Daniel Zhou 周晓丹 Mens sana in corpore sano

What I did last week:

• Developed the patch to "drupalorg" module that migrates the pivots_block from s.d.o to d.o
• Attended the SI502 GSI meeting, and prepared for the course
• Finished self-study Python
• Started to develop a Python app that crawls MITBBS (this might be used in SI708 and my online deliberation research
• Explored the possibility of attending the fbFunds program

What I'll do this week:

• Accelerate the process that applies the patch to "drupalorg" module
• Attend all the required GSI sessions

What I did in the last 2 weeks.

• Developed the "cosine similarity" algorithm for the pivots system.
• Finished the Regression II class.
• Finished the first round study of Stata/Mathematica software packages
• Read some books on Deliberative Democracy
• Worked on building China Green Party website, in hope to build an online community for future research.

What I will do in the coming week.

• Migrate the pivots system from S.D.O to D.O.
• Read more papers on Deliberative/Conversation research

We now have two more weeks of usage data on authenticated D.O. users from 7/28/2008 to 8/11/2008. The data shows a steady pattern of usage overtime. Please refer to the attachment for a brief report. We are now quite confident that the pivots block has certain values to users in terms of module recommendation.

Previously we computed the "related projects" by using the frequency of project co-mentions in discussions. For example, if the module Fivestar and CCK were mentioned together in 33 different discussion threads, whereas Fivestar and jRating in 10 threads, then we would think CCK was more relevant to Fivestar than jRating because it has more co-mentions.

However, that algorithm ignores the fact that some very popular modules like CCK simply have more chances to get mentioned, even if it's not that relevant in the context.

The pivots system was enabled on D.O. to all authenticated users on 2008-07-22. This analysis report is based on the data we collected from 2008-07-22 midnight to 2008-07-28 midnight (6 days in total). There were 10454 distinct user IDs from 14701 distinct IP addresses participating during this period.