Life Lock’s CEO Identity Stolen
Check this post Life Lock's CEO Identity Stolen from MetaFilter:
Life Lock CEO's Identify Stolen Remember all those commercials recently tell us to steal Life Lock's CEO Todd Davis' Identity? Well seems as though someone did.
This is funny to me, because I am a Life Lock customer, and by coincidence I just received their email asking me to renew. Of course I am not sure of the overall significance of this news story. I guess that the fear of idenity theft that superstition takes over and anything that might help even a little is very tempting!
Why should do online check-in when flying?
This, from American Airlines:
"Your trip is eligible for check-in now. Save time at the airport and check- in on AA.com® any time from now up to one hour prior to your departure. To use our new instant check-in feature, simply click the button below and print your boarding pass. Save this email and use your personal check-in button for quick and easy check-in for your return flight."
Anyone have any idea what possible benefit I get for checking in online? I don't think any of these
-
Save Time? How? I still have to go show my Id before getting my boarding pass don't I?
-
Checked bags? Still have to go to the counter as usual, don't I?
Checking in online seems cool, but why???
Big Search, Mechanical Turk and why Amazon is at least as cool as Google
Adam Green points to Scoble who re-discover and discover, respectively, Amazon's street by street, address by address, photographic coverage of the map of, what, the universe? It's a neat new user interface of something they've had for a while, actually, but still, quite cool!
some nuggets:
"Will I use it? Hell, yeah, it is damn useful. I can point you to Border Cafe in Harvard Square, which just happens to be one of the best college student dives in the country." (from Darwinian Web, Adam's new blog)
and…
"But, if you need to know what a store looks like before going there, Amazon is definitely something you should check out." (from Scobelizer)
and…
"Is your house on their map? It’s pretty creepy to have pictures of your neighborhood on line. Intellectually, it makes perfect sense, but it still creeps me out." (from a comment to Scoble's post)
and finally…
"Unfortunately, the image defaults to the side of the street with Starbucks. You'll have to click the film strip for the opposite side of Church Street." (again from Darwinian Web)
Which brings up Mechanical Turk, the new, totally clever Amazon service which some have written about but somehow seem to have escaped Scoble's all-seeing- eye.
So what is Mechanical Turk (see this for the origin of the name)? It's an Amazon service generates solutions to little problems or tasks which are trivial for humans and impossible for computers (exaggerating a little here.) What kinds of problems are these? Oh say choosing what photograph best represents the storefront of the Border Cafe!
What I imagine is this: Amazon has outsourced a bunch of SUVs equipped with digital cameras and a GPS to drive up and down all streets in the US. The cameras automatically snap picture after picture, each encoded with the current lat long. Using maps and directories each address will match several pictures. The remaining problem is to select the best one to represent the storefront. A very menial task, but one that requires a person.
Enter Mechanical Turk. Anyone with an Amazon account can sign up and request to 'complete simple tasks that people do better than computers, and get paid for it." I tried this and was presented with sets of 3 to 6 photos. My job : decide which one most looks like the front door of say, Ernie's Body Shop, 1234 Main Hyway, Maine. I think each task paid something like 3 or 5 cents. Clever, eh?
Even cooler, Amazon chose to build this as a totally general mechanism, with APIs for both sides of the transaction. API's to define tasks, check results, qualify workers etc.. And APIs to work on problems and suggest solutions. Pure genius!
So, let's say I have a task like, answer the question: "Is this web page a blog or not?" (a question that might be of interest to BlogBridge) I could:
-
Create a list of URLs that I want to check out
-
Add them to Mechanical Turk as projects
-
Seek out only workers who could show that they knew what a blog is (by submitting to some test questions)
-
Decide how much I wanted to spend
-
And turn the problem loose on people around the globe.
You know everyone always fawning over Google. Don't get me wrong, I think Google is great and I've done my own share of fawning.
However, in my book, Amazon is the unsung hero in the new Web 2.0 world. They are every bit as innovative and cool as Google, and they do it while somehow inventorying and delivering gazillions of books and other products around the globe.
