While it seems like a good tree model for classifying the internet (see below), I think that it'd be best if the term "authority" was not used inside the model. That term has connotations that in addition to being misunderstood will likely be misused, especially by some of the not so savory media types.

  No offense, but I view the attempts to diagram the relationships on the internet with some amusement. The internet is and has been for at least a decade and a half much more complicated than any simple representation in 2D or 3d or any human visualization space can ever show; and anyone who attempts to simplify it in that fashion is showing their naivety.

  Even before that relationships between people in any social setting larger than a few dozen were more complicated than any but a few could comprehend, and that but dimly. The internet has raised the complications of relationships between people by many orders of magnitude, and put it out of reach of our current social science's theories.

  It's one of the major core faults of most professional business models - but don't take my word for that, do your own research.

  Yeah, I don't use the "professional" lingo. But what's been happening for the last couple decades should be obvious to anyone who lived thru the times before that. To put it simply, the technological phenomenon of instant global communications has scrambled all the 'old' models of human behavior (Victorian etc), much as, but to a hugely greater degree than the printing press did.

  That might be a good thing, if the generations currently growing up with that technology use it wisely. We'll see.

  GSVEMR

  PR personnel, as well (who in this modern day and age might as well be considered spammers for all the real net worth of the crap they publish; perhaps we should call them "Corporate or Government Sanctioned Spammers" )

  Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is an "authority network"? To someone who grew up before the internet, it sounds like a modern buzzword replacement for "propaganda".

  Is the authority network peer reviewed, and is the peer review audited and signed by people in the particular field that the topic of the submissions or postings are concerned with? How do you validate your authorities? Given the ongoing fight wrt wikipedia, it would seem to me that you are facing a pretty difficult problem.

  In addition, what exactly is a "topic model"? What, exactly, do you model? Do you model the topics people actually post (hard for a startup), the topics people may post, or the topics that the average aggregate of a study of the posters on the internet post?

  The number of topics on the internet are almost literally infinite, and from a modeling standpoint, indefinite. How do you differentiate between the ones that are worth viewing and those that aren't, based on subject matter?

  Just some questions...

the problem with twitter is that it makes you realize that there's one hell of a lot of village idiots in the village.

  I sense a new sig meme approaching, force five... wait, wait, it's redundant! Cancel the alert!

  There is a huge difference between following the commentary of people you know and trust, and following the commentary of the average idiot or claimant to fame or expertise. It's just like it was before the internet, the only difference now is that it's faster and easier.

  I only follow Twits if I have exchanged correspondence with them outside of any of the social networking systems.

GSVEMR

  I had one get past the gmail filters about a month ago. To their credit it was actually something related to a lot of the things I deal with in my gmail accounts on a regular basis, ie virus removal.

  It didn't get past my home filters.

  Yes, I check my spam folders on a regular basis. I haven't had one false positive for spam wrt gmail in over two years, and I send/rcv often hundreds of emails a day.

  Google is doing it right. When I see the crap that gets past Yahoo, hotmail, etc on customers computers constantly, I direct them to gmail. /put your favorite conspiracy theory here/
.
.
.
.
.
. ... ob whitespace

  Quit letting your wife shop for you. She's obviously trying to kill you.

Counter COUNTER point:

---Counter Point:
- while the bike might not make any noise, the zombies will hear me wheezing after a short ride.

  Then get in shape, already. My dad is 72, retired from a desk job, and he still rides marathons. I regularly ride more than a hundred miles a week and he can *still* out ride me. What's your excuse again? ;-)

- zombies can go places a bike cannot

  Really? Where?

- bikes still need tires, a way to inflate them, and spare chains. Nothing like having your chain slip out on a busy road, let alone if zombies were chasing you.

  Then keep your bike in good shape, and carry a good toolkit (the one I have strapped to my pannier has nearly everything I need for maintenance on the road and weighs about 11 lbs including two spare tubes, a spare chain, links and the tools to fix it)

- fast zombies could catch me if I had to flee uphill.

  Not if you're in shape, they can't. A bike ridden by anyone in good shape can easily beat someone on foot even on uphill slopes, and zombies are slow.

- zombies won't wait for me to adjust the gear so it won't slip-out.

  Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. My main bike is more than five years old and I can still slam thru any of the gears on an uphill slope in less than a second. Oh, and knowing how to shift gears properly helps as well.

- bikes cannot carry much, besides me.

