Friday, June 27, 2014

Saturday, June 14, 2014

S/he's watching me

Eyes taking a rest.
Looking out of the window
I felt being watched.

Monday, June 09, 2014

Beginning of an End

Alright, that was not precise.
The end does begin with the birth.
At least . . .

Bienenfreund


Phacelia;  scorpion weed.
We call this flower Bienenfreund.
There is a little mound in Seanhenge,
each days visited
by hundreds of bees and bumble-bees.
There is a humming and buzzing . . .
Listening to it is at least as beauteous
as is a poem by Shakespeare,
as is a Beethoven sympony.
 



De-Light

. . . – moment of . . .

Sunday, June 08, 2014

Versus verbosity

Peony poems.
A feast of verbosity.
I took a photo.

Serendipity 25 years after


Unexpected Relevance: An Empirical Study of Serendipity in Retweets
Tao Sun, Ming Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei

Last modified: 2013-06-28

Abstract

Serendipity is a beneficial discovery that happens in an unexpected way. It has been found spectacularly valuable in various contexts, including scientific discoveries, acquisition of business, and recommender systems. Although never formally proved with large-scale behavioral analysis, it is believed by scientists and practitioners that serendipity is an important factor of positive user experience and increased user engagement. In this paper, we take the initiative to study the ubiquitous occurrence of serendipitious information diffusion and its effect in the context of microblogging communities. We refer to serendipity as unexpected relevance, then propose a principled statistical method to test the unexpectedness and the relevance of information received by a microblogging user, which identifies a serendipitous diffusion of information to the user. Our findings based on large-scale behavioral analysis reveal that there is a surprisingly strong presence of serendipitous information diffusion in retweeting, which accounts for more than 25% of retweets in both Twitter and Weibo. Upon the identification of serendipity, we are able to conduct observational analysis that reveals the benefit of serendipity to microblogging users. Results show that both the discovery and provision of serendipity increase the level of user activities and social interactions, while the provision of serendipitous information also increases the influence of Twitter users.

In case you wish to read more: Here's the pdf.