New Blog

I have started blogging at Idiots Den. Please visit
Idiots den
for more topics.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Search with attitude says Twitter


Are you a person who only want to see tweets with positive attitude?or are you interested to know the negative impact of something? Here, Twitter search is the right place for you.

You know twitter also includes the number of tweets that came after you got the results of your query.Twitter search is never too late.With the Twitter advanced search you can search tweets that have only positive attitude or only negative attitude or asking a question related to your query.Well,I searched for obama :) and obama :( and found some satisfying results.

When a man's positive can be other's negative and vice versa,I wonder how twitter could make a judjement on these.This attitude filter is something no other search engine has introduced and I am sure will have a positive impact :).

I couldn't resist to test wether its negative or positive tweets that come more.I searched only for :) and :( .ie. any positive attitude and any negative attitude tweet.After a one minute wait I found these results and they kept increasing though.







The positive attitude tweets were growing with a good rate than the negative ones confirming that Twitter is a positive attitude site to dwell in.Good going twitterers!!

Friday, June 19, 2009

Trap the Cat-An addictive Flash game

While following RichardWiseman's tweets on twitter I came across this addictive Flash game.You play it with a clever cat.You and the cat will make equal number of moves.Just trap the cat by blocking its way.

Play the game here.

I could block the cat after a few tries.Try it,Its fun.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

RankNet:How Bing Works

Bing is the new search engine by Microsoft replacing its very own Live Search.Bing was launched to the web on June 1st,2009 to increase Microsoft's marketshare in the search market.Bing uses the RankNet technology,as they call it.It is the "Ranking using Neural Net".An Artificial Neural Network(ANN),referred as Neural Net is a model developed on the basis of human neural network.



The ANN consists of processing elements called neurons arranged in different layers- one input layer,one output layer and at least one hidden layers(in between the inner and outer layers).The number of neurons in each layer depends on the application that uses the ANN.Each neuron in the input layer is connected to every neuron in the immediate layer through weights(similar to cable or a wire).The weight of each connection, also called as the connection strength is a value generally normalized to one.The connection strength can also be zero which is equivalent to no connection.

The neuron is a processing element which typically evaluates a(ny) function (Activaton Function) for a given input.Thus when some input is given to a neuron it calculates the value of the function at that value and sends it to all the neurons in the next layer,however the value reaching the next neuron depends on the connection strength.If the connection strength between two neurons is 0.5,then the value reaching the neuron will be half the value of the what the neuron sends.This neuron will calculate again on its function and send the data to the neurons in next layer finally reaching the output layer.The output depends upon the connection strenghts between the neurons and the Activation Function.In the beginning,the output will be far different from what it should be.Now,the weights of the connections will be changed according to the deviation from the expected output.

The ANN is trained with a set of samples of known outputs to inputs.The weights are initialized depending on the algorithm being followed and inputs are given.The deviation from the expected output is updated by changing the weights between the neurons.Thus,the network gives accurate outputs after training the ANN for many samples and the accuracy depends on many factors.The number of samples of input and output after which the problem converges depends on the training algorithm.We can train a neural network from simple equations to very complex realtions.The Neural net technique is a self learning technique because we never derive any mathematical relation between output and input,but simply train the network that learns by itself making the output relavant

This is how the human brain also stores and manipulates the data by modifying the connection strengths between the neurons.So,a complex ANN algorithm might use millions of neurons and hundreds of layers for more accuracy(or relevancy in this case).

The RankNet is the Bing's Neural Network that is trained with thousands of data samples before it was available.It uses very complex algorithms that makes the search engine more adaptive to the users queries.This makes the search engine always learning and helps it produce more relavant results.

Update[09/05/2010] : Please see my extended post on Artificial Neural Networks and How it applies to Bing (I am now blogging at Idiots den.)

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Twixperiments

With Twitter,you can stay updated about your friends or your favourite people.But there's a lot more Twitter can do.Now,Twitter is going to be used for a scientific experiment for the first time says Richard Wiseman.

This experiment will examine the possible existence of 'remote viewing' - the alleged ability to psychically identify a distant location.Remote viewing refers to the attempt to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception or simply the remote viewer is expected to give information about what he has not seen or does not have any idea of.

