Nearly a month after the initial launch of my map of CCTV cameras in Liege, quite a number of people contributed to add cameras on this map (some people contributed heavily ; thanks to all of them). Currently, we have identified 79 cameras but it seems we are far from finishing this work since, according to some sources, there were more than 109 CCTV cameras in Liege at the end of 2006! Did this put you at rest: 40 cameras added in one go?
Month: May 2007
Disappointed by BSN meeting
I’m very disappointed by this BSN meeting. This event is organised every 2 years so you might expect some quality standards. Well, don’t expect too much … (don’t expect anything, in fact).
Morning talks were ok, nothing more: it was not better nor worse than any other congress. But the poster session was not organised at all and there was no support from senior scientists … Moreover, authors of about 1/3 of posters didn’t even deign to come and hang a poster! Most of senior scientists left before the afternoon poster sessions (usually, questions from seniors are more useful than other students’ questions); maybe 2-3 seniors were left (for the whole Belgium!!!). And the final touch, lunch was not free (not even sandwiches!) although we paid 45€ for registration (free for members – membership is 12€ per year for students). Instead we were redirected to the UAntwerp canteen … Are they not smart enough to find a sponsor? I think it would have been better to attend the Neuroinformatics Meeting only.
We decided to leave at 16.00: on the 200 people there at 14.00, approximately 20 were left, most of the posters were already removed and no one was there anymore 1) from my lab 2) to have interesting discussions (apart from the weather topic). It’s sad for the last speaker but, hey, if the meeting organising committee is treating us like s..t, what do you expect? We spent at least one day designing our posters (I know people who spent the whole week on it!) and no one is there to discuss about it? We spent hours on highways and traffic jams trying to enter Antwerp at 9.00 to be at the same level as inept people not even coming to hang their poster? I’m sure they even didn’t designed their posters. And the result is the same for everyone: 1 line on the cv. I’m really disappointed.
Note: Alexandre Dulaunoy already left a comment on one of my photos of the meeting on Flickr.
How are you using tags?
I’m wondering how people are using tags and how it differs from keywords usage in the scientific literature.
Usually when I add tags on web services like del.icio.us or Flickr, I tend to add as many tags as possible. For example, even if a man is not the main subject of a photo, I’ll use the tag “man”. The rationale is we never know if, one day, I (or someone) would like to find a photo with a man and a tree (for example), the tree being the main subject. The problem is that I think I’m “diluting” the power of main tags. Another example … about a website helping find post-doc jobs, I’ll use the following tags: “jobs postdoc research science grants PhD job”. The problem is that “grants” is not really related (there are no list of available grants but only some jobs require grants and you never know what you’ll look for later).
In the biomedical sciences field (and many other scientific fields, I guess), we are using “keywords” when submitting a paper to a peer-review journal. This helps in the selection of peer-reviewers but, more important, it allows us to find interesting papers. The main difference with tags, imho, is that we only use a small number of keywords. For example, in this article, the author only used 4 keywords (and it’s considered sufficient). If this article would have been a webpage, I would have added some more tags: MS, Mw, pI, proteomics, …
Why is there a difference? Is it relevant? How are you using tags? Is there a “good” strategy?
I collected tag-lists from some del.icio.us users and tried to compare (*) to my tag list …
| user abbrev | N links | N tags | Mean citation per tag | Max citation for a tag |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| je | 401 | 757 | 3.52 | 84 |
| ad | 614 | 1123 | 3.07 | 98 |
| do | 113 | 195 | 2.33 | 27 |
| ch | 2320 | 582 | 15.86 | 326 |
| de | 3528 | 1550 | 13.29 | 923 |
With 5 people, I don’t pretend that it’s significant … We have clearly two groups: me and my friends (the 3 first lines) with < 1000 links and a mean citation per tag of around 2-3. The two last lines are from 2 people taken “at random” (well, I eliminated people with < 1000 links like the 1st group). When I plot the histogram of tags usage, I always get the same trend: a huge amount of tags used a few times and very few tags cited very often (as expected, see figure below).
Rashmi Sinha’s cognitive analysis of tagging is a good start to understand the tagging process. But it could be nice to find other important ressources and/or learn from others experiences …
(*) data and Python scripts available upon request. I had to write my own Python scripts to retrieve data since, unfortunately, Michael G. Noll’s Unofficial del.icio.us Python API for research are not available anymore.
Update on May 6th (a bit later): Michael’s API is back! I’ll use it later 🙂 Thanks Michael. If you want to spend your holiday in Canada, you can go to the ACM Document Engineering 2007 where he’ll introduce a paper related to this subject. Another thing: when I looked again at the table above, there are two “trends” (remember, I don’t pretend to be exhaustive nor significant): people with < 1000 links have more keywords than links ; with > 1000 links, more links than keywords. Is there a more precise limit? I guess this has something to do with the fact people are only interested in a “small” number of subjects and tend to collect as many variations (links/webpages) as possible on the subject.
Jean-Etienne's blog 
