Saturday, September 05, 2009
Google storage isn't so free any more ...
Friday, September 04, 2009
Baseball parent communication: is it getting easier?
1910 (2)
- Letter
- Handout (person present)
- Home phone (both parents)
- Work phone (father)
- Home phone (father) + answering machine
- Home phone (mother) + answering machine
- Work phone (mother) + answering machine
- Home email (father)
- Home email (mother)
- Work email (father)
- Work email (mother)
- Mobile phone (m/f) + answering machine
- Web page
- Blog with feed
- Facebook page
- Google group or similar
- Google Voice
- SMS
- MMS
- Instant Messaging (multiple variants)
- Other email (m/f)
- and many more ...
Yeah, right.
Writing as a kid baseball coach, I'm guessing 1950 was probably the heyday of parental communication. Back then phone trees more or less worked and families were forced to more or less live in the same space. This year it was damned near impossible -- perhaps due to the profusion of communication channels, the increasingly failure of email (spam, message loss, account turnover) the disruption of employment changes (phone changes, lost mobile phone, etc), the failure of the feed reader, and the virus infestations that have disabled many XP-based home computers.
We tried to use a blog (so web access + feed) supplemented with email and, when pressed, a phone call (inevitably to a voice mail that seemed to be rarely checked). It didn't really work, but I"m not sure what would.
When it comes to communication, we're in full throttle tech churn. There's no common, standard communication channel that reaches a diverse group of people. We had one parent on Twitter, a few that checked their email somewhat reliably, perhaps 1-2 who would visit the web page, and several that were fairly unreachable.
I'm betting that we've reached an apotheosis of communication of communication dysfunction. Communication is important, and, sooner or later, people are going to figure out that we need fewer, better, options.
Alas, I suspect we won't get back to the highpoint of the 1950s for decades to come ...
Armstrong admits moon landing faked!!
Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked | Aug 31, 2009
Apollo 11 mission commander and famed astronaut Neil Armstrong shocked reporters at a press conference Monday, announcing he had been convinced that his historic first step on the moon was part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the United States government...The best part is that apparently some people read this Onion spoof as fact. A delicious hit. (Sorry for the late post on this, I was on holiday when it was published. Just glad I got to read it.)
Monday, August 31, 2009
Obamacare. Wait. It's not over.
It's been a bad August for anyone worried about civilization. Despair is easy.
Don't despair.
This isn't new, and Obama is both lucky and good. It's not just him, look at his team. They're extremely formidable, and they've been in this game a while. They know the nation they're dealing with.
It's easy to underestimate Obama. He's identified with a tribe (black America) culturally associated with defeat. Unlike both Bill Clinton, GWB and most every GOP politician he doesn't rant and rave.
And yet, he tends to win.
For those who fear the worst, I suggest John Harwood's NYT article and John Scalzi's recent summary post.
Remember, any remotely sane American has to think that reform with enemies like Beck and the Birthers must be good.
Obama has been falling back, and the enemy has been charging forward. They think they see a soft center -- but they've forgotten about the hills on both sides ...
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The evolution of comment spam - from parasite to symbiote?
Comment spam used to be pretty clear. It would be unrelated to the post topic, and contained a link to a splog or other more or less fraudulent web page. These were easy to automatically block, so spammers dropped the links. Second generation comment spam aimed for search engine "optimization" through reputation enhancing back links to the author URL. Second generation comment spam was made of strings like "thanks for the the great post"
These were harder to machine reject, but easy for human reviewers to spot.
Now I'm seeing third generation comment spam. These have no links, and they're actually related to the original post. Sometimes they're almost non-sequiturs, but mostly they read like a fourth grade student answering a homework assignment. The grammar suggests either a very young or non-english writer. They do link back to splogs.
So how's the new species of comment spam being authored? It could be AI based -- maybe calling Wolfram Alpha or Wikipedia to retrieve relevant strings. It's probably human though -- outsourced work being done by low paid labor churning out comments at high speed.
This third generation spam isn't trivial to reject. Sometimes I have to think about it.
We know where this is going. Fourth generation spam comments will actually make sense. They'll be legitimate comments.
Fifth Generation spam comments will be very high quality. Skynet will appreciate them.
Update 9/4/09: Another (funny) take on the theme. Also, see the comment by one of my favorite writers.
“Back in the net’s prehistory it was mostly universities online, and every September a new cohort of students would come online and make all those noob mistakes. Then this commercial service full of noobs called AOL interconnected with the net and all its users came online at once, faster than the net could absorb them, and they called it Perpetual September.”...
