PageRank is already no more what it used to be
on
Google TrustRank
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The google-watch page on PageRank already mentions how pagerank, over the years, has switched from an actual score of popularity (number of links to a page), to a trustrank-like index, based on the reputability of the links to a page. This makes it much harder for the newbie to get a good pagerank, and empowers way too much the owners of old web sites and corporate pages.
Even though it contains way too much rant for my taste, google watch is worth a full read by all/.ers.
Back in 1993, with a dataglove (video recognition could not be used at the time), I spent some time assessing the conditions by which one could use this type of interaction. We came up with three recommendations for gesture-based interaction vocabularies:
Creation of an active zone to distinguish gestures addressed to the system from other gestures.
Recognition of dynamic gestures to ensure smooth command input.
Use of hand tension at the start of gestural commands to structure the interaction.
This last one is key: tense gestures (just as tension in the voice) carry the fact you really want something done, and thus disambiguates your gestures.
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
D. Adams, 1979 The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. chapter 12, first paragraph.
My commute time is a good 45 minutes, but 30 minutes of them are used in solid and pleasurable work: every morning, I download all my mail, and I use the quiet, uninterrupted time in the subway to prepare my working day in the earnest on my laptop. Somedays, it's the most productive part of my day, being free from all sorts of coworkers sollicitations.
Sure, this recipe might be a bit difficult to apply in the US, which miss adequate mass transit systems and appropriate ways to use its public funds at the advantage of rationale and durable development.
Perhaps pointing out the productivity gains in the use of commute time should help some lobby in favor of the development of better means of transportation...
Because the marginal cost for providing internet access is null.
Enter a coffee shop and ask (politely) for a glass of water or to use the bathroom, or to sit for an hour while you're waiting for someone: no one will charge you, as the cost for providing this service is absorbed in the fixed costs of the store.
Side note: I don't think the television metaphor is a good one: you have to keep producing TV programs to entertain TV viewers, hence TV broadcast can't be free, unless it's crap meant to zombie you into consuming habits under the disguise of entertaining you.
first of all, the use of such a device is at worst rude, in no way can it cause harm to anyone. I'm surprised to see such hysteric reactions in this forum, whereas less begnin impolite behaviors such as jaywalking (which *is* dangerous and illegal), would not be considered worth a conversation. I doubt very much the use of such a device can be punished by any sort of law, as it infringes only on the elementary rules of politeness.
Next, turning a TV off in a public space is akin to other civilized and innocuous public initiatives one may conduct, such as opening or closing a window in a bus or train to get less or more air, turning off the heater if it gets too hot or turning off the lights after leaving unused public restrooms: if you do it responsibly, you are to be thanked for it, if you do it without care for the rest of the attendance or without their agreement, you are just plain rude and deserve the insults that will probably come (specially turning off the lights in occupied restrooms).
Now, the epidermic reactions to be observed here, the blindness so many display at the nuisance a TV turned on in a public space can produce, tells a lot about the conditioning that has been going on to make commercial TV the attention grabber it has become, responsible for attention deficit disorders, loss of contact with reality and the general numbness we see in the public spaces of the western world.
In europe, we have a few non-commercial channels(I think about arte in France and Germany, for instance). These channels have of course smaller audiences than the commercial ones: their job is not to grab passive attention, but to inform or entertain their audience. Guess how are these channels mostly used: people turn to the channel when they've learned that there is something of potential interest to them, then turn it off when the program is finished. This is the responsible and normal use of a device when it is meant to entertain or inform you.
Now see what happens when watching commercial TV, specially when in a tired or vulnerable state of mind: perpetual zapping without the strength to turn the damn thing off. This just shows you who pays for this thing to stay on and who benefits from it: not you, but the advertisers. We need advertisement and that's fine. But at least we need to be conscious that a TV turned on in a public space is not there for your personal pleasure, but for the advertiser's need to let you known about their products.
