They are working so hard in the dark, since they don’t know what intelligence is, how it is done, or how it is mashed up with purpose, consciousness and experience. They are working with an essentially Platonic understanding of reality i.e. there is a non socially constructed truth and meaning out there – which is more than 2000 years out of date.
There were real technology breakthroughs in the 1970s, when computers made all text searchable using Boolean AND, OR, NOT ‘operators’, automatic sorting became possible and relational databases were invented. Since then, it has served the interests of computer companies to pretend to put what they call ‘intelligence’ into their machines, rather than enable people to use the real technology breakthroughs of the 1970s more intelligently.
I am afraid that this is yet another profit-driven tragedy wasting billions which could have been invested in enhancing the intelligent use of the technology on what is essentially a chimera based on a misunderstanding about the nature of human intelligence. More than 30 years have been wasted.
Luckily, some of us who had the privilege of working with real masters of database development, are still around who believe that the real opportunities around these technologies lie in the development of the collaborative intelligence of users.
The application of this human intelligence is why I obtain so much more useful information from Amplify, than from Google. It is why Amplify is so important as an early form of collaborative intelligence.
Report reckons that in 2008 piracy cost the sector £10bn in lost revenues |
A quarter of a million British jobs in the music, film, TV, software and other creative industries could be lost over the next five years if online piracy continues at its current rate, according to a study backed by European unions and the TUC. |
Across the EU, as many as 1.2 million jobs are in jeopardy as piracy looks set to strip more than €240bn (£218bn) in revenues from the creative industries by 2015, unless regulators can stem the flow. In 2008, the creative industries contributed €860bn to the EU’s GDP – almost 7% – and they employ 6.5% of the EU workforce, or 14 million people. |
For me, food is love. Foodspotting helps you share the love. Knowing where to eat is half the battle, the other half depends on the menu. This iPhone app can help you in either case. | “why would people want to hear about what I eat?” |
Foodspotting is an application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it. |
This is very much like Eat.ly, which lets users keep a visual record of what they’ve eaten. The lite version of the Foodspotting iPhone app has been out for a while now, but in light of SXSW the team worked hard to get the full version to the app store. Users can view guides to discover the best dishes (not restaurants) in town. People can bookmark food they want to eat later, while also marking food as eaten, or “nommed.” From there it will be sent to an activity stream. |
| there is the ability to tweet your spottings, and check into Foursquare via the app. If enough users sign up as advocates, sharing restaurants’ menus with their friends, Foodspotting hopes to strike deals with venues and brands. |
It’s the shape not the smell… | We already have iris and fingerprint scanning but noses could be an even better method of identification, says a study from the University of Bath, UK. |
The researchers scanned noses in 3D and characterised them by tip, ridge profile and the nasion, or area between the eyes. |
They found 6 main nose types: Roman, Greek, Nubian, hawk, snub and turn-up. |
The researchers say noses have been overlooked in the growing field of biometrics, studies into ways of identifying distinguishing traits in people. |
“Noses are prominent facial features and yet their use as a biometric has been largely unexplored,” said the University of Bath’s Dr Adrian Evans. |
The research is based on a study of 40 noses and the data base has now been expanded to 160 for further tests to see if the software can pick out people from a larger group and distinguish between relatives. Read more at news.bbc.co.uk |
In its submission to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), Foundem, a
price comparison site, accused Google of posing an “immediate threat to
competition and innovation”.
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Foundem asked the FCC to include search engines in its proposed Open Internet
rules.
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“Search engines have become the internet’s gatekeepers and are arguably
as essential a component of its infrastructure as the network itself,”
the filing states. “Google’s overwhelming dominance of search and
search advertising, coupled with its ability to arbitrarily penalise rivals
and systematically favour its own services, makes the need for search
neutrality particularly pressing.”
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What Google has to offer as information management tools may not be what small business needs or wants. Lord Mandelson has been accused of backing multinationals over British start-ups after the business secretary publicly endorsed a joint venture led by Google and BT to build small business websites for free. |
Anger flared on Thursday when the joint venture, called Getting British Business Online, announced that it would supply website-building tools and domain names for 100,000 UK-based small businesses. |
Several UK-based companies that specialise in this market complained that the business secretary should have at least highlighted the existence of home-grown alternatives. |
Thomas Vollrath, chief executive of Webfusion, a British-based web hosting business, said: “It is great to learn that at last the pioneering work that has been done by British-based web hosting companies over the past decade has finally gained some national recognition. Unfortunately, the suppliers involved in the programme are not British.” Read more at www.ft.com |
The key word here is “algorithmic”. It does not apply to people opting to follow or recommend each other. And it does not apply to social networkers organising their own information, either. Indeed, this patent should be an advantage to both these approaches. | Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, “displaying a news feed in a social network environment.” Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be “one of the most significant social web patents” in a decade. |
| If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there’s going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. |
| It could impact any number of other social networks - like LinkedIn, Ning and other systems not created yet. |
Today we’re ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now! Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
In a new blog posting, Amit Singhal, a Google employee responsible for the ranking system, claimed the company’s algorithms produced a better quality and more relevant result than a system that involved human intervention. |
Google is likely to remain on the defensive as competition regulators at the European Commission examine the three complaints received from Foundem, ejustice.fr and the Ciao websites. These parties accuse the US company of manipulating the formula to discriminate against competitors. |
If the Commission is persuaded that breaches of EU competition law have occurred, it would then issue formal charges against the company. Read more at www.ft.com |
If this works, it will significantly reduce the power and income of banks acting as intermediaries. Opportunities for direct investment in assets for storing value are likely to follow, further marginalising banks. The other exciting thing about this develoment is that the Paypal infrastructure could be for exchanging community and barter currencies. | nobody is as ambitious as PayPal. In November, it further opened up its code, giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay. The move could unleash a wave of innovation unlike any we’ve seen since self-publishing came to the Web. |
| Two months after PayPal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services, sending $15 million through the company’s pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose ShopSavvy program lets people find an item’s cheapest price by scanning its barcode, used PayPal to add a “quick pay” button to its app. |
| Previously, anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations and licensing bodies. But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal. “I can focus on the social side of the business Read more at www.wired.com |
Good old paper books will gain in value because they will be the only ones which a person can read in private. | vocal opponent is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one
the internet’s most outspoken privacy advocates, which is nervous about the
growth of electronic books. Digital book providers have the potential to
track, aggregate, analyse, and disclose reader activity to an extent far
beyond anything possible with physical books, it warns.
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| Google will maintain
records of every book purchased over the lifetime of the reader. The EEF
says we should be doubly wary of Google since it is also collecting data on
us elsewhere, |
| The company still lives by its slogan of “Don’t be evil” |
| people and more legal systems appear to be questioning whether
Google has a broad enough definition of evil. |
| Google makes money by selling adverts alongside book search queries, like it
does with web search queries, and it has also created an online bookstore
for downloading whole books. Authors were furious to discover a corporation
was scanning their books without asking them first,Read more at www.independent.co.uk |
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Soap box - Pity the intelligent robot makers
