Comments for Rachel Shadoan Muses http://rachelshadoan.com Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:43:53 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ Comment on The sensemaking process and leverage points for analysts as identified through cognitive task analysis by aliciadudek http://rachelshadoan.com/2012/02/02/the-sensemaking-process-and-leverage-points-for-analyst-as-identified-through-cognitive-task-analysis/#comment-139 Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:43:53 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.com/?p=847#comment-139 Reblogged this on Thinking about the future & ethnography and commented:
A truly thought provoking post from Rachel Shadoan reviewing a paper on the sense making process. Definitely worth a read.

]]> Comment on The sensemaking process and leverage points for analysts as identified through cognitive task analysis by aliciadudek http://rachelshadoan.com/2012/02/02/the-sensemaking-process-and-leverage-points-for-analyst-as-identified-through-cognitive-task-analysis/#comment-138 Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:19:13 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.com/?p=847#comment-138 I agree with you that this approach mirrors how we work as ethnographer quite well. I believe in Academia it does stand up to peer scrutiny and the test of time rather nicely. I do however have to add that it is a total luxury in the time scales of so many iterations and summarizations. The demands of business requirements are often times not only harsh but border on ludicrous. Many times you only have a few days to gather preliminary information for a project that could have 1000′s of users affected and millions of dollars of decisions riding on it. In these cases the assumptions and presupposed hypothesis that a research builds upon from training and years of experience are not only needed but highly sought after. Furthermore it is often dissenting information or knowledge from unrelated fields that can help synthesize the schema or hypotheses. Sometimes even you know the answer you need or want and just spend your time finding the evidence.

]]> Comment on Seven Reasons OU Computer Science is Better than Hogwarts by Katie http://rachelshadoan.com/2011/12/08/seven-reasons-ou-computer-science-is-better-than-hogwarts/#comment-135 Sat, 10 Dec 2011 13:35:53 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/?p=837#comment-135 That is delightful

]]> Comment on What Ethnographers Do: Data Management by Bob Williams http://rachelshadoan.com/2010/07/03/what-ethnographers-do-data-management/#comment-132 Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:37:31 +0000 https://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/what-ethnographers-do-data-management/#comment-132 I’m not sure Google provides sufficient safeguards to protect subjects from harm, as I’ve noted their services are not encrypted. University-supplied blackberry mobiles in conjunction with encrypted PC’s is likely to provide a higher level of data protection.

]]> Comment on Great Idea: Genetic Algorithms for Recipes by Rachel Shadoan http://rachelshadoan.com/2010/03/31/great-idea-genetic-algorithms-for-recipes/#comment-130 Tue, 07 Dec 2010 06:15:08 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/great-idea-genetic-algorithms-for-recipes/#comment-130 Liver and onions would get a lot of hits, as would cherry and graham crackers, but liver and graham crackers would not, nor would onions and graham crackers. (I don’t know about cherries and onions–that would probably get a moderate number). The idea is that all of the ingredients have to go well with all of the other ingredients, hence the inclusion of each member of the power set of the recipe components in the fitness function. (Also, I can’t remember if I’ve updated this post, but you have to normalize the totals for the number of ingredients, lest you skew towards longer recipes)

So, if you have two recipes, one including liver, onions, and lima beans, and one including liver, onions, cherries, and graham crackers, you would expect the former to have a higher fitness since liver goes well with onions and with lima beans, and onions go well with lima beans.

On the other hand, I haven’t managed to implement this yet, so I don’t know! Maybe I will get a chance over the winter holidays.

Okay, so now that I gave you that example I actually ran the math on it, and it turns out that liver, onions, cherries, and graham crackers have a slightly higher fitness than liver, onions, and lima beans. Granted, I didn’t include cooking methods or the single-item members of the power set (I know, I’m lazy), but still… And I just ran the example again, including “cake” in the second recipe as per your suggestion, and it still beats out liver, onions, and lima beans (if only slightly). See the lazy version of the math here: Liver Examples

Well, fine. If I were going to cook liver, onions, cherries, and graham crackers together… I would crush the graham crackers up, coat the liver with them, fry the liver, then top the fried liver with a caramelized onion and cherry sauce.

Hmm. So you have definitely uncovered a flaw in the fitness function, though I think the core is still sound. All of the individual ingredients and cooking methods of a recipe should go together, in any combination. That part works. What doesn’t work is that there are apparently a lot of spam sites that artificially inflate the hit rate. This site for instance, counts as a hit for “liver cherry recipe”, but doesn’t actually provide a recipe using both liver or cherries. So, I need to figure out a way to search more intelligently, so that I get primarily good hits (ie, real recipes of blogs discussing recipes or food ideas.)