Asymmetrical conflict in the blogosphere
I met with a potential client the other day who was on red alert because there were a lot of nasty things being said about them on blogs, comments and forums. And I thought of the concept of asymmetrical conflict as we have learned about it in recent years.
Even without knowing whether the criticism of the client was deserved: for a single act, or a pattern of action, or not at all, it struck me that they were in a very tough and unfair spot. If you look at nasty blog posts or comment streams, it is hard to deny that there's a piling on, hit them when they are down dynamic.
When hearing the people and effort that this client had deployed to try to respond to this, and how helpless they felt, i did feel sympathy. Once a thread about your company, or your product, or yourself, starts up, and gets interesting, it gathers a crowd, maybe because they agree, but just as easily because the attacker is funny or outrageous or clever in an evil way.
And then Google gets a hold of it, and before long negative diatribes become number one and two hits when people search for it. And there's not a thing you can do about it.
Basically what's going on is that individuals (bloggers but just as easily comment posters) invest almost no time, equipment or money to create essentially an attack which gets magnified 10 or 100 fold by the crowd mentality and then the search engines, and which the target, no matter how much time, equipment or money, cannot really defend against, even when it's totally untrue or unfair. Asymmetrical conflict.
Yeah I know this is the way it goes on the web and it's just one dark flip side of all the good that we get from the internet. But I know I personally will think twice before zipping off a blog post or comment in anger.
If you like food you might find this amusing…
Many more where this one came from. Good for a chuckle 🙂
Really cool rowing instrumentation
If there are any rowing fanatics out there, or competitive rowing coaches, take a look at this cool in- boat rowing instrumentation product. Here is a bit about it from their site:
"The RowMetrics system is innovative in-boat instrumentation bundled with software to provide a complete measurement system.The revolutionary force sensors installed between the foot stretchers and the rails capture the amount of force being exerted by each rower on a stroke by stroke basis. It measures the balance between the right and left feet for each rower. Also captured is the total boat's performance and the deceleration after catch. " (from ChampionMetrics website)
Arduino: Open source hardware
Check out Arduino, a totally cool tiny embedded computer suitable for creating smart things - art, robotics, sensors and controllers. You program it on your laptop, and download the program to the device. I tried it, it was pretty easy. Had to touch wires and stuff though 🙂
It appears to be a vibrant community with lots of people building compatible boards as well as add-ons which they seem to call "Shields". For example here's a shield to allow wireless communication between two Arduinos.
If you want to learn more, check out books called "Physical Computing" and "Making things Talk".
Amusing: French words missing in English
"No language is perfect, and English is no exception. There are always words or expressions that cannot be rendered from one language to another. English supposedly has the largest vocabulary of any languages in the world (7x more words than French !), and well-educated people typically know less than 10% of them. There would be too many English words and nuances that do not exist in other languages (thousands in French, Italian or Japanese), but much less the other way round. Here are examples of the occasional French words that do not have an exact translation in English, or not in a single word."
Ray Kurzweil @ MIT
Went to hear Ray Kurzweil yesterday at MIT, at an event jointly sponsored by IEEE and GBC/ACM Robotics Sigs. The blurb said:
"[…] With input from people around the world, an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century [
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/](http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/). We've invited one of the leading authors of the report, Ray Kurzweil, to present some of its findings, give his impressions of the important technological trends and challenges likely to occur over the next hundred years or so, and challenge you, some of the leading students, researchers, and industry practitioners from the Boston and New England area, to help solve them." (from Event Invitation)
Who knew there actually was a National Academy of Engineering, or even The National Academies? Your tax dollars at work. Actually the sites are quite informative, and the Grand Engineering Challenges web site and concept makes for some interesting reading. So worth a look.
Unfortunately Mr. Kurzweil spent the majority of his 2 hours on his standard stump speech about the exponential rate of improvement of information based technology leading to the singularity (in Q1 of 2029, to be exact), which I have heard before, once or twice. He is a freaking brilliant guy with a deadpan, monotonic delivery which at first is deadening, but after a while is amusing and even compelling to listen to.