The experiment goes like this.Every day Richard will travel to a randomly selected location and will send a Tweet to everyone asking to Remote view the location,i.e,send ther thoughts about that location.Exactly after thirty minutes of the first Tweet,he is going to send five photographs of which only one photograph is the actual location.The users vote on the photo which they believe is the location that Richard mentioned.So,if majority of the votes are for the actual location,the conclusion of the experiment will be that there is existence of extrasensory perception.

You can follow Richard Wiseman on Twitter here.

You must be awestruck everytime when the lead role of Final Destination movie will know what is going to happen next.That is by the psychic phenomeon also called as precognition.That sounds like a crap to most of them,but there are evidences for extrasensory perception in the past.It is no joke that US government spent 20 million dollars to determine the potential of extrasensory perception in the Stargate Project which was terminated in 1995 due to the lack of any documented evidence or theory about this.Many people still believe that it is a genuine ability and this experiment is going to test this with a wider audience.

If most of the votes are for the actual location,then it is counted as a hit and it is counted as a miss otherwise.The experiment is going to be conducted on Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday and Friday this week.Test if your instinct has that rare psychic ability of perceiving things.

In case there is ability to predict the things that happen in future,you can't escape your destiny is the theme of 'Final Destination'.But this study might help the human kind to know what is beyond the understanding of Science.

Twitter Rules

Yes,It does. Twitter is now ruling the web by asking a simple question-"What are you doing?".Twitter believes that constraint inspires creativity.The 140 character constraint has really done that.

Twitter has some rules.Twitter does not allow any kind of html tags in the 140 characters.However,links to other websites are shown in the tweets.There is also a limit on this.The url will be converted to a small url if the link is more than 30 characters in length.The url is shortened by using tinyurl or bit.ly.You are also free to use these great applications for shortening the URL's or to hide the original URL's.

Twitter does not allow you to post pictures directly in the tweets.You can post URL's of the pics uploaded on any website while most of the Twitterers use twitpic.Twitpic is a third party application and is not a part of Twitter.

You can send replies to any Tweet or message by a user by appending your message to @username.For example you can reply to me by telling
"@NeoTracks Thanks for the Twitter post".You can search all the replies to you in your home page once you login into twitter.

You can also send a Direct message to a user by appending the message after D username.For example, you can send a direct message to me by typing "D NeoTracks Are you meeting me today?".Direct messages do not appear in your tweets.This message is sent only to the user you have specified.They get delivered to the users device if any.


Below the Tweets you can see the text like posted from web,posted through text,.etc.After Twitter has become a powerful application,there are many applications developed for using Twitter on many devices.Thus twitter can be posted from the web or by text messaging or by any other application that uses Twitter API.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Twitter

As this is the first post concerning Twitter in my blog,I ask -did u ever Tweet?





Twitter is a social application that allows its users to keep in touch with their friends and fans in a great way. Twitter allows its user to post any number of messages the user wants,but each message should not be more than 140 characters.That may sound a little bit wierd to those who didn't knew about it earlier,but posting such short messages will have the user hit the exact target.While blogging WAS the best way to keep in touch with friends and fans,it is a pretty tedious process in these busy days for celebrities to write big posts and maintain their blogs.Twitter makes it simple,you just publish anything in a simple manner and easy for others to know.Twitter can most of the times be referred to a Micro Blog.

If you haven't started Twitting or Twittering-whatever you call it-go start Twittering and you can also follow me here.With twitter you can follow your favourite people and reply to their Tweets.Go get your username before some one will get the one you desire.

It is not only the basic Idea of Twittering that has made it a very popular and powerful application.It is also the interface of the website.The website is awesomely simple with a good design,the most happiest part being that you don't need to reload the page everytime you or someone else whom you follow Tweets.If you have not tried using Twitter search,you might never know that Twitter also suggests the number of Tweets that have come related to your search after the search result has been displayed.

Just sit back at home and keep tweeting all the time.If you have internet connected to your mobile,you can tweet on the go with many Twitter Applications available.Twitter also sends first 250 updates of the people you follow by SMS if you regsiter your mobile device with twitter.

Twitter was built on an open source web applicaton framework called Ruby on Rails.Ruby on Rails uses the Ruby programming language.


Tweet Tweet.