The argument over intercollegiate athletics really boils down to different people’s viewpoints on the purpose of higher education. The European model is much different than the American one. The focus truly is on education and the education you receive is also much more narrowly focused on your field of study.

In the US, however, it gets blurry. Most of the liberal arts and social sciences faculty like to argue that the purpose of college is more intrinsic than just academics; that you are gaining life skills and experience not found elsewhere. At the same institution, the faculty in the engineering department will tell you flat out that they are preparing you with a marketable skillset.  Maybe the reality is that you gain both intrinsic and extrinsic abilities.  In its current state, American higher education means different things to different people. Many students, both athletes and non-athletes, go to school for reasons other than education and it really shows when employers and the media cite statistics about how college grads can’t write or perform simple arithmetic.

I don’t think any one US college student even scratches the surface of what’s available to them during four years of school. Is a formal academic education the main benefit?  I think it depends on who you are.  Should education be the main benefit?  I think so, but you can certainly get a solid education while also being an athlete (or do any other number of things that are available in college).

The previous letter concerning the Tidewater Winter Classic smacks of arrogance and bigotry. The “flamethrower” reference in the letter makes it apparent that when some motorists leave their driveways, they leave for war. I pity those who happen to be in the way, whether they are cyclists, other drivers, or pedestrians. Road rage never fails to highlight the dark side of people.

Roads belong to everyone, yet some drivers see other vehicles as a violation of personal space. No matter how hilly or curvy, roads by themselves are not nearly as dangerous as an inattentive driver with a chip on his shoulder. A bit of patience and defensive driving will go a long way in keeping everyone safe.

Fortunately, from my experience, I find most drivers in the Williamsburg area to be respectful and courteous to motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians alike. I frequent the area near York River State Park, and I often see walkers, runners, cyclists, and even scooters along Newman and Riverview. A vast majority of the time, everyone gets along swimmingly. A few hours of bike race on a lazy Saturday shouldn’t be enough to ruin someone’s weekend.

While Facebook provides a “like” button to indicate approval of news feed posts, there is no indication that this feature is used to filter news feed content.  Facebook does provide an option to block news feed posts of designated friends, but this is a very coarse grained filter.  More recently, Facebook presented an interesting analysis of news feed posts.  This study identifies post topics that are more likely to be “liked” or commented on by friends as well as identifying post topics that are correlated with high friend  counts.  While the Facebook study analyzes post content, it only compares against metrics inherent to Facebook itself, such as “likes” per post, number of comments per post, age of posters, and friend counts.  The study neither attempts to quantify the news feed topic preferences of Facebook users, nor does it attempt to identify a Facebook user’s best or worst friends based on friends’ news feed posts.

Design

As previously mentioned, the main idea is for each FeedMod user to moderate each news feed post in a manner similar to Slashdot post moderations.  Each news feed post is assigned a moderation which consists of an integer value score and descriptor string.  For this experiment, I chose the following moderations:

Value	Descriptor	Examples
-2	Troll	Rants or politically charged arguments; I really can't stand these, hence the -2
-1	Spam	Advertisements, such as requests to attend an event, donate money, or to come to a friend's place of business to buy something
-1	Redundant	Endless duplicate announcements, typically on holidays and birthdays
-1	Indifferent	Stuff I really don't care about, such as random song lyrics or sports posts about teams that I don't follow
-1	Unintelligible	Something posted out of context, usually by someone with whom I'm out of touch
0	Normal	I assign my posts to this, otherwise I use it rarely
+1	Funny	Self explanatory, but I found myself only using it when I was about to fall out of my chair laughing
+1	Insightful	Anything that gives insight into the highlights of a friend's life or a well formed argument on a topic
+1	Informative	Usually updates on what someone is doing
+1	Inquisitive	Someone posing a question to his or her friends
+2	Interesting	Usually news articles or a post about something I hadn't heard of or thought about before (these posts are the best, hence the +2)

By moderating the status updates of all of my Facebook friends, I am then able to assign a score to each friend based on those moderations.  I can even moderate status update comments made by friends and non-friends alike.  The score, similar to Slashdot’s “karma,” is created by summing the moderation values for all of a friend’s posts.  In this way, I can see the balance of how positive or negative a friend’s posts tend to be.  The advantage of this method is that friends with a large number of good or bad posts will stick out.

Implementation and Facebook API

My original idea was to use the Facebook API to modify the news feed and allow me to moderate friends’ posts.  A month ago when I started this, I had no experience with the Facebook API and did not know if it would even allow me to do such a thing.  While I did achieve what I wanted in being able to moderate friends’ posts, I can say conclusively that the Facebook API is seriously lacking.  I have two major issues with the API: 1) an inability to customize the Facebook website, forcing developers to reinvent the wheel for even the smallest applications, and 2) limited access to information easily accessed on the main Facebook website.

