Geert Bewilders

Every once in a while I have a clear sense that what I do has a positive impact outside of the academic community. Whether its large or small, I cherish it .... and, of course, blog it.

In this case, the story regards the Netherlands' Geert Wilders, a right-wing populist, leader of the "Freedom Party", which currently occupies 24 of the 150 places in the Dutch House of Representatives. The hero of the story is a blogger, René Erker, who is speaking out against his words and actions. His blog is titled "Stop the Danger of Wilders" http://stophetgevaarwilders.blogspot.com/ (Dutch).

Mid-November, I got an e-mail from a former colleague of mine who knows the blogger and was helping to promote his blog. I share her sentiment of concern. In my view, Wilders gives the outside world a skewed view of the Netherlands and the Dutch political process, which could potentially work to damage the cooperative processes necessary to keep productive dialogue in motion and Europe and the world at peace.

But if the blog was intended to be pushing back against Wilders, it didn't quite get off to the right start. When I first read it, it had blasted off with two posts on the same day, with some entertaining rhetorical flourishes, but no information on who was writing or on the sources from which they were deriving their information. I wrote some words of critique to my former colleague, who passed it along to René. The deal we struck was that if he would write one post a week until the end of the year, I would feature his blog in a post of my own.

René has followed through. I don't flatter myself that it's a big deal to be featured in a post on my blog. Especially, of course, since I usually discuss search and not politics. If the intended readerships of our blogs overlap, it is by chance. However, the interface of search to the real world necessarily touches on political issues. In this case, the link is that my past work in the area of user generated media (blogs and podcasts -- see references below) gives me an awareness of some of the issues involved with creating media that then gets read.

I don't claim to "understand" Wilders or why Wilders is able to claim so much space on the front pages of newspapers here in the Netherlands. Perhaps I could even be allowed to say that I'm "bewildered". He appears to spend a lot of time trying to get people expelled from the country on the basis of their system of belief. The Netherlands is a "Rechtsstaat", which means we have rule of law. Belief systems don't impact rule of law until beliefs cause people to break laws. In cases where that happens, then the courts take over. What's the role of the fulminating politician in keeping the Rechtsstaat running smoothly as it was conceived to run?

Is the concern that the core values of the country will shift? That people will vote to change the law? In the end, we are all linked to each other. Each time we turn to point to the shapeless nameless "Them", it simply evaporates. As a rule (Six Degrees of Separation), every person on the planet is separated from every other person on the planet by only six degrees. Imagine a project that would calculate Wilders' six degrees of separation to each an every human soul he harbors the wish to expel from Europe. What a graphic realization of the principle that there is no "Them". What there is instead is this: a series of long and challenging conversations between linked individuals, within linked groups, down the channels of the six degrees so that they finally reach all of us in a real way. The law is as stable as our network is strong.

What is the real danger of Wilders? In a way, http://stophetgevaarwilders.blogspot.com/ by its existence (by the necessity for its existence!) says it all. Wilders obliges us to spend our time pushing back, responding one-by-one to the over-simplifications and push-button fomulations that he produces concerning the topics at the obsessive focus of his attention. Our work pushing back is the only way to restore the balance, to repave the arena for constructive discussion.

Here's the danger: The time we devote to Wilders push-back could be used for moving forward -- having the difficult conversations that we need to have with the people around us that are necessary to strengthen our society. Instead, we are stuck treading water.

Thank you to René Erker and the other bloggers that keep the current from sweeping us backwards. Keep giving us more links to each other and to your sources. And happy 2011!

He, J., Weerkamp, W., Larson M. and de Rijke, M., An Effective Coherence Measure to Determine Topical Consistency in User Generated Content. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, Vol. 12, No. 3, pages 185-203, October 2009.

Tsagkias, M., Larson, M. and de Rijke, M. Predicting Podcast Preference: An Analysis Framework and its Application, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 374-391, February 2010.

Living with defeats

In 2006, I moved to Amsterdam and in 2007, I started a blog entitled "Living with defeats," which lasted exactly four entries before I abandoned it. The title plays with the word fiets, pronounced "feats". It's the Dutch word for bike, de fiets meaning "the bike" and pronounced approximately "defeats". A bicycle was my constant companion and the beast of burden that got me there and back from my apartment near Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam to the Science Park where I worked in the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam.

The blog's title "Living with defeats" probably both anticipated and contributed to its quick demise. I'd thought I'd reflect a bit more about what went wrong, especially since my second attempt, i.e., this blog, is now celebrating its one year anniversary. This time, as a blogger I am doing something differently. What?

