Trees

Can a Computer Detect Sarcasm? is a post from Chris Pirillo

Sarcasm is a great way to take the edge off of criticism or to tell the world you aren’t exactly happy about something. When we are using verbal language, it’s usually fairly easy to detect sarcasm. It’s another matter completely when we attempt to get our point across in text. It’s easy for someone to take things the wrong way online because it’s impossible to read intended meaning. We have a few ways to combat this problem, including actually placing a disclaimer within our comment stating that we are being sarcastic.

Doing this isn’t always possible, though. How, then, are we supposed to know for sure? Why can’t our computer just tell us when sarcasm is detected? A slew of researchers are attempting to help. They have developed a computer program that can identify sarcasm in online environments with about an 80% accuracy. There’s obviously still a long way to go before computers can correctly understand all the subtleties of humor. This new research might just help companies sort through comments about products and services to find out what their customers really think.

The program uses a strategy called “machine learning,” and detects sarcasm by analyzing patterns of phrases and punctuation often used to indicate irony. Starting out, the researchers fed the computer 80 sarcastic sentences and a few thousand non-sarcastic sentences grabbed from Amazon user rewviews. Sarcastic comments included: “Trees died for this book?” and, for a smart phone: “All the features you want — too bad they don’t work!” The program analyzed all of the sentences and created several hundred patterns that it then used to evaluate a total of 66,000 reviews. Each review contained an average of fifteen sentences. One of the patterns it figured out, for example, was that sentences that start with “I guess” and end with an ellipsis are often, though not always sarcastic.

To test the program out, the team gave two hundred of the same product reviews to three independent reviewers. Results showed about an 80% agreement between computers and humans when trying to detect sarcasm in the written words. Research like this may well lead to very important advances in artificial intelligence. Who needs monkeys, anyway?

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Make a Backup of Your iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad Apps List is a post from Chris Pirillo

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It occurred to me recently that I have installed almost 600 applications on my MacBook Pro. Many of them were given to me to review, and quite a few of them were free. As I was going through the list in order to decide what I wanted to load onto my new iPad 3G, I realized that it would not be too cool if I were to lose all of these little beauties. What happens if my computer crashes and I lose all this data? Apple doesn’t make it easy to restore all of these apps – you have to remember what ones you had.

I decided to print out my list of apps so that I could have a hard copy in case I should ever need to restore them from Apple. I hit the Command + P key combination to open up a print window while viewing my apps list. I set it to the “song listing” option, but you can choose whatever you like. Under page setup, I chose the paper size of “Tabloid.” It’s going to be a large file, and you’re going to save it as a .PDF. Be sure to change it to Landscape mode instead of Portrait.

Instead of choosing an actual printer, just choose to save as a .PDF file. You CAN actually print out pieces of paper if you choose, but it will take a lot of them. Save the trees! With the .PDF, I have all of the information I might need in order to figure out what I need in case I ever lose all of my apps.

If you haven’t done this yet, I suggest you do so now. Not only will it help you if you were to lose all of your apps, it can also help you make a quick check to see if you have already downloaded something in particular. I know that for me, I tend to forget at times what I already have.

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So the other day I kind of glossed over why the Salmon Protocols idea of “Magic Signatures” is flawed… I wanted to expand on that just a little… Fundamentally it goes back to one very simple and basic principle of Digital Signatures: Only What Is Signed Is Secure.

With Magic Signatures, you basically have a bag-of-bits and a signature calculated over those bits. The spec tries to say that if you take that signature and bits and insert it into an Atom or JSON document, it somehow proves the provenance of the containing Atom or JSON. This claim is based on the assumption that the bag-of-bits being signed somehow represents the document that contains the signature.

The Magic Signature spec says: “The scope of the verification covers only the contents of the Magic Envelope itself. In some cases, e.g., when using envelope data as provenance for enclosing data, the decoded “data” value must be checked against or override the enclosing data. A secure if lossy mechanism is to throw away the enclosing information and replace it with the output of the decoded “data”. Another altnernative is to compare trees, override with signed information where there are conflicts, and annotate signed parts. The correct mechanism depends on the security model required by the processor and is outside the scope of this specification.”

In other words, the spec does not define any reliable means of taking one of these “magic signatures” and verifying the provenance of the envelope containing it. It’s possible, for instance, to generate a signature over a block of JSON-encoded data and drop that into an Atom entry that roughly correlates to the same underlying data. According to the Magic Signatures spec, so long as the digital signature of the JSON data is correct, the Magic Signature in the Atom entry is valid and somehow proves the provenance of the Atom entry.

