Boden's computer says no

Boden's computer says no
Originally uploaded by Paul Milner.

My cords have all got holes in, so I want some more, but - oh no! Boden has a server error. Being Boden, they like to inject some fun into the proceedings though, as you can see...

Developer toolbar for Firefox

Here's a good toolbar, found this very useful...

http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Alemannisch

Interesting what you find out there on the web: I'd never heard of Alemannisch - but there seems to be a whole language movement out there which is supporting the German dialects of Southern Germany, Switzerland, and neighbouring areas. See their own Alemannisch Wikipedia.

Humans v. Computers

Amazon's Mechanical Turk API - named after a fake 18th Century chess-playing robot - reportedly allows you to submit tasks from a piece of software to a real human being. You just call a method containing the "HIT" (Human Intelligence Task) you want fulfilling, and then at some point in the future an answer comes back. The caller can specify what sort of a human being should be used to fulfil the task.
It's a fascinating idea: they call it "Artifical Artificial Intelligence" - i.e. it looks like you are sending a request to something artificial, but the fact that it looks artificial is artificial: it's actually human.
This is quite like Google Answers, where you can pose a question to some remote expert and, for a fee, get back a reply, although the Amazon product (on an initial look) seems to be geared towards fulfilling tasks that any human could do. The example they give is that you pass a photo into a particular method (e.g. isHumanImage()), and the Mechanical Turk returns true or false depending on whether the photo contains an image of a person.
I wonder where all this is going. I instantly picture an oppressed underclass, like something out of a Fritz Lang movie, lined up at desks fulfilling tasks sent to them by an anonymous internet robot, their exact performance monitored closely by whip-wielding capitalists who take a big cut of the fee...
The other thing that occurs to me is that it raises the question of objectivity. If you send a photo of Adolf Hitler with the question "is this human?" then wouldn't there be a tendency for some human agents to respond "false"? Or if you sent the question "is this a country?" with the argument "Palestine": the answer might depend on the responder's political views. Only by being totally strict about how to interpret the question (e.g. "is this name on the list of countries or not?") could you avoid the tendency for humans to do slightly unpredictable things, but if you were doing that, why not just get a computer to answer the question anyway?
Questions that rely on human interpretation of sense data (e.g. "is this a picture of a human face?") would probably get the objectively correct response, more reliably than just having software scan the given image, but it would be interesting to see how value judgements can be avoided. The Wikipedia knows all about the dangers of articles surfacing on its site which are represented as "factual" but are actually "arguable": they have a system of flagging articles which are disputed.
It'll be interesting to see how the semantic web (as it emerges) deals with validity and how truth can be represented as relative as well as the traditional computing concept of "Boolean" truth.

Scary Sweeties

Scary Sweeties
Originally uploaded by Paul Milner.

Mm mm. My colleague Jukka and his Finnish compatriots sure have some delicious comestibles. Take these, for example. Sour liqorice with a centre of pungent ammonia. Scrumptious.