Know what I mean, again

As a followup to my last entry on search, MIT Technology Review discusses a few more search algorithms currently being sported by new entrants in the search engine battles.

Teoma: Similar pageranking system to Google, but concentrates on links highlighted by related “community” sites as being the “authority” on the topic at hand.

Mooter: Displays groups or “clusters” of topics related to the user’s search request. That way, the user can drill down to more specific results. User modeling is used to personalize and calibrate future search requests.

Dipsie: Utilizes a more advanced spider that can navigate forms and database interfaces, giving it the ability to crawl documents otherwise inaccessible.

AskMSR: To bring more eyeballs to MSN, MS needs better search. AskMSR uses fuzzy logic to answer natural language questions. It searches the web to give a shortlist of hypothetical answers. (It reminds me of the “ask the audience” lifeline in “Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire”)

Stuff I’ve Seen: A tried and true (if monopolistic) MS tactic: integrate search into Windows. Will display all items off your hard drive and the Internet (Office documents, appointments, addressbook contacts, webpages) related to the current topic you are working on (replying to email, drafting a presentation, writing an essay).

John Battelle offers some remarks.

Silverstein has a pretty good point – the cost of switching from one search to another is nil. I started off liking WebCrawler, shortly by AltaVista (when DEC was still around! Time flies.). I switched to Infoseek in 1998 shortly after AltaVista banned all Geocities sites. I was an early adopter of Google, and am still using it to this day. With no barriers to entry, I’m guessing things will be very different in five years.

Status quo, way to go

I think that motivational business books are a bit of a guilty pleasure for executives – they are fully of ambiguous, high-level, feel-good concepts and witticisms, yet they don’t carry the loser stigma of self-help literature.

So I read fishtales.jpgFISH! Tales: Real Life Stories to Help You Transform Your Workplace and Your Life. It is a well-written, charming book written in the style of Reader’s Digest; four workplace testimonials are separated by “inspirational” one paragraph blurbs. Their concept of achieving satisfaction at work is to be like the fishmongers of Seattle’s Pike Place Market: loosen up and be positive. Then, as the book says, making money and winning customers will come naturally.

Personally, I have been at the Pike Place tourist trap, and while the fish throwing ritual was amusing to watch, I did not experience a joyous epiphany like FISH! authors did (as their DVD movie trailer attests). Then again, the whole FISH! philosophy is all about state of mind – you can either choose to be miserable and inert, or happy and adaptable.

So it all boils down to intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation – you can essentially bribe employees with more salaries to stay at their jobs, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be more satisfied with their jobs. So FISH! suggests that managers cut some slack, and try to make their employees understand they’re here by choice, not by force.

But will it really work?

The major issue (and everyone knows this) is that there’s nothing management won’t do to save a buck. They don’t really give a crap about their employees’ wellbeing. Let me be more specific: a company will give a crap up to a certain point – that point being a potentially catastrophic degradation in work performance. However, if, say, removing the water cooler will save them $200 a year, they’ll do it. It may make you slightly less happy, but happiness cannot be quantified – but money can. And managers are awarded for meeting budgets, not for making their workers content.

Eventually, things start slipping toward a Dilbert dystopia, an the kneejerk reaction is to generate more corporate rules, or increase micromanagement. Maybe a work quality improvement initiative will be started; there’s a pep rally, posters are put up, everyone gets a coffee mug or keychain with the Inspirational Slogan du jour, and then everything simply continues on just like before.

Take one of the motivational programs I was involved in a few years ago. If it was deemed that you went beyond the call of duty, you got a pack of Tic-tacs. However, you may still be stuck in a dead-end monotonous job. Rather than improving the quality of your work, you are probably now paranoid about the quality of your breath. Curiously-strong breath mints don’t retain employees.

Breakfast: it’s not just for breakfast

Two strips of bacon, four triangles of butter-soaked toast, two eggs over easy, a tomato slice as garnish, and a bottle of ketchup. Are you smiling yet?

Back in university, that was what we called “The ABB Big Breakfast”. You see, in the basement of the ABB Building was a hidden little cafeteria. It was replete with cozy little booths luxuriously upholstered in periwinkle vinyl and plastic wood. It also served the best breakfast on campus.

It didn’t matter that another cafeteria up north also advertised a “big breakfast”. It just wasn’t the same. At the ABB, with a wink and a smile, you could even get your eggs sunny-side up.

Alas, the ABB Big Breakfast is no more. In my final year, the cafeteria was demolished and replaced with an exam writing centre. Its replacement opened in a brand new building across the street, with an anonymous Pizza Pizza franchise and cramped McDonald’s-style formica stools welded to formica tables. The ABB Big Breakfast is now lost for all time.

