If I were an alien entity observing the earth, and I wanted to test humanity to the breaking point, I’d come up with a scheme that required China, India, America, Canada, Australia and the rest of the world to come together to solve a huge problem with uncertain consequences that unfolds relatively slowly and requires painful action from everyone on a time scale of years.
A trans-galactic gambling scheme? An alien art form?
Cue twilight zone music.
Just one phrase in a wonder filled post on Google’s new Japanese speech recognition system …
…speech recognition systems are surprisingly similar across different languages…
I bet some Google researcher has a multi-axial plot of the speech recognition attributes of the languages they work with. That will be a great graphic one day soon.
The essay is required reading. How the hell does anyone learn to write Japanese? Yes, I know people do it, but, really, how?
Most of all, this essay is a small measure of what Google does, and why I swear allegiance to the House of Google (3 on Gordon’s scale of evil). These are gray days in America, but we will return …
Chromium Blog: Security in Depth: The Extension System
... To help protect against vulnerabilities in benign-but-buggy extensions, we employ the time-tested principles of least privilege and privilege separation...The original has wikipedia* links to relevant articles. These principles are broader than computer security. Think of them when you provide access to your Facebook information.
A classic example of the lazy journalism of false equivalency …
Edward Lotterman – Real World Economics – Pioneer Press (TwinCities.com)
… Unlike in most other industrialized nations, U.S. citizens remain divided on whether climate change is really occurring. Indeed, the proportion that is skeptical is growing rather than shrinking…
…This is not a lack of consensus, but rather a fundamental division that is not likely to be solved in the foreseeable future. For significant portions of both camps, it has become a matter of faith rather than reason…
When one camp is aligned with the overwhelming majority of the peer reviewed and respected scientific literature, and the other camp is not, this is not a “matter of faith rather than reason”.
One camp is on the side of reason, the other camp is faith-based.
This is, at best, a lazy invocation of the easy cliché. Most likely, it’s intellectual cowardice.
List price CD: $70The Amazon MP3 is less than half the cost of list price CD.
Amazon CD: $56
iTunes AAC (256 kpbs, AAC encoded*): $40
Amazon MP3 (256 kpbs, LAME encoded): $34.31 (why the 31 cents?)
Digital Domain - AT&T Takes the Fall for the iPhone’s Glitches - NYTimes.comWhy do I find this persuasive, even though one of the sources gets AT&T money?
... When I set about looking for independent data, however, to confirm the superior performance of Verizon’s network, I was astonished to discover that I had managed to get things exactly wrong. Despite the well-publicized problems in New York and San Francisco, AT&T seems to have the superior network nationwide.
And the iPhone itself may not be so great after all. Its design is contributing to performance problems.
Roger Entner, senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen, said the iPhone’s “air interface,” the electronics in the phone that connect it to the cell towers, had shortcomings that “affect both voice and data.” He said that in the eyes of the consumer, “the iPhone has the nimbus of infallibility, ergo, it’s AT&T’s fault.” AT&T does not publicly defend itself because it will not criticize Apple under any circumstances, he said. AT&T and Apple both declined to comment on Mr. Entner’s assessments.
Neither AT&T nor Verizon was willing to reveal its internal data on performance. But Global Wireless Solutions, one of the third-party services that run network tests for the major carriers, shared some of its current findings. The service dispatches drivers across the country with phones and laptops equipped with data cards. They have covered more than three million miles of roads this year, while running almost two million wireless data sessions and placing more than three million voice calls, said Paul Carter, the president.
The results place AT&T’s data network not just on top, but well ahead of everyone else. “AT&T’s data throughput is 40 to 50 percent higher than the competition, including Verizon,” Mr. Carter said. AT&T is a client and Verizon is not, he added.
In Holiday Crush, a Fatal Shootout in Times Sq. - NYTimes.com
... The video showed Mr. Martinez turning, the police said, but he moved out of camera range. Police officials, who did not immediately release the video, said it also showed the sergeant reaching for his weapon and raising it.
It also showed Sergeant Newsom, who has been on the force for 17 years, raising his left arm over his chest in hopes of protecting his heart. It is a defensive move rookies are taught in the Police Academy. Police officials were astonished that the sergeant, less than 15 feet from the stubby barrel of a semiautomatic weapon with no hope of taking cover, was cool-headed enough to remember to do so.--
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Mr. Martinez fired first, getting off two shots. Then his gun jammed.
Mr. Kelly said the sergeant fired four shots. All four hit Mr. Martinez: in the chest, below the neck and in the left arm; he also suffered a graze wound to the right arm...
Amazon.com: Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (9781605299563): Ray Kurzweil Ph.D., Terry Grossman M.D.: Books
According to futurist Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) and homeopathic medical doctor Grossman (The Baby Boomer's Guide to Living Forever), medicine is transforming into an information technology, which by its nature advances at an exponential rate..
I’ve interacted with three social network systems. Two get a lot of media attention, but the most interesting one is currently invisible. Here’s how they look to me in December 2009.