Problem is, Only What Is Signed Is Secure. Only the block of JSON-encoded data is signed, making it the ONLY block of data whose provenance is proven. The Atom entry itself could have been generated by anyone, at any time, and could contain additional pieces of information that the originator of the JSON-encoded data never intended. If a would-be attacker figures out that a service provider is using the compare-and-merge strategy suggested by the spec, then that service and it’s users will be exposed to a potentially very serious attack vector.

Magic Signatures tries to circumvent the exact mechanisms that the XML Digital Signatures specification puts in place to defend against this exact kind of issue.

This problem, however, only applies to the enveloped magic signature.. what about standalone magic signature documents? I’ll deal with the standalone documents in another post.

Moths are some of the most versatile animals in the world, in fact you can take a black moth and place it in white birch tree fields and their offspring will evolve very quickly to match the white color of the trees. If that isn’t cool enough for you, new nanocoating based off Moth principles could produce displays that are glare proof and scratch resistant.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg, Germany have discovered a nanocoating technology that is placed over the top of glass items, removing glare. This technology can be placed over Smartphone screens or on the dashboard of our cars to reduce glare.

When applied to touchscreen devices the possibility of scratching the device is greatly reduced, possibly more so than the oleophobic coating found on devices such as the iPhone.

So how are moth’s related to this new technology? There eyes are non-reflective, which gave researchers the backing information they needed. [Gizmag]

           

The Brooklyn Botanical Garden might have overshot the scheduling for their annual Cherry Blossom festival. Though it's happening in two weeks, the city seems to be at peak bloom right now! The full "Hanami" celebration lasts the full month between April 3rd and May 2nd, and according to their map, most of the park is in peak bloom right now, with some trees even in the middle of post bloom. The Sakura Matsuri cherry blossom festival will feature contemporary and traditional Japanese music and dance, as well as fun projects for kids like origami folding and tea bag making. Until then, check out these gorgeous photos of cherry blossoms blooming all over New York.

One thing Zynga loves are the “ville” games. Farmville now has 80+ million monthly users, and they’ve go FishVille, YoVille, PetVille, etc. as well as lots of other games. Next up, it looks like, is FrontierVille And as ridiculous as these games are, people love them, sometimes they get addicted to them, and the revenue keeps rolling in.

Next up is FrontierVille, if the screenshots I saw while logged in to Facebook as a Developer Test Account are to be believed.

The game description? Click and then keep clicking. Ok, not really. It’s “Howdy Pardner! Let’s explore a new life on the frontier. You gotta chop trees to construct buildings, clear land to raise livestock, plant crops, and raise a family. The untamed wilderness is hazardous, but your fellow pioneers are there to help.”

Milestones include things like “learned the ropes,” “just broke ground for a new homestead!,” and “just finished building a General Store in FrontierVille.”

I just wish they’d create BloggerVille. I think I’d be really good at that.

Randy Seaver is one of my very favorite genealogy bloggers. (Click here to visit his blog.) He has excellent insights about tools, technologies, and content that genealogists find useful, and he often provides better reviews (and screenshots) of new products and services than anyone else I follow.

He is into genealogy – not social networking – so he typically reviews things from the perspective of a genealogist. I think that makes sense, because he is an excellent genealogist and his readers look to him for genealogy advice. But I have sometimes felt that he and other genealogy bloggers haven’t appreciated the fact that our primary thrust at FamilyLink.com has been to expose literally tens of millions of non-genealogists to the first experience building a family tree made up of their living relatives (whom we make it easy for them to find on Facebook) and then to help them stay in touch with those relatives.

Most of the millions of trees that our users have created on our Facebook app or on our Flash-based family tree on FamilyLink.com are made up of living relatives. In fact, of the 80 million people who have used our application, the average user has 8 known relatives. We make it easy for them to drag-and-drop those relatives onto their family tree on FamilyLink, and then, if they want to, to add information about ancestors as well. (Randy is right that we haven’t enabled GEDCOM uploading on FamilyLink – making it almost useless to a genealogist wanting to share his/her tree with their relatives. The reason is that only a small percentage of our users even known what a GEDCOM is, while the majority of our users want to share and view recent family photos with each other. So it’s always been a matter of priority.)

