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IBM is building HAL

17 Jun 2010 -

IBM has spent the last three years building a fantastic question-answering machine called Watson. Much like Deep Blue beat the grandmasters of chess, Watson will attempt at beating the best players of Jeopardy!, a much harder task as it involves complex language parsing and spans enormous knowledge areas. New York Times has a fascinating article on how they approached the challenge and just how far they’ve come:

Ferrucci showed me how Watson handled this sample “Jeopardy!” clue: “He was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974.” In the first pass, the algorithms came up with “Nixon.” To evaluate whether “Nixon” was the best response, Watson performed a clever trick: it inserted the answer into the original phrase — “Nixon was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974” — and then ran it as a new search, to see if it also produced results that supported “Nixon” as the right answer. (It did. The new search returned the result “Ford pardoned Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974,” a phrasing so similar to the original clue that it helped make “Nixon” the top-ranked solution.)

Donating to Corporations

10 Jun 2010 -

CommonDreams.org asks where the Haiti money is going:

Of the U.S. money, 40 cents on every dollar goes to the U.S. military, according to sources gathered from USAID and the U.N. and compiled by the Associated Press. Less than one cent goes to the Haitian government. U.S. government contracts, paid for by citizen’s tax dollars, are being given out to private U.S. corporations for post-earthquake work including damage assessments, security guards, military “mission support,” shipping of supplies, clean-up, construction, long-term planning, “monitoring food security,” and much more.

That does not sound very humanitarian

Facebook Is Not Your Friend

15 May 2010 -

The Guardian’s Andrew Brown on Facebook and privacy:

This may seem like a bad way to treat customers, but the whole point about Facebook is that users aren’t customers. Anyone who supposes that Facebook’s users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren’t customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not.

Interview with Mick Jagger

15 May 2010 -

Mick Jagger on living as a musician:

But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

Understand The Web

7 May 2010 -

Ben Ward reminds us what it’s all about:

Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else.

Brilliant!

We're All Bastards

7 May 2010 -

New Scientist on palaeogeneticist Svante Pääbo’s discovery:

Any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome, Pääbo’s team estimates. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. A small amount of that genetic mingling survives in “non-Africans” today: Neanderthals didn’t live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no trace of Neanderthal DNA.

Remarkable!

The Oldest Living Life

16 Apr 2010 -

Photographer Rachel Sussman has been taking photographs of some of the oldest life on earth and the results are some remarkable images. Wired has more images

Designing for iPad

14 Apr 2010 -

A great rundown of some of the challenges designing iPad apps by informationarchitects.jp

Water covered insects

31 Mar 2010 -

Fantastic photographs of insects covered in dew.

International Space Station Expansion

23 Mar 2010 -

Flash animation by USA Today showing how much has been added to the ISS since 1998

Cloudhead

19 Mar 2010 -

David Pell, internet addict and early adopter by his own admission, on how the realtime, social web is effecting us:

And the stream [of updates] creates information equality where it shouldn’t exist. I post happy birthday messages to people I hardly know and then forget Norman’s altogether. When my brain was in charge, it used to make these kinds of value judgments. The stream doesn’t. It just runs and runs.

It must be valuable

1 Mar 2010 -

Mindblowing talk by Jesse Schell from Carnegie Mellon University on the future of games and how they will be everywhere. Immensely packed with insights, it is a must watch.

The Google Algorithm

1 Mar 2010 -

Wired’s Steven Levy on Google search:

Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group. There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,” says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. “Essentially,” he says, “all the queries are involved in some test.” In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you’re a lab rat.

Homo empathicus

20 Feb 2010 -

New Scientist interview with Jeremy Rifkin on a new model for society based the fact that the human species is social to the core.

A lot of business people would say that you can’t be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution–it’s an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that’s what is happening now.

Shock full of thought provoking remarks, it’s well worth a read

Brute force

17 Feb 2010 -

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. – Alan Kay

Buzz launch wasn’t flawed, Google’s intentions are

17 Feb 2010 -

Kontra:

Google is a $170 billion company. It employs thousands of engineers and developers. It tests, tests, tests, and tests more. In fact, its “designers” once unable to pick a shade of blue tested 41 variations of it. It’s ludicrous to think that the Buzz fiasco was simply a result of under-testing.

World's largest cell

4 Feb 2010 -

New Scientist has a fascinating story about the little-known Syringammina fragilissima, a single-celled species that can reach an astonishing 10cm across! Outside the usual definition of a cell, Syringammina contains several nuclei and though speculative, it might feed by farming bacteria inside itself. It really is amazing how life adapts and evolves.

Whatever form or strategy, surviving works.

It's the execution, not the idea

22 Jan 2010 -

Joel Johnson from Gizmodo nails it:

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry.

A lot of people believe that the idea is what matters to succeed; that the rest is just details. I say ideas are easy. It’s making them real that takes real effort and a whole lot of time.

As Steve Jobs says, real artists ship!

Does it work

21 Jan 2010 -

‘‘Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,’’ says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. ‘‘People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.’’

The World of Things would be a better place if everyone kept that in mind.

Software Changes

13 Jan 2010 -

Guy English has written an insightful article on how software use changes. Just like the internet was democratised in the nineties, the same is happening to software – particularly on the iPhone:

“Apps” is fun. It’s fun to say, it sounds unthreatening, it’s a word sufficiently abbreviated that it takes on a life of its own without dragging to the forefront of peoples minds the more sterile and technical sounding “application”. Apps are not Applications – they are their own things. They are smaller. They are more fun. Apps are treats atop your technological sundae.

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