An important aspect is my understanding of my audience. In "Living with defeats", I was attempting to write a blog of the genre "American living in Amsterdam." Who was going to read it? Here, I write about things that keep my brain busy. It's more of an attempt to empty my head. To put ideas on the the back burner. The best typification: this blog is a conversation with my future self. In other words, now, I really know my audience.

Then there are the practical aspects. Blogger is easy to use -- I have a browser open most of the time anyway. "Living with defeats" didn't use a blogging platform and required quite a few extra clicks to write and publish.

Also, I have a different perspective on how frequently I need to blog. I find that I have time to do it about once or twice a month. In Amsterdam, nearly every day generated a new bike-related anecdote and I had a constant feeling of being behind. For all the cute word plays, I failed to be "dam square" with myself on how much time I actually had to devote to the project.

Most importantly, I am incurably passionate about search and especially about spoken content search. I catch myself in my free time thinking about finding things, especially bits of interesting multimedia, and also reflecting on the subject of "what I know about the things I don't know", i.e., the possibility of finding information or a resource that I don't know exists.

It's not that I don't still think about bikes. Although the Triumph finally needed to be replaced and the commute to Delft University of Technology is much shorter, I still accumulate plenty of Dutch bike anecdotes. When I get the urge to write about my bike, however, I control myself, at least in this forum.

Probably the major contributor to the relative longevity of this blog has been my work on coherence measures.

He, J., Weerkamp, W., Larson M. and de Rijke, M., An Effective Coherence Measure to Determine Topical Consistency in User Generated Content. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, Vol. 12, No. 3, pages 185-203, October 2009.

Blogger consistency is a blog characteristic that is independent of the topic of a blog, "orthogonal to topic", as it were. Yet, it really impacts building of blogger credibility and the relevance of blog material to user information needs.

From this distance, I have come to regard "Living with defeats" as an exercise in cheap failure. I'm not exactly sure how long my new blogging project will last. But already, I've been able to consolidate my thinking by going back and reading old posts. Since my future self is the target audience, this constitutes nothing short of a rave review.

Actually, I'm living with my Triumph
Wednesday January 10, 2007



Although this blog claims to be about defeats it is actually about triumph, or should I say a Triumph. De fiets, pronounces more-or-less "defeats" is Dutch for "the bicycle" and the bike that inspired me to go on-line with my musings about Amsterdam is a metallic blue Triumph.

Currently, the Triumph is being stored at Central Station. "Your tire is flat", the attendant pointed out as I brought my bike down to the bike storage to lock it up. In my rush to make my train on time I hadn't noticed.

New Year's resolutions: fix the tire, get a picture of the Triumph on to the blog, learn how to spot a flat before it is pointed out to me by a more bicycle-aware Dutch denizen.

Key to Triumph
Sunday January 28, 2007

The Triumph (tire now repaired) spends a lot of time tied with a chain to railings of bridges over canals.

The first time I locked my bike up in this way, I realized that even a little slip on my part could lead to my whole ring full of keys flying through the bars of the railing and into the opaque water.

How many people in Amsterdam, I asked myself, have experienced such a mishap? If other people are as inclined to fumbling as I am, the bottom of those canals must be strewn with bundles of keys. I wondered how many busy schedules have lurched to a standstill because of keys flying into canals. People who have suddenly found themselves locked out of house and office and unexpectedly deprived of their means of transport, now immobilized on a bridge. Hopeful job applicants fatally late to that big interview. Romantics with nervous fingers never forgiven for missing a first assignation.

Anything capable of such disruption of the directed bustle of Amsterdam, must surely be a widely-foreseen threat.

There must be a service, I thought, someone to call in case this happens. I wondered if this would be a key-retrieval type service, which would rescue keys from any of the places they can fall in Amsterdam (train tracks, too, for example.) Or would this be a special service to retrieve things from the bottom of canals?

I addressed this question to an Amsterdam expert I know, and got quite a practical reply. Of course there is no rescue service. No one puts a bike key on a bundle with other important keys. A bike key needs its own ring. And naturally, you have a spare bike key somewhere handy.

It will be interesting to see how I do, administering now two key rings in my life along with mobile phone, memory stick, wallet and pocket calendar. Of course, I have particular motivation to get it right, since the chain to the Triumph has no spare key.

