Daily Archives: November 3, 2010

Chatbot wears down proponents of anti-Science nonsense

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Now here is an excellent use of technology.

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

I like this approach. It’s got lots of other applications. Now, let me see: where shall we start? There’s all that gibbering about how the bond markets will come for us if Osborne doesn’t slash public spending. And then there’s the bleating of the Irish government about how the country’s situation is “manageable”. And there’s the fantastical vapourings of the Intellectual Property lobbies…

Where the iPad comes into its own

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As time has gone on, I’ve found that my iPad has a few really useful affordances. The biggest is the battery life — which means that I no longer have to cluster with other laptop users round the few available power sockets. So I now take it to every meeting where I’m likely to want to take notes. I’ve also managed to get the hang of the on-screen keyboard, so I can type reasonably quickly.

There are now tons of note-taking Apps for the device, and so far I’ve tried quite a few: Apple’s (relatively expensive) Pages App; DocsToGo; Mental Note; Dan Bricklin’s NoteTaker HD; and Simplenote. Of these, I found Simplenote to be the most useful, because it automatically syncs to all my other devices — which means that a note can be accessed from anywhere. A few weeks ago, for example, I had to give a talk at a symposium, but didn’t have time to prepare a presentation or even print a script. So in the venue car-park beforehand I jotted down some notes on my laptop using the JustNotes program (which syncs with Simplenote), and then used the synced version on my phone as an aide-memoire for the talk.

This week I was a speaker at a Cambridge symposium on “The Digital Revolution and its futures” and — as usual — took out the iPad to begin taking notes. Sitting behind me was Andrew Gruen, a Gates Scholar who is doing very interesting work on Citizen Journalism and who is also an iPad & Mac user. He tapped me on the shoulder and said “Have you heard of Soundnote?” When I looked blank, he said “Try it: it’s really cool”.

So I did. At first sight it looks like any other notetaking App. But it has one magical ingredient: it can record audio and sync the recording to the typed notes. In other words, it does much of what my Livescribe pen does, but with none of the associated gadgetry — and cost. The Livescribe pen retails at around £120, and then there’s the cost of the special notebooks (you can print your own special paper, but life’s too short for that) on top.

And the cost of Soundnote? Why £2.99. For some people — those whose work involves taking minutes of meetings, for example — it would justify the purchase of an iPad. If this isn’t a Killer App, then I don’t know what is.

There’s an informative review/description of Soundnote here.