Rat 1, Yale students nil

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Lovely New Yorker piece by Louis Menand, reviewing Philip Tetlock’s book on pundits…

Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error.

Osama: the facts

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From The New Yorker…

Assuming that bin Laden is still alive, he is now forty-eight years old. He developed his vision for his global jihad organization, Al Qaeda, over the course of more than three decades, and his formative experiences have included participation in combat during the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the nineteen-eighties; prolonged exile from Saudi Arabia; the survival of at least two assassination attempts; at least four marriages, which produced at least a dozen children; and, lately, the trials of being the world’s most wanted fugitive.

No wonder he looks knackered in those home movies of his. I had always assumed he was about 108. First it was policemen who were younger than me; then it was High Court judges; now it’s the World’s Number One Baddie.

The e-book phenomenon

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The Times asked me to write a piece about the e-book phenomenon, so I did. Sample:

Two factors will limit the size of the e-book market. One is that reading substantial amounts of text on a screen is a masochistic, headache- inducing experience that makes one appreciate the merits of paper: high resolution and low power consumption; great portability and infinite flexibility. And it will still function after you’ve poured a cup of coffee over it.

The other reason e-books won’t become dominant is that they usually embody tiresome “digital rights management” (copy-protection) systems. Publishers love DRM because it gives them control. Consumers hate it because it takes away time-honoured freedoms. If you buy a printed book, for example, you can resell it, lend it to a friend or donate it to the school jumble sale. But the licensing and DRM provisions on many e-books remove these freedoms. The e-book does not “belong” to you: all you have is a licence to use it in ways that have been approved by the publisher…

At the end of the piece I am described as “a commentator on the internet”, which is a bit grand. All references to the Observer have mysteriously disappeared!

SNARFing your email

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Er, according to MIT’s Technology Review, Microsoft Research has released a program which prioritises the contents of your inbox depending on how close you are to the sender. The (free) download is called SNARF, for Social Network and Relationship Finder. It runs alongside Microsoft Outlook (2002 and newer versions), poring through e-mail histories and following chains of communications to ferret out the unread messages it deems most important.

SNARF measures a sender’s importance based on two key factors: the number and frequency of messages sent and received. The program then sorts unread e-mails into three fields: messages where the user is listed in the To or CC fields, group e-mails, and all messages received in the last week. SNARF lists messages by senders, rather than subject lines, and puts a user’s most important correspondents on top.

“We’re just counting e-mails,” one member of the development team said. “Some people might call it a brain-dead algorithm, but the messages you send someone is a pretty good proxy for how well you know people,” he says. “It can be very detailed.”

Would you like fries with that download?

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The New Scientist reported, and the NYT followed up on, a Disney patent application which could lead to McDonald’s Happy Meal toys being replaced with portable media players that hold Disney movies, music, games or photos. Users could add files to the devices by earning points with food purchases. The NYT says:

The plan could work something like this: A customer enters a restaurant and buys a meal, receiving the portable media player and an electronic code that authorizes a partial download of a movie, video or other media file, which can be downloaded while in the restaurant, according to a United States Patent and Trademark Office application filed by Disney. Then, with each subsequent return, the customer earns more downloadable data, eventually getting an entire movie or game.

The report also claims that McDonalds has been kitting out its premises with wireless Internet connections since 2003, and since then has installed Wi-Fi in more than 6,200 restaurants worldwide. It charges customers for Wi-Fi usage and trades promotional coupons and prepaid cards for network access time.

I really must get out more. On second thoughts, perhaps not.

Sunlight on the bay

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There’s a wonderful road which runs north to south through the Dingle Peninsula. Not for the faint-hearted (steep drops at one side), but the pay-off is a wonderful view as you come over the rise. This is what it was like this morning on the way to Inch.