What I really wanted to do was to be able to modify the existing Facebook news feed and insert a moderation select list next to each status update.  When a FeedMod user selected a moderation, the post-moderation pair would be stored in a database.  Unfortunately, Facebook does not allow developers to modify any portion of the Facebook website, including the news feed.  It would be much easier if Facebook allowed this since I wouldn’t have to recreate the entire news feed.  This lack of customization is a serious barrier to developers who have an idea for a simple application that makes use of the existing Facebook website.

The Facebook API does, however, allow you to query status updates and friend information for use on your own website.  What I learned was that apps within Facebook are actually remote websites running within an iframe on the main Facebook website.  Unfortunately, Facebook limits the information you can get: news feed items are restricted to status updates, links, videos, and photos — you cannot retrieve time ordered taggings, newly added friends, profile picture updates, and likes, among other things.

Interface

While I found the Facebook API disappointing, I was able to recreate the Facebook news feed on my own webserver, using the Facebook PHP toolkit.  Finally, with a database backend to store moderations, I was able to produce a customized news feed with the ability to moderate friends’ posts:

News Feed with Moderation Select Lists

To the right of each status update, I included a select list to moderate the post.  I also display the current moderation total for the friend, the friend’s moderated post count, and the percentile rank out of all friends (the friend with the most negative moderation total is 0%, the most positive is 100%).  This way, at a quick glance it is easy to see how many good or bad posts a friend has made to date.

I also created a statistics page, which ranks friends by the number of posts as well as lists of the top ten best and worst friends based on their moderation totals.  I also breakdown the moderation total and display the leaders of each moderation attribute (for example, who has the most “spam” posts).

Evaluation

After finishing the implementation, I then moderated posts for a month and now present an analysis of the results.  During a one month period, I moderated over 2,000 posts with 250 individual posters.  Some other interesting tidbits:

• 67% of my friends posted at least once within this one month period
• 64% of all moderated posters were friends; the remaining are non-friends commenting on a friend’s post
• 93% of all moderated posts were made by friends

Here is a breakdown of all moderated posts by their assigned attributes:

Moderation attributes by percentage of all moderated posts.

From the figure, a clear majority of posts are positive, while 35% are negative.  Out of all negative posts, the “indifferent” and “unintelligible” categories are used the most.  On the whole, I find most posts that I don’t like to be something I don’t care much about (and don’t want to read) or something that I don’t understand (usually it’s something taken out of context), hence the pervasiveness of the “indifferent” and “unintelligible” categories.  The “informative” category dominates the positive posts, followed by “insightful” and “interesting.”  My experience is that a significant number of posts (almost 40% to be exact) are status updates announcing what a particular friend is doing.  While most of these are mundane, I don’t really find them to be bothersome, hence the positive score.

Next, we look at how many posts each Facebook friend created during my one month evaluation:

Most friends post very little, but a few post all the time.

This figure shows the number of posts made by each friend that posted at least once.  A little less than 40% of my friends posted once, while about 3% posted more than 40 times in the past month.  One friend posted almost 120 times, or roughly four times per day!  Clearly, my news feed is dominated by posts from the same handful of friends.

Next, we look at the distribution of moderation scores across all of my Facebook friends:

Most of my friends have slightly positive moderation scores.

This figure shows that most of my Facebook friends (the ones that posted at least once) have a slightly positive moderation total. Since most of my friends do not post very much, the lack of extreme scores makes sense.  A small number of friends have very bad or very good scores — 3% have have a total less than -6 and another 3% have a total score greater than +20.  Those 3% that have the worst scores clearly stand out from the majority of my friends and are definitely good candidates for defriending.  Conversely, the top 3% go a long way in keeping my news feed enjoyable.

Lastly, we look at both post count and moderation total:

Friends that post more tend to be more positive, but there are some outliers.

Here, we see the quantity and quality of posts made by each Facebook friend.  Some friends have identical (post count, moderation total) values, hence the z-axis indicating the number of overlapping friends.  Like the previous two figures, this shows that most friends have slightly positive moderation totals and low post counts.  It also appears as though friends with higher post counts tend to be more positive.  However, there are some friends that buck the trend and have very negative scores for relatively high post counts (as identified previously, these are the ones that should be defriended).

