Because of this sanctioning system, we can make a reasonable inference that items that have been taken off of Craigslist have been sold.  The items that have short lifespans on Craigslist are desirable – they are a good value, priced properly – and those with long lifespans are either unwanted or improperly priced.  I’ve recently been in the market for a used car (cough, a minivan), so I’ve been collecting information about the cars offered on Craigslist and their lifespans on the service. By looking at prices and lifespans (and a few other variables), can we automatically identify cars that offer the greatest value?

What follows are some charts from a simple survival analysis of the last 30 days of Honda Odyssey sales on Craigslist in Raleigh/Durham.  The de-duped dataset includes 55 cars (out of about 130 posts). Before you read much into the data, many of the variables I explored (mileage, model year, etc.) weren’t significant predictors of “hazard” (that is, sale). If you were able to get this data on a larger scale, it does seem likely you’d be able to identify patterns of value. That said, there is a lot of randomness is a car’s quality once it has been driven, so the value of such a model-based approach would only be in prioritizing potentially under-priced cars.

n.b.: You could also do this sort analysis on want-ads. Want-ads have a great sanctioning system, as it is pointess to pay for an ad after you’ve sold your car.

p.s.: Perhaps what is charming about Craigslist is that there isn’t any meaningful historical data. This likely generates more variability in price, leading to the perception that you can find great deals (which you can!).

I developed Anti-Social because of a problem I ran into consistently with Freedom – I loved being offline, but found myself frustrated when I needed to look up a citation or a new article when Freedom was running. Anti-Social allows you to tune out the social parts of the web – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – while allowing you access to research materials, Google, and other invaluable resources. I’ve been using it for the past few weeks while working on an R&R – Anti-Social allowed me to remain in focused writing mode, while allowing me to research as I revised the manuscript.

Together, Freedom and Anti-Social represent an emergent computing phenomena I’ve been calling “80% computing.” By taking problems that are socially or computationally hard (e.g. changing habits, reducing compulsive surfing), and providing imperfect solutions, I’ve found there’s an interesting spot in the market. I wonder what other highly complex problems (e.g. productivity) we could solve with 80% solutions?  If we move away from perfection as a computational standard, and allow individuals to adapt their practice to imperfect technologies, we may be able to develop some very simple solutions to very challenging problems.

Along those lines, the Economist recently profiled my software in a wonderful article. I’ll quote at length:

“CLEAR your screen and clear your mind.” That is the philosophy behind a new wave of dedicated software utilities, and special modes in word-processing packages and other applications, that do away with distractions to enable you to get on with your work. The problem with working on a computer, after all, is that computers provide so many appealing alternatives to doing anything useful: you can procrastinate for hours, checking e-mail, browsing social-networking sites or keeping up with Twitter.

But in its severity and simplicity, Freedom (for Macintosh and Windows) may be the ultimate tool to ward off distractions: the virtual equivalent of retiring to a remote getaway, or going on a writers’ retreat, to get things done.

But fans of Freedom are not concerned by such philosophical niceties; they use it because it makes them more productive. Peter Sagal, the host of the American public radio show “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”, is one such fan. He has no trouble writing to a strict deadline at work. But outside work, “I simply can’t resist the call of a website or an RSS feeder or now my Twitter feed. I simply can’t do it,” he says. Before he started using Freedom he managed to write a book, but only by unplugging his cable modem to cut off his internet access. “But that was too easy to plug back in,” he says. The internet, he grumbles, has “murdered” his ability to do extracurricular creative work, such as writing books, plays and screenplays.

Hardware and software are usually sold on the basis that they can do more, do things faster or have whizzy new features. There is clearly a place for products that are simple to use and hide complexity—a hallmark of Apple’s products. It is perhaps more surprising that there also seems to be demand for products that disable features. But for people trying to get things done, a hobbled computer may in fact be more useful than a fully functional one, for an hour or two at least. Temporarily worse can, in some ways, be better.

Artwork from the Economist.

Of note, the New York Post also ran an article that prominently featured Freedom and Anti-Social. The title of the article was a classic Post headline: Fatal Distraction.

I should close with the following. First, I am aware that spending time writing anti-procrastination software is actually meta-procrastination. Second, Anti-Social really is great. Check it out. It is a revelation to be on the un-social Internet. Finally, I’m waiting for Peter Sagal to come and ask me for a percentage of my sales. He is simply too kind with his advocacy of Freedom!

