Epistemographer

So, I spent six years of my life getting trained to be part of a priesthood, and like any priesthood, mine is pretty particular about holding Supreme Knowledge close to its vest (after all, the only thing that makes members of a priesthood special is that they have ways of knowing stuff that others don’t). [...]

I’ve spent the past few weeks working on and off with others at the Center on a grant application to the IMLS. We’re proposing to build a package of interfaces and extensions to Firefox that will in essence stick our Scrapbook and Scribe programs into the browser itself (where more and more research is done).

With [...]

Around midnight last night, I flipped on my TiVo to see what it’d collected over the weekend, and realized that the first two episodes of Season 4 of 24 premiered Sunday night. Needless to say, I tore through ‘em immediately, happily rekindling my relationship with what’s arguably the most addictive show on TV.

Something struck me [...]

Following the thread of my previous post, the proliferation of referral rewards programs has led to an interesting consequence; the commodification of referrals. If a referral to purchase a given product has a specific value (whether a commission of up to 10% from Amazon or 1/4 of an iPod from TiVo), then it seems natural [...]

So, in addition to being a TiVo addict, I’m a member of their rewards program, which means that I can earn points toward all sorts of goodies when people activating new TiVo service put me down as having referred them. And like the headline says, I ain’t too proud to beg, so if you happen [...]

At a cafe tonight, I noticed a bulletin board posting advertising a pocket-sized electronic game that would play twenty questions, which reminded me of an online artificial intelligence experiment that plays a spookily accurate game of twenty questions about which I blogged a year and a half ago.

When I got home I did a little [...]