Month: May 2006

O-yA Deep Search? Oh, No

Read a review this weekend in PCWorld of O-yA’s Deep Search 100. This is a standalone search box that retails for $3,000. Plug it in to your network, and it will index files on the machines connected to that network. Then anyone with permission can search for relevant information across the network.

Just a couple problems. First, PCWorld notes that the searching is fairly limited,

Searches simply look for all documents that contain every keyword you list. You can’t search for instance of an exact phrase, and you can’t exclude results that have a certain keyword.

Second, the number of documents that can be indexed is fairly limited. According to PCWorld, the $3,000 box is limited to indexing only 100,000 documents.

At that price, depending on the size of the organization, you could buy something like DT Search Network and a decent server to host it. Index millions of files taking up terabytes of data, and with numerous ways to search it. The only drawback to DTSearch is its reliance on a client application rather than implementing a Google-style web interface for searching as O-YA Deep Search 100 does.

Presentations The Lazy Way

Tim Harford’s Presentations the lazy way really cuts to the core of the problem with most presentations and offers some interesting advice to avoid those problems,

Don’t write a script. If you’re going to write a script, it has to sound like a real person talking. This is widely recognised to be hard work. Writing something down which sounds like a real person talking is the kind of thing that wins Quentin Tarantino Oscars. If you’re Quentin Tarantino, by all means write your script. Otherwise, cut out the hard work and achieve that elusive effect of sounding like a real person talking by… talking.

Don’t create any slides. We all know that it is important to give the modern audience something interesting to look at, and maybe you fancy yourself Piet Mondrian instead of Tarantino. But unless you really are Mondrian, which I doubt, you don’t stand much change of creating anything worth looking at with a piece of software like PowerPoint.

. . .

Produce quality not quantity. Dig up a single good one-liner, an excellent analogy or example, and perhaps one striking new piece of information. (Here’s an idea – put one of them in your first five seconds and one more in your last five seconds.) If you must have slides, then create just one useful one rather than twenty useless ones. (Lazy tip: press ‘B’ when you’re not speaking and the PowerPoint slideshow will go blank. That way you don’t need to wallpaper your whole talk with bullet points.)

Of course the joke is that the “lazy way” is actually a lot harder than the typical way. It doesn’t take too much time at all to start with a half-baked idea or barely thought-through concept, add 20 or 30 slides with a plethora of bullet points, and voila, you’ve got the penultimate PowerPoint presentation.

Talk like a real person? Don’t rely on bullet point crutches? That’s hard work.

Lou Dobbs and Cokie Roberts — Where Do They Find These People?

Warning: gratuitous ad hominems ahead.

I love the title of this article by CNN’s resident nativist commentator, Lou Dobbs.

The headline, “Do you takes us for fools?” echoes a question in the text of the article where Dobbs asks, “How dumb do you think all think we are?”

Frankly, every time I watch Dobbs I see him set new lows for intelligence in homo sapiens so I’m not sure there is a straightforward answer to that question.

He’s like Pat Buchanan minus the wit, which must take a lot of work.

Not that the ranks of those in favor of looser immigration lots aren’t filled with half-wits either. Cokie and Steven Roberts with the award there with this April 2006 flourish (emphasis added),

The anti-immigration forces have taken one principle, law and order (tinged with a rancid whiff of xenophobia), and elevated it over every other principle — loyalty and patriotism, charity and courage. That was the calculation behind the noxious bill that passed the House last winter, which makes it a crime to live here illegally or even to help a paperless alien.

Living here illegally might be made a crime? Perish the thought!

Of course, Cokie once stood in front a blue screen for a “live” broadcast from the White House, so she’s not exactly the brightest light bulb in the box anyway. But seriously, can’t she get anyone to edit her stuff to remove obvious nonsense like that?

Too bad they’re on different networks, or the immigration debate could really be taken up a notch by having Lou interview Cokie in front of a blue-screened image of Mexico City.

