Your Brain on Google

November 21, 2008 11:47 am · Filed under Internet stuff

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhLnoZFCDBM]

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TechTalk: Disruptive Technologies

November 17, 2008 9:24 pm · Filed under TechTalk

I was listening to C-SPAN radio (nerd alert) the other day and heard a reporter from Forbes magazine discussing the economy, in which he talked about the role of disruptive technologies. In essence, his argument was that because business media in particular has been undercut by the Internet, there is a lack of capable, competent business reporters and business news outlets. As a consequence, we have seen an “innumeration” of business news and therefore our current understanding of the financial system is out of whack. His analysis is that our economy, while under some stress, is not nearly as “depressed” as some have prognosticated.

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TechTalk: Machine Translation

November 2, 2008 8:29 pm · Filed under TechTalk

Personally, I’ve always felt limited in my ability to read by my knowledge of only one language. I think that in the future, we’ll probably be able to translate with better accuracy the materials written in languages unfamiliar to us.

Just for fun, here’s my post translated via  google translator:

像一些其他谁已经公布，我一定救我酒精有关的资料，我组的介绍星期三。但是我非常有兴趣听听的读/图书组将出席。

就个人而言，我一直认为在我有限的阅读能力由我的知识，只有一种语言。我认为，在未来，我们也许能够更好的翻译准确的书面材料不熟悉的语言给我们。

Here’s a humorous article from 2000 about machine translation’s past and future.

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Bradley effect or Facebook effect?

October 17, 2008 2:53 pm · Filed under Internet stuff, politics

Howard Fineman at Newsweek has an interesting little recap of the recent debate and makes the argument for a new “effect”: the Facebook Effect…

Obama is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to organize and turn out these young voters, many of whom got con-nected to his campaign through social-networking sites such as Facebook.

Now he has to turn them out—make them do something in real space as opposed to digital space. Pollsters do not have accurate “turnout models” for this new cadre of voters. Obama has registered millions; how many will actually vote remains to be seen.

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