Conclusions and Future Work

After struggling with the limitations of the Facebook API, I was able to implement a moderation system for Facebook news feed posts. This moderation system quantifies the contributions of each friend to the news feed and clearly identifies the friends with very good and very bad posts.  Using this system, it is possible to filter the news feed based on friends’ moderation scores as well as filter the news feed based on previous moderation of similar content.  It is also possible to extend the moderation system across a user’s social network, identifying friends whose posts are well liked by everyone.

Within the past few days, my news feed has been jammed with these “numbers” posts.  For the most part, it’s been people who I haven’t seen or talked to in years posting a status update with a number followed by a random out of context comment that makes no sense to me.  It’s been getting so bad that one of my Facebook friends posted that he would defriend anyone that posted another “numbers” status update.  While these people aren’t trying to sell me Viagra, the effect is the same as email spam: annoyance and frustration.

It’s no surprise that the top reason for defriending is “frequent, unimportant posts.”  Others, as well as myself, are getting frustrated with junk like these “numbers” posts and are on the brink of defriending the perpetrators.  To solve this, I propose FeedMod, a Facebook news feed moderation system to remove the garbage and push the good stuff to the top.

Disclaimer

I have absolutely zero experience with the Facebook API, so I have no idea how much of this is possible.  We’ll see.

How it works

My proposal is to borrow from the Slashdot moderation system.  Facebook already has a “like” button, but it’s inconclusive that by clicking it, similar posts will be given priority in the news feed.  There is also an “x” for each post, but clicking this seems heavy-handed, since it appears to blot out most posts from that particular friend.  Instead, FeedMod participants will moderate each post with a positive, neutral, or negative descriptor.  The results of this moderation is to flush out the good posts and hide the bad ones.

Unlike the Slashdot system, every news feed post can always be moderated by a FeedMod user.  With Slashdot, the goal is to have publicly acceptable posts float to the top, hence the need for randomly selected moderators to avoid gaming the system.  With FeedMod, however, the goal is to have posts acceptable to individual users float to the top, so users should be able to moderate everything in order to provide as much training information as possible.  Perhaps later the moderation can extend across groups of friends so that certain Facebook users can be recognized as having posts liked or disliked by all of their friends.

Label each post as good, bad, or neutral

I would keep all the positive Slashdot post descriptors: informative, insightful, interesting, and funny.  I would keep one neutral descriptor, such as “normal” or “neutral.”  Also, I would modify the negative descriptors from what is used on Slashdot so that they are more appropriate for social networking and individual preferences: out of context, spam, unintelligible, and troll.  Most news feed posts that annoy me either fall into the “unintelligible” or “out of context” categories: posts that make no sense due to poor writing skills or lack of background information since I don’t live every minute of my life with the poster.  Stuff like the “numbers” posts would fall into the “spam” category and posts from friends looking to incite others (usually politics) would get labeled “troll.”

Customized News Feed

As a FeedMod user labels each news feed post with a descriptor, the news feed becomes customized to the user’s preferences.  This is the tricky part, because I’m not sure if the Facebook API will allow me to rip out the text of each post and store it in a database.  If I’m able to do that, I can try to model a user’s feed preferences based on the friends they mod as mostly positive or negative and the likelihood that a new post from a particular friend will be acceptable.  I could go a step further and find keywords or topics that are found in good and bad posts, allowing new posts to be shown or hidden in the feed based on their content.

If all else fails, defriend

I should definitely be able to rank a user’s friends by the number of positive, neutral, and negative posts.  That way, after a few weeks of modding posts in the news feed, a user can have a top 5 and bottom 5 list of the most liked and most offensive friends.  Then, the user can just defriend those bottom 5 and see an increase in the news feed quality.  There can also be rankings by each specific positive or negative descriptor as well as ranking by post volume.

What’s Next?

When time permits, I’ll try to figure out what the Facebook API is capable of and hopefully be able to attach moderation descriptors to each news feed post.  With that, I’ll be able to find the friends whose posts I like the most as well as the least.  Learning preferences will be more difficult, especially if the API has limitations on what can be accessed in a user’s news feed.  Why Facebook hasn’t already implemented a better news feed moderation system is beyond me.  I’m sure they’ve at least considered it.

With email nearly as old as the internet, the protocol still in use today assumes that: 1) All users trust each other, and 2) All users have a moderate level of skill to send and receive email properly.  The failure of the first assumption has led to the high levels of spam and phishing emails we see today.  There is no trust: how does anyone know that a link supposedly send by a friend isn’t a botnet client?  The failure of the second assumption is just as bad: how many jobs have been lost due to a hasty “reply all” click?  The remainder of this post will focus on the second assumption: email misuse.