  I have regularly put over a hundred lbs of groceries, tools, or what-have-you on my bike, and that's not even considering the backpack or the bike trailer.

  No offense, but if you do ride on a regular basis, you have a lot to learn.

So you see US laws are setup that you can legally kill anyone on a bicycle,

  Actually, pedestrians - which includes anyone on a bike - have the legal right of way just about anywhere in the US. Whether or not that means that drivers actually watch for them more is up to debate, but over the last twenty years I've sat in as a witness on seven court cases where a negligent driver who hit a bicyclist on the street was convicted of manslaughter in addition to the lesser charges; in three of those cases, the vehicle driver was crowding the shoulder.

  Now maybe there are places where the pedestrian laws don't include bicycles; I'd be interested in hearing about them, because I certainly am not ever going to live there.

GSVEMR

  I'll agree with that. I live next to a thru-road that a lot of ranchers towing large horse trailers and RVs drive past, and I can't decide which is worse, the stink, or the noise. Diesel trucks have gotten a lot better over the last ten years or so but they still emit a lot worse exhaust compounds, and are a lot noisier at 2 AM than the average gas engine driven car or truck.

  And yes, these are modern diesel trucks. Very few of the ranchers that live out past here have anything older than a 2005 or so. They put a lot of miles and stress on those vehicles and it's cheaper for them to upgrade often than it is to do constant repairs.

GSVEMR

  That, 'old man', is the best comment I've seen on this subject yet. +5 Instructive, on both points ;-)

  If one is that confused at that point, it might be a good idea to slow down, take a deep breath, and ensure that one isn't going to unintentionally create any unwanted child processes by running an unfamiliar command as the root user.

He actually only needs to know how to unhook a bra because it's currently holding a bundle of Cat6 together. ... and he would need to find the old Unix sysadmin who put it there in the first place.

There should be an X-prize for a solar cell production facility that operates only on sunlight.

  All of them do. Storage is a different problem, and there are a lot of different solutions to that.

  You might have said "a solar cell production facility that can be built in microgravity by automated systems using the minimum of resources that have been boosted to orbit" or some such - which would be a great Xprize idea, actually ;-)

Hawking is a physicist not an engineer or a biologist, and it shows. (He's also not very good at metaphysics, since he seems sometimes unable to understand that physics can't ultimately answer "why" questions. On the other hand, I'm not much good at thermodynamics, but at least I don't pontificate about black holes.)

  At a guess, I would say that Hawking probably understands more about any of those subjects than nearly everyone else on the planet. Just because the specialty he is famous for is deep level physics does not mean that he is narrow-minded or ill-informed about other subjects. I have watched several of his video lectures over the years and the breadth of his knowledge about science in general is astonishing.

  Some people, however, are likely to misunderstand your post because, quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet, or how likely we would be to exterminate ourselves by destroying our atmosphere if we even diverted significant resources to putting lots of stuff outside it.

  Colonizing another planet requires a lot of energy, sure. So does flying an 100+ ton aircraft across the Pacific without refueling, carrying several hundred people, and a hundred years ago nobody even knew how to *do* that.

  The last part of your sentence is WTF nonsense. Our atmospheric problems nowadays mostly stem from misusing resources to put too much 'stuff' into it.

  vague handwaving about nonexistent technologies, nonexistent methods of energy generation, and nonexistent materials, the ability to create any of which in great enough quantities would imply a civilisation that really wouldn't need to waste them on a colonial experiment

  Do you use a cellphone? You do realize that the technologies that make it work did not exist even forty years ago? Satellite weather? Do you realize that we had no idea how to harness the energy needed to launch those satellites into geosynch orbit until well after WWII? I won't even comment on materials science, it's obvious that you have no idea what you are talking about there.

  As to colonial experiments; I'd bet that, if we could ask them, a lot of the people who boarded primitive sailing ships back when the north american continent was being colonized would probably agree with you; but they went anyway. Some of them were probably pretty astonished that we could transport people across the Atlantic ocean in a few months. Amazing!

  (BTW, the energy we utilize in transportation has undergone at least three major jumps in magnitude in the last hundred years or so. Certainly nobody even fifty years ago could have imagined how we'd be moving millions of people around the globe every day within time periods of less than a day, not including layovers)

  I apologize for the sarcasm, but people who say "we can't do that because it involves advances in engineering or energy utilization" don't get a lot of my sympathy.