Because of our unique focus on helping people find living relatives, we have attracted a huge mass audience since we first launched “We’re Related” on Facebook in October 2007. Clearly, far more people are more interested in their living relatives than they are in their deceased ancestors. (I recall data from my MyFamily.com days – a long time ago – that 7% of adults are involved in family history but 95% of people feel it is important to stay in touch with living relatives. That means we may potentially have a 13.5x larger audience than purely genealogy sites.) That said, many of us at FamilyLink helped pioneer the online genealogy industry, and have wanted to provide valuable and innovative tools and content to the family historian in every family – in addition to the living family tools.

Already this year, we have enhanced our photo sharing features for families, added instant messaging, and are rolling out a new sign-up flow, a new home page, and a desktop photo uploader in the next few days. After we complete two more major features in the coming weeks, we will take FamilyLink.com out of beta and formally launch it. We believe it will be ready for millions of families to rely on as their primary family web site. Other features and enhancements will be added later, of course, but the major features of our family social network will be in place, and no longer in beta testing mode.

With the social features well underway, we are turning our attention back to taking some of the “really good ideas” Randy gives us credit for – he’s referring to our genealogy ideas – and baking them into our FamilyLink experience. Many observers will say “it’s about time.” But as a company, we feel good about the fact that given our limited startup capital we had to choose between building (or completing) our advanced and innovative tools for genealogists and our mass market family social network tools, and we chose the latter. Now we are in a position to complete some of our earlier projects and roll them out as part of our flagship service, FamilyLink.com.

Randy recently wrote a blog post about FamilyLink Plus, the new premium (subscription) service that FamilyLink is introducing. Like most other companies in the family/genealogy space, we have chosen to introduce a premium service on top of our basic free service – and some of the main features in the Plus product will appeal primarily to the family historian of the family.

Randy raises some good questions about FamilyLink Plus, which I will attempt to answer here.

• Regarding Ancestor Searching (letting members search more than 1.5 billion online names) he says, “This must be a subscription to WorldVitalRecords, right?” Yes, in fact, it is a subscription to the World Collection on WorldVitalRecords.com. This is an introductory price, and there is currently no way to extend your current WVR subscription for $59.40, but our call center will probably be able to do that soon. (Call 801-377-0588 in a week or two if you want to do this.)
• Regarding Family Tree Matching he asks, “Does this mean they will finally accept a GEDCOM file upload?” I hate to disappoint, but the answer is our tree matching will be done before we support GEDCOM uploads. We have purchased technology that will enable us to support GEDCOM uploads soon – hopefully within a month or two – but the focus of our family tree matching will be to help you find more possible living relatives more than it will be to help you find more possible ancestors. As Randy says, others have done a very good job with tree matching for genealogical purposes.
• Regarding Map My Ancestors he wonders if FamilyLink will “permit all localities to be shown for the family tree entries” and if this feature will behind the subscription wall. Since this is built on Google maps, it should support all localities that match current place names in Google (some historical locations will continue to give us trouble), and since we have far more engineering resources on FamilyLink than we have on worldhistory.com, we expect our location-support will improve on what we built before.

So even though Randy concludes that he will pass on subscribing to FamilyLink Plus for now (partly because of the very sound logic that he already has a subscription to WorldVitalRecords), I especially appreciate Randy’s sentiments about FamilyLink:

“I want them to succeed, because they have really good ideas and I believe that competition is really good for the genealogy world.”

In conclusion, we view ourselves as the world leader in social networking for families. Our priority has to be features that help families find and stay in touch with each other.

But at the same time, it is often true that the genealogist in the family is also the connector of the living family – the person who keeps track of marriages and births and family achievements and makes sure that family reunions occur to keep people connected.

When I was fund-raising back in the late 90s for my first genealogy company, I used to joke that there are two kinds of people who keep in touch with all their living relatives – genealogists and multi-level marketers – and that we decided to focus our company mission on helping the former gather families together online.

Building more features for the genealogist of the family will increase the number of people actively using FamilyLink to share and preserve their family heritage online — in addition to “what’s happening today” in their family.

There is an ad running during the NCAA basketball playoffs that’s so creepy and surreal that I decided to take some screen shots of it, as a kind of public service to the company spending money on it. Here ya go:

You’re looking at this guy’s hairy pit and all of a sudden a rectangle in the middle drops down, opening a grave, right there. It’s like watching that eyeball get sliced in Un chien andalou. Creepy as shit. And you wonder, where did the missing block of pit go?  Is it down by the rib cage somewhere? Packed around his rotator cuff? Or is he hollow? And why no blood? Then this white triangular mess rises out of the same hole. You wonder, what the fuck is that? before seeing that Oh, okay, it’s a Matterhorn. But it’s not like the real thing. It’s more like a toy Matterhorn, with a little Swiss Chalet at its base, flanked by a few trees, looking like a snow-globe scene, without the globe or the snow.