Hence the need to shut it off politely when it's on and nobody objects to it. I'm gonna buy one of these.
Not intending to do self promotion, I'll point first to a competitor's product rather than my own: Hivegroup's Honey Comb relies on the treemap technique from University of Maryland. This is far cooler idea than those lame heatmaps.
If you want a free try on your own data, you may also try my own version of the same stuff: ILOG Discovery.
First, if ever Apple gets sued, they'll just have to increase their retail price by 20 euros or so to cover the extra cost, like Sony, Thomson and other MP3 player vendors already do. Given that they already are the most expensive on the marketplace, it shouldn't affect too much their market share.
Second, from a pure moral standpoint, when you pay $300 or more for an MP3 player, don't you find it legitimate that a small portion (8%?) of this cost actually goes to those who will provide the actual *content* that you will enjoy, and not simply the machinery used to get it ?
SACEM (and ASCAP in the US) does not represent the music industry, but the actual composers, writers and performers who create the music. They are union-like organizations in charge of:
gathering claims from anyone who intends to make a living out of their art. If you write a song, even if you have no record label/producer, you can register your song for a small fee and they will track how it performs and pay you what you're due. Usually if you have a publisher, the record company will do it for you, for all countries where your records are sold.
collecting copyright fees over some national boundaries (from radio, record companies, discotheques, registered DJs, advertisers, pretty much anybody who uses music or performing arts for business purposes). Most notably, they audit record sales to ensure record companies don't screw up their artists (how do you imagine artists could trust the record company about their sales numbers otherwise ?) BTW. In France, if you organize a dance party with your own records and ask your attendance a participation fee (for food, room rental and...music), the SACEM will (often) come by and collect the artist's fair share, as this use is not covered by your copyright license (it is considered public performance if your attendance pays a fee, no matter how small is this fee).
assessing the rights due to each author, based on statistics from radio play lists, polls, sales numbers... and distributing the collected fees to registered authors and performers based on those statistics and the amount they have collected.
occasionally, if they can't find you anymore, hire a genealogist to find your closest heirs to pay the dues: it did happen when the movie "Titanic" came out: Cameron being a perfectionist, he wanted in the movie the actual music played on board at the time. It was by some deeply forgotten french composer who died only 30 years before the movie was shot. Hence the SACEM got a reasonable chunk of money to give to the heirs and had to look for them...
Third the real purpose of this post:
It's a fact that the music sales have gone down by 25% over the last few years. And people don't listen less music. They copy instead of buying. Talented musicians may want to make a decent living, have a family life, do what they do best for a living: play music, and possibly for a career time: 40 years. They're no business sharks like Prince or Madonna, so they favor keeping a low profile. Most Jazz musicians are in this situation indeed. It's way harder than making a programming career you know.
Assuming this guy deserves to lead this kind life, just like Irakis deserve to be free and benefit from the oil revenue of their land.
What solution do you propose for artists who want to make a (small) living of their art ?
Go the American, brute-force way:
RIAA lobbies Congress, convinces Intel and Microsoft to put a cop in your computer, DCMIA does not even care about your privacy rights ? And end up with massive resistance and a likely mess that's 10 times worse: Intel and microsoft enforce the cop in your computer, but it's only used for their usage monitoring and artists don't get a cent out of it, Irak falls into civil war for 30 years, Ahmed Chalabi outperforms CIA trained-Bin Laden by blowing up Washington DC with the missing WMD he miraculously found...
If you really want to be objective about these issues try to look beyond the smoke and mirrors.
At least, this statement is not incorrect...
A recent study by Arctic researchers showed that the polar ice cap isn't just shrinking in terms of land mass [bbc.co.uk], it's shrinking in terms of depth too [bbc.co.uk], by 4cm a year.
All that water's going somewhere, and that somewhere is the oceans. Global sea levels are rising, and you only have to look at the situation in Tuvalu in the Pacific [bbc.co.uk] or Venice, Italy [veniceinperil.org] to see that the threat of rising tides isn't a myth.
