via "He drinks espresso from an oversize mug and scrolls through e-mailed reports from financial analysts, searching restlessly for interesting arguments, anecdotes and illustrations. “It’s from the subtleties that you start to see the trends,” he sometimes tells his staff.""During the course of an average 16-hour day, Weisenthal writes 15 posts, ranging from charts with a few lines of explanatory text to several hundred words of closely reasoned analysis. He manages nearly a dozen reporters, demanding and redirecting story ideas. He fiddles incessantly with the look and contents of the site. And all the while he holds a running conversation with the roughly 19,000 people who follow his Twitter alter ego, the Stalwart. He spars, jokes, asks and answers questions, advertises his work and, in the spirit of our time, reports on his meals, his whereabouts and whatever else is on his mind.""Some of what he writes is air and sugar. Some of it is wrong or incomplete or misleading. But he delivers jolts of sharp, original insight often enough to hold the attention of a high-powered audience that includes economists like The Times columnist Paul Krugman and Wall Street heavies like the hedge-fund manager Douglas Kass and the bond investor Jeff Gundlach.""Weisenthal reproduced a Google search showing a slew of articles describing the stock market as “headline-driven,” meaning that prices were responding to the latest news. Then he showed a chart he created illustrating the close relationship between movements in stock prices and a basic economic indicator.""Wall Street analysts produce similar insights about what moves markets and then go home to much fancier apartments. Weisenthal briefly tasted what his life could have been like when he was a junior analyst at an investment firm, but he found the work stifling, with little room for experimentation and a too-small audience. He prefers the shabbier course he’s on now.""The tweet-driven life is a good fit for Weisenthal, who says he gave up online poker because he kept getting bored and opening other browser windows. Also, he loves an argument — not to hurt anyone, just for exercise.""He sat in front of his four computer screens, the two on the right streaming information from Bloomberg, the one on the left devoted to Twitter and one in the middle for browsing and writing. ""Food is another of his passions. He was raised vegetarian and became a vegan in college, at one point eating nothing but brown rice for 10 days. Not long after he moved to New York, he adopted a “paleo” diet, eating mostly meat and berries. Now he is obsessed with authentic Chinese food.""It is an odd fact that Weisenthal, so focused on speed, gets most of his economic data from his Bloomberg terminal at the same time as anyone else.""But Weisenthal is often — perhaps more often than anyone else — the first person to describe new data on Twitter. And almost as quickly, he repeats the thought, with a new headline, on Business Insider. When the government reported that only 120,000 jobs were created in March, well below expectations, he quickly rewrote the draft of his tweet:"Weisenthal managed to post a complete sentence before one of his main rivals, a blogger whose handle is ZeroHedge, tweeted just this: “120k.”

It also looks pretty silly in retrospect. The creation of 120,000 new jobs was not a disaster by any reasonable definition. Other media outlets, some working almost as quickly as Weisenthal, chose far more modest words.""

“DISASTER: MARCH JOBS REPORT MISSES EXPECTATIONS AT 120K. (Analysts expected +205K)”"But retrospect is not really the relevant measuring stick. Investing is a binary activity, and its practitioners are speed junkies. A New Jersey company, Hibernia Atlantic, is spending $300 million to run a new cable across the Atlantic Ocean so that information can travel 5.2 milliseconds faster between New York and London.""When Weisenthal typed “DISASTER,” what he meant was simply this: bad, down, sell.""Writing about the markets is like playing fantasy football; it’s a simulacrum of Wall Street. Weisenthal’s money is not at stake; investors aren’t paying him.

Weisenthal embraces this freedom. He will make the same prediction repeatedly, crowing when he’s right and shrugging it off when he isn’t.""When she really needs his attention, she said she sends him a tweet."

"Automated Argument Extraction"

via https://twitter.com/#!/MJ_Coren/status/197049192038936576 "How far into the book did you get before your mind was changed?

Not a facetious question. I’m serious. The Communist Manifesto is 80 pages long. Certainly long enough to make an impact.

It has never taken me beyond a hundred pages to be persuaded. Sure, there are times when the pages after page 100 help me pile on, give me more depth and understanding. But a hundred (and usually fifty) is enough to get under my skin.

On the other hand, a tweet has never once changed my mind about anything."

Stella Heras and others

via references from Logics of Conversation to 2000 work: Bras, Le Draoulec & Vieu, 2 papers at French conferences

"• Digging by Debating
Principal Investigators: Colin Allen and Katy Börner, Indiana University, Bloomington, NEH; Andrew Ravenscroft, University of East London, Chris Reed, University of Dundee, and David Bourget, University of London, AHRC/ESRC/JISC.
Description: A project to develop and implement a multi-scale workbench, called "InterDebates", with the goal of digging into data provided by hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of digitized books, bibliographic databases of journal articles, and comprehensive reference works written by experts. The team’s hypotheses are: that detailed and identifiable arguments drive many aspects of research in the sciences and the humanities; that argumentative structures can be extracted from large datasets using a mixture of automated and social computing techniques; and, that the availability of such analyses will enable innovative interdisciplinary research, and may also play a role in supporting better-informed critical debates among students and the general public."

