@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

This Internet flame between Google and China is interesting because the question has been posed previously:

·      CAN THE NATION STATE SURVIVE THE WEB?( http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalrevolution/makingofprog2.shtml )

And the Google situation is possibly the first example of an influential Web co taking on the power of a nation state, China.

Well, it’s probably helpful to keep apace of the story and online threads to-date so here are some links:

·      http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

·      http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-01/25/content_9368402.htm

·      http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60L1DK20100125?type=politicsNews

·      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8478005.stm

·      http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/092d5ab6-08fc-11df-ba88-00144feabdc0.html

·      http://news.cnet.com/Evidence-found-of-Chinese-attack-on-Google/2100-7349_3-6250413.html

·      http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/google’s-china-stance-more-about-business-than-thwarting-evil/

Plus here’s some context on Google’s interactions with the People’s Daily site and the current situation with Chinese authors and Google Book’s alleged infringement of their copyright:

·      http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2009/10/27/banned-by-google-peoples-daily-web-site-claims/tab/article/

·      http://english1.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/6813963.html

Oh and let’s include how the “Iranian Cyber Army,” who got a reputation for disabling Twitter on 17/18 December 2009, was said to be responsible for attacking Baidu this January with trojans. Baidu is China’s top search site with two-thirds of the market share and Google’s direct competitor:

·      http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/12/iranian-hackers-chinese-search-engine

So…………..it’s interesting that Google complained of an alleged security breach by CHINA-IP-ADDRESS-USING hackers on the same day (12 Jan 2010) that the Chinese’s top search site was also supposedly subjected to an attack by the “Iranian Cyber Army”.

Of course, none of the media or tech commentators have put this together yet so readers of @T are the first to even be made aware of this “oddity of coincidence”.

Could it be that there are black hat hackers (also known as “crackers” and let’s remember the word associations with “crackpots” and “crazies”) who are NEITHER American nor Chinese — or maybe include both nationalities plus some other countries — playing the US and China off each other?

Readers will note that I use the term “CHINA-IP-ADDRESS-USING HACKERS” rather than “Chinese hackers”. Just because the source address of Google’s hackers originated from a China-based server does not necessarily mean that Chinese hackers were involved. Let’s make the distinctions clear.

Ditto just because a hacking team call themselves the “Iranian Cyber Army” it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re Iranians.

After all, some people online are not who they seem: they use all sorts of pseudonyms and false information. Some might even claim their names are “Snow White”, they live in Russia and they work for the KGB or that they’re a Nigerian and have US$1 million in prize money waiting for you in a Swiss bank account that you can access if you’ll only provide all your bank details or that they can make you sexier than Casanova himself. In reality, their name is probably Ted or Ting Ting, they live in Mississippi or Manchuria and they’re a 300lb postman or housewife.

Anyway, it would be a lot more conducive if the likes of Senator Clinton and Google’s strategy team adopted a SMARTER AND MORE EXPERIENCED DIPLOMATIC approach to resolving the current scenario with China. Direct challenges about how China operates its policies on freedom of information, censorship and cyber-security are probably going to be counterproductive for resolution.

From my perspective, there are clearly language and cultural philosophy issues involved. The US government definitions of “freedom”, “censorship” and “security” aren’t the same as the Chinese government’s. Neither definitions are the absolute nor the best, imo.

Sometimes, some governments’ definitions of these three words are not even the same as its own electorate’s. For example, it’s said that censorship and anything against freedom of information doesn’t happen in Western democracies. Hmmn……….then news items like these appear:

·      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245599/David-Kelly-post-mortem-kept-secret-70-years-doctors-accuse-Lord-Hutton-concealing-vital-information.html

·      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/6735670/Dr-David-Kelly-doctors-start-legal-action-for-new-inquest.html

Even between American technology aficionados there’s an array of definitions on “freedom, censorship and security”. When a US social network decides to close a user group or remove their content that’s also an infringement of the principle of free flows of information; censorship like this happens and it’s rarely reported upon by the media.

Moreover, any form of editorialism (whether self and voluntary, imposed by journalistic regulatory associations with industry standard practices or a reflection of political affiliations) is a form of censorship.

Now another interesting perspective is that, sometimes, some Western democracies levy the “It’s government propaganda!” against other states — as if the Western democracies don’t and have never used the media for their own purposes (e.g., winning elections, concealing information from their people and pushing through policies).

