Joakim Nygård Archive Linked About

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

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