Contrary to popular belief, most serious oceanographers believe that a global warming would rather lower the sea level than raising it: The most influential water tanks that could have an impact on sea level are the antartic and groenland continental ice caps. If those melted then sea level would rise, and vice versa. It happens that those regions have very little precipitations because clouds very seldom go up to these latitudes. Because the area is (and will stay) still very cold, the melting in fact barely compensates the accumulation of water on these continental ice caps. Hence, the ice there is not renewing itself a lot. A global warming would increase the evaporation at the equator, push the clouds at higher latitudes, and augment the precipitations on top of the continental areas. Hence water would keep accumulating on the land, therefore lowering the global sea level. QED.
Now, this is not to say that human-induced climate change is not dangerous and that we should not take drastic measures to limit the various activities (including farting;-) that could have an impact on climate. It's just that if you read very informed litterature, you'll find that no one can in their earnest say whether or not human activities will or will not have a drastic impact on our planet's ecosystem.
The best seems to try to stay as informed as possible and not let false Cassandras monopolize the discussion.
Ben Shneiderman has, in my opinion, voiced the best why there's only limited future to speech based UI: We can't talk and think at the same time.
In other words, the act of forming and uttering words is mobilizing some of our brain's planning and reasoning resources, which are thus not available for making sense of the data that's presented to us or for planning the next steps in a complex task.
So, voice may be fine for some basic tasks, but not for what a computer is most interesting for: augmenting our thought process. See a more elaborated discussion on the topic.
Another argument against speech-based input is that the speech signal is intrinsically ambiguous. Making sense of "put that there" requires more than the best speech recognition software we'll ever be able to built !
More on the ambiguous chapter: In french, there are more than a thousand syntactically valid interpretations of a very simple sentence like: "J'ai mal au pied", and 2 fully ambiguous semantic interpretations: "j'ai mal au pied" and "j'ai mal aux pieds" ("my foot hurts" or "my feet hurt"). Some examples of those curious but perfectly acceptable interpretations: "Geai male, au pied!" (male bird, at my feet!), "J'aima l'haut pied" (I loved the high foot), "J'ai mal, Oh, pie et..." (It hurts, oh, bird, and...) and so forth.
I'm sure native english can come up with similar strings of possible interpreations of a simple basic sentence...
This project is a rework of the infamous Hole in Space project, dating back to 1980.
This project consisted in linking together by audio and video two public spaces, without telling the passerby anything about the installation. At some point, bystanders would realize the link was bidirectional and started impromptu conversations between the two locations.
By a funny twist of things, this project inspired much of the 1980's and early 90's work carried at Xerox PARC and the University of Toronto Telepresence project.
These in turns nurtured a number of startups, such as PictureTel/Polycom, still a leader in videoconferencing technology.
Notice that by the time, the technology was fully analog, and for having used it in the early 90's, I can say the link quality was far better than most current IP-based videoconferencing is today.
If it was really about math, you might not qualify: to have one half of the population below 100, you would need that 100 be the median IQ, not the mean IQ...
Besides, the IQ of people using email is (still) most likely above average, as they tend to be more active, educated and keen to learn new things... I'd say easily above 110, probably even higher for the older users segment, who had to put up extra efforts to learn the thing,
as they hadn't had training or friends to drive them in.
If there is a solution to spam, it would have to go through a balance of:
user education: even an IQ below 100 can learn things.
technical changes, to force the traceability of emails. SMTP is becoming socially dangerous.
careful legislation
No matter what your IQ is, one day someone will send you an unsollicited but useful email. To have had this email, you will have had to withstand thousands of unwanted pieces of news. Hasta la vista !