Have a light?
Friday March 16, 2007

What at first appears to be a snarl of cars, bikes and pedestrians has sorted itself out in my mind into three distinct streams whose twining is regulated by a set of rules. One learns to reconstruct the rules by asking questions, by observing the signs and markings on the bike paths and by watching how more experienced bikers avoid running into each other. Some of the rules I don't think I will ever be in danger of breaking. For example, the fact that there are occasionally speed bumps built into bike paths leads me to believe that there must be some kind of a bike speed limit. My Triumph is, however, permanently stuck in third gear. Without doubt it is able to achieve significant speed, but the protests of my knees will keep me well below ever being the kind of biker that those speed bumps were built to reign in.

One rule I do watch out for is the the lights rule. You're supposed to have lights to be visible after the sun sets. You can imagine that if my gears do not work properly it is something of a challenge to maintain the rather delicate set of wires that runs from the dynamo to the head light and back to the tail light. Extricating one's own bike from a forest of other bikes locked to the same rack tends to get wires and things caught on other people's pedals and break levers. I am careful. I monitor my bulbs. And at night my pedal power is transformed not only into forward motion but into twin beacons one ahead and one behind.

I was rounding the corner to go under the bridge at Muiderpoort and two police agents stepped on to the bike path one on either side. Oh, I thought, this is how the police stop bikes in Amsterdam and I stopped.

"Mevrouw" they said "we have stopped you because of the example you are providing for the neighborhood." I was a bit flustered. What kind of an example? What was I doing wrong? They looked at an age to be relatively new to the force and their faces were solemn. Doubtlessly they had those bike rules I was trying to reconstruct freshly memorized down to the last footnote.

Thankfully the dramatic pause was short and they continued on to explain, "You are using your bike lights. To show our appreciation we would like to present you with this light-up police keychain."

My fluster fled."Oh," I exclaimed. "Bedankt" I take the keychain "Echt leuk." But you have to imagine that I used the American English intonation of "Hey, thank you, that's soooooo nice."

They looked at each other. Then back at me. They were probably not too thrilled about getting assigned to keychain distribution detail. My Anglophone ebullience was not making the assignment any easier.

"You're welcome," in English, the staccato reply.

Now, the light is on my keychain. It has a police logo and a button to push to make it light up. I mean to show it to the next police agent who pulls me over, since it will without doubt be for doing something contrary to those bike rules.

Fiets feats: Breakfast by bike
Sunday May 13, 2007

In Amsterdam, you don't interrupt your life just because you are on your bike. A mp3 player or a cell phone conversation makes a long ride go by much quicker. Now I automatically get on my bike with my cell phone somewhere I can answer it easily.

But I am definitely still a newbie. Around me feats of unimagined coordination and balance are integral to the lives of Dutch denizens. One kid in the back one kid in the front. Everyone gets to school and work on time. One kid in the front one kid in the back add the grocery shopping and we're home in time for dinner. No kids, on the cell phone explaining the delay to the baby sitter.

Left hand steering right hand clutching cell phone thumb tapping in text message to boss. Call friend to talk about stressful day, right hand on cell phone left hand holding cigarette still sneaks in adequate steering. I haven't actually seen this combination, but I strongly suspect that the smoking phone talker could easily add an umbrella to the mix in case of rain.

The part of my life that is moving onto my bike is breakfast. I don't wake up hungry in the morning. I am not a breakfast person and my body does not wake up with the realization that there is going to be a half hour of hard pedaling before leaving the house and arriving at work. So half way to work I have taken to stopping and picking myself up a scone.

The scone I put in my pocket, since I need two hands to get going. But once under way I can do handle bar left hand, scone right hand, mouth munching. And no one stares. Quite to the contrary. Already on my second bike breakfast a passerby wished me bon appetit.

I am getting quite a lot of practice with the breakfast scone and I hope in a couple months to be able to add a cup of coffee. Someone in Amsterdam must sell handle-bar mountable cup holders.

Diep Blue

I am sitting in the train from Brussels to Rotterdam. I have work to do, but I am also too tired to do it well. I need to entertain myself instead. What to do? Hmm. Hey, write a blog entry. But I have the strangest problem. I don't have internet connectivity. I can't write. But I could write a post and upload it later.

I still have the same feeling: I just can't write.

Can't write? Well, first, I have my blog drafts stored on blogger.com. I currently have one half finished and I'd like to finish it off. But I can't get to my draft and if I could, I couldn't finish it, since I'd like to put in some links and check some data sources and facts...that requires connectivity. Slowly it strikes me: I carry an inner conviction that I can't write without access to a search engine. Is it true? I can't create without search? I'm moved to prove that this is not true.

