Tag: language
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Finnish Idioms
While living in Finland, I learned of some of the Finnish idioms that give a wonderful glimpse into the Finnish mind & culture. Here are some of my favorites. juosten kustu translates literally as, “pissing while running” which, if you’re a man and have ever had to do this, results in a wavy line in…
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Digital Cartography
Eric Fischer takes large datasets and turns them into art. His flickr stream is a collection of fascinating time-series maps plotting data over time to draw out shapes which take on a greater meaning. Weather it’s a map of taxis in San Francisco or an overlay of flickr metadata on top of NYC, Eric’s creations are at once…
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Watson Wins Jeopardy
Ken Jennings graciously concedes losing to IBM’s Watson computer on the final day of the three day Jeopardy tournament. More details on the research behind the experiment on my earlier post.
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IBM Watson on Jeopardy
In a brilliant piece of PR, IBM Research stormed back on the scene matching their artificial intelligence computer, Watson, against top contestants of the popular American game show, Jeopardy. On February 14, 15, and 16 Watson’s competes against two humans on live television. According a piece on Wired’s Epicenter blog, 25 IBM scientists spent four…
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Singularity and Sentience
I tuned into the launch of Echo’s social media mixer, the StreamServer, which they describe as a platform for the activity streams-based economy. As the saying goes, in a world where the amount of information is ever-expanding and time remains constant, attention is what is of value. As your phone and computer beeps and buzzes with…
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Soylent, the macro made of people
More on this question of crowdsourced writing, (plugging wet-ware into software) comes Soylent, (yes, it’s made of people) a research project which has written a add-in to Microsoft Word. Hooked into Amazon Mechanical Turk, this project offers three services: Shortn – trim document length without changing meaning Crowdproof – distributed human proof-reading The Human Macro –…
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Textbroker.com – low cost, bespoke content
So the results are in from our little experiment and the view is . . . you get what you paid for. Just to review. Textbroker.com is a service which will write for you on the topic of your choosing. They have a four levels of service and pay by the word. For our experiment,…
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Outsourced Thinking
Last week a colleague of mine tweeted about a new service that offers “exclusive written articles created to your specifications” I replied that Udo might be stretching the definition of “professional” if we look at the quality of output. Cranking out “content” on demand for pennies a word, one has to wonder about the thought…
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Hecka nice
“He’s an extraordinary player who makes every team a lot better. This guy is hecka nice. . .” High school coach for Jimmy Rollins who has just been named Baseball’s National League’s Most Valuable Player. Jimmy Rollins is from Alameda, CA where I live. Encinal High School, where Jimmy played, is in Alameda. We’re all…