Okay, here’s the thing: if there was no propaganda (or to use its preferred euphemism “PR / spin in the national or public interest”), there’d have been no wars……….EVER. PERIOD. No Crusades, no Hastings, no Alamo, no Trafalgar, no 1812, no Indochine, no World Wars, no Israel vs Palestine, no Cold War, no Iraq War, no Afghanistan, no trade wars, no etcetera etcetera.

So…………..this all leads us back to one of our pet subjects: IT’S ALL SEMANTICS, RAGAZZI.

Now begins the journey towards language, standards and conduct that’s more conducive to cyber coexistence.

In the same week that the media moguls are gathered in Sun Valley to attend boutique investment bank, Allen + Co’s, pow-pow over how to monetize social networks, get consumers to pay for content and make their investors happy, the political leaders are in Italy discussing the global economic crisis and climate change.

The two events may seem discrete and unconnected, but actually they can be “twained”. Here goes……..

Yesterday news reports said that G8 leaders had hailed a “historic” agreement on climate change policies to try and set new temperature and CO2 emission targets for 2050 (lowering by 2 degrees Celsius and halving, respectively). This follows on from 1990 agreements to cut CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Here’s the website of the July 2009 G8 summit being held in L’Aquila, Italy and hosted by the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi:

News coverage on the G8 is available here:

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/g8/

Below are some useful links on what the UN Environment Program, Oxfam, BBC forum bloggers, Open Democracy, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the All Africa network believes needs to be covered by the climate change agenda at the G8 summit:

· http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=593&ArticleID=6242&l=en

· http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/g8-2009

· http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=6705&edition=1&ttl=20090709111737

· http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-g8-and-climate-change-towards-copenhagen

· http://www.panda.org.za/?section=News_AboutUs&id=191

· http://allafrica.com/stories/200907070060.html

CLIMATE CHANGE: TWAINING SOCIAL NETWORKS TECHNOLOGY WITH PRODUCTION STREAMS AND CUTTING CO2 EMISSIONS

Several years ago, I posted a broad overview of my business case for “Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” onto slideshare — an excellent site run by an excellent management team, btw. In its time it was ranked #1 if you searched for “Web 3.0”.

Now, I’m not going to be one of those people who allows the “Why should emerging economies agree to cuts when it’s the developed economies who’ve been responsible for polluting the world ever since the Industrial Revolution for the last two centuries?” argument distract me from what is a CLEAR CHALLENGE AND SOLUTION we all need to find. Nor am I going to argue, “Well, emerging economies like India and China are actually churning out more CO2 because their factories are manufacturing goods to fulfill the consumption demands of developed economies. It’s actually them that’s causing us to pollute in the first place. Factories built because developed country economies wanted to take advantage of the cheaper labor and wage costs abroad, etc. etc. etc.”

There are countless objections all sides can put forward to why developed and emerging economies shouldn’t do something about climate change but all of these objections are, frankly, fatuous and don’t move human progress forward (and I like moving human progress forward, :*)).

What also needs to be recognized is that what all governments have yet to do is to make COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENTS for companies and consumers to tackle climate change. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary remains a philosophical call to our conscience rather than a pragmatic program towards change in action — not simply attitude — of consumer behavior.

What we need is the model I propose in ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation’.

At the moment, social networks seem to be little more than online meeting points where consumer herds are channeled into topic pens for marketers to push more information at them and increase their consumption habits. They then buy more goods (often not what they genuinely need but for momentary consumer satiation or fad reasons), cause factories to churn out more CO2 and other noxious chemicals to pollute the environment and then waste electricity on the gadgets and goods they’ve bought but don’t really need. Disposal of these over-produced gadgets with their harmful substances (e.g., mercury in monitors, aluminum smelting, etc.) further causes complications to the ozone layer which still need to be researched and mitigated against. Admittedly, there are political lobby groups set up on the social networks — including climate change activists — but still this is not the optimal harnessing of consumer intelligence, influence or active collaboration on a wider and more effective scale than some educated niche activists providing information and awareness rather than instigating actions which affect bottom line results.

In short, the non-virtuous cycle of climate concerns goes around: we’re marketed into wanting, we buy to satisfy this want and then we worry about what kind of Earth our children and their children will inherit (deforestation, ocean pollution, out of control weather, airborne chemicals which damage their lungs, etc.).

Now let’s turn the social network model on its head and think about a monetization model at the same time.

