2010 Jan 28, 4:00Jonathan Zittrain on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, artificial AI, and related topics.
jonathan-zittrain video amazon mechanical-turk mechanicalturk technical 2010 Jan 28, 2:36Amazon's Mechanical Turkers enact the Prisoners Dilemma.
amazon mechanical-turk psychology economics prisoners-dilemma 2009 Dec 15, 2:01"Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror fame) was in for a horror when he realized that his server crashed and his data was gone and due to some reason, the backup mechanism was not working. ... So what should
Jeff do now? Since Coding horror is a high traffic blog, I think there is a way to get back at least some of the images." Reconstruct the HTML from Google's cache, change the HTTP server to tell the
client it has the correct cached image for all the images, add script to the HTML to grab the images and send them back. Awesome idea. Of course now I want to setup Fiddler to swap in random
images...
via:ericlaw jeff-atwood backup web http cache image javascript technical 2009 Dec 3, 1:54Uses Amazon's mechanical Turk program to test framing: "Framing the outcomes in positive vs. negative terms produced a reversal of participants’ preferences for the two programs. In condition 1, the
majority of respondents (69.4%) favored Program A, exhibiting risk aversion. In condition 2, the majority of respondents (65.3%) favored Program B, exhibiting risk seeking."
via:pskomoroch science experiment social risk security mechanicalturk amazon 2009 Oct 29, 10:43"Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair (ARMAR) explores the use of augmented reality to aid in the execution of procedural tasks in the maintenance and repair domain." Giant goggles hooked up
to a G1 give 3D overlays over the mechanics view to point them to and help with the current task.
video augmented-reality 3d research 2009 Oct 18, 5:22"Q: The caulk around my bathtub is peeling away in places, and it looks pretty ugly. How do I remove it and recaulk?"
howto diy home tool caulk shower bathtub tile 2009 May 22, 6:59"...but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. ... So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are
10+1 rules by which you should try to play." I always liked Bill & Ted's time travel mechanics better than Back to the Future's - not that it made for a better movie of course. I'd like to see a
chart comparing the time travel mechanics of well known fiction that features time travel.
time-travel movie fiction bttf 2009 May 13, 10:35In my first linear algebra book they had examples of linear tranformations applied to an image of a cartoon sheep. The fist example was a shear mapping.
sheep humor amazon mechanicalturk via:swannman 2009 Apr 7, 9:02
I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as
handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:
- Better integration of web apps with your system.
- Its easy for web apps to do.
- Links to URNs can now take the user to the sites the user prefers for the sort of thing identified by the URN. For example, if I have a physical address in HTML, instead of making that an http
link to Yahoo Maps, I can make the link a geo scheme URI and those who follow the link will get their preferred mapping site that
has registered for that scheme. Actually, looking at the geo scheme's RFC, maybe I'd rather use some other URN scheme to represent the physical location, but you get the point.
However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following:
- There's no way to know if you are the handler for a particular URL scheme which is an important question for web app URL protocol handler authors.
- There's no way to fallback to an http URL in the case that a particular URL scheme isn't registered. A suggested solution to testing the registration of a scheme is for browsers to provide an additional script method
to check if a scheme is registered. I don't like the idea of writing script that walks over all my page's links and rewrites them based on that method. I'd much rather see a declarative and
backwards compatible fallback mechanism, although I don't know what that would look like.
- There's no way to register for a namespace within the urn scheme URI, the info scheme URI, or the tag scheme URI. I want to register
info:lccn/... (Library of Congress Card Number identifiers) to LibraryThing or Amazon and I want to register urn:duri:... (dated URIs) to the Web Archive, among other things.
- Will this result in a proliferation of unregistered URL schemes with clashing namespaces? The ESW Wiki notes why this would be bad.
