Monday 28 November 2005

Monday 21 November 2005

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk follow's Googles Any Quention Answered service by allowing people to submit tasks to be done, and others to do the task and post the results in return for (micro) payment. The difference is that mTurk uses a web services interface so that a program can submit a question and then post the answer back to the client, as though the machine has worked it out! Not sure about a 7 day latency though.


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Tuesday 15 November 2005

Birmingham Post - 051101 - iMode

It started with “i can buy you flowers”, went through “i am big in Japan”, and now the posters declare “i have arrived”. O2's i-mode service is here, but should the posters really be saying “i'm too late.”?


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Monday 14 November 2005

info namespace

The new The "info" URI Scheme for Information Assets with Identifiers in Public Namespaces coul dbe one of the most important documents goings as it provides a standard for the semantic web in referencing "things" rather than attributes. For instance a book could become info:isbn/16298753X, then every semantic web application would know you're talking about the same book, Amazon could provide a web service to let you see its price, and you could dynamically create reviews from every mention of that book on the planet. Wonderful.


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Wednesday 9 November 2005

Response rates

The DMA has just pubilshed its latest response rates survey. Key summary:

"Response rates for Direct Mail as a whole are 11.6 per cent.
This is the average across 3,942 campaigns in both business-tobusiness
(B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). This includes
375 campaigns – 9.5 per cent of the total - that achieved
outstanding results of 30 per cent or more. Removing these
campaigns produces a more realistic average of 6.7 per cent.
The average response rate for B2B Direct Mail campaigns
stands at 10.9 per cent, but this includes 86 campaigns (5 per
cent of the total) with response rates over 50 per cent.
Excluding these reduces the mean response rate to 7.7 per
cent. Excluding all campaigns with a response rate above 30
per cent (a further 73 campaigns representing 4 per cent of the
total) further reduces the mean to 6.2 per cent.
For B2C Direct Mail campaigns, the overall average response
rate was 12.1 per cent. There were 105 campaigns – or 5 per
cent of the total – which achieved a response rate above 50
per cent. Removing these brings the mean response down to
8.9 per cent. If the further 112 campaigns (5 per cent of the
total) which pulled over 30 per cent are also excluded, the
overall average response rate for consumer Direct Mail falls to
7.1 per cent."

The US DMA does a similar report.


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Anthro 'zine

Welcome to ANTHRO #2!

An on-line SF/future human 'zine.


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Monday 7 November 2005

Just click to record.....

TiVo, Yahoo Deal Connects - Digital-Lifestyles.info

Now that's what I call ease of use and integration. Just click on the Yahoo TV listings link and your TiVo will record the show.

The big debate emerging though is whether home based recording or centralised recording is the way to go. Just got the flyer through for Telewest's TV Slave servcie today - they record the whole weeks output for you (well "popular programmes"), for you to watch at your lesiure over the next 7 days. PromiseTV does a simialr thing, but in a potentially home sized box. Just as I wanted to buy a PVR too....


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Thursday 3 November 2005

In Soviet Russia

In Soviet Russia jokes are the subject of much debate on Robitron at the moment as tests of chatbot grammar handling. For instance:

In America, you watch television. In Soviet Union, television watches you.

In America, you check books out of library. In Soviet Union, library checks you out.

In California, you can always find a party. In Russia, The Party can always find you.

Invented by Yakov Smirnoff apparently.


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As We May Think - 60th Birthday

vannevar bush

As We May Think was the classic essay by Vanevaar Bush written 60 years ago in 1945 that introduced the concept of the MEMEX:

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk....."

Well he got the last bit wrong, take a laptop, a WiFi connection, The Internet and some Web 2.0 applicationsand we're almost there.


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Wednesday 2 November 2005

Thought Treasure

ThoughtTreasure commonsense knowledge base

Very interesting, exactly what I'm trying to build up in triples. They've even got the dimensional stuff in there.


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An architecture of diversity for commonsense reasoning

Technical forum

An architecture of diversity for commonsense reasoning - a seminal paper by half of IBM, including Minsky, Lau and Mueller.


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Yahoo's Keyword Extraction service

Term Extraction Documentation for Yahoo! Search Web Services

Likewise, might have some AI uses - although it really looks as though its just reducing noise words.


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Tagyu

Tagyu :: Your tags, smarter

A dynamic tagging system. Content looks pretty sparse at the moment though. Could be a use for it in AI by finding new discussion topics and helping the conversation to flow.


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