“Flash Mobs” has made it into the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, according to Smart Mobs. Maybe it’ll be able to get its smarter cousin inducted soon…

Be the first to comment »

20q.net is an online game of 20 questions that apparently starts off with no knowledge base. It learns from the interactions of the players. And it is pretty damn impressive.

I’d like to know more about how it works, but I’m having trouble finding any explanations, and mail to the address given on the site is going unanswered. Anyone know of a place that discusses how it works? In particular, how does it come up with the questions? E.g., where does “Does it come in packs?” come from?

TIA (no, not Total Information Awareness.)

17 Comments »

Now this is odd.

1st Lt. Mark V. Shaney, of the US Marine Corps, posted a report from Baghdad today as a comment to a blog entry of mine from March 2003. That struck me as odd, as did his almost-coherent sentences and his giving as his URL a conservative site called The National Center for Public Policy Research. It occurred to me that perhaps the National Center was sending Shaney out to various blogs to post the same upbeat posting.

I didn’t find any similar posts, but Googling “Mark V Shaney” turns up the surprising news that he’s a computer program that generates plausible sentences on the basis of Markoff Chains (hence his name) derived from bodies of text. Mark was written by Bruce Ellis and was a well-known poster to Usenet back in the day…one of his most famous posts was in 1984.

Here’s a page that lets you download a DOS version of the program:

Mark V Shaney does two things. using a text input (usually a short story, essay or concatenated email – you choose), it builds probabilistic tables which describe how likely it is that certain words or phrases follow other words or phrases.
then, using these tables, mark will generate a new version of the input text. this process can be iterated, resulting in the amusing, strange or plain eerie. John J Mackin was a great fan of mark’s. john felt that mr. shaney often demonstrated his sentience, especially when it generated “I was born out of a user manual.”

I created a small text base consisting of a blog entry of mine about the authenticity of voice and the first part of a transcript of a recent speech by W. From this Mark generated the following (excerpt):

It means that in speaking with you, I am aware of how I think this is one of those questions that exposes a contradiction in our cultural cognitive disconnect the concept of authenticity exposes is, I believe, that we have inner and outer selves, and that the inner self is our real self. I personally find those ideas more misleading than helpful.) Semantic Behavior Index Jon Udell speculates on what our OS would do if Google wrote it instead of Microsoft: On the Google PC, you wouldn’t need third-party add-ons to index and search your local files, e-mail, and instant messages. It would also embolden the terrorists, leading to more bombings, more beheadings and more brutal. There are five steps in our very being, whatever that means. (But it seems to mean something.) While we need the term “authenticity” so we can talk about phonies, and simultaneously shouldn’t trust its implication that only “unfiltered” voice is “real.” But, then what marks an inauthentic voice from an authentic one? (The cultural cognitive disconnect the concept of authenticity exposes is, I believe, that we have inner and outer selves, and that the sequence of my small-motor movements may not think the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic. Yet our coalition and Iraqis will govern their own affairs. America’s ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will present

Meanwhile, I still don’t know who posted the Shaneyized text into my comments…

5 Comments »

Here’s a feature I’d like in a mail client: Wait for Message (WFM).

Sometimes I’m expecting a message from someone that I want to make sure doesn’t get washed down the spam drain. So, I’d like to specify an address or keywords and have my mail client notify me when it arrives. After I acknowledge receipt of the message, by default it removes the search string from the WFM list. This is like a white list that plays favorites.

I tried building this in VBA for Outlook but succeeded only in creating a time-space loop that dims lights all across our neighborhood, although it actually shouldn’t be very hard to do. (It obviously gets more complex for those who use server-based spam filters.) Do any XP clients currently do this?

17 Comments »

Our old Philips TiVo box (hacked so it has an extra HD in it) is showing every sign of imminent disk meltdown. Playback frequently freezes, requiring a hard boot.

Any Tivo or Linux hackers out there who know how to get the TiVo software to do some disk maintenance, blocking bad sectors, etc.?

Thanks!

