Google Glass 2: A Good Question
January 10, 2016
I read “Would You Wear Google Glass If It Looked Like This?” The “this” is a pair of Revenge of the Nerds glasses.
The answer from me from my redoubt in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky is, “No.”
Why? I have a mobile phone which works just fine. When I do things, I want to concentrate on the task. I do not want to be distracted.
I had a pair of glasses like that in high school. Was I cool looking or what?
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2016
Watson Weekly: Revenue Wait Watcher?
January 9, 2016
I read another bit of IBM Watson public relations’ fluff. The story was “CES 2016: IBM Announces Watson as a Personal Fitness Coach.” I assume that IBM Watson’s ability to craft recipes with tamarind will go from the kitchen to the gym with aplomb.
According to the article:
The news signals the rapid adoption of Watson technology by consumers and to illustrate this, announced that Under Armour and IBM have developed a new cognitive coaching system. Watson, will serve as a personal health consultant, fitness trainer and assistant by providing athletes with timely, evidence-based coaching about health and fitness-related issues. Where Watson differs from other systems is that it determines outcomes achieved based on others “like you.” It integrates IBM Watson’s technology with the data from Under Armour’s Connected Fitness community – a vast digital health and fitness community of more than 160 million members.
I hope that IBM lifts the weight from the shoulders of IBM stakeholders who want to be buoyed on a rush of new revenues. Vast too. A consumer product?
Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2016
Omnity: A Worry for the Googlers?
January 8, 2016
A New Year. Another Google challenger. Anyone remember Qwant.com which kept Eric Schmidt awake at night? Yep, right.
I read “Semantic Search Engine Omnity Reckons It Can Beat Google.”
The write up had a great phrase: Tyranny of the taxonomy.”
This should make the purveyors of Boot Camps, software, and human controlled term schema developers perspire. Well, maybe only a little on the upper lip.
The new sheriff is Omnity described this way:
Omnity is a new kind of search engine that asks the question: What if, instead of searching for keywords like “baseball scores” or “best-rated Nintendo 64 games,” a search engine let users search across disparate documents, from Wikipedia pages and news articles to patent filings and PDFs, in order to find shared interconnectedness?
The method used? The article reports:
when Omnity searches across documents, it throws out “grammatical glue but semantic noise”—commonly used words like “the,” “he,” “she,” or “it.” Stripped of this “noise,” Omnity is then able to analyze the remaining “rare words” to find common threads that link together different documents.
Once the company works out the name confusion with the 3D utility product, the system will be easier to find online. Check it out at https://www.omnity.io/.
If Mr. Schmidt is reading this blog post, now you can dream about Qwant and Omnity.
PS. The write up had a wonderful quote from the founder of Omnity, Brian Sager, which I reproduce here:
“I use Google every day and it’s great, but no, we’re more likely to buy Google.”
Worry, Mr. Schmidt. Worry.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2016
The Secret Weapon of Predictive Analytics Revealed
January 8, 2016
I like it when secrets are revealed. I learned how to unlock the treasure chest containing predictive analytics secret weapon. You can too. Navigate to “Contextual Integration Is the Secret Weapon of Predictive Analytics.”
The write up reports:
Predictive analytics has been around for years, but only now have data teams begun to refine the process to develop more accurate predictions and actionable business insights. The availability of tremendous amounts of data, cheap computation, and advancements in artificial intelligence has presented a massive opportunity for businesses to go beyond their legacy methodologies when it comes to customer data.
And what is the secret?
Contextual transformation.
Here’s the explanation:
A major part of this transformation is the realization that data needs to be looked at from as many angles as possible in an effort to create a multi-dimensional profile of the customer. As a consequence, we view recommendations through the lens of ensembles in which each modeled dimension may be weighted differently based on real-time contextual information. This means that, rather than looking at just transactional information, layering in other types of information, such as behavioral data, gives context and allows organizations to make more accurate predictions.
Is this easy?
Nope. The article reminds the reader:
A sound approach follows the scientific method, starting with understanding the business domain and the underlying data that is available. Then data scientists can prepare to test a particular hypothesis, build a model, evaluate results, and refine the model to draw general conclusions.
I would point out that folks at Palantir, Recorded Future, and other outfits have been working for years to deal with integration, math, and sense making.
I wonder if the wonks at these firms have realized that contextual integration is the secret? I assume one could ask IBM Watson or just understand the difference between interpreting marketing inputs from a closed user base and dealing with slightly more slippery data has more than one secret.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2016
Search Online Too Long? Tietze Disease Will Get You
January 8, 2016
I read “Technology Addict Develops Tietze Disease from Spending 23 Hours a Day Online.” I know, gentle reader, that using search engines can be frustrating. I know too that most of my readers spend hours upon hours trying to make Bing, Google, and Yandex point to a specific document which will answer your most pressing business question.
The fix is little more than search systems which return relevant results without ads and fluff.
Be aware. If you find yourself investing hours upon hours in crafting queries, you may succumb to “shooting pains” in your “back and chest.” You may have strained your “costal cartridges.”
The culprit Tietze disease.
