In the face of a hectic schedule, motivation sometimes falters, and one may wonder why they have to have such a busy life. A simple mental exercise helped me shrink my problems to a much more manageable size. (so I can continue working on amazing things!) Continue reading
Monthly Archives: February 2011
The Guelph Seven
I’d like you to go check out The Guelph Seven. From March 5-11th, 7 students will spend 7 days writing 7 apps, in Guelph, Ontario. We’ll compete on friendly terms with our Waterloo counterpart, 7^3. It’s going to be really fantastic.
How did this happen?
Three months ago, I heard about a cool application called QuickCite. My friend Paul pulled it up on his laptop while browsing HackerNews, and we talked about it being a cool idea. We thought the idea to have 7 Students spend 7 Days writing 7 Apps together – and publicize the heck out of it – was an even cooler idea. They called themselves 7^3.
By the new year, we’d talked to some of the 7^3 students (who turned out to be friends of ours!) and decided to go on our own adventure. Planning commenced – we had many short meetings, email threads, and gtalk conversations – and we’re still at it! But enough information is solid that we’re certain this will happen, and we’re excited as heck.
We’ll be working round the clock from March 5th to March 11th, taking the week away from school and all other responsibilities (at least, every one we’re able to), and producing a new application each day. ThreeFortyNine has amazingly sponsored us by providing us with workspace, and all that’s left now is to find sponsorship for food and to hone our skills.
We’ve got a website. We’ve got twitter. We’ve got an email address, and ideas, and energy, and we’re going to make amazing stuff and have a great time doing it. Soon there will be a short bio detailing the epic quests of each of member of the team, and not long after, descriptions of our daily struggles and beautiful results.
Catch you on the flipside – don’t miss us.
Short Literature Review / Presentation
Conducted a short literature review and I gave a presentation on it; may as well send it into the aether.
The review is titled “Networked Social Communication”, as that seemed like the best semi-formal description of what I’m looking into. The papers were really interesting, but there wasn’t really a lot of stuff focused on “what could be done to make social chat better”, which is what I would like to do. The result ended up being pretty much what I expected, which is that Twitter is great, but could stand to be better for collaboration. While it manages to support conversations, the best support for them is found in third party layers built over top of it.
So it leaves me with the question of, “How can we do to Twitter what IM did to email?”
There it is.
I think I might have had the realization of purpose that I’ve sought for a long time. The Golden Age of Information will need the proper definition of Information Science. One day, “math” will be the union of the math of today and the information science of the future. The math of today, who knows, but I think it’ll be recognized as a formal subset of the larger system.
The math we’re going to figure out is gonna be pretty important. It is literally the formalized notion of process, and we will probably apply it to ourselves, to each other, to civilizations, to the stars – to the whole universe. There’s a lot of things out there to understand, and information science will be what allows it.
Whatever I can do, I’d like to help.