Imagine if, instead of registered users being pushed marketing at or lobbied, they were engaged in the production process. Imagine if they were harnessed as a gigantic market research pool to ask them:

· what products they’d like to buy

· what price point they’d be prepared to pay for that item

· when they plan to complete purchase (within 1 week, 1 month, 1 quarter, half a year, end of year)

· which distribution outlet they’re more likely to buy it from (online, boutique, super-store)

· who else they would recommend the product to

instead of the current market research methods which try to extrapolate purchase intent from demographic information gathered (e.g., if you live in a household where income is US$100K and you are a white, male professional who reads the New Yorker, you’re likely to buy the Apple iPhone).

Then imagine if they were enabled with tools to collaborate in the design of products, with a percentage share in the net profits of any sold for a defined period of time. Next, imagine that this market research and product collaboration feeds directly into a sophisticated inventory system so that the company produces a level of goods which more accurately reflects and meets consumer demands — rather than the current way this works which is whereby companies have to make projections 3 to 5 CAGR years in advance, based on consumption behavior gathered in reports from the likes of Datamonitor etc. which are only comparatively small sample populations with all their inherent skews, extrapolation inaccuracies and time lags rather than social network sampling which is instantaneous, targeted and more representative of sizeable populations. The way it currently works also means that there is a lot of wastage in materials used to market to consumers (e.g., flyers, billboards, paper cut-outs at consumer electronic shows).

Finally, consider how this change in engaging the consumer further upstream in the production process will change CO2 emissions and move the climate change issue towards a positive solution.

Companies will actually gain insights into what consumers REALLY need and want. They can better manage their inventories to produce at levels needed rather than over-stock. In this way, factories won’t be over-producing and churning out excessive chemicals to further damage the environment. Plus companies will increase their communication effectiveness and production efficiencies, and reduce the wastage and costs incurred in over-stocking of materials, labor, electricity etc. needed to produce goods to meet consumer demands.

Governments can support companies which foster this form of positive consumer influence by giving them tax breaks, emission offsets and assistance with factories abroad where the goods will be manufactured.

Moreover, the consumer can be incentivized and will be rewarded for their participation in product design process. They will also end up getting products they want: what, when, where and how they want it.

Now, THAT is the COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENT governments, companies and policy-makers need to explore and implement.

These “2 degrees Celsius and halving CO2 emissions here and there, developed versus emerging economies claims to be allowed to build factories and use electricity” etc. are too ephemeral and theoretical to companies and to consumers.

What we need to do is transform the awareness of climate change into ACTION at the bottom line level. We need to engage consumers further upstream in the production process and not simply downstream where they’re pushed more marketing to increase unnecessary consumption (and, inadvertently, CO2 emissions).

There, that’s my “twaining” of the paradigms between technology, business models and government policy on climate change.

Now we just need Google to choose my GREENSPOT proposal (an Android / mobile devices application to develop a global social network for green consumers) in their 2008/9 Project 10 to 100th competition so that we can realize this vision of companies and consumers contributing positive action where climate change, changing consumption behavior and better production levels is concerned!

* http://www.project10tothe100.com/

Yes, we do need the commitment of tech giants like Google to do it — purely because they have the global resources to reach out towards corporate and consumer audiences and encourage them to convert to new consumption and production frameworks.

Yes and the ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” model is consistent with the Global Brain and Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) constructs. The objective of any Global Brain is for us to collectively collaborate to solve the world’s major challenges which includes climate change. The usefulness of a Semantic Web would be for machines to be able to understand us and each other when, for example, there’s an inventory order out of Paris and we can work out that means from the capital of France instead of the Hilton celebrity.

Tesla is right: think through before we do. At some point, the theories and the practices will twain — LOL.

So as some readers are aware a SemWeb play, which is such a disappointment I won’t even namecheck them and give them free PR, deleted vital content of mine on some baseless — and frankly stupid — issues of theirs. This brought to the fore all the typical online concerns relating to:

* stewardship of users’ content and IP;

* trust between the online provider and the content generator;

* how people can misinterpret and misunderstand each other’s meanings and intent (semantic differences of perception), so how can we expect machines to understand humans; and

* whether various parties can overcome their egos and psychological constructs to genuinely collaborate towards the Global Brain.

Clearly, the CEO of the SemWeb play and I do not have the same vision for or insights on the Global Brain, rewarding content contributors or fostering constructive and democratic relationships. It’s just as well that my content is no longer subject to his team’s control, oppressive deletion or influence since he’s the person who spun a whole heap of garble about Semantic technology, Google not having any semantic capabilities in its search algorithms and customer care which have proven to be completely off-the-bullseye. After all, he and his team willfully closed their public feedback channels not once but at least THREE times despite my advice to the contrary.

