hey, it's noah

A good Friday afternoon afternoon video: Some friends of a Colbert Report writer hosted Julian Assange and this is their story.

[Via Marbury]

Via: Life with Julian // NoahBrier.com

I was bummed to miss the conversation this morning between Matt Creamer (formerly of AdAge) and Joe Fernandez of Klout. A few months ago Matt wrote a piece for AdAge that I missed until now. In it he argues against the commonly flouted influence measure that Klout and others use:

Think of Twitter as a game with just a few objectives: earn followers and retweets and clicks on your links. While services like Klout are wonderful at judging the winners on those rules, they’re not as good — even useless — at providing a means of understanding how that particular performance might be extrapolated out to something as broad as influence. Thinking about this reminds me of studying for the SAT and coming across this bit in a Princeton Review book: “We’re not big fans of the SAT. It doesn’t measure intelligence. It can’t possibly measure your future success in college. The SAT measures one thing, and one thing only: how good you are at taking the SAT.”

In the piece Creamer quotes Duncan Watts (whose influential study I found very … influential) as well as talking about reach versus influence, which many seem to get tripped up on.

Via: Measures of Influence // NoahBrier.com

Making fun of SXSW with a story in a major newspaper: 0

Making fun of SXSW with 10 short stories: 1

[Via ObssessiveCompulsive]

Over at the Guardian, science columnist Ben Goldacre asks an interesting question: Why don’t more journalists link to primary sources?

If we had a culture of linking to primary sources, if they were a click away, then any sensible journalist would be too embarrassed to see this article go online. Distortions like this [an exaggerated and since retracted Telegraph story about whales and offshore wind farms] are only possible, or plausible, or worth risking, in an environment where the reader is actively deprived of information.

I suspect there are a bunch of answers to this question. First off, within mainstream media outlets there still seems to be a general lack of linking to things, which I suspect has something to do with publications being afraid people won’t find their way back (which they always do). But more specifcally, I wonder if it’s because journalists are constantly being asked to publish new things, and even when they’re writing about something that exists (as in a journal article that’s been read by a few dozen people), it could make it seem like old news. Or, of course, there’s the cynical take, which is simply that there is worry that exposing sources would expose shoddy reporting.

Goldacre also has an interesting view on the difference between linking practices between bloggers and journalists: “There’s also an interesting difference between different media: most bloggers have no institutional credibility, so they must build it by linking transparently and allowing you to double-check their work easily.”

As an aside, it would be even more amazing if journalists linked to press releases in their stories. That would probably have a bigger impact on writing than the research linking would.

[via Colin Nagy]

Via: Transparency in Journalism // NoahBrier.com

Over at his blog, Paul Kedrosky lists some of the questions on the All Souls Exam (All Souls College apparently sits within Oxford and is unique because “all of its members automatically become Fellows, i.e., full members of the College’s governing body.”). Anyway, the questions are generally interesting (and very difficult), but I particularly like this one:

Has there ever been a period that was not an information age?

I wonder this just about as often as people say the phrase. I certainly am no expert in history, but it seems to me that throughout all time people have had to deal with more information than their predecessors. Then again, I am a self-admitted “ever wasser”: “[insisting] that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.”

Via: Has There Ever Been a Period That Was Not an Information Age? // NoahBrier.com

I was struck by this paralell between Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy playing computer, and on how IBM initially triumphed in chess. First on Watson’s architecture:

This deadline [build a viable Jeopardy-playing computer by 2009] compelled Ferrucci and his team [at IBM] to build their machine with existing technology—the familiar semiconductors etched in silicon, servers whirring through billions of calculations and following instructions from many software programs that already existed. In its guts, Blue J would not be so different from the battered ThinkPad Ferrucci lugged from one meeting to the next. No, if Blue J was going to compete with the speed and versatility of the human mind, the magic would have to come from its massive scale, inspired design, and carefully-tuned algorithms. In other words, if Blue J became a great Jeopardy! player, it would be less a triumph of science than of engineering.

And this from the New Yorker’s article on chess star Magnus Carlsen:

But how does a grandmaster play? The early computer programmers struggled to solve this puzzle. They took note of the chess adept’s highly developed memory, his understanding of the value of having pieces on certain squares on the board, and his ability to have his moves informed by previous games that he had played or read about. Replicating the thinking of a human chess player was extremely difficult, though. Well into the nineteen-nineties, top grandmasters were still beating computers. But computers eventually got so fast that they no longer needed to be particularly smart to beat humans at games — they could just play out every scenario for the subsequent ten to fifteen moves and choose the best one. Brute force replaced finesse as the favored approach in computer chess.

It’s funny because at first this seems like brute force, but really it’s just designing around the platform. One could argue our brains are actually the brute force, piling an absurd amount of processing power (far more than a computer) into a human head. We are able to solve these problems more elegantly because we don’t have to worry about the hardware limitations.

Via: Processing Power // NoahBrier.com

I wasn’t crazy about Inception. I thought it was an interesting idea with an alright (though visually arresting) execution. When I said that to someone recently they argued back that for a summer blockbuster it was amazingly deep and different, which is hard to disagree with and does make me like it a bit more. Anyway, has an interesting piece about the struggle to make that movie and what Hollywood has in store for us over the coming years. I love how the article breaks down this summer’s slate of films:

With that in mind, let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

[Via Kottke]

Via: Summer Movies // NoahBrier.com