Pause of several minutes.

We pass over the Hollands Diep by Dordrecht. Is that really what it's called? I've just always thought that this water here was what people were talking about when they say Hollands Diep.

Well, no way to look that up now. Instead I gaze out on it, the first few seconds wishing that I was making a video of the view from the bridge. It's the fading light. The sky and the water are nearly the same color and the struts of the bridge (hmm, shall I call them struts or girders--can't check that either...) pass by in regular intervals, with a comforting rhythm. I realize the bridge will be over, so I give my thought flow a little nudge towards simply enjoying the view and not wishing I were capturing it.

The conductor comes by and checks my ticket...ok that was another couple minutes.

Now were stopped in Dordrecht...here comes the coffee guy...in Dordrecht still...Hey, at least I can add a nice Dordrecht image to this entry.

The first several don't come out well. Then the station is gone, but there are trees. Rows of trees. That's iconic for the Netherlands, at least in my mind. Click, click, I capture a couple images. Trees and telephone lines. Whereby the telephone lines are strangely crisp against the blurry trees. Color looks interesting grey/blue. That's nice...I can fiddle with it more later.

I've listened to quite a few talks lately on classifying multimedia according to affect. These talks are mostly discussion the emotional impact that an image or a video has on the viewer as opposed to discussion of the affect being experienced by humans depicted in the image or video.

I look at my trees and telephone line shot again and wonder what the emotional impact on the viewer would be. I guess the color would be sadness: the Dutch word verdriet comes to my mind. Of course, I can't go and look up what the affect people say about this color. I think it's a cool color. I also remember one talk in which there was a slide that wanted to convince me that people consider this sort of color masculine.

I remember that slide exactly because it caused me a bit of mental distress. If I had a group of subjects doing user test and I asked them to arrange pictures on a masculine to feminine scale -- what exactly would they be doing? Accessing their emotional experience? Or, and I consider this more plausible, "cheating" by tapping into past baby congratulations card selection experience? Look around the train, where do we see blue? The button that closes the doors. Blue. The button that opens the doors. Yellow. The labels get removed or the malicious switch them, but the regular train riders know. It's convention and not emotion.

I think that when I will look at this picture the future, it will remind me of tiredness. Of how exhausted I was when I took it. Of my failure to capture the moment in the way I thought it should be captured. And how befuddled my brain was both by the tiredness and also by the attempt to write -- to develop a coherent point -- without access to search.

But here we are now. Rotterdam.

No, Comment

Six months ago the Boston Globe ran an op-ed by someone named Douglas Bailey entitled 'Got a comment? Keep it to yourself.' The piece takes the position that comment posting functionality should be removed from online newspapers in order to restore 'journalism's dignity', lost, according to Bailey, when newspapers started making their content available online for free, thus devaluing it. Not surprisingly, this article has collected 193 comments, 191 of them within the first five days it was on line. Nearly every sentence Bailey wrote, it seems, is graced with a reader reaction. One commenter advises him to 'Keep his op-ed to himself.' A November late addition declares 'Reading the comments section is the BEST part of the article,' which sums up the view of many.

I made a stab at reading all 193 comments -- starting with the ones that received the highest reader ratings. I didn't make it through everything. Somebody (or some spam filter) must have, however, since there are notes where certain comments have been censored 'We removed archie-skip's comment.' The filterer was not, however, Bailey himself, who begins his final paragraph with, 'By the way, don’t bother posting any comments directed to me when this article appears on the Web. I won’t see them.'

What do I have in common with Douglas Bailey? Well, I won't see your comments. In fact, you can't make comments here, I have the comment functionality turned off. At times -- especially around deadlines -- I don't visit my blog for weeks at a time. For this reason, I can't spam filter and I also can't react fast enough to start a meaningful dialogue.

A lot of commenters overlooked Bailey's final sentence which read, 'If you really have something interesting to say, I’ll find you.' By turning off the comments on this blog, I am in a sense, saying the same thing.

If we believe that the Internet should be a place where opinions are expressed and exchanged, where we go to meet in circles of friends, fellow hobbyists, professional colleagues, compatriots, fellow humans, where we learn from each other, hash out the issues, forge consensus, if we want that sort of dialogue on the Internet, then Bailey's casual, 'I'll find you' represents a real challenge. Effectively, he is pushing the whole burden of supporting the dialogue onto, yes, well, right, search.

