Yostivanich

“To help address this chal­lenge, we’ve com­bined Google’s auto­matic speech recog­ni­tion (ASR) tech­nol­ogy with the YouTube cap­tion sys­tem to offer auto­matic cap­tions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recog­ni­tion algo­rithms in Google Voice to auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate cap­tions for video. The cap­tions will not always be per­fect (check out the video below for an amus­ing exam­ple), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the tech­nol­ogy will con­tinue to improve with time.” Very nice.

Logic vs. pithy sayings.

“The prob­lem with being an ama­teur sci­en­tist is pre­cisely the rea­son that mar­keters rel­ish the oppor­tu­nity to sell to us, the ama­teurs: we make stu­pid deci­sions, eas­ily manip­u­lated by those who might choose to do the manip­u­la­tion (on their behalf or on ours). The news here is not that peo­ple are irra­tional, giv­ing too much cre­dence to the dra­matic and the local and the short-term (that’s not news), but that peo­ple have added a veneer of sci­en­tific ratio­nal­ity to their irra­tional deci­sions. Armed with Zagats or inter­net data or some rumor off Snopes, we act as though now we’re supremely ratio­nal choicemakers.”

“If you can count on the drive being solid state, you can make all sorts of per­for­mance opti­miza­tions. They’re build­ing for the future.”

“I sus­pect that we’re cross­ing that point now, and the deci­sion is about to be made (or recently has been made) to abol­ish what we know of today as app review. I have no idea what would replace it, or whether its replace­ment would be sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter. But it’s not like Apple to sit on their hands with such a high-profile part of their prod­uct line and do noth­ing to improve it. Maybe this is just blind hope. It’s cer­tainly not based on any infor­ma­tion. It’s a hunch at best. But I can hope.”

“You could almost for­get that for well over a year, Repub­li­cans have ridiculed Barack Obama as lighter than a souf­fle, an inex­pe­ri­enced upstart who owes every­thing to arro­gant pre­sump­tion and a care­fully crafted image. But Obama wrote a 375-page book, The Audac­ity of Hope, that shows a solid, and occa­sion­ally tedious, grasp of issues. It is hard to imag­ine Palin (as opposed to a ghost writer) pro­duc­ing any­thing com­pa­ra­ble. Almost as hard as it is to imag­ine that mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tives would expect it. Lead­ers who can think? That’s so 20^th century.”

“But that’s a lot of work. Really freak­ing hard work! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do some­thing a bit sim­pler and eas­ier to, just … say … off­set the bad code you’re producing?”

“Do you remem­ber how peo­ple insisted that the gays were try­ing to ruin mar­riage? Well, they suc­ceeded in Texas. When the peo­ple of Texas passed a 2005 con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment to “pro­tect” mar­riage, those clever, clever gays some­how forced them to word it poorly enough that it might pro­hibit ALL mar­riage in the state, same-sex or otherwise:”

“What’s mak­ing the dif­fer­ence is just how much mind­share Apple is build­ing as a result of these types of tales of sup­port love. There’s a great urban leg­end about Nordstrom’s that they actu­ally took a return on snow tires. Years ago, I did a pre­sen­ta­tion for Nordstrom’s in Seat­tle and had a chance to chat with some of the fam­ily mem­bers who still are active in run­ning things. Of course, I had to ask the ques­tion: is the story about the snow tires really true? There was a pause in the room and folks looked at each other and smiled. Finally, one of the fam­ily responded. I won’t tell you if it’s true or not, but here’s the thing, they’re not telling that story about Macy’s.”

“The United States should rat­ify the Con­ven­tion on the Rights of the Child, which is sup­ported by nearly every other nation in the world, Human Rights Watch said today. The United States and Soma­lia are the only coun­tries that have failed to rat­ify the Con­ven­tion, which was adopted 20 years ago, on Novem­ber 20, 1989.”

“How should city tran­sit author­i­ties treat inde­pen­dent soft­ware devel­op­ers who make use of pub­lic sched­ule data? What approach results in the best expe­ri­ence for their pas­sen­gers and cus­tomers? Two mod­els appear to be emerg­ing to answer this ques­tion. One, typ­i­fied by New York City’s MTA and Wash­ing­ton, DC’s WMATA, sees sched­ule and related data as valu­able intel­lec­tual prop­erty, to be zeal­ously pro­tected, licensed and mon­e­tized. So far, the results of this approach appear to have been bad press, irate pas­sen­gers, wasted money and stymied inno­va­tion. The other model, typ­i­fied by San Francisco’s SFMTA and Portland’s TriMet, holds that encour­ag­ing inde­pen­dent devel­op­ers to make free use of sched­ule infor­ma­tion can both save the city money and fos­ter inno­v­a­tive applications.”

Pru­dence is a great option.

“Since 2008, the Cit­i­zens for Decency have pro­moted leg­is­la­tion requir­ing all pub­lic libraries and schools in Idaho to have pornog­ra­phy fil­ters installed on their com­put­ers. Their attempts to get the bill dis­cussed dur­ing the 2009 ses­sion were unsuc­cess­ful due to the heavy empha­sis placed on state’s bud­get. Offi­cials close to the bill believe this ses­sion could be different.”