Public Domain

Most artwork is copyright protected, which means you can't use it without permission and that usually means paying for the right to use it -- on your website, on a coffee mug, whatever.

But, if you look you can find public domain artwork. Public domain just means you can use the works in your own work (website, coffee mug art, etc).

Here's some public domain playing card artwork.

Page Rank

Google's Page Rank explained.

Random email

A press release from Northwestern University

Rational or Random? Model Shows How People Send E-Mail


In the last 10 years, e-mail has gone from a novelty to a necessity. What was once a pastime is now an essential form of communication, with many people opening their inboxes to find dozens of e-mails waiting.

But how do people respond to those e-mails? Do they act rationally, responding to the most important first, making sure the process is efficient? Or do they send e-mails randomly, when they are at their computers or when they have time, without any regard to efficiency?

These are questions that Luís Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, and his collaborators set out to answer. After studying e-mails sent and received from more than 3,000 e-mail accounts at a European university during a three-month period, they created a mathematical model that shows people send e-mail randomly, but in cycles.

The findings are published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Amaral said he was inspired to create such an e-mail model after a recent paper said that the rational model -- where people respond to e-mails in the most efficient way -- was the correct model.

“I was not convinced, since I don’t do it in a rational way,” he said. But if a random model was correct, there would be a typical interval between e-mails -- which, when Amaral looked at the data, wasn’t the case. He wondered if it was possible for people to send e-mail randomly but still have non-random intervals where they didn’t send e-mail.

The answer, it turned out, was fairly simple: People don’t send e-mails when they are sleeping.

“During the day, you send e-mails, but then you go home, or go away for the weekend, and you don’t send e-mails,” he said. “These data were from a few years ago, and in Europe, this was especially the case, since many people didn’t have the Internet at home.”

The result was a model in which people send e-mails at random, but the probability of them sending e-mails during a given period depended on what that period was. If it was in the middle of the night, the probability was near zero. If it was during the weekend, the probability was much lower than during weekdays.

“The model explains all the data, and it shows that people have cycles in which they use certain services,” Amaral says. “You can then make predictions based on those cycles to know when people are going to request a service. Even though it’s random, there are peaks in demand that don’t look random.”

Other businesses and services could use such a model.

“If you know how people access that service, you can better plan how much capacity you need, when you need it, and how to best engineer your system to supply that capacity,” Amaral said. “It also teaches you how to interact with the system -- a good time to send an e-mail is just about the time that the person has arrived at work.”

Using email

A press release from University of Chicago

How to improve email communication
Developing strategies to mimic face-to-face interactions
In a new article in the current issue of American Journal of Sociology authors Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian (both of the University of Chicago) study how we use emoticons, subject lines, and signatures to define how we want to be interpreted in email. The authors find that “a shift to email interaction requires a new set of interactional skills to be developed.”

Unlike face-to-face conversations, email interactions leave out tone of voice, body-language and context, which can lead to misunderstandings. While these authors agree that there are difficulties, they believe that no way of communicating is actually superior to another.

Menchik and Tian argue that face-to-face and internet-based contexts each require a set of distinct interaction strategies. “People can cultivate ways of communicating in online contexts that are equally as effective as those used offline,” they write. “The degree to which … individuals develop unique conventions in the medium will determine their ability to communicate effectively.”

The research focuses on “the case of a well-known scientific organization that decided to replace occasional meetings of a research panel with ongoing email interaction.” The panel encountered numerous problems conversing via email. But the researchers identified several ways people were able to overcome these barriers.

“People innovate in response to the challenges of a new context for the communication of essential elements of language,” the authors write.

Capital letters, use of quotations, emoticons, exclamation points, punctuation, bullet points, style and even color help the sender communicate the meaning of a word or message. For example, “I feel betrayed” reads differently from “I FEEL SO BETRAYED!! ;)” where the capital letters and winking smiley face indicate sarcasm.

Participants also maintained their conversational flow by cutting and pasting from previous emails and using subject lines that referenced previous discussions. In email listservs these devices help address comments to a certain individual and help the discussion to stay on topic.

Signatures, disclaimers and other information about the person’s state of mind were also commonly used when writing an email. The authors found that subjects felt more comfortable communicating once they knew a little about each other, like the information included in a signature. They also found that indicating the frame of mind as a disclaimer, (i.e. “I wrote this at 5AM” or “on a blackberry while on vacation”) helped prevent the email from being misinterpreted.

Developers have picked up on these cues with the advent of linguistic monitors such as Eudora’s MoodWatch feature. This program tries to indicate to the sender that their email might be considered inflammatory, and to the receiver that they are about to receive such an email.

Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian, “Putting Social Context into Text: The Semiotics of E-mail Interaction” American Journal of Sociology 114: 2.

Links

One of the things search engines look at when they're evaluating a web page is links -- links into that page from other sites.

So it can pay off to have multiple blogs and and few independent sites to create a round robin of self-referential links.

To help boost the search engine interest in Diet and Sugar I created a page on a website I have called 400 Blogs. Registering that URL costs $8 a year. Of course I need hosting services also, which costs about 6 times that but the hosting service cost can be spread across other sites.

I called the new page My Diet Page and it's just a page of links to the Diet and Sugar blog and other related websites. It's a small thing, but every little thing helps.