I know this is all over the blogohedron right now, but come on, I had to post it. From Mercury News: Feds after Google data The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases. The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches. In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period. The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents. Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government’s effort “vigorously.” “Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,” Wong said. The case worries privacy advocates, given the vast amount of information Google and other search engines know about their users. “This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared,” said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. “The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about […]

I stumbled on the transcript to the News Hour segment that occured just after Kasparov conceded defeat to Deep Blue. They had Dennett and Dreyfus on, and they go at it with their standard arguments. It is really the culmination of what I will officially call the Old School Debate on AI, or OSDAI. It is really quite entertaining, and Dennett really just nails Dreyfus. MARGARET WARNER: Hubert Dreyfus, what do you think is the significance of this? There’d been a lot of commentary about it. “Newsweek” Magazine called it the “brain’s last stand.” What do you see as the significance of this outcome? HUBERT DREYFUS, University of California, Berkeley: Well, I think that’s a lot of hype, that it’s the brain’s last stand. It’s a significant achievement all right for the use of computers to rapidly calculate in a domain–and this is the important thing–completely separate from everyday human experience. It has no significance at all, as far as the question: will computers become intelligent like us in the world that we’re in? The reason the computer could win at chess–and everybody knew that eventually computers would win at chess–is because chess is a completely isolated domain. It doesn’t connect up with the rest of human life, therefore, like arithmetic, it’s completely formalizable, and you could, in principle, exhaust all the possibilities. And in that case, a fast enough computer can run through enough of these calculable possibilities to see a winning strategy or to see a move toward a winning strategy. But the way our everyday life is, we don’t have a formal world, and we can’t exhaust the possibilities and run through them. So what this shows is in a world in which calculation is possible, brute force meaningless calculation, the computer will always beat people, but […]

From The Daily Yomiuri: Robotic hand translates speech into sign language An 80-centimeter robotic hand that can covert spoken words and simple phrases into sign language has been developed in a town in Fukuoka Prefecture. … A microchip in the robot recognizes the 50-character hiragana syllabary and about 10 simple phrases such as “ohayo” (good morning) and sends the information to a central computer, which sends commands to 18 micromotors in the joints of the robotic hand, translating the sound it hears into sign language. … The robot was shown to teachers at the school in December to ensure that its sign language was understandable. That last comment is especially interesting to me. It seems that the translation are nowhere near perfect, and is based almost entirely on words and phrases, and not on statements or meanings. On any standard account, this would imply that the machine isn’t really doing a translation at all, but just performs the function mapping words in Japanese to movements of the robotic arm. But that misses the essential point of communication: that the message conveyed is actually understood by the the interlocutor.

http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/2899/precog9ki.jpg Image Hosted by ImageShack.us I know, you know From Nature: Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing. Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny. So I’m reading a conference paper on Andy Clark’s extended mind hypothesis. The argument offered against Clark is that we know our internal states with an immediacy that is absent in his extended examples, which involve perception of external devices and are thereby open to sabotage and deception in ways the internal awareness is not. Clark’s reponse, at least according to the paper, is to say that we do sometimes treat perception like immediate internal awareness. Phenomena like change blindness occur because we think perception is so reliable in the normal case. The paper then proceeds to argue that this response isn’t convincing, and tries to defend Clark from other angles. I think Clark is right, though grossly […]

Dangerous Idea 120: Ending any list with a prime number. Courtesy of D&D. From The Edge World Question Center: The Edge Annual Question – 2006 WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true? Pinker apparently offered up the question, and the responses are all over the map and really interesting. Here’s one of note, from Barry Smith: What We Know May Not Change Us … We are perhaps incapable of treating others as mere machines, even if that turns out to be what we are. The self-conceptions we have are firmly in place and sustained in spite of our best findings, and it may be a fact about human beings that it will always be so. We are curious and interested in neuroscientists findings and we wonder at them and about their applications to ourselves, but as the great naturalistic philosopher David Hume knew, nature is too strong in us, and it will not let us give up our cherished and familiar ways of thinking for long. Hume knew that however curious an idea and vision of ourselves we entertained in our study, or in the lab, when we returned to the world to dine, make merry with our friends our most natural beliefs and habits returned and banished our stranger thoughts and doubts. It is likely, as this end of the year, that whatever we have learned and whatever we know about the error of our thinkings and about the fictions we […]