The "moving pieces on the board" task is a good example that "sentient AIs" can not be build inside a computer as we know it alone. This sort of tasks require more than just computation: they require interaction. That interactive process cannot be modeled by Turing machines was known by Turing himself, according to the following paper:
Well, my cell phone holds about 20 numbers that I haven't called for a year but which I'm sure I could need to call soon: a replacement cleaning person when mine goes on vacation, the nearby hotel when I can't host friends who come by to visit, an old buddy working in a competing firm whom I want to hire when I can have the budget... If these guys change phone number, they may lose some business.
In my european country, the same laws were passed a few months ago, and after some initial hassle by the phone companies who tried to make it impossibly complex to keep the same phone number, it now goes quite well:
Consumer associations, which are quite good lobbyists here, threatened to sue or publish bad reports, to which phone companies answered promptly by making the service much easier to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The google-watch page on PageRank already mentions how pagerank, over the years, has switched from an actual score of popularity (number of links to a page), to a trustrank-like index, based on the reputability of the links to a page. This makes it much harder for the newbie to get a good pagerank, and empowers way too much the owners of old web sites and corporate pages.
/.ers.
Even though it contains way too much rant for my taste, google watch is worth a full read by all
This last one is key: tense gestures (just as tension in the voice) carry the fact you really want something done, and thus disambiguates your gestures.
More at: Charade: remote control of objects using free hand gestures
D. Adams, 1979 The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. chapter 12, first paragraph.
See also: Charade: remote control of objects using free hand gestures (1993)
My commute time is a good 45 minutes, but 30 minutes of them are used in solid and pleasurable work: every morning, I download all my mail, and I use the quiet, uninterrupted time in the subway to prepare my working day in the earnest on my laptop. Somedays, it's the most productive part of my day, being free from all sorts of coworkers sollicitations.
Sure, this recipe might be a bit difficult to apply in the US, which miss adequate mass transit systems and appropriate ways to use its public funds at the advantage of rationale and durable development.
Perhaps pointing out the productivity gains in the use of commute time should help some lobby in favor of the development of better means of transportation...
Because the marginal cost for providing internet access is null.
Enter a coffee shop and ask (politely) for a glass of water or to use the bathroom, or to sit for an hour while you're waiting for someone: no one will charge you, as the cost for providing this service is absorbed in the fixed costs of the store.
Side note: I don't think the television metaphor is a good one: you have to keep producing TV programs to entertain TV viewers, hence TV broadcast can't be free, unless it's crap meant to zombie you into consuming habits under the disguise of entertaining you.
first of all, the use of such a device is at worst rude, in no way can it cause harm to anyone. I'm surprised to see such hysteric reactions in this forum, whereas less begnin impolite behaviors such as jaywalking (which *is* dangerous and illegal), would not be considered worth a conversation. I doubt very much the use of such a device can be punished by any sort of law, as it infringes only on the elementary rules of politeness.
Next, turning a TV off in a public space is akin to other civilized and innocuous public initiatives one may conduct, such as opening or closing a window in a bus or train to get less or more air, turning off the heater if it gets too hot or turning off the lights after leaving unused public restrooms: if you do it responsibly, you are to be thanked for it, if you do it without care for the rest of the attendance or without their agreement, you are just plain rude and deserve the insults that will probably come (specially turning off the lights in occupied restrooms).
Now, the epidermic reactions to be observed here, the blindness so many display at the nuisance a TV turned on in a public space can produce, tells a lot about the conditioning that has been going on to make commercial TV the attention grabber it has become, responsible for attention deficit disorders, loss of contact with reality and the general numbness we see in the public spaces of the western world.
In europe, we have a few non-commercial channels(I think about arte in France and Germany, for instance). These channels have of course smaller audiences than the commercial ones: their job is not to grab passive attention, but to inform or entertain their audience. Guess how are these channels mostly used: people turn to the channel when they've learned that there is something of potential interest to them, then turn it off when the program is finished. This is the responsible and normal use of a device when it is meant to entertain or inform you.