4 Comments »

Kevin Werbach, Clay Shirky, Andrew Odlyzko, and David Isenberg have launched the Wireless Unleashed weblog. These are some way smart folks, so if you care about how we can give everyone more spectrum than we’d ever though imaginable, you might want to tune in.

6 Comments »

I’ve modified the Outlook script I posted so that now it finds all (?) the urls in a selected set of messages in your inbox. This is useful if you receive dozens or hundreds of comment spams and want to paste all the offensive links into Jay Allen’s mahvelous MT-Blacklist utility for MovableType. The copy-and-paste version is here. Please note the warnings listed in my original blogpost.

2 Comments »

I’ve been happily using PopFile to filter my spam in a Bayesian way. But it’s inconvenient to train it because it’s not integrated into my mail client (Outlook, ulp). I tried Outclass, but it was over-featured and under-explained. So, I’m trying out SpamBayes, another free Bayesian filter with seemingly good integration into Outlook. It doesn’t filter into all the buckets that PopFile does, but it’s easy to batch-train it against your existing junk and inbox folders.

I was motivated to try new filters by the elegant way Thunderbird integrates spam filtering into the client…much as the Mac client does. I’m using Thunderbird on the road, and find much to like about it, not least that it’s not Outlook.

4 Comments »

At 3pm, I bought my daughter a Samsung-Napster MP3 player. Deciding among the indiscernibles, the Napster’s ability to broadcast to an FM channel for wireless car connectivity sold me.

At 7:30pm, I returned the Napster and got a Rio Karma.

I had a bad feeling about the Napster from the moment I started installing the software. It kept adding layers and layers of cruft, forcing me to upgrade my Windows Media Player, bundling in a CD burner, forcing me to register at Napster.com…window after window of incomprehensible files and DLLs until I wanted to scream that it ought to take its over-educated, over-engineered supercilious ass to the mountains and take up goat herding. And, sure enough, although Windows recognized the Napster device, the Napster software didn’t. After four hours of trying, I gave up.

The Rio is a thing of beauty. Baddaboom, it installed. Baddabing, it let me download MP3s into it. Now that’s the way software should work!

(Yes, we looked at the Ipod, and it was elegant and supercool, but also super-expensive, especially since the 15G version would have required us to buy a Firewire-USB converter.)

13 Comments »

A growing percentage of the 2,000+ spams I’m receiving every day come to false names at my domain, evident.com. Here’s a VBA script for Outlook that searches the selected entries in a folder and moves bogus ones sent to that domain into a folder of your choice. To use it, create a folder to receive the putative spam; I’m calling it YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER in the script, but you should change it to whatver yours is called. Also, replace “domain.com” with the domain of your mail, and be sure to specify the addresses to domain.com that you want to accept. (And watch out for bad wraps in the code below.)

Public Sub CheckForBadEvidents()

Dim ToWhom As String
Dim objNS As NameSpace
Dim objInbox As MAPIFolder
Dim objSpamFolder As MAPIFolder


Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set objInbox = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
Set objSpamFolder = objInbox.Folders("YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER")
Dim objApp As Application
Dim objSelection As Selection
Set objApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set objSel = objApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection
Dim objItem As Object


' check to make sure the folder is there
If objSpamFolder Is Nothing Then
MsgBox ("Folder not found")
Exit Sub
End If

x = 0 ' count the number of hits, for fun

For Each objItem In objSel
If objItem.Class = 43 Then ' if mail msg

' get the To line
ToWhom = objItem.to
' If it's to evident.com but not
' to a recognized address...
If InStr(ToWhom, "@domain.com") > 0 And _
(ToWhom <> "[email protected]" And _
ToWhom <> "[email protected]" And _
ToWhom <> "[email protected]") _
Then

' move it
objItem.Move objSpamFolder
x = x + 1
End If
End If
Next

MsgBox "Moved to YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER "    & x & _
" msgs with ill-formed evident.com addresses."

end Sub

Note: I’m an amateur and you use this script at your own risk. Really. I mean it. (The code for moving a msg to a folder came from here. I’ve lost where I cribbed the other functionality from.

7 Comments »