall that polarization increases when group members identify themselves along some salient dimension, and especially when the group is able to define itself by contrast to another group. Outgroups are in this position-of self-contrast to others-by definition. Excluded by choice or coercion from discussion with others, such groups may become polarized in quite extreme directions, often in part because of group polarization. It is for this reason that outgroup members can sometimes be led, or lead themselves, to violent acts
    • Stopped at pg 186 – III. DELIBERATIVE TROUBLE.
  • Looking at IBM Bluemix briefly in case we have to go down that route
    • Registered.
    • Chrome, or at least the way I set up Chrome and bluemix do not get along. trying Firefox. Still not great, but better.
    • Since it looks like we’re not going to do wacky mash-ups, back to work on the rating app.
  • Hit the MySql max_packet limit. Changed to 4M. Other follow-on changes:
## of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 64M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 8M
## Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size
innodb_log_file_size = 20M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1
innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50

Phil 3.22.16

7:00 – 7:30

  • I think I want to install this??? https://github.com/dthree/cash
  • Still thinking about social trust and system trust. Today, Brussels was attacked by ISIS or ISIS sympathisers. An official when interviewed said that Belgium had been ‘prepared’ and was ready. No one was surprised that one group of people would try to kill another group of people. In other news, the iPhone from another set of killers was unflaggingly resisting attempts to unlock it. In many ways, every day (ironically because of the news) we are informed how horrible and untrustworthy people can be. And at the same time, every day, our machines generally do what they are supposed to do, and when looked at over time, get better at it. Is it any wonder that we have high system trust and low social trust (or high cynicism?).
  • This isn’t really new. Music can be pure. Musicians can be awful.
  • Continuing The Law of Group Polarization.
    • Page 181: Thus when the  context emphasizes  each  person’s  membership  in  the  social  group  engaging  in deliberation,  polarization  increases.  This finding  is  in  line  with  more  general evidence  that social  ties  among  deliberating  group  members  tend  to  suppress dissent  and  in  that  way  to  lead  to  inferior  decisions.
      • So a website with a strong point of view (Breitbart or Moveon or PETA for example) should have less variance among commenters, while more balanced should have more variance? Data may be here: http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/. I would think that these could be compared against edit histories on Wikipedia for a more Star-like pattern?
    • Persuasive Arguments Theory (PAT)?
    • Interaction with others increases decision confidence but not decision quality: evidence against information collection views of interactive decision making.
      • So in this case, the paper was scanned and protected, so I couldn’t do OCR on it. The workaround was to export as jpg, then open the first jpg in Acrobat DC, select Tools->organize pages then Inset->from file, shift-click all the pages, select ‘insert after’ and read them in. Once that’s done go to ‘Enhance scans’ and run OCR on the file.
      • Anyway, the paper looks interesting, with quantitative support. I wonder why all this research seems to be focussed in the 1990s through early 2000s? The Wikipedia page on Group Polarization has a wider date range.
  • Working on the rating app. Worried that jsoup doesn’t seem to be pulling down pages that well
    • Got a 403 on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10716828/joptionpane-showconfirmdialog using URL.openStream, but it works on Google.
    • Going to try a more web-scapey pattern. Checking out Jaunt.
  • Changing the selection lists
  • Adding a check to see what ratings have changed as a user check – Done
  • Need to start on the backlinks.
  • Meeting with Aaron about next steps based on the