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Unit Structures

Fred Stutzman's thoughts about information, social networks and technology.


StatSheet, The FiveThirtyEight of HoopsNovember 26

Late November in North Carolina is a very special time of year, as it marks the beginning of a period of deep religious reflection.  That’s right, it’s college basketball season.  For those of you who are fans and/or stats junkies, I wanted to point you towards a great website - StatSheet.com.  StatSheet is the product of (the amazing) Robbie Allen, a friend and fellow collaborator on BarCampRDU and other RDU-area projects.

What is StatSheet?  It’s the FiveThirtyEight.com of College Basketball (as well as the NFL, NBA, and High School Basketball).  The site boasts a terrific, clean interface, with a focus on stats and graphs - for wonks, Bill James-heads, and fantasy fans.  I particularly like the embeddable graphs - check out the GameFlow graph from last night’s UNC-Oregon game:

Stats by StatSheet.com

Robbie’s blogged about his statistical forumla for calling a game over at the StatSheet Changelog.  And for the die-hards, StatSheet also list information about referees.  As noted by Robbie in the discl


SearchWiki, Groupthink and PrivacyNovember 25

Yesterday I posted about a few of the serious privacy flaws in Google’s SearchWiki.  Thankfully, there seems to be a solution to the problem of name association.  Dave Weinberger noticed “[T]he results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up.”  To address this problem, Google will allow you to change your nickname.

Is my email address displayed to other users?
No. Other users who view your SearchWiki notes see only your Google Account nickname. (Note that you can see your email address in the top right of your screen when you’re signed in to your own Google Account.) You can edit your nickname by clicking My Account in the top right corner of the screen while you’re signed in.

I suppose that is a start.  Of course, with a RDB backend, one wonders what happens when you change your nickname - is your nick changed everywhere?  And if so, is Google really affording privacy by allowing you to change your nickname?  That is, if your handle is changed on all of the previous content you



Guest Lectures in Technologies of FriendshipNovember 25

Wayne Sutton, one of my esteemed guest lecturers in last night’s (penultimate) Technologies of Friendship class, streamed and recorded the lectures via Ustream.tv.  If you’d like to check them out, here’s a link - and I’ve embedded the video.

Streaming live video by Ustream

Thank you again to my speakers - Brian, Wayne, Dave and Abe. We had great conversation and I’m pretty sure we could have kept going for a few more hours (which is saying something for being in class on 8:30PM on a Monday). To find out more about the speakers and their projects, check out the following:

Serious Privacy Issues with Google SearchWikiNovember 24

David Weinberger highlights a stunning oversight by Google’s SearchWiki team (bold mine):

[T]he results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up. So, now the whole world will see that “dweinberger” not only searched for “Angelina Jolie” but thumbs-upped the page of closeups of her tattoos? Guess who just changed his nickname to something less identifiable! This is a feature without value — the list of names isn’t clickable or complete or tell you how many people voted it up — unless you recognize someone’s nickname, in which case it has negative value.

In addition, Google has made a curious decision in requiring all SearchWiki “notes” to be public.  That is, if you want to take advantage of SearchWiki and leave yourself a note, all other SearchWiki members will be able to read it.  This is broken on many levels.  Obviously, there are privacy concerns - you may want to leave a note, but do you really want all other Google users to be able to read it?  And beyond privacy, what about utility.  Let’s say you want to leave yourself a note “To get to the policy page, click on About, and then Policies.”  Since you can only place that note publicly, it will quickly get lost in the sea of other Google users notes.

Considering Google’s zero-day rollout of SearchWiki into their m

Fixing Google with Adblock PlusNovember 22

TechCrunch is right - Google, It Wasn’t Broke.  Google has rolled personalization at the item level into search, cluttering their elegant interface.  As far as I can tell, this affects all users who are logged in with a Google account (i.e. Gmail, etc), and there’s no way to opt out.  Now, I’m not against personalization - if you want it.  And while it appears there’s no way to opt out, you can make the cluttering icons disappear with Adblock plus (Firefox users).  To make the buttons and conversation icon disappear, add the following “element hiding rules” to Adblock Plus:

google.com#BUTTON(class=wci)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w10)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w20)

Voila, Google back to normal.

Update: TechCrunch reports that Google may be rolling this feature back, and it reports on a Greasemonkey script that accomplishes the same results as this Adblock Plus filter.  I’m not a Greasemonkey user so I’m not able to verify.