Better knowledge graphs fit for Star Trek computers coming to Google
Last year Google acquired Metaweb, providing a reliable future to their many projects, including Refine and Freebase.
From earlier this year, here’s a quote from Amit Singhal, Google’s SVP responsible for their Knowledge Graph:
We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the “Star Trek computer” that I’ve always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.
In the near future, I expect both Google’s knowledge graph, and the increasing awareness of the usefulness of such graphs, to change the structure and scope of industrial-scale knowledge processing. Thanks to all those working on these tools and solutions; see you in 2013!
Double entendres, or adianoetas, as seen by linguists
The paper: “That’s What She Said: Double Entendre Identification”
“Surely Yuriy Kiddon me”, I thought, reading this University of Washington monograph. But no, they really are that cool over there.
A Free Market Fix for the Copyright Racket – Virginia Postrel
A crisp, thorough summary of recent proposals to fix copyright, from across the political and economic spectrum. Postrel makes some effort to put them in historical context, and links to other even more detailed overviews of past and present trends.
John Taylor Gatto’s Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher Manifesto: Read it!
The 7-lesson schoolteacher.
"I teach school -- and I win awards doing it. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will:"
So begins one of the great essays on the modern school system.
Via Doc Searls.
Recursive β-Metafunctions In the Case of Polypolice
I just finished reading about how bogus transmogrification conversion on an oscillating harmonic field of glass bells, with green gig and kerosene lamps for diversion, can be solved by beastly incarceration-concatenation. I was reminded of how much the great scienxplorers such as Watterson and others owe to this cloud of novel scientific inquiry from the ’60s and ’70s.
It makes me simultaneously want to immortalize Lem and Kandel in an eternally entangled quantum fringe, and to fire up a Trurlapaucius abstract-generator based on snarXiv code.
Solving problem-sets: Improving our focus on new knowledge at scale
Realization: In academia, science has grad students to do anything known to be important but not yet automated / solved. A common goal once these are identified is automating / solving. Wikipedians have done the first part, but don’t clearly have an analogy to the second as a goal.
Software design (for wikis) has focused on making reading better or more accessible, or helping making manual work less arduous; but not primarily on identifying automatic classes of work and solving them / knocking them off. That’s been limited to bot developers and ad-hoc tools built on the toolserver. (If any tools in the wikiverse do this, they are often by Magnus, and regularly get rate limited by the limitations of default toolserver allocations when they get popular.)
Thought: I suspect that is really the primary work moving the project forward. We need to recognize that and start framing and articulating goals, tools, and infrastructure accordingly.
<update from the AI era: yes, with bells on!>
Prepare for the end, apocalyptically, of… the calendar year
On December 21 this year we should all make text posts that sound really apocalyptic but aren’t, like
OH GOD EVERYTHING IS BURNING
because I turned up the heater
or
ALL I HEAR IS SCREAMING
from my tv
or even
THIS IS GOODBYE BECAUSE WE’RE EVACUATING
the dancefloor
or
I’M UNDER THE BED IN THE DARK I CAN HEAR THEM COMING FOR ME
I might lose this game of hide-and-seek
via unwinona
XOXO Rocked! Honoring togetherness as it transforms the world
This sounded amazing when the idea was floated months ago. And by all accounts that sound catalyzed all who felt similarly to come make the sort of ambiently generative meeting that every physical gathering aspires to be. A few recaps:
Peter Sunde Pleas: ‘Pardon the Swedish people from court corruption’
Peter Sunde, public face of The Pirate Bay during its publicity and trial over the past six years, recently published a long personal essay about the experience.
It is a hair-raising story of judicial manipulation, international arm-twisting, and companies offering jobs to prosecutors in cases affecting them… breaking the design of the legal system in a few places. The result, for Sunde, has been a ridiculously punitive and overwhelming sentence and fine with, in his case, only circumstantial evidence. (he is asked to pay more in fines than he is likely to make in a lifetime.)
Thanks to Rick Falkvinge for translating the essay; and to Sunde for sharing it. Please read it.