- And last, although this is nitpickier than the rest, I don't like the '%s' syntax used in the registration method. I'd much rather pass in an URL template, like the URL template used
in OpenSearch. If an URL template is used for matching rather than registering against a particular URL scheme, this could also allow for registering a namespace within a URN. For example
something along the lines of:
registerProtocolHandler("info:lccn/{lccnID}", "htttp://www.librarything.com/search_works.php?q={lccnID}", "LibraryThing LCCN")
url template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn 2009 Jan 23, 1:47"When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic. ... Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it
cost for someone to reveal their face?"
privacy research amazon mechanicalturk internet photo experiment social 2008 Sep 10, 1:32Discussion on IETF DNS mailing list about Mozilla's Public Suffix list and what they should do ultimately. "I'm inclined to suggest: Gather and hard-code your list into Firefox, and also provide a
mechanism by which domain authorities can publish information which overrides your list for their domain."
idn domain firefox publicsuffix ietf mozilla tld 2008 Sep 4, 11:30
This past weekend Sarah and I went to Salty's on Alki. I had never been
down to the Alki area so that was fun and I took a few photos while we were there. It turns out they were the last few photos I'll be taking with that camera as it turned itself
on in my pocket and the lens extension mechanism broke for the inner most lens. So now I'm looking for a new camera, preferably one that has a lock mechanism so I can't accidentally turn it on in
my pocket. The dinner was good and Salty's has a great view. On an unrelated note, the next day we went to an Audi dealership and test-drove the new 2009 A4 which was fun. I'm happy with my car but
Sarah's feeling antsy.
alki rambling camera weekend birthday nontechnical 2008 Aug 14, 9:38
I recently finished Braid, the Xbox Live game, and a comparison with Portal is helpful. From a screen shot Braid
looks like a normal 2D platformer, but that's like looking at a screen shot of Portal and saying its a first person shooter. While the scaffolding of the game-play may sort of fall into that
category, the games are actually about exploring the character's ability and solving puzzles. In Portal the ability is bending space and in Braid its bending time. However, whereas in Portal there
is one space bending mechanism, the portal gun, Braid's protagonist explores several different time bending techniques including, most prominently, reversing time, but also time dilation, multiple
time-lines, and other odd things.
Similar to the difference in game-play, while Portal has a strict simplicity to its visual style, Braid is much more ornate, like you're playing in an oil painting. Without seeing video of the game, or playing the demo (which is available for free on Xbox Live) its difficult to convey, but it is quite lovely and the
animation adds quite a bit. Both games too are rather short leaving you just a bit hungry for more and have an interesting plot and an ending that I'd hate to spoil although Braid replaces Portal's
humor with melancholy. If you enjoyed Portal and Twelve Monkeys then I'd recommend Braid.
braid game videogame portal nontechnical 2008 Mar 8, 11:44"This memo defines extensions to the RFC 2045 media type and RFC 2183 disposition parameter value mechanisms to provide ... a means to specify parameter values in character sets other than
US-ASCII..."
http http-header rfc standard reference ietf mime encoding charset language content-disposition 2008 Feb 19, 8:57A video of a player's many attempts at the same level in a hacked Super Mario World game overlayed on top of one another.
video mario game quantum-physics via:boingboing 2008 Feb 8, 12:52FTA: "Quantum mechanics has a number of weird consequences... In trying to come up with a classical conceptual model in which to capture these non-classical phenomena, we eventually hit upon using
the idea of using computer games as an analogy. ...let us
humor nerd science quantum-mechanics tomb-raider game gaming 2007 Nov 19, 12:35
Two weekends ago I went down to California for Angie and Kane's
going away party. It was fun despite going to a country western club. It was a very large place with plenty of space for line dancing, a dentist chair turned into a make-margaritas-in-your-mouth
chair, and of course a mechanical bull. Surprisingly, I did not fit in.
This past weekend Sarah and I went to the
EMP and SciFi Museum. The last time I was there was for the Star Trek convention (I'm cool) and Sarah hadn't been before. We also ate in the attached diner which
was acceptable.
emp seattle nontechnical 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Mar 8, 1:02Defintion of the escape mechanism used in XML.
xml escape encoding reference w3c standard character-entity-reference 2006 Nov 28, 3:24GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. It is a technique for obtaining RDF data from XML documents and in particular XHTML pages. Authors may explicitly
associate documents with transformation algorithms, typic
reference w3c web xml rdf metadata grddl semanticweb
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