Facebook is currently useful, but worrisome. It's useful because it’s been a useful way for me to share family news that (very) close friends may enjoy seeing. Facebook is where I announce that my 12 yo scored a goal in a hockey game, and where my readers would understand that a goal is not always just a goal. Facebook is worrisome because their business model is currently based on exploiting the weakest members of a social graph, and then on selling information and marketing access to the entire graph. It’s remarkable how uninteresting Facebook’s ads are. That’s a bad sign, even thought it says something interesting about the limited predictive value of one's friendships.
Twitter would be more interesting if I had an archaic cell phone with unlimited text messaging, or if I had an interest in the domestic disturbances of celebrities. Twitter’s usage is on the same track as Friendster and MySpace. I don’t think it will last very much longer.
The most interesting social network I know of, however, is one that has very few members, no media coverage, no books, little documentation, no clear strategy, and mysterious privacy and revenue models. This is the Google Reader share and comment graph including the (currently) “like-based” discovery model.
Through the Google Reader (GR) “like” link I’ve identified about six English-language writers around the world who share an interest in topics I want to know about. When I find one who is sharing interesting items I don’t see or know about, I add them to my GR graph. They may choose to follow me or not – that’s not relevant to me. The value is that I can follow what they do.
I add one such meta-feed to my knowledge stream every few weeks. The stream volume does not increase much, because I can in turn drop direct reads of streams my experts cover. Given the uber-geekiness of the GR graph membership the quality of shared items is currently very high, but I don’t see why this approach won’t scale even in the event that the GR graph gets market attention.
The primary risk to this model, of course, is that Google will lose interest. I suspect, however, that this experiment will provide Google with interesting ways to explore and classify the world’s information stream – a mission very dear to their revenue model.
Google’s machine translation is improving every month – I’m looking for my first Chinese-language source. That will be interesting.
The GR graph means Google wins and I win. Maybe, if this increases the value of the world’s knowledge stream, we all win.
I like that model.
See also
I’ve finally given in to DeLong’s imprecations and added some Financial Times sources to my feeds. The FT sources ought to complement my much appreciated Guardian feeds.
I do get one feed from the Murdoch paper – the WSJ’s Health blog is actually pretty good. Otherwise, unlike Brad who seems unable to stay away, I ignore the WSJ.
Here’s the set I’m starting with, I’ll tweak it up and down over time.
So what will I drop? Probably some of the Economist’s feeds – that mag seems to be continuing its downward course. I expect Murdoch to buy it any time now.
PS. Google Reader's "Add to Folder" select menu doesn't scale. At least give it a scroll bar! As an interim measure I've deleted all my "Google Reader" tags. The Reader team really messed up the folder/tag metaphor.
Update 12/5/09: Ok, that was a Fail. The FT allows only a small number of free article views a month and the subscription fees I was shown when registering was about $200 a year - for electronic access alone. That was bad, but I might have considered it -- except a feed link takes me to a view that's incompatible with a mobile client. Delete all.
Comment by Augustine 11/29/09
... I don't trust predictions that are based on extrapolations from current rates of growth. These predictions are, and will be, correct, but only for limited time frames. Extend them out too far and they become absurd. Moore's Law works fine, and will continue to work fine for a while I’m sure, but basing predictions on ever accelerating computing power is about as useful as imagining accelerating a given mass to the speed of light.There's more to the post, but I'll stick with these two questions. The "limits to exponential growth" argument is even stronger than stated here since, in fact, Moore's Law itself has already failed. We have some more doublings to go, but each one is taking longer than the last.
The greater problem, however, with the argument lies in the fact that we are at best imperfect predictors ... You cannot accurately infer a future singularity when you cannot know what will change the game before it happens, if you get my drift...
I thought Melvyn was pushing a bit hard during In Our Time’s program on The Siege of Münster, but by the end I could see how much he had to cover. This 16th century nightmare is a cross between the “Killing Fields” and Jim Jones Kool-Aid in Guyana with the “Tailor King”, Jan (Bockelson) van Leyden, in the starring role as a brutal theocratic polygamist*.
In the early 20th century van Leyden was considered a precursor to Hitler, and although IOT’s academic rejected the comparison I find it more persuasive. There are even some similarities in the reaction. The Munster horror made the Anabaptists radical pacifists and made some common cause between European Catholics and Protestants. The Holocaust made post-war Germany a peaceful state, and led to the creation of the European Union.
van Leyden introduced polygamy into his besieged cult. I wonder if memories of Munster played a role in the early 19th century response to Joseph Smith, then mayor of Nauvoo, and his polygamous theocracy.
It’s horrifically fascinating, and overdue for a cinematic interpretation.
* There are curious attempts to sanitize van Leyden, including, at this time, the wikipedia article I link to. I’d go with the trio of IOT’s academic historians over the Wikipedia article on this one; he was a Monster in a monstrous time.
Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident - Wikipedia
... Unidentified persons allegedly hacked a server used by the Climatic Research Unit, posting online copies of e-mails and documents that they found.[5] The incident is being investigated by Norfolk police[18] and involved the theft of more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 other documents,[9] consisting of 160 MB of data in total.[12] ...For my own record, here's my take:
