I am curious how many books they'll be able to continue to sign up into the program. If it really increases sales for the books that sign up, it could happen. On the down side, if you type in the right search phrases, you can get Amazon to give you the page images for basically an entire book. I tried the query "neural networks", and they linked to a $62.95 book called Applying Neural Networks: A Practical Guide which had given permission to be used in "search inside". Because you can view not just pages with the search term on it, but also adjacent pages up to two away, they offered me links to page views of pages 1 through 71 inclusive, picking up again to give pages 77 through 129, then pages 132 through 148, at which point I gave up checking page runs. In total, they directly linked to 222 of the 303 pages in the book as having the search term on it. And one can easily fill in gaps by taking a page adjacent to the gap, picking a search term from that page, and searching on it. In other words, if you're willing to do a little work, you can get the entire text of any "search inside" book off of Amazon.

Now, it's probably not worth it for a regular reader. But if you're a college student being asked to buy an expensive textbook, and you only intend to refer to it for the main figures or equations (and isn't that the case for a lot of technical textbooks...), this would be a very tempting alternative. You don't have to rely on a library reserve copy - you can just sit in your room and pull up Amazon to look at that page with the algorithm you need on it. If it's really key, you can save it and print it for later.

Frankly, the more I think about it, the more surprised I am that any publishers went along with this.
[10.23.03]

Electronic Gaming got a bunch of pre-teens together, made them play classic 70's and 80's video games, and shared what they had to say about the games with us. They were really big fans of Pong:

John: [...] By the way, is this supposed to be tennis or Ping-Pong?

Becky: Ping-Pong.

Gordon: It doesn't even go over the net. It goes through it. I don't even think that thing in the middle is a net.

Tim: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.

Yesterday, Project Gutenberg posted its 10,000th freely-available book onto the internet, reaching its longtime goal! I've been following their progress for a couple of years, and this past year finally got involved as a Distributed Proofreader, using their simple web interface to proofread OCR'd texts. The On-line Books Page (a portal indexing free books on the internet from a variety of sources including but not limited to PG) has a small article about this on their site. I love this project, and with over thirty years of history, I think they have a good change of reaching a million titles on-line someday. I intend to continue helping out, and if you're at all interested in their project, I'd suggest you consider lending a hand too!
[10.16.03]

On the one hand, this is just a story of another researcher using a web game to obtain data - in this case, the ESP Game, which anonymously pairs two users, shows them the same images, and asks them to enter descriptive words until they get a match. But there's both some good and some bad computer science that seems to be going on here.

On the good side, there's definite value in finding ways to use people for data collection in places computers fall down, and this program seems engineered to do it well. Asking people to agree on terms is good, because it allows some confidence that they aren't just based on a single view of the world, so I like that aspect of the system. But I've got my doubts about the quality of the data, and being a mainstream media article, that isn't discussed here. Basically, I played the game a few times, and people soon learn that if there isn't an obvious object in the picture, throwing out the names of the major colors will usually hit a match. Same with just typing in any words that appear in the picture. You can tell from the list of "taboo" words (these are, one assumes, words which have already been identified to be relevant to the image), that they vary in quality. Now, there seems to be some ranking based on how quickly the shared term was agreed upon, so that may help, but by making it a game you are asking for people to ... well ... game the system.

I also have my doubts about a comment from late in the article about future applications:

Blum suggested another problem that might be solved with this approach: Internet searches concerning mathematics. Different mathematicians use different symbols to represent the same variable in equations -- what one labels X, another might label T. Humans can recognize that it's the relationships of the variables that matters, not the labels, but computers can't.

The problem I suspect being referred to (and it is possible that this was expressed, but the reporter simply didn't understand the distinction), is coming up with the ability to type a mathematics equation into a search engine and have all of the occurences of that equation, up to equivalent variables/substitutions, come out the other side. But this is hard in part because of the difficulty of just finding the equations. Images are tagged as such on the web, but equations are sometimes rendered in ascii, sometimes in images, and sometimes as a combination. I suspect many of them are in pdf files viewable as webpages. Once the problem were broken down to the point that a user could be asked if two mathematical equations related or not, I believe a computer could check that as well.