... “AOL is the origin of intelligence?” She laughed, and he couldn’t tell if she thought he was funny or stupid. He wished she would act more like he remembered people acting. Her body-language was no more readable than her facial expressions.
“Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgement about whether their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from which they could learn. From there came the first machine-intelligence algorithms, and then my kind...
Friday, August 28, 2009
OS X 10.6 - do you feel lucky punk? Do you?
Monday, August 24, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Yeah, Cheney/Bush used the orange alerts to scare up votes
The Google Voice story: It was Apple, not AT&T
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Conde Nast's latest spam ploy - Axciom's Delivery.net
Acxiom Digital"Permission-based" my ass.... Acxiom Digital helps the world's leading marketers create and deliver permission-based email marketing campaigns. Acxiom Digital acts as an agent for our clients in delivering email communications to their customers. Our clients own the data on their customers, including email addresses, which are gathered via permission-based processes at their website or other online and offline sources...
The check engine light in the mobile net era
- This should really be called the check emission control system light. In most vehicles it's triggered by a sensor in the emission side of the engine.
- The most common cause is a loose gas cap. Presumably the loss of suction causes venting of gas into the emission systems.
- Rarely it can be something bad with the engine, so the official word is always to get it checked out. If you play the odds though ...
- Depending on the car it can cost $150 or more to read off the error code (my next car needs to have a diagnostic USB port on the dash as well as 4 110 V outlets - it's insane these are so hard to read).
- In some cars the light won't ever go off until the dealer checks it out. In others, if the problem is corrected the light will eventually go off. The trick is that this may take 15-20 restarts (the number of restarts seems to be more important than time, presumably due to how the sensor works.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
One possible strategic error in the Obama reform
I wonder why his team chose to tie insurance reform and access to any kind of changes to medicare. Politically, would it have been wiser to have kept the two topics completely separate? The problems of medicare are huge, but perhaps should have been addressed in year 2 or 3 of the administration.
We'll get something, but it will be another patch. We'll be back in 10 years.
Alas, a large portion of America seems to suffer from Stockholm syndrome. They prefer familiar misery to the terrors of hope.
Friday, August 14, 2009
The CDC's vaccine data mess - please help them out
You know, the kind of reporting that's useful, for, say managing swine flu vaccine programs.
It's not being distributed in some UMLS data format, or a tab delimited UTF-8 file, or a Microsoft Acccess table or XML or even Microsoft Excel or ... or ... or even a 4 column RTF or .DOC table.
It's distributed as an HTML page with inline comments and footnotes or as a PDF document.
Anyone wanting to actually implement this has to cut and paste into something like Excel, move the inline annotations around, get rid of the footnotes, represent color and font changes as attributes, and so on.
This isn't rocket science guys. The management of this sort of data set was well understood in the 1960s. Forget about all those wonderful visions of just-in-time clinical decision support, this is really simple, basic, stuff.
American Express credit card information theft
Same old, same old.
I'm astounded that web services expect me to give them my Google authentication credentials. They're conning us when they claim mere encryption will secure the data.
Incidentally, this emphasizes the stupidity of the "secret security question" fail (see US Bank security shield makes me scream). Not only do they make it easier to hack into user data, they do nothing to protect us from the commonplace insider thefts and other, old, tactics.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Galaxies like stars in the sky
Download the images linked here, and open them in a robust image viewer. Browse at will. Visit galaxies as they were billions of years ago. Squint very hard, and image you're seeing something squinting up from one of the billions of worlds in the billions of stars ...
ESO - ESO 39/08 - A Pool of Galaxies - Associated ImageBe sure to try the zoom tool.... The new image released by ESO combines data obtained with the VIMOS instrument in the U- and R-bands, as well as data obtained in the B-band with the Wide-Field Imager (WFI) attached to the 2.2 m MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla, in the framework of the GABODS survey.
The newly released U-band image – the result of 40 hours of staring at the same region of the sky and just made ready by the GOODS team – is the deepest image ever taken from the ground in this wavelength domain. At these depths, the sky is almost completely covered by galaxies, each one, like our own galaxy, the Milky Way, home of hundreds of billions of stars.
Galaxies were detected that are a billion times fainter than the unaided eye can see and over a range of colours not directly observable by the eye. This deep image has been essential to the discovery of a large number of new galaxies that are so far away that they are seen as they were when the Universe was only 2 billion years old....