Meanwhile you’ve witnessed two awful things you don’t want happening to your body: Having your armpit turned into a deep hole — and then having it replaced by a piece of broken kitsch.

Not my cup of meat. Or whatever that dude is made of.

In case you haven’t been watching, Nestle’s Facebook Fan page has been overrun by critics around deforestation, sustainability and poor social media relations. While this isn’t the place to have a discussion on sustainability, let’s look at the ramifications this has to society, brands, fans, and Facebook.

I spent a few hours reading and researching, it looks like members of Greenpeace launched an online protest, (read the initial report, then news here, here, here) spurring a groundswell of online criticism, a majority of it on their Facebook fan page.  (Update: It’s clear that Greenpeace helped in part organize this social attack, see here, here, here, and this timeline of events) Nestle’ responded defensively,  threatening to remove off-brand logos from it’s Facebook page resulting in a flurry of negative comments. It’s not totally clear if Greenpeace staged and executed the whole attack, but regardless, the community is relentlessly dog piling on the brand’s Facebook page.  While Nestle’ responded with a Q&A on their corporate site, it appears Nestle’ has retreated from the discussion –leaving the page open for detractors.

Brands are Unprepared for Organized Social Attacks
I’m not hear to pile on and criticize either parties, but I’d like to take a look at the ramifications and make pragmatic suggestions to be prepared. The last few days has taught us that:

• While every company has critics, they can now organize a coordinated attack. Every company I work with has some degree of critics, it’s a natural state of the market.  Now, these critics may start to organize globally by using similar tools and technologies brands are to market themselves.   Expect coordinated and organized attacks from critics.
• Facebook fan page brand-jacking is the new form of tree hugging. As movements form, the organized groups can stage mass attacks on brand Facebook fan pages, overrunning it with negative messages.  Like sitting in trees with banners to slow down clear cutting and spray paining messages on buildings, this is simply the digital form of real-world protest.  Expect more of this in the future –not less.  (Update: interesting perspective on “social media warfare“)
• Ownership isn’t clear –yet the power belongs to community. The brands think they own the Facebook fan pages, but the fans can demonstrate power and take over ownership.  When you look closely, neither parties ‘owns’ the property, it belongs to Facebook –but don’t expect them to do much, brands are really on their own.

Recommendations: Develop a Community Strategy and Practice Crises Response
Don’t be scared. Instead, develop a plan, resources, and a crises response plan now.  It’s important you do this before it happens, rather than wait for the incident to occur.

• Companies must have a community strategy –don’t jump without a parachute. Companies (and their agencies) are allured to adopt the latest tools like Facebook pages without thinking it through.  Don’t go without a clear set of policies, roles, and experienced staff, approach your Facebook fan page as you would opening a real-world store –don’t relegate management to a PR intern.   Unlike traditional advertising or email marketing, this is an ongoing relationship, so budget the right set of resources, monies, and programs for this long term effort.
• Hire seasoned community managers –don’t relegate to PR intern. I know many companies that are throwing the Facebook fan page to the junior intern as they ‘get social media’ because they are Gen Y.  Change your mindset: think of your Facebook fan page as your physical store. Would you anoint a freshly minted student to run that physical store?   Instead, hire an experienced community manager that knows how to deal with angry members, foster relationships with advocates, and handle crises without breaking a sweat.
• Plan and practice for the worse –yet live for the best. Companies should expect a full scale organized attack from critics.  One that will simultaneously overrun blog comments, Facebook fan pages, and an onslaught of blogs resulting in mainstream press appeal.  Start by developing a social media crises plan and developing internal fire drills to anticipate what would happen.  This doesn’t mean you should live your social efforts in fear, but instead, forge key relationships with members now that will defend your brand in the long run.  The goal?  To stay off this list of brands that got punk’d.

Love to hear your thoughts from this, what should companies do to be prepared for a social assault?

Whiteboard War Room Analysis: Nestle’ vs Greenpeace

Update March 24th, a few days later. We’ve done a white board analysis breaking down exactly what went wrong and providing actionable recommendations on what brands should do. Also see Susan Etlinger’s share of voice analysis, yet Howlett suggests this doesn’t impact share prices