Tag Archives: ideas

Elementary “Watson”

The IBM project that this week led to a spec­tac­u­lar demon­stra­tion of machine Ques­tion Answer­ing (yet another “QA” acronym) has a lot of seri­ous com­put­ing sci­ence behind it. Much of that technology—although none of the tech­niques, naturally—is lucidly explained in a recent arti­cle in AI Mag­a­zine. The over­ar­ch­ing prin­ci­ples in DeepQA are mas­sive par­al­lelism, many …

February 18, 2011 – 9:54 am | By pwg | Posted in Ideas | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Answering the voices?

“A lot of home­less peo­ple come in and do live web­casts” Extract from Con­fes­sions of an Apple Store Employee (Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics) A primer on mod­ern mores by an Apple slave. The tedium of being earnest.

February 18, 2011 – 7:51 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Twitterton (on the Potomac)

Or “Fuck­nutsville” accord­ing to the President’s Chief of Staff. An intrigu­ing story of dys­func­tional, triv­i­al­is­ing, momen­tary, par­ti­san­ship in Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment. Bro­ken gov­ern­ment? Maybe… The point of this long Van­ity Fair essay seems to be that “no-drama” Obama is the man for his times; angling to res­ur­rect endur­ing vic­to­ries for good gov­ern­ment from beneath the treach­er­ous …

September 6, 2010 – 8:36 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Trade ‘imbalances’ are misleading

Alexan­dro Jara, the Deputy Director-General of WTO “[R]elying on con­ven­tional trade sta­tis­tics gives a dis­torted pic­ture of trade imbal­ances between coun­tries. As we saw when look­ing at the Chi­nese con­tent of the iPad, what counts is not the imbal­ances as mea­sured by gross val­ues of exports and imports, but how much val­ued added is embed­ded in …

July 12, 2010 – 1:43 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Revisiting the climate evidence

Julia Gillard’s deter­mi­na­tion as Prime Min­is­ter to revisit the debate about an Aus­tralian response to the poten­tial dan­gers of cli­mate change calls for a review of the evi­dence to ensure that any response is pro­por­tion­ate and effec­tive. In my view, the rel­e­vant data show less and less rea­son to attribute recent warm­ing to human activ­i­ties …

June 29, 2010 – 3:24 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Why we should pull out of Afghanistan now

There can be no stronger argu­ment for our with­drawal from com­bat (along with Nether­lands and Canada) than this arro­gant mar­tial non­sense from Mal­colm Turn­bull on the ABC “Q&A” pro­gram on 21 June “We are in a war, a global war against ter­ror, and the bat­tle in Afghanistan is the front line, so we have a vital …

June 23, 2010 – 9:43 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Failure of the ‘Third Way’

John Kay describes Gor­don Brown as a “redis­trib­u­tive mar­ket lib­eral, hold­ing, like other adher­ents of Blair’s ‘Third Way’, that …[t]he eco­nomic role of gov­ern­ment should be lim­ited and con­fined to a short list of issues described as mar­ket fail­ures. Redis­trib­u­tive mar­ket lib­er­als believe, how­ever, in a big role for the state in review­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion …

May 6, 2010 – 11:28 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)