The new mind-body dualism taking shape in the new and largely unconceptualized world of the Internet is, as we have seen, the service/content dichotomy. This dualism reared its head in the discussions on Wikipedia, and it surfaces again in SBC- I mean, AT&T’s- continuing attempts at disrupting internet neutrality. From Ars Technica: AT&T sees benefits to tiered Internet service Saying that “the reality is that business models are changing,” Lindner said that there are opportunities to “enter into commercial arrangements and agreements that are beneficial to [AT&T and other] companies and are certainly beneficial to the service that customers have.” As an example, Lindner talked about gamers who would benefit from AT&T partnering with a game server hosting company in order to provide exceptional service by creating privileged network connections “where we control quality of service.” This isn’t the same thing as allowing users to host game servers, or setting up servers for their broadband community. No, the idea is that using technological means, an ISP can partner with another provider on the Internet, and build a privileged network link to enhance service. The multi-tiered Internet thus begins to take shape. You can continue to pay for your 6Mbps connection, but don’t expect it to deliver all things equally. Quality of Service (QoS), a networking concept describing the technological methods for guaranteeing that some network traffic is serviced better than traffic, is the key. Customers will soon pay for premium service options to see specific kinds of traffic—gaming, VoIP, media streaming, and who knows what else—perform better because there is technology available that can give that kind of traffic a privileged status. For high-intensity bandwidth services, this could mean that companies dealing primarily in Internet-delivered services will need to partner with ISPs in order to deliver the experiences they want. […]

I figured we were due. From Robotics Online: Year of the Robot Just how much intelligence we attribute to a robot is not the issue. They are devices with extremely advanced processing abilities, but human cognition and other emotive abilities aren’t part of today’s robot culture except in science fiction. Not that universities and other researchers aren’t exploring these issues – they are. Some are experimenting with facial expressions and even devices similar to stuffed animals that can help autistic children or provide companionship to lonely seniors, and others are poking into the realm of artificial intelligence where insects are the current measuring stick.

I’m making a list. Checking it twice seemed excessive. Average spending per person for Christmas, 2005: $942 Average spending for internet purchases, 2005: $1,498 Average amount spent by each person in my household: $800 Total amount spent on interfamily gifts: ~$6400 Total number of robotic or artificially intelligent gifts: 10 (Includes 4 remote controlled cars and 5 Aquapets) % of my gifts that required batteries: 0

http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/9726/evolution4009yd.jpg Image Hosted by ImageShack.us From the Detroit News Online: Latest versions of robotic lawnmowers are pretty sharp Once it is programmed, this is a tool that mows your lawn for the entire season requiring no involvement by you. It cuts the grass from 0.8 to 2.7 inches high and has mulching type blades so the finely cut clippings add the equivalent of one application of fertilizer to the lawn over the season. The blade is sharp on both sides, so can be rotated at the end of the season for a second year of sharp cutting. A new blade costs about $10. The Evolution runs on lithium batteries. After working for about four hours, it heads back to its own little house for a recharge which takes about two hours. This shiny red turtle with wheels is so smart, it will go straight to its little house whenever it starts to rain. It is very quiet running and can do hills up a grade up to 27 degrees with no problem. If someone is dumb enough to try to pick it up when it is operating, this little robot turns itself off immediately. If someone wants to steal it, crooks will learn that unless they have the numerical code you used to set it up, the machine is worthless to them. This little robot can handle the mowing needs of up to 30,000 square feet or 3/4 of an acre. You can program the machine to mow every day, or every other day, or if you can believe this, when the grass is tall enough to need mowing. It can actually detect when grass is taller than its programmed height and sets about cutting all the grass that is too tall. $2500 isn’t really jaw-droppingly unreasonable, either.

At Rose’s waffle party this Monday, Kyle asked me about what made Google special. I blathered for a minute about various things, but really, my eye was on the prize, and the prize was Kyle’s well-crafted waffles. But so anyway, here’s a more complete answer. I was trying to say something along these lines, but I am no expert. From CNN: The future of online search (Spark’s John Batelle interview) CNN: Google isn’t the only search business, but its name is synonymous with search. How has it done this? JB: It’s certainly not the only one. There were these companies, apart from Google, that were doing the same thing essentially. But the timing wasn’t right, the technology wasn’t right. The moment Google broke out, there were a number of things that happened. One of them was the bubble actually blew up — pieces were all over the ground. But the public, the audience, us, we didn’t stop using the Internet. People stopped making [it] on the Internet, lot of people lost a lot of money in the stock market, but the rest of us kept using the Internet. The portals, the Yahoos, were not worried about search, they were worried about holding you on their sites. They didn’t want you to find something and go over to it. They want you to stay in one place and watch their ads. It turned out that their ads had very little to do with what you might be interested in. Google’s model, which is how they broke out, was that when you put your intention into that box, it would reorganize the page around your intention. If you put the word “minivan” in there, the page would reorganize the advertisements with regards to minivans. Whether there’s cars or whatever would be right […]