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Category Archives: Culture
Wow, how did I miss the Mechanical Turk?
Amazon Mechanical Turk is an astonishing idea – an Artificial AI marketplace. Basically, there’s an API you can call to get humans to do tasks (oddly enough, they want to be paid). Currently, a big favourite for the tasks is transcribing podcasts. I can see that it would be a cheap way to truth a set of training data for AI systems, like number plate detection / recognition.
An artist has used the Mechanical Turk to acquire 10,000 hand drawn left-facing sheep and put them on a site for your viewing pleasure – plus, there was an exhibition of the collectable stamp sheets etc (you can buy the as stamp-sheets for only $20 a sheet). Given the images cost less than a cent each to acquire, he may be a bullshit artist.
The Turk is an example of what Wired calls Rise of Crowdsourcing – Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. It’s about the markets, people. These are markets for micro-transactions – micro in their repeatability, or micro in their value.
Towel Day
Dammit, today was Towel Day. Why did nobody remind me? I’ve forgotten every year since 2001.
Protecting yourself against the BitTorrent bandits!
Yet again the internet works around corruption. With the anti-P2P crowd attempting to poison the BitTorrent well, here’s today’s workaround to Wasted BitTorrent data.
Basically, it’s a list of IPs known to host fake/posion BitTorrent peers that can be loaded into µTorrent.
More on human comment spam
Update to this post about human comment spam, about a new trend in blog comment spamming, using real life human spammers, to get around the fact that most bloggers can see the robots coming from miles away.
I’ve had a large number of these come through on my blogs in the few weeks. They’ve all been leaving links to sites like the one pictured. This one’s about antioxidants, but some are purportedly about computer viruses, drugs, whatever.
I really should update all my remaining blogs to use NoFollow, so if any get through, they don’t gain any PageRank. Time to chuck WP-Hashcash into the fray on all of them, as well.
Uh, so many blogs, so little time.
Update 26/5/2006: Another example added.
Geek art
Rob Gonsalves, who is Australian by birth, does some pretty Escher-esque paintings that are reproduced by inkjet.
TV downloads
Channel 9 launches commercial downloadable TV in Australia (the ABC’s broadband casting of their shows has been going for a while, though theirs don’t download), starting with a freebie episode of McLeod’s Daughters. It’s WMP files (so playable on Windows computermachines only) and normal price will be A$1.95 for a show that will play for up to 7 days. (via TV Idents blog).
I wonder how prominent AU shows are on BitTorrent, anyway?
Meanwhile there’s speculation that Hollywood may embrace Torrents, with Warner Brothers planning to use it to distribute some of their content, at US$1.00 per episode for TV shows. It’s unclear if users outside the US will be able to join in — so those who, for example, Torrented the final West Wing earlier this week may have to stay on the wrong side of the law. Making this content available internationally must be considered at some point — many overseas viewers are sick of waiting to see their favourite shows months or even years after they broadcast in their home territories.
Virginity and Unexpected side-effects
Mark Morford thinks that Christian Virgins Are Destroying America:
No wonder over half of all teens who take any sort of virginity pledge end up breaking the ridiculous vow within a year (says a new Harvard study), and fully 88 percent end up having sex before marriage anyway. What’s more, such silly pledges only result in more oral and anal sex among teens who try, vainly, to adhere. They also marry younger, have fewer sexual partners (read: less skill) and yet have exactly the same rate of STDs as kids who are smart enough to avoid such pointless pledges in the first place.
apparently these virgins don’t need sex education, so they don’t realise that the use of condoms is… ahhh… rather important. Morford reckons they should be running around having lots of safe sex and becoming well rounded, happy members of society.
I blame Bill Clinton:
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
from which America’s youth has determined that taking it up the bum (or putting it into someone’s mouth) is not sex. Nice one guys. Statistical proof above. Apparently it’s called technical virginity. Yep, that’s what God wanted.
Hand-written comment spam
Amongst all the easy-to-spot robot comment spam, I’m getting a bunch that (at first glance) looks like it’s written by humans. Gone are the stupid out-of-context broken-English comments and links to drug sales. These all have comments that look like they’ve got a few milliseconds’ thought put into them, all on new posts, they all leave a rediffmail (Indian GMail-type operation) address, a 209.97. IP address, and a link to a web site featuring lots of links and no content.
So far I’ve been spiteful and kept the comments but wiped the URL link.
I wonder if they’re particularly targetting WordPress sites that haven’t yet been upgraded to use the NoFollow links.
AU copyright reforms
The AU government gets with the programme, proposes to make ripping CDs to MP3 players legal, as well as taping off radio or TV for domestic purposes… though you’ll be legally obliged to wipe the tape after watching it. Uh huh.
“Hey did you catch Monday night’s Six Feet Under?”
“Yeah but it’s on too late, so I taped it and watched it the next day.”
“Can you lend it to me?”
“I’d love to but the copyright laws say I’m not allowed to.”
Meanwhile the Brits have trained sniffer dogs to detect DVDs, for the purposes of fighting piracy.
Trapped Miners
In case you’ve been living under a rock, some miners were trapped in Tasmania, but they’re out now. Normal programming may resume.
Can anybody tell me what the big deal was?
Documentary on Adventure Games
The guy that brought us a documentary on Bulletin Board Systems is now at work on documentary on text adventure games. I believe it’s going to be released under the Creative Commons license, and shot in stunning HiDef, those talking heads are going to look really nice. Adventure games are, apparently, known as interactive fiction. I never thought of it like that.
Ah, Zork. Is there anything you can’t teach us about ourselves? Not like that goddamned HHGTTG, with it’s prescriptive plotline – what a POS.