Total Information Awareness...Take 2

Oy...

Check out this Wall Street Journal (of all sources!) article on how Total Information Awareness is being resuscitated:

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them.

And

The agency's best-known product is a database called TIDE, which stands for the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. TIDE contains more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror links. Some names are known or suspected terrorists; others are terrorists' friends and families; still more are people with some loose affiliation to a terrorist.  

Yeah, that means you, you threat to national security peace activists. 

Facebook and Pinterest posts not included.  

Yet.

You code, girl!

The Anita Borg Institute has published a list of famous women computer scientists. It's pretty impressive.

Gotta love my systers!

Death of the Technologists

Been a bad month for the techies. Starting with Steve Jobs on Oct. 5, followed by Dennis Ritchie on Oct. 12, and then John McCarthy on Oct. 24. We've lost a few of the founding fathers this month.

Should we regulate babies?

There's some very thought-provoking discussion on assisted reproductive technologies in today's New York Times Room for Debate section.

The fertility industry in the United States is largely unregulated. This lets consumers and business people dictate what is acceptable, what is normal and what is allowable -- including the extreme cases like the one sperm donor who had 150 children. Are such situations a problem? Many other nations, like Britain, regulate the fertility industry more closely. Should the U.S. emulate them?

Personally, I think our society might benefit from a little regulation in this area...at very least things like truth-in-advertising about the successes and problems of these technologies, requirements on practitioners' training, quality control on procedures, that sort of thing. However, I am horrified to read that to the extent that there are current FDA guidelines, they suggest that gay men should not be sperm donors unless they have been celibate for 5 years, ostensibly to prevent AIDS issues. Don't straight men get AIDS, too???

Bill Gates is getting serious about crap

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is apparently sponsoring research to reinvent the toilet!

I think it's fabulous.

A couple of years back, BBC reported that public sanitation was considered by doctors the best medical advance in over a century. It's really sad that it's not available for a large portion of the world. Toilet technology improvements could really make inroads into that. In particular, the ability to process sewage locally, with minimal access to water infrastructure could make huge improvements in quality of life.

Apart from health considerations, the other big benefit they are looking into is use of raw sewage for energy generation (possibly using the energy for processing the waste, to recover water and minerals). Why should it only be cattle whose waste products produce power?

Ever wonder where all your energy is going?

This is a very interesting interactive graphic. It shows how much energy was produced in 2009 by various sources (e.g. solar, coal, petroleum, etc.), how it was used by various sectors (residential, industrial, commercial, transport), and how much was used vs. wasted. It's a little hard to read, at first, but stick with it.

A total of 94.5 quadrillion BTU (QBTU) was produced, of which solar was, by far, the smallest source (0.1 QBTU), and petroleum the largest (35.9 QBTU). Of these, 38.2 QBTU was used to produce electricity, with the remaining 56.3 used directly. (Though I'm a little confused -- the solar link doesn't show it being used to produce electricity.)

I think there must be some policy lessons in there, but I'm sure they won't be learned.

Bingle?

So, according to this article, Google has figured out that Bing uses Google as a subroutine. Specifically, when you do a Bing search, Bing essentially performs the same Google search, and combines the results with its own indexes, and outputs results that incorporate Google's results. (You may get a different order of items, or some items may be different, but it's essentially using Google as one factor in finding and ranking results.) And it seems that part of what may be making this possible is a kind of eavesdropping that IE 8 does, that allows it to send home to the mother ship people's search results and the links they choose to pursue.

It was very clever how Google figured this out: they apparently rigged things in their databases for a set of nonsense searches, so that they would find a specific totally unrelated site. They then tried Bing on the same nonsense searches, and lo and behold, what should come up, but the exact same totally unrelated site. More details are here.

Microsoft does not deny the claim. They tried to shrug it off as Google is just one among 1000 factors. Which is probably true. The question is: is it closer to factor 1 or to factor 853? I think we can all guess the answer to that one.

I doubt this is against the law, but it's certainly cheesy.

Netflix and the Death of the DVD?

Netflix has essentially killed Blockbuster, which itself killed the mom-and-pop video store business. And now they're saying "we're going to stop doing DVDs". You will get only online "Watch Instantly" access to movies.

Interesting bait-and-switch.

The first article I read about this was a bit alarmist. It turns out that the switch will happen over a number of years. Apparently Netflix hasn't even peaked, yet, in the DVD space -- that doesn't happen until 2013, according to projections. Nevertheless, I find the predicted shift interesting.

I see a few drivers for the shift away from physical to online:

1. Decrease costs associated with physical management of the DVD media -- mailing costs, storage costs, replacement costs, etc. And it's not just about DVDs, either. Remember videos? 33 1/3 LPs? Tower Records? Who wants to be stuck with the world's largest collection of DVDs, when Gra-ray(tm) comes out?
2. Better control over copyright issues. Personally, I believe this is the main driver. It's easy for customers to copy DVDs, and the RIAA is probably breathing down Netflix's neck about doing stuff to prevent this. With Netflix controlling delivery of the content via the Watch Instantly functionality, they may be able to make it harder to copy movies. I'm not saying they'll be able to control it completely (this is unlikely), but they'll be able to make it hard enough for all but the most determined to make copies, so that from their perspective they'll be making a sizable dent in the "copyright infringement" problem.
3. Better control over your commercial experience. This is probably another big driver. We see this sort of thing already -- when you watch The Daily Show or Colbert Report online, you are not permitted to fast-forward through the commercials, and even more annoyingly, unlike your TV (which you couldn't fast forward either) they are REALLY LOUD, so that you are forced to hear them even if you try to escape them in the bathroom. Netflix will be able to sell this capability to advertisers or sell you premium commercial-reduced service. Great for improving revenue stream either way.
4. Finer-grained customer profiling information. I would have to bet that online viewing offers some interesting data-mining opportunities, including stuff like how often you watch a particular movie, what times of day you watch it, which segments you watch over and over, etc. You know...the kind of stuff that would be great for targeted advertising.

Of course, without physical media, and customers' complete dependence on online providers, it will be interesting to see what happens to prices and diversity/availability of content. But for the reasons I've listed above (and probably others, too) I'd say that the writing is on the wall.