01 Nov 09 1,600 Names Suggested Daily For FBI's Watch List

schwit1 writes with this excerpt from the Washington Post: "During a 12-month period ended in March this year, for example, the US intelligence community suggested on a daily basis that 1,600 people qualified for the list because they presented a 'reasonable suspicion,' according to data provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the FBI in September and made public last week. ... The ever-churning list is said to contain more than 400,000 unique names and over 1 million entries. The committee was told that over that same period, officials asked each day that 600 names be removed and 4,800 records be modified. Fewer than 5 percent of the people on the list are US citizens or legal permanent residents. Nine percent of those on the terrorism list, the FBI said, are also on the government's 'no fly' list."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tagi: senate judiciary committee, us intelligence community, unique names, permanent residents, mth, milli, fbi, excerpt from, lt, citizens, bas, fly, peoe

06 Nov 09 Going Head To Head With Genius On Playlists

brownerthanu writes "Engineers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a system to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail', in music recommendations. It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data. It's an artifact of the popular collaborative filtering recommender algorithm, which Genius is based on. In order to establish a more holistic model of the music world, Luke Barrington and researchers at the Computer Audition Laboratory have created a machine learning system which classifies songs in an automated, Pandora-like, fashion. Instead of using humans to explicitly categorize individual songs, they capture the wisdom of the crowds via a Facebook game, Herd It, and use the data to train statistical models. The machine can then 'listen to,' describe and recommend any song, popular or not. As more people play the game, the machines get smarter. Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tagi: recommender system, california san diego, wdom, university of california san diego, fashi, collaborative filtering, insufficient data, artt, c world, artifact, pandora, crowds, herd, bias, genius, algorithm, university of california, peoe, popularity, mod

19 Dec 09 Can You Really Rent a Coder?

I've been a fan of Dan Appleman for about as long as I've been a professional programmer. He is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely, so I was heartened to see a spate of recent blog updates from him. One of the entries asks a question I've often wondered myself: can you really rent a coder?

Over the past year or two I've kept an eye on the various online consulting sites - Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, oDesk. I've actually used RentACoder once (as a buyer on a very small project) and was satisfied with the results -- though I suspect I spent more time writing the spec and managing the programmers than I would if I had done the work myself.

I'm surprised Dan opens with such a sunny outlook on these services, because I've heard almost universally negative things about them. As professional programmers, I think we're all naturally inclined to see these sort of low-bid contract sites as cannibalizing and cheapening our craft. It's roughly analogous to the No-Spec movement for designers.

The odd thing is that, despite the sunny outlook, the article Dan wrote on this topic comes across as quite cautionary:

• You'll be competing with people around the world. In fact, you'll be amazed at how little people in some parts of the world will bid. That’s because a few dollars an hour can work well in a country where the average wage is a couple of hundred dollars a month.
  
  
• Many of the projects posted are unrealistic. For example, people asking for a clone of ebay for under $500. What ends up happening in these cases is that usually somebody ends up getting ripped off (either the client or the consultant who underbid or fails to deliver).
  
  
• A lot of projects go bad. They get cancelled. Or the consultant who bid on the work never delivered, or delivered poor results. Or the client has unreasonable expectations, or doesn’t actually know what he wants.

Maybe it's just my natural bias talking, but these sites seem awfully impractical to me.

Simply sorting out the DailyWTF project pitches from things you could actually deliver -- at ultra-competitive offshore programming rates, no less -- would require the patience of a saint and the endurance of an olympic athlete. Specification documents are hard enough to write when everyone involved is a coworker sitting in the same room. I can't even imagine the difficulty of agreeing on what it is you're building when the participants are thousands of miles away and have never met. But then I thought Amazon's Mechanical Turk was a failure, and it seems to be enjoying a moderate level of success.

Dan has a small chart comparing the services of these online freelance/consulting sites. It's too easy to write these sites off as an affront to software engineering. I guess they're sort of like dating sites -- they might be one way to find a client relationship, but I'd be highly suspicious of any professional developer who can't find a stable, long term relationship with a client eventually.

If nothing else, we should be looking at them for research purposes, as a baseline. Surely you can demonstrate better value to your employer than the random, anonymous programmers on Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, or oDesk. And I'd certainly hope that the projects you're working on are more sensible and rewarding (in both senses of the word) than the stuff that appears on those sites.

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Tagi: natural bias, apeman, sunny outlook, coue, rentacoder, ebay, average wage, low bid, spate, pitches, ly, programmers, guru, programmer, heroes, designers, peoe

21 Dec 09 Barnes & Noble giving $100 for Nook pre-orders that miss Christmas

Haven't got your Nook yet? You may actually be in luck. For people who pre-ordered early enough to expect a pre-Christmas delivery, Barnes & Noble is promising a $100 B&N.com gift card if it misses December 24th -- which is apparently distinctly possible. Of course, if you're one of the lucky / unlucky ones to have this on offer, you've probably already seen the email, and if you're a different sort of hapless pre-orderer that won't be seeing a Nook until next year, this is just another reason to curse your lot in life. To think: not only are you not ushering in 2010 from an economy suite in a space hotel, but you're going to wrap up this year reading paper books, without $100 to show for it! Can't we do better as a civilization?

Barnes & Noble giving $100 for Nook pre-orders that miss Christmas originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tagi: miss christmas, space hotel, orderer, december 24th, paper books, reas, nook, gift card, barnes, amp, email, peoe, nbsp, christmas, sun

03 Jan 10 Google Sets Censorship Precedent In India

eldavojohn writes "Censorship varies from country to country but India, home to a sixth of the world's population, appears to be shaping up much like China. Not far behind everyone else, Google has increasingly censored websites with an incident where a very popular politician died and Google forcibly deleted and dissolved a group on Orkut where offensive comments about the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh were posted. An official from India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said, 'If you are doing business here, you should follow the local law, the sentiments of the people, the culture of the country. If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.' The lengthy opinion piece calls attention to the beginnings of a definitive lack of free speech online for Indian citizens. A spokeswoman for the 'Do No Evil' company explained, 'India does value free speech and political speech. But they are weighing the harm of free speech against violence in their streets.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tagi: lord rama, indian citizens, india home, google, offensive comments, political speech, minter, free speech, censorship, riots, sentiments, spokeswoman, politician, doing business, peoe, violence, china