Math Carnivalia: Present, Future and Past

The 15th Carnival of Mathematics is now up at John Kemeny's A Mispelt Bog, and it looks like a good one. I especially like how he has taken the time to provide some background on the posted subjects above and beyond what was in the post entries themselves. It definitely sets a high bar for whatever poor schlemiel is going to be hosting the next one.

Which reminds me, the 16th Carnival of Mathematics will be hosted by yours truly right here in two weeks, on September 7th. The theme for the next fortnight's edition will be:

How has the mathematical mindset shaped your self-actualization in a post-postmodern world?

I don't know about you, but I could write a few thousand words on that without even thinking... Hey, wait, come back! I'm only joking! The Carnival of Mathematics is not a "themed" carnival beyond the mission statement that applies to all editions. The short version, from the Blog Carnival entry for the CoM is as follows:

Everything math-related goes in here: proofs, explanations of basic concepts, puzzles, writings about math education, mathematical anecdotes, refutations of bad math, applications of math, reviews of popular math... Note that sufficiently mathematized portions of other disciplines, especially physics and computer science, are acceptable.

For a slightly longer version, check out Alon Levy's description at the CoM homepage. And for anyone who's stumbled upon this page without having encountered the notion of a blog carnival before, more information can be found at Wikipedia.

So, start sending those submissions my way. You can use the Blog Carnival submission form, or you can email your links to me at kurt (at) learningcomputation (dot) com. Please include "CoM" or "Math Carnival" or the like in your subject line so I don't mistake your message for spam.

Now, I'd like to make a couple of extra requests of you for the upcoming carnival, beyond what may have been done in the past:

First, note that Alon has added a bit of extra instruction for this edition on the submission form:

It's perfectly acceptable to nominate entries from other blogs. The limit of three posts per individual means that a single blogger may not have more than three posts in an edition; it does not mean you may not nominate many more posts from many blogs or bloggers.

Several people in the past have made the observation that there is a lot of interesting math blogging going on that for one reason or another never gets submitted. I think it was this little exchange with Noah Snyder at the Secret Blogging Seminar that finally convinced Alon to codify this into the carnival description. So if you come across an example of someone else's math blogging that you think deserves a wider audience, by all means submit it to the carnival. Let me know whether or not you've already mentioned it to the author, because I'd like to give them advance notice before linking to them.

Second, when you submit a link to me, please include a paragraph or so describing what the linked post is about. I'll certainly read through all of the submitted posts, but I know from reading past carnivals that there are some posts for which there is just no way I could do them justice in my own words. Heck, a couple of them might as well have been Greek to me...

Finally, there has been some discussion around the past few editions of the carnival concerning the mix of "math ed" posts and "math research" (for lack of a better term) posts, for example here, here and here. So as a little experiment, I'll be grouping the submissions by these categories. However, I know from past carnivals that some posts don't fit cleanly into one category or another, so let me know how you think your submissions should be grouped. If I receive enough suitable entries, I'll also create a "comp sci" category. The first few carnivals had several submissions dealing with algorithms and computational geometry, but comp sci has been AWOL lately. I'd really like to see that change.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to return to perusing the 15th edition ...

Link this, SocialRank

[Update: I thought, since I mentioned Snap Shots in this entry, that I should just turn this feature on in this blog instead of sending you elsewhere. Done. Unfortunately, it turns out not to be a magic bullet, as you'll see if you scroll over the mathbloggers.com link. However, the cached Snap Shots image at The Unapologetic Mathematician that I refer to below still worked the last time I checked.]

I've noticed in the past couple of days, trackbacks appearing on many math blogs for a site named mathbloggers.com. Well neat, I thought, a new math blog. Unfortunately, that site is password protected, so clicking on that link is not going to get you very far. However, the site is evidently not shielded from search engines and the like, and if you roll over the trackback link on a blog that has the Snap Shots feature enabled, you can see that it appears to be just a link aggregator site. (For example, as of this writing you can use this post at The Unapologetic Mathematician and scroll to near the bottom of the comments.) There is one other thing, though, and that is the phrase "powered by SocialRank" on the trackback link.

What is SocialRank? On the Snap Shots image I can make out the blurb, "SocialRank brings you the most popular stories that people are paying attention to right now." If I try Googling "socialrank", I find a great number of these aggregator sites on all variety of topics, and all apparently password protected. Well now, SocialRank isn't going to be bringing me much of anything if I can't get to any sites powered by it... Could this be some bizarre new kind of comment spam? Did someone figure out a new way to hack search engine rankings or something? I tried doing a whois lookup on some of the sites and found that they were registered to someone named Michael Reining at a company called MindValley.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. MindValley appears to be a "Web 2.0" type of company dealing in e-commerce and web marketing and the like, based in Kuala Lumpur. And, they have a blog. On it, they explain a little bit about SocialRank:

We develop breakthrough applications that have the power to be very disruptive. We are currently working on a project called SocialRank that will instantly be able to surface the top blog posts for 1,000 blogging communities online. To help us pull this off, we have hired one of the smartest mathematicians from the leading technical school in India and assembled an all start team of developers. The algorithm is nothing short of breathtaking because for the first time you will instantly be able to see 1) the top stories coming out of every blog community and 2) see which blogs are the hottest right now to see where the conversations are happening online.

So there you have it. I'm guessing that when they feel their product is ready for public consumption, the password protection will come off those sites.

Oh, and that mathematician, a fellow named Talat, has a blog entry with a math anecdote from his youth. Maybe we can get him to submit something to the Carnival of Mathematics :)