Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Friday 23 August 2013

Tweeting from beyond the grave with LivesOn

A colleague at Queen Mary is doing some work analysing tweets and sent round a memo to the department that I'm in asking for people (who tweet regularly and have more than 700 tweets already in the bag) to help test the system. Since I have been tweeting for just over 5 years and have sent out thousands of the little messages I thought I could help, and also that it might be fun.

It seems pretty intuitive, to me at least, that given that I am constantly and consistently 'me' that my tweets must have a 'me-ish' quality that could probably be identified, captured in an algorithm and then exploited to produce further me-ish tweets. I think that's the aim.

The idea behind the LivesOn dot Org (website now something unrelated as of 2017) service is that, once you're kicking up the daisies, the system can still send tweets that sound like you - presumably as some sort of comfort to those left behind. You have to teach the system (with feedback) and it learns your likes, tastes and syntax.

Mine's been running for a few hours, at the beta site, and produced 9 tweets each of which are not that much like me (I think) but which have used words and phrases that I have previously used. It's a bit like taking three word excerpts from my previous tweets and recombining them to produce something fairly gibberish.

Fortunately the tweets come prepackaged with my name as a hashtag and the LivesOn handle, so hopefully it's reasonably clear that they're not from me directly - though I've only actually posted one 'live' on my timeline. Also, I'm not dead!

Here are 8 of the 9 tweets so far...




No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).