@mdekstrand@hci.social
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mdekstrand

@mdekstrand@hci.social

Asst. Prof IS @ Drexel. Trying to make information access (RecSys, IR, etc.) useful and equitable.

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mdekstrand, to random
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If a blind student wants to do a CS undergrad specifically to work in assistive technology, what schools would be particularly good for that? (Feel free to boost for reach.)

noleli, to random
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I have a 72-page, 36-year-old typewritten document that was scanned to a non-OCRed PDF in 2010. I’m trying to cleanly extract the text so I can convert it to markdown. All attempts at OCR have yielding extremely messy results. Is there a new generation of ML-based OCR I could try, or should I MTurk it?

mdekstrand,
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@noleli sound good to me! (and what problem do people have with <section>?)

mdekstrand,
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@noleli @brucelawson @aardrian it looks like the primary problem is with section +expecting a document outline algo that doesn’t exist, not with <section> as a container in combo with properly-nested h1/2/3, except in so far as section may not have a purpose without said algo?

ISTM that your proposed use is closer to the container w/ proper header tags when applicable. Another option could be “<h3 class=untitle>Untitled Section</h3>

mdekstrand,
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@noleli @brucelawson @aardrian I was also curious because I use <section> all the time with proper header tags, just as a nicer alternative to wrapping the section in a div, based on what I learned from MDN and not reading the background discussions. It looks like this probably isn’t creating any of the problems discussed in these pieces? (This is also what Pandoc does if you specify HTML5 output and section-divs.)

mdekstrand, to random
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Super excited to be co-teaching a tutorial at this year on doing experiments with POPROX, an platform currently in development to support user-facing experiments. Come join us! https://recsys.acm.org/recsys24/tutorials/

scheidegger, to random
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You maybe think I'm joking about citing "do not create the torment nexus", but I get like one of these every week, seriously

mdekstrand,
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@scheidegger da fuq?

Reminds me of the paper that cited my gender bias audit of book recommenders to justify some bullshit computer vision technique to recognize gender from skeletal structure because gender recognition is “important for recommender systems”.

mdekstrand,
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@scheidegger oof. no. and it isn't like your paper is that difficult to understand, esp. in its CACM version.

I've definitely seen it cited in some pretty superficial ways. Like just cite it, claim to make a WAE assumption, move forward without engaging in the deep interrogation needed to figure out what an WAE assumption would really, plausibly look like in this case, etc.

but chronic failure to engage with the substance of an argument is endemic to academia. very sadly.

mdekstrand,
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@scheidegger versions of it are something I see in students a lot too 😔. Some of them, with coaching, grow past it.

But lots of what seems like keyword matching — latching onto the words and the superficial sequence & structure, without grokking and translating the fundamental substance. Which drives me batty, because my brain is all connections, all the time, and thrives on seeing where different authors are using wildly different language to make the same basic argument.

mdekstrand,
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@scheidegger It can! And honestly one of the reasons I didn't seek pharmaceutical treatment until I was 38… was worried that meds would interfere with the mental connection circuitry.

(they didn't. they help me act on connections more effectively.)

mdekstrand, to random
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

"your algorithm can’t do anything that would be illegal if done by a real person" — I appreciate the FTC explicitly articulating this principle. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing

mdekstrand, to random
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On the downfall of civilization … https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/sorry-we-machines-destroyed-your-civilization-in-such-a-boring-way

mdekstrand, to random
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

dear : a lit review chase this week has had me trying to scare up a copy of Frayling's 1993 "Research in Art and Design" (Royal College of Art Research Papers v1n1), and it does not seem to be on the Internet. Worldcat shows one physical copy in Denmark?

Does anyone have a link (or a PDF) they could share w/ me? (feel free to reply by email)

mdekstrand, to random
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This is depressing. https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

mdekstrand, to random
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"Do you want to get credit for this review in Web of Science?"

idk, sure.

"Do you want to go through the work of figuring out how the hell to properly create and link accounts to get that credit to show up?"

uhh not really.

mdekstrand,
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@bkeegan and one would think “sign in with ORCID” would fix it, but nope.

regehr, to random
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which is more cursed... the warning or the code being warned about?

/home/regehr/llvm-project/llvm/include/llvm/Support/AutoConvert.h:1:1: warning: C++ style comments are not allowed in ISO C90
1 | //===- AutoConvert.h - Auto conversion between ASCII/EBCDIC ------ C++ --===//

mdekstrand,
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@regehr @scheidegger ERROR: E4666: unexpected sequence in string literal. Try compiling with -Z cursed-options -Z str-is-utf-ebcdic

mdekstrand, to random
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I really need to find a better liquor store, but I guess Highland Park will tide me over until I go to Scotland in March.

mdekstrand,
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@bkeegan They had both of those, but not a fan of Laphroaig — way too smokey for me. I had an Ardbeg once a while ago, and remember it being ok. They also had Macallan and Oban, but priced higher than I was feeling this week. Highland Park was the only thing that looked to be in the spice-forward department.

mdekstrand, to random
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

as we see yet another Boeing safety alert, I keep thinking about the role of rendering antitrust law a dead letter.

Since we allowed Boeing to gobble up all their competitors, the US airliner industry consists of one firm. If they were competing with McDonnel-Douglas and Lockheed, suitably stiff penalties and compliance costs could be levied without upending the economics of an entire industry.

mdekstrand, to random
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Looks like the NSF/Amazon Fair AI program didn't exist past 2022 — anyone know if that is correct, or whether there's a successor program?

mdekstrand, to random
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All this work in AI for “customer service” but what about AI for navigating customer service? If it’s good enough for them to try to handle my problem, shouldn’t it be good enough for me to try to navigate customer service to get it solved?

mdekstrand,
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There was that Google demo a few years ago to call restaurants and stuff that everyone hated (for some pretty good reasons IMO).

mattwilcox, to random
@mattwilcox@mstdn.social avatar

Oh god, cursed idea; storing your SVG UI elements as strings in local storage, that you stuff into the DOM via JS, so that you get the benefit of "caching" like they're an img src, but also the ability to target and style in CSS because they're loaded on the page as actual SVG.

Essentially loading SVG assets you often want to theme with CSS as a browser-stored package. Instead of needing to dump raw SVG in HTML, or do icon-green.svg icon-red.svg etc.

mdekstrand,
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@noleli @mattwilcox what is this sorcery?

<reads web component docs>

mdekstrand,
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@noleli so, i could replace my web site's secret content architecture that currently stashes ciphertext in a <pre> and includes the decrypt form in HTML with

<secret-content>CIPHERTEXT</secret-content>

and make a web component do all the work?

i am simultaneously intrigued and horrified

mdekstrand, to random
@mdekstrand@hci.social avatar

Another preprint! Lex Beattie, Henriette Cramer, Sole Pera, and I map the space of goals and “intervention strategies” for consumer-side impacts of IR & (with application to other stakeholders too).

We argue that effective impact work needs to be well-grounded, contextualized in broad and creative thinking about possibilities, and use methods that are well-matched to the goals. TL;DR put down the regularizer and step away from the algorithm.

https://md.ekstrandom.net/pubs/ecir-impacts

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