Comment Re:Please don'd die (Score 1, Funny) 271
My friends call me when they want takeout.
Comment Re:Please don'd die (Score 1) 271
Maybe it is the GPS then. I used to have it always on in my BBerry Curve, and I had no problems.
Thanks for the advice!
Comment Re:Please don'd die (Score 0) 271
Using, not talking.
Comment Re:Please don'd die (Score 1, Informative) 271
Yes, I am exaggerating. And yes, I actively using the phone, so it never lasts a full day. Not that many other smartphones last much longer.
To whomever maked me as troll: understand the difference between humorous and serious comments.
Comment Please don'd die (Score 5, Funny) 271
My most common command to my Google Nexus phone is: "Please (beeeeep) battery, do not die. It's been just 3 hours since I fully charged you."
I hope that the next generation of Android will teach the phone to obey.
Comment Re:A little bit too late to be excited? (Score 0, Troll) 70
Of course it is not a zero-sum game. My point is that it is less news-worthy today, ***in terms of methodology***, as distributed computing is much more commonplace compared to 10 years ago.
I am sure it would have been front-page news if this was done 10 years back.
Comment A little bit too late to be exited? (Score 2, Informative) 70
Not sure if we should be excited or be sad.
- Excited: The first discovery based on a generic distributed computing infrastructure (BOINC)
- Sad: Distributed computing is rather commonplace today, and plenty of people have access to scalable Hadoop clusters that can scale on demand.
Yes, BOINC allows people to use idle computing capacity. But if we need plenty of computing capacity today, it is not that hard to get it: It is much simpler to simply rent a few EC2 machines, or get a computing grant from Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Amazon/IBM/NSF (you get the idea), and get such projects done much faster, rather than trying to use BOINC.
SETI@Home (and later BOINC) were revolutionary 10 years back. Today distributed human computation seems to be as revolutionary as distributed computing was back in 1999. reCAPTCHA seems more revolutionary in utilizing idle human capacity for a good purpose (digitizing books). The FoldIt project (see the recent Nature article), which also uses creatively human computation, seems much more fresh and interesting.
NASA Universe-Watching Satellite Losing Its Cool 153
coondoggie writes "NASA this week said its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE satellite is heating up — not a good thing when your primary mission instrument needs to be kept cold to work. According to NASA, WISE has two coolant tanks that keep the spacecraft's normal operating temperature at 12 Kelvin (minus 438 degrees Fahrenheit). The outer, secondary tank is now depleted, causing the temperature to increase. One of WISE's infrared detectors, the longest-wavelength band most sensitive to heat, stopped producing useful data once the telescope warmed to 31 Kelvin (minus 404 degrees Fahrenheit)."
Textured Tactile Touchscreens 99
HizookRobotics writes "A new covering developed by Senseg and Toshiba Information Systems gives touchpads, LCDs, and other curved surfaces (eg. cellphones) programmable texture using a high-resolution electrotactile array — a grid of electrodes that excite nerves in the skin with small pulses of current to trick the body into perceiving texture, pressure, or pin-pricks depending on the current amplitude and electrode resolution. The new covering has many potential applications: interactive gaming, touchscreens with texture, robot interfaces, etc."
Submission + - The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets (wsj.com)
Brad Lucier writes: Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty's computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny. The file consists of a single code---4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37---that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn. The code knows that her favorite movies include "The Princess Bride," "50 First Dates" and "10 Things I Hate About You." It knows she enjoys the "Sex and the City" series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.
Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a "beacon" to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person's name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty's tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of "50 First Dates").
Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a "beacon" to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person's name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty's tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of "50 First Dates").
Submission + - Study: Wind Power Raises CO2 Emissions (heartland.org) 2
Tangential writes: New study is out which finds that the inefficiencies associated with wind power actually raise emissions. From the study: "the frequent ramping up and ramping down of other power sources to compensate for wind’s unpredictable variability causes such inefficiency in power generation that overall carbon dioxide emissions rise. The effect is similar to that of automobile gas mileage. A driver who sustains a consistent speed of 60 miles per hour will get better gas mileage than one who frequently accelerates and decelerates between 45 and 75 mph. The inefficiency caused by frequently ramping up and ramping down vehicle speed is substantial enough that the vehicle driven at variable speeds will burn up more gasoline than one with a lower fuel economy rating driven at a consistent speed."
Submission + - Mechanical Turk, Low Wages, and the Market for Lem (blogspot.com)
pirot writes: There is significant discussion about the appalling pay rates on online crowdsourcing services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Many people blame the requesters and the low rates, or the workers for accepting them. But this is not the enough to explain the rates.
The basic problem: Spammers. Given that many large tasks attract spammers, most requesters rely on redundancy to ensure quality. So instead of having a single worker to do a task, they get 5 workers to work on it. This increases the effective rate from $2/hr to $10/hr.
Effectively, Amazon Mechanical Turk is a market for lemons , following the terminology of Akerlof's famous paper, for which he got the 2001 Nobel prize.
A market for lemons is a market where the sellers cannot evaluate beforehand the quality of the goods that they are buying. So, if you have two types of products (say good workers and low quality workers) and cannot tell who is whom, the price that the buyer is willing to pay will be proportional to the average quality of the worker. So the offered price will be between the price of a good worker and a low quality worker. What a good worker would do? Given that good workers will not get enough payment for their true quality, they leave the market. This leads the buyer to lower the price even more towards the price for low quality workers. At the end, we only have low quality workers in the market (or workers willing to work for similar wages) and the offered price reflects that.
Comment Re:The problem is not an efficient algorithm (Score 0) 421
"they quickly change their behavior based on that knowledge": This is exactly what game theory studies: how agents will change their information based on the knowledge they have.
Here is how an interaction will happen, in a very stylized manner:
1a: Party A will act in a specific way, following action A1, which seems to be the best.
1b: Party B, anticipating the action A1 of A, will follow action B1
2a: Party A knowing that party B will play B1, now revises the decision and follows action A2.
2b: Party B knowing that part A will play A2, now revised the decision and follows action B2.
3a: Party A knowing that party B will play B2, now revises the decision and follows action A3.
3b: Party B knowing that part A will play A3, now revised the decision and follows action B3.
....(the story continues)....
At the end, we have a situation where this interaction converges into the equilibrium.
The problem is not that humans will "change their behavior based on that knowledge". It is that most humans do not have the infinite computational capability to follow the logic until the end. Costis work shows that the computational power required for agents to compute their "optimal" actions is too high, so they will most probably go with their suboptimal decisions.
Comment Perhaps an antidote for ADD? (Score 0) 695
I wanted to say something but I forgot after checking my other open apps...
Submission + - Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not?
pirot writes: "The Mechanical Turk website seems to be of much smaller value to Amazon, in terms of direct revenue, than originally thought. The average value of HITs posted in any day is around $2000. The $2K/day value means that the average revenue per day for Amazon is around $200 per day (10% of the requester's payment), or $6K/month. This hardly covers the expense of dedicating a developer to the service! .... It seems that Mechanical Turk is not generating any significant revenue for Amazon. It is also unlikely that it generates any profit.... Thankfully Amazon uses Mechanical Turk for its own purposes, so there are second-degree benefits for Amazon to keep the service around."