Perhaps the real application would be a tool that presents a line of a webpage and asks if there's an equation in it or not....
[10.8.03]

Always amusing, the 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded yesterday. Physics, as always, has one of the best winners, with the prize going to a number of Australian researchers for their paper An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces, though the interdisciplinary report on Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans would some in a close second. If you haven't been before, take time to browse the rest of the Annals of Improbable Research website - there's really funny stuff tucked away in there.
[10.3.03]

If you're local, or near-local, to Ithaca, this is perhaps the best weekend of the year around these parts, so get out and enjoy yourself. The Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, Craft Show and Sale starts today and runs through Sunday on the Commons. At the least, go pick up a peck of local apples and bake some pies this weekend. Then, on Saturday, get over to the opening day of the fall Friends of the Library Book Sale, the 3rd largest used book sale in the country. The prices drop each day, so remember to go back next week, and for closing day on the 20th when you can get books for $1 a bag. With the beautiful fall weather finally here, but the snow still holding off, it's going to be a great weekend to go out and enjoy the town. I can't wait!
[10.3.03]

Speaking of computer games - I do enjoy the "on-line and free" variety, and recently I've been playing Shockwave.com's recent offering: Crash. Navigate cars and trucks through increasingly congested intersections without letting them crash into each other. But, since smashing hapless vehicles into each other is actually the appealing part of the game, when you get a black car with a sckull on the hood, smash it into someone for bonus points! I love those little black cars....
[10.3.03]

I'm not a huge video game player, and I don't enjoy horror movies, but this review of Ghost Master makes me want to go buy a copy and spend the weekend curled up on my sofa with my laptop. It sounds like a more goal-oriented, and silly, version of the Sims... with ghosts. I could rent Ghostbusters and while I played and pretend I was back in high school.
[10.3.03]

I've got the Emmy's on in the background while I'm cooking dinner (wooo - the Daily Show just won its second Emmy of the night!), and Dennis Miller did a bit on the "year in review" which was mostly predictable, but his sports highlight from the year was the Milwaukee sausage getting clobbered by a Pirate! Wheeee! That video clip never gets old. I haven't watched the Emmy's in years, though - I'd no idea they were so goofy. It's like a ton of minute-long comedy bits, with hyper-rushed 30 second award presentations. It also seems wrong that the Academy Awards are up for an Emmy...
[9.21.03]

Even up north, it's a windy, rainy, stay-inside day. If you're warm and with power, have some nice mindless fun trying out the new cat herding game Cats over at Orisinal. [via PCJM] I also finally tried out the much cited Virtual Drug Dealer, which is the type of game therapists should use to diagnosis your personality. Are you the type who buys a little of everything? Or blows it all on one unit of DesignerZ when the price dips low and hopes to make a fortune on a one-time deal? Frankly, if it weren't for the fact that Use of Human Subject protections make it illegal, I'd suspect that most of the games on the internet were put out there by psychology grad students. Worse for us, they're probably put out there by marketing people....
[9.18.03]

Lots of special holidays looming! Tomorrow on the 19th, of course, we get the first Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrr! Wear your eye patch and cutlass to work, or just go see Pirates of the Caribbean again. Then entertain your more serious side, and celebrate the start of Banned Books Week starting on Saturday. Then close off the weekend with The International Day of Peace on Sunday.
[9.18.03]

I loved rebuses as a kid. There are hundreds of them at Rozie's puzzle site, along with some other games and puzzles. The off-site Enigma Puzzle is a fun implementation of a one-level letter substitution code where you use letter swaps to resolve in on a decoding.
[9.17.03]

I grew up with 3-2-1 Contact, remembered mostly to me as "that show with The Bloodhound Gang", because everyone knew that was why you tuned in. (And, by the way, I am quite sadenned that searching for the actual show title by Googling "Bloodhound Gang" results in pages of links to a band which appears to be best known for a song called "Hooray for Boobies", because the internet shouldn't tarnish all my childhood memories.) After 3-2-1 Contact went off the air (and stopped publishing their very cool magazine...), I found Square One, which I watched way passed the intended age. Again, the end-of-the-show serial mysteries were the best. Mathnet ruled even more than the Bloodhound Gang (the Fibonacci sequence trumps moth-pheremone ghosts any day!) and I remember being unwarrantedly excited the time they had an episode-long mathnet special.