In the end, this little algorithm should mostly be providing inspiration and fun anyway. Also, I’m totally going to try to combine liver, onions, cherry, and graham cracker now.

]]> Comment on Great Idea: Genetic Algorithms for Recipes by barton http://rachelshadoan.com/2010/03/31/great-idea-genetic-algorithms-for-recipes/#comment-129 Tue, 07 Dec 2010 05:17:23 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/great-idea-genetic-algorithms-for-recipes/#comment-129 I’m a little sceptical about your rating system… liver and onions recipe may get a lot of hits, cherry and gram cracker cake might get a lot of hits, but I defy you to combine those…

Finding the right fitness function is going to be the hardest part of this exercise. I was thinking about creating a GA that would work on human ratings of mixes of spices cooked into a neutral base… I think that I could be confident of the quality of the fitness function, but it would be dog slow

when it comes right down to it I think that cooks doing fusion cooking are actually doing what we’re looking for.

]]> Comment on The Story of the Samosa by Rachel Shadoan http://rachelshadoan.com/2010/01/29/the-story-of-the-samosa/#comment-127 Sun, 28 Nov 2010 06:18:19 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/the-story-of-the-samosa/#comment-127 Thank you so much for the correction, Azita! I’ll fix the story the first chance I get. Would you be interested in helping me correct wikipedia, so the mistake doesn’t propagate?

]]> Comment on The Story of the Samosa by Azita http://rachelshadoan.com/2010/01/29/the-story-of-the-samosa/#comment-126 Fri, 26 Nov 2010 06:53:14 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/the-story-of-the-samosa/#comment-126 Dear Rachel
Before everything I have to excuse for my bad English .
I am Iranian and ” Simurgh ” is a myth in our ancient history . Your discribtion in this beautiful story about Simurgh actully is about ” Shir-daal ” that means ” lion-eagle ” . This is a comonly mistake that most of the people make ( also wikipedia ) . There are so many refernces that discribe the diferences between them in Farsi , our own language . I found these about Simurgh in English .

http://www.chnpress.com/news/?section=2&id=8044

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/world/mideast/mi-homa.htm

As you see ,shir-dal which you call it gryphon or hyppogryph , has eagle head and teeth that makes us to see it as a dog (although sometimes without wings ) In Persepolis you can see so many shir-daals . But Simorgh is compeletely a ” bird ” which has beautiful wings and long tail . It is so similar to phoenix . In our ancient religion and stories and poems Simorgh is very wise and is able to speak and even sometimes has a human face but with a bird body .
It is not hyppogriph or gryphon or …. It is just a very beautiful wise bird .
please search in google images for their names . Wikipedia has made wrong about it .

]]> Comment on Ethnography and the Bleedy Edge: Living in the Gray (Coping with Uncertainty) by Kate Saunderson http://rachelshadoan.com/2010/04/26/ethnography-and-the-bleedy-edge-living-in-the-gray-coping-with-uncertainty/#comment-124 Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:56:02 +0000 https://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/ethnography-and-the-bleedy-edge-living-in-the-gray-coping-with-uncertainty/#comment-124 I sit here with a cup of coffee (nearly tea) in my hand, and I know your words are wise. I just hope that in the red mist I remember them!!

Thanks again for being wise.

]]> Comment on Great Idea: Genetic Algorithms for Recipes by Rachel Shadoan http://rachelshadoan.com/2010/03/31/great-idea-genetic-algorithms-for-recipes/#comment-109 Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:43:44 +0000 http://rachelshadoan.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/great-idea-genetic-algorithms-for-recipes/#comment-109 Hi Guilherme!

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back with you. Been a pretty crazy semester. I will be happy to post a heads-up on your flickr when it’s done! But realistically that will be in the fall after I’ve finished the Master’s course I’m currently working on, which doesn’t leave me much time for coding. :( This is further complicated by the fact that the beautiful, beautiful generic GA that I wrote a couple of years ago was written for a school project and I was working up so close to the deadline that I didn’t get it commented.

From my perspective, you can both stir an apple (like making apple sauce, or even cutting it up and stir-frying it) and fry chocolate (Texas, I believe has pioneered deep-fried candy bars).

I’m actually really excited about the funny ones. I once made a savory tart with sweet potatoes, orange, vanilla, parmesan cheese, garlic, red chile flakes, paprika, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg…. It was the most confusing tart I have ever made. It smelled like I was trying to cook an entire meal, dessert included, in one dish. I suppose that any beginning cook is a genetic algorithm for recipe generation! This is just a fun way to formalize it.

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