50 days left

Chapter 7: FilmTrust

Finally some progress. I cracked the thick-shelled nut of the recommended ratings this afternoon. I don't know why it was giving me problems because it works exactly like i expected it to. I can show that as the user diverges from the average tastes, the recommended rating stays close to their opinions (much closer than the average). I also have tweaked the implementation to correspond with what I discovered, and it seems to be working quite well.

I wrote all of this up to essentially complete the section on recommended ratings. That is 5 pages, 1500 words. Total for the chapter now is 8 pages, 2200 words. Previous research and the section on ranked reviews still to go.

The ranked reviews section can be started since there is a firm justification for it. However, this is where I think I need to conduct the user study. I started assembling questions for that today, and also emailed Ben to set up an appointment to talk about it.

It's a great relief to have figured this all out.

Chapter 8: TrustMail

Yes. There was another error. My code completed, I wrote the new code to do the last calculation. It was backwards. So yesterday I started it running again, forwards, but I was not checking a case that I should have and that DRASTICALLY increased the run time such that it didn't finish and wouldn't have finished for a long time. So again I had to stop it, and it's running now. All this for 3 stupid numbers that don't actually matter that much in the first place.

Chapter 6: Continuous Trust

It's slowed enough that I'm putting the title next to the chapter number again. I got an email from the guys at Stanford and another trust implementation guy I emailed. Haven't worked up the EigenTrust code based on this new email, but it makes sense (I think). The other algorithm should be coming soon and I expect in a form I can use. That will be great.