So when The Guardian waxed poetic on all-day breakfasts, I was smiling from ear to ear:

“To fully appreciate an all-day breakfast, it should be eaten after midday, hideously hungover, when the sober-minded are choosing between some disgusting wrap or trays of lurid raw fish.”

Open season

Azhar writes a succinct summary of the open source movement:

“Open source has at least three benefits for conventional enterprises. First, it creates new wealth and new businesses, such as the Linux-based consultancy Red Hat, which now has an annual turnover of $100m. Second, it stops companies reinventing the wheel in areas of open source research, and thus releases time and money for more fruitful activity. Third, open source’s decentralised methods may, as we have seen, produce results otherwise unobtainable.”

Open source, at first glance to the grizzled business analyst, is counter-intuitive. How can you sell any milk if you give the cow away for free? In the press, the open source movement has been compared to everything from hippie communes to Communism, with a touch of mocking, damning praise.

But open source makes its money in consultancy and support. The cow may be free, but the farmhands and milking machines cost extra. Open sources licenses also encourage participation; enhancements or alterations to the common source code are often released back into the community. With this “pay it forward” scheme, thousands of coders contribute to the good of the code. With so many people looking at the code, bugs are detected and squashed quickly. New versions are released very rapidly. The Mozilla project, for instance, releases a new test build of its popular browser software every night.

It has caught the attention of a few companies. Companies like, oh, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.

Know what I mean

How do you find an answer in a sea of data? What would be the most painless way? You’d go ask someone who might know, right?

But now we’re in the Information Age. We don’t have to suffer and sift through card catalogs at the local library. Or buy stacks of encyclopedias from a creepy salesman. We have Google. You can simply type your question into Google, and it will spit out a litany of possible results in in some absurdly short interval of time. It’s fast and accurate.

Sometimes.

How does Google know you are looking for information on sequoia trees, instead of the Toyota Sequoia? How can it understand common sense queries? How are we going to build the search tools of the future?

The key, some believe, is user modeling. The development of an intelligent agent that observes what your interests are and the way you think, and estimates what you would want to search for. To borrow a term from Frank Herbert’s Dune, a mentat.

In a way, Google already compensates for its artificial intelligence by harnessing the power of human minds. Google merely observes how us humans build our websites and link to others. Using this kind of citation analysis, Google knows what are the most popular sites.

Techno-profiling is still very crude. It is still doesn’t understand natural language. It needs to learn some common sense. “The Web needs to go through the infantile process of self-discovery. The Web doesn’t really understand itself. There’s lots of information on the Web, but not much “information about information,” also known as “metadata.””

Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. are tackling the same issue with a research tool called Project Halo. A “Digital Aristotle”, filled with scientific information, that can respond to natural language queries. Unfortunately, like that guy you used to know in university with a photographic memory, it’s doing well when asked to simply regurgitate data from its memory banks, still having problems understanding application-based questions.

It also suffers from the age old problem of content quality. It’s first prototype failed because it wasn’t taught chemistry correctly.

Flexing the OL tag muscles

Francis Wheen’s Top 10 Modern Delusions

  1. “God is on our side”
  2. The market is rational
  3. There is no such thing as reality
  4. We mustn’t be “judgmental”
  5. Laissez-faire capitalism is the prerequisite for trade and prosperity
  6. Astrology and similar delusions are “harmless fun”
  7. Thin air is solid
  8. Sentimental hysteria is a sign of emotional maturity
  9. America’s economic success is entirely due to private enterprise
  10. “It could be you. . .”

Jeffrey Veen’s Seven Steps to Better Presentations

  1. Tell stories
  2. Show pictures.
  3. Don’t apologize.
  4. Start strong.
  5. End strong too.
  6. Stand.
  7. Pause.

Mahjongg was the first Everquest

1. Amusing sights, yesterday: a changeable message sign on a TTC bus, proclaiming, “GO LEAFS GO”, and a CIBC bank machine with the frozen image of the Windows NT Workstation splash screen on it.

2. Went out to dinner with V for the traditional Sushi Time Pizza (Fried rice crust and mayo topped with salmon and roe). He discussed how many concepts from Hinduism have been taken or distorted. For example, the dowry is supposed to be a gift from both parents given to the bride as a form of insurance in case something happens to the groom. These ideals, along with the caste system, became corrupted after years of strife in the region. I pointed out that William Gibson postulated that in the future, culture and subculture will be endangered species because all so-called exotic memes, such as Hinduism, which took thousands of years to incubate, will have been readily disseminated within a few centuries.

And when he pointed out Moulin Rouge! was “Bollywood movie with white people”, I was suddenly enlightened.