Sources:

Dobbs to President: Do you take us for fools? Lou Dobbs, CNN, May 10, 2006.

Today we march, tomorrow we vote. Cokie and Steven Roberts, The Daily Dunklin Democrat, April 16, 2006.

Creative Sues Apple Over iPod Interface

As I mentioned the other day, Creative Labs’ $100 marketing effort to overtake Apple has led to Apple controlling 75 to 80 percent of the portable MP3 player market, while Creative posted a $114 million loss in its recent 3rd quarter financial results.

So what do you do if you’re in Creative Labs’ shoes? Of course, the only recourse is to sue Apple for patent infringement.

According to an article at MacNN,

The patent is for an invention that “provides an efficient user interface for a small portable music player. The invention is suitable for use with a limited display area and small number of controls to allow a user to efficiently and intuitively navigate among, and select, songs to be played. By using the invention, very large numbers of songs can be easily accessed and played,” according to the filing at the US Patent office.

Specifically, it describes overlapping categories that would allow for selection of the same song via different categories and for multiple functions assigned to the same device button or control. The patent also calls for organization based on metadata associated with each track as well as internet-based sources such as CDDB as well as the now popular playlists for organizing music.

“The creation of playlists is one technique to organize the playing of songs. A set of songs can be included in a playlist which is given a name and stored. When the playlist is accessed, the set of songs can be played utilizing various formats such as sequential play or shuffle,” the company wrote its patent filing.

Given how Creative Labs has pretty much ripped off the iPod look-and-feel, using over something as basic as overlapping metadata categories and playlists is beyond absurd. And it will probably prove as effective as Creative’s marketing campaign to unseat the iPod.

Source:

Creative sues Apple over iPod interface. MacNN, May 15, 2006.

Three Troubling Death Penalty Cases Involving Bogus Evidence

In the course of a week earlier this month, two news stories highlighted the continuing problems with the way in which people are sent to death row in this country.

In Virginia, Earl Washington Jr. won $2.28 million from the estate of the police officer whom Washington lawyers claimed help fabricate a false confession that put Washington on death row.

Washington spent 18 years on death row for rape and murder. He was pardoned in 2000 after new DNA testing implicated a convicted rapist in the murder.

There’s just one problem — not only did Washington confess to the murder, but his confession contained details about the murder that only the murdered and the police knew. Since DNA testing indicated that Washington wasn’t the murderer, the obvious conclusion is that the details in Washington’s confession came from Detective Curtis Reese Wilmore, who interrogated Washington and obtained his confession.

Washington is mildly retarded and would have been highly susceptible to manipulation and feeding of details about the murder by police.

Meanwhile, the Innocence Project released an extremely disturbing picture of death row convictions of arson in Texas. The report looked at the case of two men who were sentenced to death as a result of arson convictions — Cameron Willingham and Ernest Willis.

In both cases, the Innocence Project found that testimony by arson “experts” at trial was riddled with errors. At Willis’ trial, a prosecution expert actually testified that fires were rarely caused accidentally by cigarettes, even though that is the leading cause of fire deaths in the United States.

In both Willingham and Willis’ trial, the Innocence Project claims, arson experts testified that a number of indicators led to the conclusion that the fire had to be arson, but the experts in each case grossly misinterpreted those indicators.

Willis spent almost 17 years on death row before he was pardoned in 2004. Willingham was executed in 2004.

The scariest part of the Innocence Project’s report is the laughable qualifications to be an arson “expert” in Texas. According to the New York Times,

Many arson investigators were self-taught and “inept,” the report said, adding: “There is no crime other than homicide by arson for which a person can be sent to death row based on the unsupported opinion of someone who received all his training ‘on the job.'”

Unbelievable, but sadly fairly routine. CSI is the fiction; Barney Fife is too often the reality.

Sources:

Faulty testimony sent 2 to death row, panel finds. Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times, May 3, 2006.

Jury: Investigator must pay ex-death row inmate. Associated Press, May 5, 2006.