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September 5th, 2010 | 3 notes | Permalink
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“… For many years, the conventional wisdom, certainly within the auto industry, was that carmakers would never introduce intelligent safety features so long as there were plaintiff lawyers. Autonomous technology shifted the liability for accidents from the car’s owner to the car’s maker, said industry spokespeople, and was tantamount to corporate suicide. Three developments changed their minds. First, active safety technologies have become substantially more robust, thanks to improvements in sensor design, and, most importantly, in sensor fusion and planning algorithms. Second, drive-by-wire has rendered the legal debate largely academic - car functions are already mediated by computers, one way or another. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the auto industry experienced an unprecedented, violently destabilizing, massive contraction. Technology that previously seemed like a grave, existential threat now seems like the least of their problems. It turns out that, innovation, like freedom, “is just another word for having nothing left to lose.” … Essays about artificial intelligence normally end with some ponderous treacle proclaiming how the more we study AI, the more we appreciate the human mind in all its splendiferous mystery. This is, to be charitable, wishful thinking. AI does teach us about intelligence. It teaches us that “intelligence” is a motley assortment of heuristics, kludges, and cheap tricks. The danger with AI is not that machines will become smarter than us, but that we will become as dumb as machines. The absurdly prescient William S. Burroughs was wise to this fifty years ago. “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods,” pronounces Dr. Benway, in 1959’s Naked Lunch. “Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.” “Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens.” 
“Even though he was using an old computer running through the slow but anonymous Tor network, Andersen estimates he logged about 70 percent of all check-ins in San Francisco over the last three weeks. That amounts to 875,000 check-ins. Foursquare is one of the most popular of a growing number of services that let people quickly report to friends, family or the entire world where they are — and is part of a growing trend of making public more information that used to be private.” (via White Hat Uses Foursquare Privacy Hole to Capture 875K Check-Ins | Threat Level ) “Strangely hidden from the casual user is a spiffy command line utility that allows you to view, configure, and troubleshoot your Mac’s wireless connection. It doesn’t appear to be well documented, and judging by the obscure location of the command, Apple probably didn’t think it would be too useful for the average Mac user. But the hidden command line airport tool is very useful indeed, so here is how to access it, and how you can use it too…”
“Here’s my recipe for programming success: - Peter Norvig “Depending on his or her turnout percentage – high, middling, or low – a voter will be ignored, targeted for persuasion, or targeted for get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts by a campaign. Targeting for turnout, along with almost every other type of political targeting, is explained in detail in Political Targeting by Hal Malchow (2008).” Java 4-Ever Trailer (via willhui) 
“A lot goes on across the company to prepare for this event, and I along with the Communication Design team played a large role in the aesthetic direction of this years event. We started working on it in January (the conference was in April) talking with Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox about the conceptual direction and what they wanted to communicate. We ended up talking a lot about personal identity and the transformative power of a unified open graph of the world. After these initial conversations and some logistical planning of the deliverables we would need to produce, we started putting pen to paper and trying to figure out how we could visually communicate the things we wanted to say. Along with personal identity and the open graph it was really important to Mark that this event feel closer to our internal culture and our Hackathon events so we spent a lot of time thinking about materials, signage, decoration, and furniture. There was a lot to get done, but at the same time it was critical that we put a high level of care and craftsmanship into every aspect of the event.” (via f8 Conference | The Graphic Works of Bernard Barry) “We are going to see a market for predictive modeling suites, similar to the market for databases. Multiple vendors will built (or have already built) similar suites. In the same way that today Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Teradata and so on, compete for the best SQL engine, we will see competition for such turnkey solutions for predictive modeling. You upload the data and then the engines complete for scalability, speed of training, and for the best ROC curve.”
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Alex AinslieI'm a recent Cornell CS MEng graduate interested in data, computation, design and their intersection. In 2009 I graduated early with an independent BA in Computing, Cognition & Aesthetics and minors in French and Information Science. My honors thesis examined the traces our Bluetooth-enabled devices leave behind in public space and my masters thesis explored opportunities for machine learning and visualization to inform personal sensemaking. I have spent the past three summers as an intern at Google working on mobile maps and gmail, suggest, query refinements, social search, and most recently goggles and mobile local search. I joined Google fulltime in August 2010 - the views expressed here are mine alone. This site was born as a personal photo journal during a semester spent abroad in Paris and has evolved into a curated collection of links, text, and images. |