Mailing List Misuse

The timing of Facebook’s email announcement coincided with an incident that really demonstrates that it’s well past time for email to die.  I have subscribed to a fair number of mailing lists throughout the past 15 years or so I’ve been using email.  As per Wikipedia, electronic mailing lists fall into two categories: 1) Discussion lists, and 2) Announcement lists.  Discussion lists, such as the TinyOS programming help mailing list, allow all subscribers to send questions to everyone else in the list.  Someone poses a question in the email, puts the mailing list address in the “to” header, and once sent, all other subscribers get the email.  Anyone with an answer “replies all” to the list so that everyone can benefit from the discussion.

Announcement lists, on the other hand, are only a one-way broadcast.  Only a single owner is permitted to send announcements to all subscribers on the list with the recipients unable to reply to all.  That’s the idea, anyway.

In September, I joined an alumni mailing list which I would estimate has at least several hundred subscribers.  The list owner sent out regular updates at an interval of roughly once per two weeks, as illustrated in the figure below.  However, following the most recent announcement, chaos ensued.  On September 15th (see figure), a subscriber learned that he could “reply all” to the list and not only email the list owner, but all of the other subscribers as well.  For whatever reason, the announcement list was set up like a discussion list, allowing any subscriber to reply.  It only got worse from there.

Once one subscriber hit "Reply All", the rest is history...

Soon, a torrent of emails followed in the steps of the first subscriber as one person after another typed up a response and hit “reply all.”  Being an alumni list, the discussion circulated among a group of individuals of about the same class year, discussing subjects that made no sense to anyone else.  The responses quickly got out of hand: through the afternoon of September 15th, the sending rate soared to well past 1 email per minute.

After the initial rush of random discussion, complaints ensued.

Following a mad surge of random discussion on the 15th and another resurgence on the afternoon of the 16th, subscribers began to email the list complaining about the onslaught.  One after another, again surging past the rate of 1 email per minute, subscribers demanded that they be unsubscribed and that the discussion be taken to a message board.  Finally, the message was heard: everything died down and stopped completely by the evening of the 16th.

So what went wrong?  First, the list owner should have ensured that he was the only one able to send emails to the list.  Second, a significant number of subscribers emailed the list in an attempt to unsubscribe instead of emailing the list owner.  Both mishaps plus the breach of protocol for announcement lists made things quite a mess in only a few hours.

Some other interesting statistics can be computed in the aftermath.  Since the list’s inception, about 10% of the total volume can be attributed to announcements, 50% for misuse/discussion, and 40% for complaints about the discussion.  Next, we show the age distribution of senders:

The misuse is confined to the 45+ age group.

Since this is an alumni list, I was able to determine the age of just about every sender within two or three years, however, beyond some quick Googling, about 2% of the senders have an undetermined age.  The above figure shows that those who abused the mailing list for discussion are all older than 45.  Conversely, there is a roughly even distribution of age for those complaining.  There is also slightly lower percentage of users under 45.  From the figure, we can conclude that the younger generations are savvy enough to avoid either: 1) Misusing the announcement list as a discussion list, or 2) Sending the list an unsubscribe email instead of the owner.

Another interesting fact is that 37% of all senders used a business email address to reply to the list.  37% of senders used their business email for personal reasons!  That’s insane.  Another 9% had nasty hundred word “disclaimer” signatures at the end of their messages.  Stuff like: “THIS IS A LEGALLY PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION THAT IS INTENDED TO BE VIEWED ONLY BY THE INTENDED RECIPIENT…ANY DISSEMINATION, DISTRIBUTION, OR COPYING OF THIS TRANSMISSION IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.”  I think the distribution and copying prohibition went out the window the minute they hit “reply all.”  It’s a wonder more people don’t get busted for stuff they put in emails.

In conclusion, this case study demonstrates exactly why email ought to be abandoned.  There are too many avenues for abuse, misuse, and unintended consequences.  It would be nice to see Facebook come up with something appropriate for today’s internet.

The really interesting thing about this is the expansion studies for the HRBT completed two years ago.  Instead of adding another tunnel, “Alternative 6″ consists of a high level suspension bridge.  This bridge would have a main span of 5400 feet, making it the third longest suspension bridge in the world as well as the longest in the United States.  It would be 1200 feet longer than the Golden Gate Bridge and have the exact same clearance at 220 feet.  A bridge like that would be way more impressive than another tunnel (the previous link has some renderings).

Of course, the tunnel option is only “marginally” more expensive at $3.3 billion compared with $3.2 billion for the bridge.  The bridge would also be subject to some serious winds during hurricane season, not to mention the impact to the naval base if it were destroyed during a war.