Rest easy. The problem is benign. Go back to searching. Be tough.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2016
The Long Goodbye of Internet Freedom Heralded by CISA
January 8, 2016
The article on MotherBoard titled Internet Freedom Is Actively Dissolving in America paints a bleak picture of our access to the “open internet.” In spite of the net neutrality win this year, broadband adoption is decreasing, and the number of poor Americans forced to choose between broadband and smartphone internet is on the rise. In addition to these unfortunate trends,
“Congress and President Obama made the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act a law by including it in a massive budget bill (as an extra gift, Congress stripped away some of the few privacy provisions in what many civil liberties groups are calling a “surveillance bill”)… Finally, the FBI and NSA have taken strong stands against encryption, one of the few ways that activists, journalists, regular citizens, and yes, criminals and terrorists can communicate with each other without the government spying.”
What this means for search and for our access to the Internet in general, is yet to be seen. The effects of security laws and encryption opposition will obviously be far-reaching, but at what point do we stop getting the information that we need to be informed citizens?
And when you search, if it is not findable, does the information exist?
Chelsea Kerwin, January 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
In Scientific Study Hierarchy Is Observed and Found Problematic to Cooperation
January 8, 2016
The article titled Hierarchy is Detrimental for Human Cooperation on Nature.Com Scientific Reports discusses the findings of scientists related to social dynamics in human behavior. The abstract explains in no uncertain terms that hierarchies cause problems among human groups. Perhaps surprisingly to many millennials, hierarchies actually forestall cooperation. The article explains the circumstances of the study,
“Participants competed to earn hierarchy positions and then could cooperate with another individual in the hierarchy by investing in a common effort. Cooperation was achieved if the combined investments exceeded a threshold, and the higher ranked individual distributed the spoils unless control was contested by the partner. Compared to a condition lacking hierarchy, cooperation declined in the presence of a hierarchy due to a decrease in investment by lower ranked individuals.”
The study goes on to explain that regardless of whether power or rank was earned or arbitrary (think boss vs. boss’s son), it was “detrimental to cooperation.” It also goes into great detail on how to achieve superior cooperation through partnership and without an underlying hierarchical structure. There are lessons to take away from this study in the many fields, and the article is mainly focused on economic metaphors, but what about search vendors? Organization does, after all, have value.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Oscobo: A Privacy Centric Web Search System
January 7, 2016
Before you get too excited, the Oscobo service uses results from Bing. Yep, that is the search engine which uses Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia for results.
The Oscobo search system is about privacy for its users, not about the dreary precision, recall, and relevance issues. “Oscobo Is An Anonymous Search Engine Targeting Brits” reports that the system reminded the article’s author of DuckDuckGo and Hulbee, both working to ensure the privacy of their users.
The results are filtered to cater to the needs of the UK online search it seems.
According to the write up, Oscobo’s business model
is simple paid search, based on bare-bones search data (i.e. whatever string a user is searching for) and their location — given the product is serving the U.K. market this is assumed to be the U.K., but whatever search string they input may further flesh out a more specific location.
There is no definition of “paid search”, however. You can check out the system at https://oscobo.co.uk/.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2016
Google and Students: The Quest for Revenue
January 7, 2016
The Alphabet Google thing is getting more focused in its quest for revenue in the post desktop search world. I read “Google Is Tracking Students As It Sells More Products to Schools, Privacy Advocates Warn.” I remember the good old days when the Google was visiting universities to chat about its indexing of the institutions’ Web sites and the presentations related to the book scanning project. This write up seems, if Jeff Bezos’ newspaper is spot on, to suggest that the Alphabet Google thing is getting more interested in students, not just the institutions.
I read:
More than half of K-12 laptops or tablets purchased by U.S. schools in the third quarter were Chromebooks, cheap laptops that run Google software…. But Google is also tracking what those students are doing on its services and using some of that information to sell targeted ads, according to a complaint filed with federal officials by a leading privacy advocacy group.
The write up points out:
In just a few short years, Google has become a dominant force as a provider of education technology…. Google’s fast rise has partly been because of low costs: Chromebooks can often be bought in the $100 to $200 range, a fraction of the price for a MacBook. And its software is free to schools.
Low prices. Well, Amazon is into that type of marketing too, right? Collecting data. Isn’t Amazon gathering data for its recommendations service?
My reaction to the write up is that the newspaper will have more revelations about the Alphabet Google thing. The security and privacy issue is one that has the potential to create some excitement in the land of online giants.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2015
Cloud Performance: The Storage Function
January 7, 2016
Curious about which cloud storage system is “faster”? A partial answer appears in “AWS S3 vs Google Cloud vs Azure: Cloud Storage Performance.” The write up presents performance data for downloads, splitting up data across regions, and uploads. The three services evidence difference performance characteristics. Network throughput remains an issue. If you find one system performing poorly, perhaps the problem falls into the shadows of a link in the chain balking or, in some cases, being down.
The net net is that Google’s service appears to take some time to queue up the operation. Once underway, the Google is marginally quicker for some operations and pretty snappy for others. Azure, which does not surprise me too much, seems to be bringing up the rear. The retail giant Amazon which offloads some of its infrastructure costs to its cloud customers is in the middle of the pack.
For those wanting to move search to the low-cost, ever reliable cloud, those server farms under one’s own control may eliminate some restless nights. Interesting stuff. Now, what about that pricing?
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2016
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