Quick Bites: Email becomes a Dangerous Distraction

Just read this article citing a number of studies to the effect that email is a major productivity drain. Nothing surprising to me--a lot of us have learned the hard way that the only way to be productive is to not check email constantly.

But I am curious if anyone has made progress on tools that alert you to emails that do call for immediate attention. I'm personally a fan of attention bonds approaches, but I imagine that the machine learning folks have at least thought about this as a sort of inverse spam filtering problem.

Nice Selection of Machine Learning Papers

John Langford just posted a list of seven ICML '08 papers that he found interesting. I appreciate his taste in papers, and I particularly liked a paper on Learning Diverse Rankings with Multi-Armed Bandits that addresses learning a diverse ranking of documents based on users' clicking behavior. If you liked the Less is More work that Harr Chen and David Karger presented at SIGIR '06, then I recommend you check this one out.