Now see what happens when watching commercial TV, specially when in a tired or vulnerable state of mind: perpetual zapping without the strength to turn the damn thing off. This just shows you who pays for this thing to stay on and who benefits from it: not you, but the advertisers. We need advertisement and that's fine. But at least we need to be conscious that a TV turned on in a public space is not there for your personal pleasure, but for the advertiser's need to let you known about their products.
Hence the need to shut it off politely when it's on and nobody objects to it. I'm gonna buy one of these.
Not intending to do self promotion, I'll point first to a competitor's product rather than my own:
Hivegroup's Honey Comb relies on the treemap technique from University of Maryland. This is far cooler idea than those lame heatmaps.
If you want a free try on your own data, you may also try my own version of the same stuff: ILOG Discovery.
Second, from a pure moral standpoint, when you pay $300 or more for an MP3 player, don't you find it legitimate that a small portion (8%?) of this cost actually goes to those who will provide the actual *content* that you will enjoy, and not simply the machinery used to get it ?
SACEM (and ASCAP in the US) does not represent the music industry, but the actual composers, writers and performers who create the music. They are union-like organizations in charge of:
Third the real purpose of this post:
It's a fact that the music sales have gone down by 25% over the last few years. And people don't listen less music. They copy instead of buying. Talented musicians may want to make a decent living, have a family life, do what they do best for a living: play music, and possibly for a career time: 40 years. They're no business sharks like Prince or Madonna, so they favor keeping a low profile. Most Jazz musicians are in this situation indeed. It's way harder than making a programming career you know.
Assuming this guy deserves to lead this kind life, just like Irakis deserve to be free and benefit from the oil revenue of their land.
What solution do you propose for artists who want to make a (small) living of their art ?
Go the American, brute-force way:
RIAA lobbies Congress, convinces Intel and Microsoft to put a cop in your computer,
DCMIA does not even care about your privacy rights ? And end up with massive resistance and a likely mess that's 10 times worse: Intel and microsoft enforce the cop in your computer, but it's only used for their usage monitoring and artists don't get a cent out of it, Irak falls into civil war for 30 years, Ahmed Chalabi outperforms CIA trained-Bin Laden by blowing up Washington DC with the missing WMD he miraculously found...
Here is where to file a complaint at google. Fast and easy to do, don't hesitate...
If you really want to be objective about these issues try to look beyond the smoke and mirrors.
;-) that could have an impact on climate. It's just that if you read very informed litterature, you'll find that no one can in their earnest say whether or not human activities will or will not have a drastic impact on our planet's ecosystem.
At least, this statement is not incorrect...
A recent study by Arctic researchers showed that the polar ice cap isn't just shrinking in terms of land mass [bbc.co.uk], it's shrinking in terms of depth too [bbc.co.uk], by 4cm a year.
All that water's going somewhere, and that somewhere is the oceans. Global sea levels are rising, and you only have to look at the situation in Tuvalu in the Pacific [bbc.co.uk] or Venice, Italy [veniceinperil.org] to see that the threat of rising tides isn't a myth.
Elementary physics will tell you that the artic ocean ice caps could fully melt without raising the sea level by one centimeter: Whether the artic ocean is in a solid or liquid state does not change the underwater volume (remember Archimedes ?). This is quite fortunate, because otherwise the sea level would drastically change between the northern hemisphere winter and summer, precluding much of the seaside activity many of us enjoy sometimes. The problem with the Venice lagoon has to do with centuries of mishandling the water flows in the local area and nothing to do with global climate changes.
Contrary to popular belief, most serious oceanographers believe that a global warming would rather lower the sea level than raising it: The most influential water tanks that could have an impact on sea level are the antartic and groenland continental ice caps. If those melted then sea level would rise, and vice versa. It happens that those regions have very little precipitations because clouds very seldom go up to these latitudes. Because the area is (and will stay) still very cold, the melting in fact barely compensates the accumulation of water on these continental ice caps. Hence, the ice there is not renewing itself a lot. A global warming would increase the evaporation at the equator, push the clouds at higher latitudes, and augment the precipitations on top of the continental areas. Hence water would keep accumulating on the land, therefore lowering the global sea level. QED.