Being an adult, I don't keep up on PBSs children's offerings like I used to, but I somehow discovered that the latest show in the "TV for geek kids" genre is Cyberchase, and I decided to check it out. This show is great. Deviating from the standard science-for-kids format, instead of a melange of separate scenes, each episode is a half-hour cartoon with a coherent plot. In each one, three children are sucked into cyberspace to protect MotherBoard from the attacks of the evil villain Hacker (played by Christopher Lloyd). This usually requires solving various puzzles. The cool part - often the kids get the puzzles wrong, and time is spent showing the kids trying to talk out the answers, often with each taking a different approach. In the few episodes I've seen, the puzzles have covered basic math and logic, but also pulled in what I would consider computer science puzzles, such as require inductive breakdowns of the problem or considering alternate representations of the data.

Definitely check this show out if you've got kids. It's just goofy enough to be fun for adults watching along as well. Tomorrow's episode looks to be a fun one:

Double Trouble
Out for revenge, Hacker invades Shangri-La and imprisons Master Pi . The kids and Digit arrive as Hacker searches for the Good Vibration -- the source of peace and happiness on the cybersite. Trouble doubles with unexpected results for the kids as well as Hacker, Buzz and Delete. Will the good vibrations continue, or will Hacker turn Shangri La into Shangri Blah?

The recreation of Milgram's "6-degrees of separation" study on the internet which I linked to a ways back has now been completed, and the results are consistent though not identical to the snail-mail results. Messages were still able to find their way though in about six steps (the researchers attribute the huge drop-out rate to disinclination rather than inability to find a suitable person to forward to). Despite the small percentage of messages that got through, the absolute number was many times larger than in Milgram's study (384 vs. 13 successful messages), and they were able to investigate his theory that successful message passing relied on social hubs - and disprove that theory! Successful message passing also used more professional than familial ties.

In the Milgram study, all successful chains went through one person -- a well-connected tailor. The Columbia study did not show this funnel effect, however, said Strogatz. It showed, rather, "that there are a lot of roads to Rome," he said.

The new research also shows that the key to good social searches is weaker friends, or more distant acquaintances, said Strogatz. This makes sense -- closer friends are less useful in this case because people who know each other well tend to have the same friends, he said.

I have no comment on this entry from Everything Once, My Big Fat Greek Blinding, except to say that it has nothing to do with the movie its title spoofs off of, but is rather a hilarious contemplation of the reality of Greek mythology. Trust me - just go read it.
[9.5.03]

It's moved on from overdone to a yearly academic tradition: the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2007 is out. There are always a couple of items on the list which surprise me and illuminate small changes that I never noticed happening. This year, those items include:

8. An automatic is a weapon, not a transmission.
12. Gas has always been unleaded.
32. They have always had a pin number.
33. Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America.

How did I miss this! I noticed a link to this list of Most Misspelled Cities in America (based on web search data), but nobody told me number 1 is Pittsburgh! I mean, I momentarily thought it might make the top ten, but it's just not that hard to spell. Of course, as the article points out, in the late 1800's the U.S. Board on Geographic Names standardized location spellings after over a century of people naming their towns whatever they wanted, willy-nilly. They ruled that all *-burghs would drop their final "h", except for Pittsburgh, which got an exemption. So, in typical Pittsburgh style, it makes number 1 by virtue of refusing to get with the program. I love it! [via Gael's new Test Pattern]
[9.1.03]

I had vaguely heard that Mars was closer to Earth than it had been for millenia, but I hadn't really paid much attention to that fact before I was outside a couple of weeks ago and was positively freaked out by the red object in the sky near the moon. I've never before been able to notice the red color that people claim they can see in Mars (it's always looked white to me...) so it was the first time I'd ever noticed a star or planet actually having a color, and I found it eerie. Since then, I've been keeping a closer eye on Mars coverage, including checking in at the Hubble telescope's homepage, which has been temporarily taken over with A Rendezvous with Mars special coverage. Definitely check out the video they pieced together of a rotating Mars globe, though all of the images are beautiful. The site also provides convenient links to previous "best images" of Mars, for comparison.
[9.1.03]

Sadly, my camera has died and there will be no more Photo Fridays for the forseeable future...