Brad Ideas - Technology - Comments

Ebay feed back

Anonymousebayer's — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:59:16 -0800

I agree that the Ebay feedbacks are bullshit.

You are in a way obligated by the sellers to give them positive feedback.
Even if you have been a perfect buyer, They won`t give you a positive feedback right away.
Instead 97% wait to see the feedback you will give them before giving you your feedback.

So if you are not happy with their product and mention it (they will revenge you)
regardless if you are right or wrong
for them a `good ebayer` is someone who buys from them, pays them fast and is satisfied with what they bought.

If you are not happy they automaticaly revenge you (you are a bad customer)

Not strong enough

brad — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:56:23 -0700

The micro usb is never going to do it, in a car you need something to handle the bumps and hold something as heavy as a tablet.

And yes, wired data should always be there if it can be. Wireless data is getting better, but the open bands are getting noisy and you have to do pairing.

heh, nearly broke my

rektide — Fri, 06 May 2011 06:30:37 -0700

heh, nearly broke my micro-USB cable playing around with this idea.

the USB cable itself might

rektide — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:23:37 -0700

the USB cable itself might be a convenient semi-universal mount. with a semi-rigid construction, i can see it serving as prop to a variety of mobile devices. it might end up causing overly much strain, but from the feel even my weighty B&N Nook is pretty solidly jacked in on it's micro-usb.

hopefully the connection need not provide more than power, at least not for long. between upnp, dlna, bluetooth, and whdi there's a pretty good spectrum of networked connectivity abilities out there already. mobile devices are just beginning to figure out how to use these (and more primitive connectivities such as HDMI), but hopefully the network can made to fill the role the cable has in antiquity served.

On distraction

brad — Tue, 03 May 2011 08:45:41 -0700

I do agree that touchscreen UIs are quite distracting though I suspect a fixed one on the dash is less likely to draw your attention from the road than a phone you are holding. While I see what you are saying, you will have a very hard time reducing app developers to simple button UIs, that’s for sure. You would want to allow touch UIs when stopped of course, and you also need to enable them when there is a passenger (the passenger seatbelt sensor could do this) but once you have done this the driver will be very tempted to try to get them as well.

For no-UI stuff, like “show me my navigation and traffic map” the dash screen will be better.

Terminal mode

!!Dean — Tue, 03 May 2011 04:48:40 -0700

I believe the "distraction" of a cell phone is not entirely in the talking, but changing your focal distance to near-field, focal location away from traffic and focal field to a small screen. There is a center console on every car full of things that divide the driver's attention. But these things are in fixed locations with big controls. This means it is easy to remember (even muscle memory) where the interface is which makes the act of interfacing with the controls not a distraction. Plus, basic dash controls are usually set-it-and-forget-it.

So, I believe the terminal mode with the following criteria would be an improvement, but still more dangerous than a static dash:

The mobile phone hides away in a driver-side glove box where the connector and phone-specific adapter live.
The vehicle presents the phone's screen on a larger-scaled display: a HUD on the windshield or a sunlight-welcoming Pixel Qi display on the dash.
EVERY app must use common controls that have BIG buttons that are ALWAYS in the same location.

These constraints make the UI restricted like early J2ME and less like an anything-goes smartphone app, but that's what I believe is needed for safety.

Oh, and my patent-not-pending idea: the buttons should have a Portrait orientation, not Landscape. This is because when driving and pointing at a screen your finger is more likely to stray vertically due to the operator bouncing along on the road. So the button's target shape should be vertically oriented for greatest chance of positive contact.

What's on encrypted hard

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:45:46 -0700

What's on encrypted hard disks is none of their business. I am a crytographer, cryptanalyst for a government, and all my computers and laptop are encrypted with high levels of security and encryption. There is no way customs of any country would have me decrypt one of my laptops, ever. Because doing so would have me sent to prison for life in my country, as high treason charges. Some companies work in special areas (weapons, and high level industrial secrets) and do encrypt laptops that leave the company.

Words all at once

brad — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:39:10 -0800

They do actually discuss this. They say that since the human’s retinas get the image when it shows and Watson gets the IP packet, this is “fair” as a contest of man and machine. Yes, humans can’t grok and entire screen of text in an instant to turn it into words, but neither can Watson understand the words instantly.

One could argue a fair test might be to watch human eyes to figure out the average time it takes them to read the passage, and give the words to Watson in groupings matching typical human reading. That would probably eat up a second or so from Watson’s time, and IBM would have answered that by just adding more cores. So it may not have been fruitful.

One could also ask Watson to do OCR. It would do that faster than humans can read though — today’s OCR systems on a single core can read an entire page in a second or two. On 2800 cores it would be a blip.

But the contest was not about reading, and it was not really supposed to be about buzzing. It was supposed to be a test of question answering. It just happens that Jeopardy is the most famous and well understood way to do that, one the public would tune in for.

A game of beat the switch

DensityDuck — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:33:51 -0800

Well, human players can start working out the solution after only a few words, but Watson gets ALL the words simultaneously.

Indeed, it would be interesting to see what Watson would do if it were presented the clues "one word at a time", similar to the (presumed) way that the humans receive them. It would be neat to see the answer evolve as the clue was completely revealed!

I'd have *liked* to see an indicator of whether the human players buzzed in, and when they buzzed in relative to Watson; but, of course, that would reveal that it was indeed just a game of beat-the-switch.

They documented that

brad — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:29:10 -0800

They learned daily doubles appeared mostly in row 4, then in rows 3 and 5, and for some reason mostly in column 1.

Hunting for them is exactly what it was doing, not to bet heavily, but mostly to deprive the other players of the chance to use them, since with those two players, these would have been their real chance to win enough money to beat Watson.

answer selection

Anon Y. Mouse — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:00:42 -0800

Another oddity in Watson's game play was how it picked the next
answer. It seemed to be going across the board from category to
category at the same dollar level, or bouncing around the board
seemingly at random, as opposed to working down a single category
as most humans do. I have occasionally seen people play this way,
most likely looking for the Daily Doubles. I don't know what
Watson's algorithm would be.

Percentage of correct answers

Randy — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:40:52 -0800

Did anyone keep track of Watson's percentage of correct answers out of the total number of questions? I didn't, although I suppose I could go back and look at the recording.

I also found it compelling that Watson would essentially say, "I don't know," when his confidence is low. That's almost as important as getting the correct answer.

Randy.

That would be the only fair way to do it

brad — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:34:23 -0800

Though I would disagree that it was fair to remove categories that need explanation. Watson should just get the explanation. As it turns out, Watson did OK at learning about categories by example.

Watson would also do almost perfectly at audio and video clues with a large library of fingerprinted audio and video. Recognizing very similar pictures and sounds is mostly a solved problem. As such it would not be impressive, nor good for the humans, but it would be a special algorithm in Watson and some work, so it is fine to have left them out. Leaving out a hard, unsolved problem reduces the contest a small bit.

The humans had trouble with the keyboard keys category too, but I doubt Watson would ever have gotten it.

Nova did do that

brad — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:29:52 -0800

But it was nothing like this. The Nova was like most other such shows, with footage shot and edited by Nova. Jeopardy contained a number of IBM-made films about how great IBM was, how they planned to use Watson for business etc. They really felt very different in style.

It's been stated in several

Tom Galloway — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 04:03:57 -0800

It's been stated in several places that the games for the Watson match were chosen at random by a third party from games written by the usual J! writers for regular J!. And then either scrubbed for visual/audio clues and categories that only make sense after Alex explains them with an example, or boards with such clues/categories weren't included in the set the selection was made from.