"ynow, this could be turned into a technique in CSCW design for
understanding stakeholder perspectives
"-Mike Twidale

These guys sounded an awful lot like their books.

"the concept of “engineering” is socially constructed.""Of the 31 citations in the paper:

6 are self-references (Koen citing himself)
6 are history/travel/science TV shows or the websites of those shows
5 are Wikipedia entries
5 are other online encyclopedias and dictionaries
…and arguments like this.

The moderator reaches down and picks up a broken piece of the pipe and stays in a truly astounded voice: “This is a 4500 year old sewerage bath water collection pot chard.” And then somewhat later in a voice over, “…showing the extraordinary skills in engineering and planning.” On this evidence alone, surely we should admit there were engineers in ancient India.

Maybe there were engineers in ancient India. Maybe not. We can discuss the criteria used for determining whether an ancient work should be counted as engineering. But I don’t think “television announcer said so” counts as a valid criterion, regardless of how truly astonished their voice was when they said it.

Other evidence admitted:

The History Channel documentary was titled “Engineering an Empire: Egypt.”
Dr. Kent Weeks (in the above documentary) uses the word “engineering” to describe the work of the ancient Egyptians.
Dr. Zahi Hawass (also in the same documentary) says the egyptians were “the pepole who invented engineering.”
Dr. Hawass has expressed this sentiment in “numerous documentaries produced by a wide variety of organizations.”
A Wikipedia article claims that “Engineering has been an aspect of life since the beginnings of human existence.”"

"Discourse structure

A methodology for motivating a set of coherence relations

My PhD work (Knott, 1996) looked at the question of how to decide in a principled way on a set of coherence relations to use in analysing and generating text. Although the general idea of coherence relations is widely accepted in computational treatments of discourse structure, there is considerable disagreement amongst researchers as to the nature of relations themselves: how many are needed, how they should be defined, and what exactly they model. No two researchers use the same set of relations, and new relations are constantly being created---the resulting proliferation makes for a great deal of confusion. In my thesis I propose a methodology for determining a standard, well-motivated set of relations. The methodology is founded on a conception of relations as modelling cognitive constructs, used by readers and writers when they process text. I argue that evidence for such psychological constructs can be sought in a study of the linguistic resources for signalling relations in surface text, and in particular in a study of the set of connective cue phrases in a language (Knott and Dale, 1992). On the basis of this argument, a three-stage method for motivating relations is proposed (Knott and Dale, 1996; Knott, 1993b). First, a very large corpus of cue phrases is gathered from naturally-occurring texts, using a simple pre-theoretical test. Second, this corpus is organised into a taxonomy of synonyms and hyponyms, using a second pre-theoretical test to determine the substitutability of one phrase by another in a range of contexts. The taxonomy motivates a feature-theoretic conception of relations, whereby cue phrases signal combinations of features of coherence relations, rather than whole relations (Knott, 93a). The final stage in determining relation definitions is to use the taxonomy to define a set of independent features, representing orthogonal dimensions of variation within the set of cue phrases (Knott and Mellish, 96).
Interdisciplinary studies of cue phrases and relations

The feature-theoretic conception of cue phrases and relations developed in my thesis has served as the basis for subsequent research in several areas. One group of studies examines the cross-linguistic validity of the proposed set of features. Studies have been carried out on English and Dutch (Knott and Sanders, 96) English and German (Stede, 94), and French (Rossari and Jayez, 98). The feature-based conception of cue phrases and relations has also found application in computational treatments of discourse structure and lexical semantics. The conception meshes well with emerging accounts of discourse structure in terms of lexicalised tree-adjoining grammars (Cristea and Webber, 97; Webber and Joshi, 98; Webber, Knott and Joshi, 99; Webber et al, 99), and has also formed the basis for an analysis of subordinating conjunctions in a lexical knowledge base (Litkowski, 98). Another group of studies focus on the issue of cue phrase ambiguity. The feature-based account of cue phrases sheds interesting light on the question of whether very general cue phrases such as ``and'' and ``but'' should be thought of as polysemous or underspecified, from a Gricean standpoint (Oberlander and Knott, 96). It has also proved useful in interpreting the results of psychological studies in which cue phrases are used as an experimental window on subjects' discourse processing strategies. A recent study (Stevenson et al, in preparation) notes the problems posed by ambiguous cue phrases and reports new experiments using maximally specific phrases. Another psychological study finds independent evidence for the feature-based account of relations from cluster analyses of disagreements between text analysts (Knott and Sanders, 96). A final strand of research emerging from the study of cue phrases is corpus-based. The large collection of cue phrases gathered during the study has been used in studies of the distribution of cue phrases in large corpora (Marcu, 97; Cristea and Webber, 97)."