One might argue, that pieces of information get linked up in ways other than search. But type-into-search-box is the basic search gesture and our browsing, retrieval, exploring, generally amusing ourselves on the Internet behavior relies on this gesture and on the variations we bring to it. Linking things in other ways is non-trivial. Bailey's article ran ran ten days after it was published in the IHT (http://global.nytimes.com/) under the title 'Do not comment on this article' This is where I originally read it. The New York Times published two reader reactions on their site...but it is quite tricky to get from these reactions back to the original piece. You need search. I executed a couple of rounds of type-into-search-box and found it at the Boston Globe...without even thinking about it.

I guess, I am not too concerned about reliance on search to perpetuate the dialogue in this blog. The "you" reading this blog is mostly my future self, and she can comment without needing comment functionality.

But more generally, we should reflect more often on the responsibility of writers and commenters to not only express their opinions, but express them in a way that they can be found and can be associated with the larger dialogue to which they contribute. Organizing discussions around specific articles, however, might not be the answer. Surely, the issue is important enough to sustain serious debate for more than the five days that Douglas Bailey drew serious volumes of reactions...it deserves a life of its own independent from the specific article. Afterall, someone might still have something to say about it six months later.

Say Anything

Standing drinking a Diet Coke I gazed at an advertisement for the Guardian outside the Spar on the campus of Dublin City University.

The advertisement stated, "Owned by no one, free to say anything." I paused. My paper of choice is associated with the motto "All the news that's fit to print." Never worried about it before, but in comparison, it suddenly seemed a bit dated.

It's relatively uncontroversial to consider source when assessing the credibility of media. In our work on the PodCred Framework we cite Rubin and Liddy (2006) as a source for the notion that user generated media builds credibility by avoiding hidden bias. I smiled at the idea of The Guardian as a huge blog; and then again at myself for finding that funny.

The PodCred Framework includes an indicator meant to capture the source of the income of the podcaster: stores, sponsors, advertisers. The idea that transparency of funding does indeed impact listener satisfaction with podcasts hasn't been test driven yet, too my knowledge. But seeing the Guardian sign made my thoughts return to consideration of its potential.

Then I finished my break and went back inside to continue working on VideoCLEF assessment management tasks, which is why I am currently in Dublin, and my mind turned to other things.

I've found the image to accompany this post at http://www.scaryideas.com/ If this is indeed a scary idea, I wonder if it indeed sells papers. But if it's really owned by no one, perhaps they need to make the link up to who is actually doing the writing. (Note to self: I do, too.)

Preferential Attachment at SIGIR 2009

Waiting for my plane yesterday at Boston Logan airport I found myself starting out the window and reflecting on scale-free networks rather than attending to my e-mail as I should have been. The reflections were, of course, inspired by the keynote of Albert László Barabási entitled "From Networks to Human Behavior" and consisted mostly of wondering why the properties of scale-free structure are perceived as unintuitive or unnatural. A conspiracy is improbable, but can it be that we are subtly taught to expect behaviors characteristic of random connections? Barabási used the word "democratic" in describing random networks and one of the audience questions afterwards dealt with how to overcome potential isolation between nodes in scale free configurations. Yes, they are out there, but how do we fix them? The answer was, to paraphrase, know it's there and work with it. I'd been standing in line with an audience question of my own, but I resumed my seat, deciding that it was basically covering the same ground: "Are the scale-free networks in and around us inherently irreconcilable with our notions of democratic forms of organization?"

Later that evening, in a semi-conscious effort not to always hang with exactly the same crowd, I fell in with group of bloggers for an interval that would, unknown to me as it was happening, later be referred to as Day 2 post banquet. Face-to-face discussion with bloggers seems to have helped to counter my conviction that I am almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a blogger myself. Except for my apparently innate repugnance for preferential attachment. Work with it.

Kill your blog?

A "rant" I sent to Wired in reaction to "Kill your Blog" (Wired Nov 2008 p. 27). It didn't get published there--it seemed only fitting that it should land here in the blogosphere:

"How did we come to so completely repress our dissatisfaction with mainstream search engines? You point a finger at blogging and bloggers, but the issues you raise could also be laid at the doorstep of Google. Dare to imagine a search engine that lets our voices be heard within the intimate internet communities important to us, a search engine that distills for us the pith of our posts, keeping pace with publication. My rant passed your magic 140 character Twitter limit in my second sentence--shouldn't internet search technology be addressing the challenge of making my opinion heard anyway?"