Two triathlon races will be held at Jamestown on Sept. 11 and 12. There will be 1,200 competitors from all parts of the state competing. Please be patient and observe the police checkpoints along Greensprings Road and Route 5 toward the Chickahominy River, as the cycling portion will be on the roads and not the path. The race brings local revenue and money for local charities, so please show everyone what respectful citizens we are.

The fact that someone wrote in to say this is telling. I hope for the cyclists’ sake that there is a sizable police presence, for Route 5 is a magnet for road rage against cyclists. I’ve had several run-ins with drivers on different places on that course — even on the backroad portion I had someone yell at me out the passenger window and give me the finger.

Much of the problem on Route 5 stems from the adjacent bike path: before the path was installed, I never had any trouble. However, since many other cyclists and I don’t feel like hitting a pedestrian or getting clotheslined by a dog leash, we stick to the road. While we exercise responsibility by avoiding pedestrians, some drivers don’t feel like driving responsibly and avoiding cyclists, as reported in this Last Word comment:

Riding bicycles is part of living a healthy lifestyle, but ride them on safe roads where there is a bike path. Motor vehicle drivers should not have to slow down to follow behind bicyclists. If we attempt to go around them, we are crossing the yellow line, which is illegal. If we hit them, we go to jail. Ride on appropriate roads where there is a bike lane.

This attitude is very pervasive among drivers where I live: many treat the road as their personal space and are unwilling to share. Whatever happened to defensive driving? Everyone has an equal right to share the road, be it cars, trucks, bikes, or pedestrians. Some are not “more equal than others.” The attitude above makes the road a dangerous environment for everyone, including other drivers. The boilerplate “laws of physics give heavier vehicles priority/roads are designed for motor vehicles” arguments are no excuse for poor driving skills, not to mention the law. If you can’t safely handle slower (or faster) traffic, you shouldn’t be on the road. If you think bikes or pedestrians shouldn’t be on the road, then write to your state representatives to change the law, but I guarantee it will be an uphill battle.

It isn’t just a cycling problem, either: I’ve seen drivers completely ignore other cars and pedestrians, creating plenty of close calls. I’ve seen plenty of pedestrians march into traffic without a second glance. I’ve been on group rides where some people will sail through a red light. It’s time to take some responsibility. Everyone complains about traffic, but if you’re stuck in it, you’re as much to blame as anyone else.

I wonder who makes these postcards… I bet there’s a hole in the wall shop somewhere just filled with these.

It’s either a big potato or a small model.

For well over a year, I’ve imported the RSS feed from my blog to Facebook via the Notes application.  This particular feature has been flaky in the past and now appears to be completely broken despite cries to fix it.  I’m betting my bottom dollar that the poor implementation and maintenance of the blog import feature is deliberate on Facebook’s part: they want you to stay within their walled garden and keep all of your content solely within it.

Before last week, anything I posted on my blog would take up to three days to show up on Facebook.  Occasionally, I would make several posts and they would all show up out of order several days later.  To make posts show up immediately, I had to log in to Facebook and manually update the blog import.  Several days is an eternity for a service that depends on real time information, especially when I get 20 or 30 wall posts every hour.  Why should my blog posts be treated differently than wall posts?  Google has real time search for the entire internet, but Facebook can’t keep up with a handful of RSS feeds for new blog posts?  It’s obvious that Facebook could easily make an import feature that functions in real time and would allow you to import anything from anywhere.  So why haven’t they done this?

Now, however, the Facebook blog import feature appears to be completely broken.  After writing a blog post last week and then trying to manually import it, I got the following obtuse error from Facebook: “The blog/rss url you entered is not valid. “  I got no such errors from Feed Validator.  I also thought it could be because I had upgraded to WordPress 3.0, but a discussion thread revealed that plenty of people with other blogging services were also having trouble importing to Facebook.  After a week and a half, I have a hard time believing that Facebook would allow a bug like this to go ignored without some kind of acknowledgment or fix.  What are they up to?

My guess is that Facebook deliberately broke the blog import feature, thinking that those who used it would just forget about it and start posting to Facebook directly.  If true, it’s quite the subversive attempt to gain even more control over my information.  I’m certainly not going to abandon my blog just because I can’t import it into Facebook.  My guess is that the more restrictions like this that Facebook imposes, the more incentivized people will be to abandon their accounts.  Changing privacy policies at the drop of a hat may not be enough to convince Facebook users to leave, but I’m betting that restricting users’ control of their own data will be the last straw.