Now, this is not to say that human-induced climate change is not dangerous and that we should not take drastic measures to limit the various activities (including farting
The best seems to try to stay as informed as possible and not let false Cassandras monopolize the discussion.
Ben Shneiderman has, in my opinion, voiced the best why there's only limited future to speech based UI:
We can't talk and think at the same time.
In other words, the act of forming and uttering words is mobilizing some of our brain's planning and reasoning resources, which are thus not available for making sense of the data that's presented to us or for planning the next steps in a complex task.
So, voice may be fine for some basic tasks, but not for what a computer is most interesting for: augmenting our thought process. See a more elaborated discussion on the topic.
Another argument against speech-based input is that the speech signal is intrinsically ambiguous. Making sense of "put that there" requires more than the best speech recognition software we'll ever be able to built !
More on the ambiguous chapter: In french, there are more than a thousand syntactically valid interpretations of a very simple sentence like: "J'ai mal au pied", and 2 fully ambiguous semantic interpretations: "j'ai mal au pied" and "j'ai mal aux pieds" ("my foot hurts" or "my feet hurt"). Some examples of those curious but perfectly acceptable interpretations: "Geai male, au pied!" (male bird, at my feet!), "J'aima l'haut pied" (I loved the high foot), "J'ai mal, Oh, pie et..." (It hurts, oh, bird, and...) and so forth.
I'm sure native english can come up with similar strings of possible interpreations of a simple basic sentence...
This project is a rework of the infamous Hole in Space project, dating back to 1980.
This project consisted in linking together by audio and video two public spaces, without telling the passerby anything about the installation. At some point, bystanders would realize the link was bidirectional and started impromptu conversations between the two locations.
By a funny twist of things, this project inspired much of the 1980's and early 90's work carried at Xerox PARC and the University of Toronto Telepresence project.
These in turns nurtured a number of startups, such as PictureTel/Polycom, still a leader in videoconferencing technology.
Notice that by the time, the technology was fully analog, and for having used it in the early 90's, I can say the link quality was far better than most current IP-based videoconferencing is today.
Besides, the IQ of people using email is (still) most likely above average, as they tend to be more active, educated and keen to learn new things... I'd say easily above 110, probably even higher for the older users segment, who had to put up extra efforts to learn the thing, as they hadn't had training or friends to drive them in.
If there is a solution to spam, it would have to go through a balance of:
- user education: even an IQ below 100 can learn things.
- technical changes, to force the traceability of emails. SMTP is becoming socially dangerous.
- careful legislation
No matter what your IQ is, one day someone will send you an unsollicited but useful email. To have had this email, you will have had to withstand thousands of unwanted pieces of news. Hasta la vista !The "moving pieces on the board" task is a good example that "sentient AIs" can not be build inside a computer as we know it alone. This sort of tasks require more than just computation: they require interaction. That interactive process cannot be modeled by Turing machines was known by Turing himself, according to the following paper:
You may want to look at Peter Wegner's argument about Why Interaction Is More Powerful Than Algorithms, Communications of the ACM., May 1997 . (also available in the ACM digital library.)
Well, my cell phone holds about 20 numbers that I haven't called for a year but which I'm sure I could need to call soon: a replacement cleaning person when mine goes on vacation, the nearby hotel when I can't host friends who come by to visit, an old buddy working in a competing firm whom I want to hire when I can have the budget...
If these guys change phone number, they may lose some business.
In my european country, the same laws were passed a few months ago, and after some initial hassle by the phone companies who tried to make it impossibly complex to keep the same phone number, it now goes quite well:
Consumer associations, which are quite good lobbyists here, threatened to sue or publish bad reports, to which phone companies answered promptly by making the service much easier to use.