I’m on iPhoto 6, so it is possible this has been fixed in later releases.

Booksearch Lookup

When you’re on an Amazon product page, click this bookmarklet and you’ll be taken to the Google Booksearch results for the book.  If previewing is allowed for the book, you’ll be able to leaf through it before you purchase/borrow/walk to your shelf.  To install the bookmarklet, drag the booksearch lookup link to your bookmarks folder.

Some quick notes on Booksearch:

• Booksearch has changed the way I look at digital books (for the better).  I’m a fan of print, and I’ve always had a hard time imagining reading a book on the computer.  I still have a hard time with digital long form, but the mistake I made was to think all books were the same.  Many books, especially the reference/textbook/manual genre are analogous to large webpages.  If you’re searching for a specific bit of information and Google Booksearch can give you the chunk you need, that’s a wondeful case.
• Booksearch has also changed how I look at publishers and libraries.  You know how today if you buy an LP, a band will throw a CD in for free?  Publishers have to get there, and fast.  Libraries need to give me a virtual shelf that houses digital copies of all the books I’ve checked out (and even the ones I’ve returned).  We’re simply wasting too much time and money chasing around print resources when a digital resource will do.
• It is unfortunate that Google is the monopoly, but you have to give them credit for taking on a task that would have taken an inter-intitutional consortium eons.  Sometimes the market wins.  I just wish that the research libraries had thought twice before signing their collections over in perpetuity.
• Finally, I remember a time (not long ago) where music was a scarce resource.  To hear a band, you actually had to find a copy of an album or swap a tape.  Lots of stuff was like that pre-digital.  One of the few places I see that attitude today is around the scholarly book.  If there’s a book you need, you’ve got to search it out.  If your library doesn’t have it, if ILL is going to take 6 months, if none of your friends are hoarding a copy, you’ve got to plunk down the 50 or 100 or 150 dollars to order the book from somewhere far away.  It is totally frustrating, but there’s also a weird sense of pre-digital accomplishment that goes with it – knowing that you posess an actual scarce resource.  I know that in a few years my students will just booksearch every version of that book I spent so much time and effort to acquire.  I imagine it will feel a little like knowing that there’s a torrent of all the 7″ your favorite band put out, when you worked so hard just to collect a few.  Bottom line is we’ll have to get over it, albeit grudgingly.

BackTweets, search for links on Twitter (unlike Twitter Search, this dereferences links from URL shorteners like TinyURL)

Something I asked for a long time ago.  Don’t know why Twitter search still doesn’t do this, perhaps now they will.  Great execution, smart defaults, instantly indispensable for anyone monitoring Twitter.  Excellent.

Amazon Wishlists solves this problem – you keep a single list, which is always accessible, and you get the value-add of Amazon’s recommendations.  It is Amazon’s recommendations that make this sustainable for me: it is extra work to look up books in Amazon and add them to my wish list, but the product page is so rich with information that I often find one or two other interesting books.  This is virtual equivalent of stacks-browsing you just don’t get in most OPAC’s.

A couple of quick notes: If you already use wish lists for your actual wishes, you will want to create a separate list.  I named mine “Reading List” and include a warning that I don’t want these books purchased for me by some kind soul.  If you don’t do this, you may find an obscure $200 stats book under the Christmas tree instead of the iPod Touch.  You can also make your list private, which solves the problem.  To simplify the Amazon-to-OPAC lookup, I’ve created a bookmarklet that does an OPAC lookup from the Amazon product page.  My bookmarklet is configured for UNC but if you want to hack it for your school, feel free.

Note: For the times you actually have to buy books, I’ve been working on some software that profiles your wish list and predicts the best time for you to buy a book (based on historical pricing data). Watch this space for more details.

The first step has two parts.  If you don’t have a Gmail account, I assume that you know how to fix that.  Lit alerts are a little more challenging, as different domains will have different publishers.  If you’re doing the kind of research I do, then setting up alerts with Sage, ScienceDirect and the ACM Digital Library (ToC alerts are free, but search alerts require an ACM membership) is a good start (Springer, Wiley and IEEE are also useful).   You’ll need to create accounts with all of these sites for lit alerts to work.

Literature alerts come in two forms (as far as I know).  The first is a table of contents alert.  This means you can get notified when a new journal or proceedings is published.  The second is a search alert.  Search alerts are saved searches (i.e. Facebook AND College Student); the system notifies you when new results are found.  You’ll want to set up these alerts and direct them to your Gmail account.

Over the next few days your inbox will begin filling with literature alerts (assuming you’re looking at an active subject).  Because you’re not always going to want an inbox filled with lit alerts, what you’re going to do is set up filters.  For each publisher that emails you, click on the email and select “Filter all messages like this” from the dropdown.  I then set the filter to skip the inbox, and apply the label “Alerts.”  After a few days, you’ll have filtered all of the alert messages to a label – meaning you can process them on your own time.

Two important notes.  First, when signing up for searches, opt in to get the most verbose alerts possible.  You want abstracts, etc.  Second, rather than deleting alerts after they are done, you’re simply going to leave them read in the labeled folder.  Here’s where the fun begins.  Over time, you’re building a portable, personal archive of all new literature on your topic.  And because you’ve set up the alerts across publishers and libraries, you’ll be able to search for new literature across publications easily – without authenticating to a library or running a meta search across publishers.  All of the new literature will be in your gmail, searchable with the “label:alerts” key.  For example, if I want to know all of the new literature matching Facebook and psychology, I simply go into my Gmail and search “label:alerts facebook psychology.”

This kind of management strategy would also work for mailing lists, fare alerts from airlines, etc. In my dreams I’d have a Gmail plugin that would add impact factors in to the subject headings. The rest of my literature alerts come in via RSS (lots of open-access journals only offer RSS alerts), and I’m slowly moving those over email (via RSS-to-email). How do you manage your literature alerts?

The problem with GS cited by is that there is no easy means for searching within the results.  This is fine if your publication is cited only a few times and you can eyeball the results.  But as the citation count scales up, being able to search within the results becomes pretty important.

The good news is that you can search within GS cited by, it just requires a little URL hacking.  In my case, I was looking for publications about web surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book “The Media Equation.”  We’ll do this step by step:

1. Open up GS, and search for “The Media Equation“
2. The first result is the Reeves and Nass book.  Click on the “Cited by 1598” link.
3. The URL will look something like this:

   http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&cites=12773235514158955901

   You will want to select that list bit, the “&cites=12773235514158955901″.

4. Now, open up GS in a new tab and run a search for “Web Survey.”
5. Finally, paste the “&cites=12773235514158955901″ onto the end Web Survey URL, so it looks something like this:

   http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=Web+Survey&btnG=Search&cites=12773235514158955901

6. Voila!  You’ve found the 337 publications matching Web Surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book.  The first one looks like a very promising publication from some highly regarded methodologists.  Win!

I was unable to run a comparison in the WoS database as it doesn’t seem to know about the Reeves and Nass book.  Are there any other places you use for Cited By searches (i.e. other databases, vendors, search engine hacks)?  And if there is some easy way to do this search in the GS interface, please let me know.  I’ve read the advanced searching docs and researched this, but it doesn’t appear there is a simple way to search within citations.

BibTex4Word is an add-in for Microsoft Word that allows the citation of references from a BibTex database. BibTex4Word will insert a bibliography into your document using your choice formatting style.

It is intended for three types of user:

1. LateX users who need to use Microsoft Word. BibTex4Word allows you to use your existing BibTex database and favourite bibliography style.

2. Word users who can’t afford a commercial bibliography package but need to insert citations and bibliographies into their documents. Everything you need to manage references is available free.

3. Word users who have a commercial bibliography package but who don’t like it. BibTex4Word is lightweight, transparent and doesn’t mess up your documents. It is also free.

I’m completely married to Bibdesk as my reference manager, but the lack of Word integration has always caused headaches.  I’m very excited to have found an answer.

Announcing Times Open, a day-long event for developers interested in working with NYTimes.com as a news and information platform. When we started this Open blog, we also embarked on a mission to share more of what we do on the development side of The Times. So far, we’ve done that via conference presentations, open-source software, blog posts and (most recently and probably most importantly) our APIs. Times Open is the next logical step in our vision of NYTimes.com. We see our site as more than just a source of news and information: it’s a platform on which news and information become building blocks.

If only I had the time/money/bandwidth to get there – there are some awesome things to be built with the Gray Lady’s data.  Featuring my buddy Gabriel Dance.