3. “If anyone’s ever promised you the sun, the moon and the stars, tell ’em you’ll settle for BPM 37093.” ‘Cuz BPM 37093 is a giant space diamond, the largest in the known galaxy, that was discovered by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics. It’s actually a white dwarf star made of 1034 carats of crystallized carbon. No word on when deBeers will show up with the hush money. 😛

Maps for these territories

Silverlotus had been meaning to pick up a CueCat for cheap on eBay. Turns out that people have hacked them and provided all sorts of new interesting uses for them. For example, she could have used a CueCat to scan in her book collection to a database (but she ended up doing it by hand).

As somewhat an extension of the same concept, there’s an interesting project in the works at Microsoft Research: Aura, or Advanced User Resource Annotation. The primary goal of this technology is to allow users of mobile devices to assign snippets of data to physical objects, and provide this info on the Internet. In other words, creating the ultimate hyperlink (or Smart Tag if you prefer), and bridging the virtual and physical worlds.

You can walk into a bookstore, scan the ISBN of a book, and pull up price comparisons, reviews, or blog postings on that book. Or a museum can embed Bluetooth transmitters around the property, and you can use your wireless PDA can lock on to these broadcasts, retrieve audio commentary off the Internet, and use it as a virtual tour guide.

Right now, there are concentrating on just using barcodes as frames of reference. The neat thing is, they have left the method of cataloging flexible. In the future, one could append data on items with RFID tags, vehicle identification numbers, magnetic strips, or GPS coordinates.

MS isn’t the only one working on “bridging” technologies, however. Sem@code works in the same principle, but uses special pictograms you can take shots of from a camera-equipped cellphone. The nTag lets you gather information from fellow nTag wearers via infra-red.

Intriguely, Project AURA’s final goal is to be able to “study emergent individual and group behaviors associated with the ability to digital tag objects and places.” Just as long as they don’t study these behaviours to secretly spam people with advertising.

The best thing since slicedbread.com

getfirefox_large2.png I don’t believe it…of all the things Firefox 0.8 brings to the table, such as next-generation browser features and phenomenal page rendering speed, all people can talk about is the friggin’ name…just let it go!

Like it’s daddy, the Mozilla Application Suite (aka “Seamonkey”), the Firefox standalone browser sports enhanced features such as tabbed browsing, popup window controls, advertisement blocking, and excellent web development tools such as the DOM Inspector and JavaScript Debugger. However, it fits all these goodies in a package in half the size, and with a simplified, more user-friendly interface.

While the plans to eventually replace the monolithic Application suite with the standalone Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client are currently up in the air, it is definitely a good indication of innovations yet to come from the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox 0.8 hints at a new level of professionalism within the Foundation with its sharp graphics and user-focused design.

Contrast the efforts of the Red Lizard with those of its major competitor. On the day of Firefox 0.8’s release, the chief security officer of Microsoft UK had claimed IE is “the most secure browser”…because they have patched up so many security flaws in it. By extension, the Ford Pinto must be the safest car of all time, since they recalled so many of those lemons. It is even more ironic consider the security flaw in question, the “URL spoofing flaw” that allows malicious websites to masquerade as benign sites in the browser’s status bar, took MS two months to fix. Not only did Mozilla and Firefox suffer from a slightly less serious version of this same flaw, developers had released patched beta versions (called “nightly builds”) for public download within 48 hours.

takebacktheweb_large.png

“In open source software development,” Steve Garrity wrote, “the usual reply to any requests, suggestions, or criticisms is the classic refrain: ‘Where

It’s been one week

It’s been one week since I’ve made my triumphant return to Toronto and started my new job. OK, maybe it wasn’t triumphant ala Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra feb 011.jpgentering Rome, but it’ll be nice to be able to buy char sui bao again.

The move was the smoothest one I have ever undertaken, thanks to the help of the parents, Furmac and Juice. Everything fit inside a 16 foot cube van, despite all indications that we had too much dang stuff. Furmac pointed out that his working at a geospatial mapping firm helped him optimize the space in the van.

Even the cat travelled well. She got into her carrier grudgingly, and meowed critically on occasion, but it was a far cry from the last move, where she cried like a newborn baby the entire way. She even acclimatized well to the new place; by nightfall she had reconnoitered the area, secured her possessions (the cat hides in box.jpgComfy Wingback Chair and the Food Dish), and went to sleep on top of the comforter.

The new apartment is smaller than my old one, so it feels quite cramped. Or cozy, depending on your mood. We’re also no longer on the 21st floor, so gone are the high ceilings and panoramic views.

It is located in a quiet neighbourhood just west of High Park. Up north is the quasi-trendy European delis and bakeries of Bloor West Village. The disadvantage is that it is too far of a walk to the Village, so I’ll have to take the bus or streetcar if I want to go anywhere.