Anyway, today I’m reminded of how justifiably annoyed I am at his deletions of my content.

As I mentioned last week I met a Google engineer who’s using MapReduce to populate large volume data onto a map. Now, I know for a fact that what we all need is an early detection system for build-ups of economic bubbles and I believe that something like MapReduce could potentially be an element of this system. Therefore, I was going to send her an 80+ page PDF of some economic statistics some clever guys had generated back in Sept/Oct 2008. Unfortunately, they’ve presented their findings in a static format and it would be really helpful if their data was actually in a timeline or MapReduce form.

So that’s my good intention: share this economic analysis with Ms. Google MapReduce and do my itsy-weensy bit to accelerate us reducing our risks of repeating the recent global economic crisis.

However, here’s where the chink in the sense chain appears: the SemWeb platform. I entrusted the link to and contextualization of that PDF to the SemWeb platform. I no longer have access to that content. This means that the sum effect is:

* the SemWeb platform wasted my time; instead of putting the link and contextualizing it with fellow contributors on their site I’d have been safer putting it into my Gmail or my own blog; and

* the SemWeb platform is (yet again) responsible for a delay in human progress and collaboration.

* the SemWeb platform and its team has increased ignorance, discontent, annoyance and the system’s stupidity rather than advanced Enlightenment.

Yes and I do hope that the upcoming Google Wave “blows them out of the water” because that’s what their inconsiderate actions and disrespect towards users have resulted in: disappointment and disloyalty.

Meanwhile I have to go rooting for this PDF again. This time I’m bookmarking it direct into my browser.

Yesterday the Wolfram Alpha team announced the creation of their community:

* http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/18/announcing-the-wolframalpha-community/

They wrote:

“To that end we are officially launching the Wolfram|Alpha Community, which allows you to submit questions, ideas, and favorite inputs.

We already have a few static forms to contribute things such as facts, figures, and structured data or algorithms, methods, and models. The Community serves to supplement these types of feedback with a more free-form discussion among all Wolfram|Alpha users.”

Everyone knows by now I’m a firm believer in companies providing open, democratic and multilateral channels for users to provide feedback and to interact with the company. Given this opportunity, I suggested that the Wolfram Alpha team could look into providing answers to my test questions:

(1.) Who discovered radium?

(2.) Where is Atlantis?

(3.) How do we make gold from lead?

(4.) Can robots dream?

(5.) What is a sprite? [This is my trick question since ‘Sprite’ is a drinks brand as well as a type of fairy.]

(6.) When did Homo Erectus become Homo Sapien?

(7.) Why are we here?

(8.) How many light bulbs are there in the world?

(9.) Who is the Vitruvian Man?

(10.) Where is Schrodinger’s cat?

COBALT + ERIC SUGGEST I’M CLUELESS

In response to my suggestion, two users by the name of Cobalt and Eric wrote this:

“You misunderstand the point of Wolfram|Alpha I think. It is not a search engine like google nor is it a forum of expertise like answers.com.”

It is a tool that allows you to find and analyse data (i.e hard facts) from the web. It can only answer questions that have a definite answer or present data related to a subject. Things like the weight of 1g of gold or the average age in Australia. Questions with no definite answer such as the location of Atlantis and do robots dream will not and should not be answered as that is what google and the like already do.” — Cobalt

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“2. not a fact
3. not a fact
4. not a fact
6. not a fact
7. not a fact
8. not a fact
9. not a fact
10. not a fact

You don’t understand what Alpha is used for. If it’s not a fact, it can’t calculate it. Where is Atlantis? Mankind doesn’t even know if it existed, how the hell are is Alpha supposed to point it out? Can robots dream? It doesn’t create narratives, it gives you numbers in return. If you want to know why we are here, talk to a philosopher. If you want computable data, use Alpha. It couldn’t be clearer.” — Eric

MY RESPONSE: THERE’S RATIONALE IN TWAIN’S TEST

This is what I wrote in reply:

Unfortunately, Cobalt and Eric, you’re the ones who may be misinterpreting my testing approach. Stephen Wolfram, in an interview with Semantic Universe, notes that WA should be compared with the likes of Google and Yahoo! and not with HAL or Cyc, so it was reasonable for me to run WA results against Google’s and True Knowledge’s. Also let me give some context which may help.

I have a maths degree and have worked in banking, so I understand perfectly well the difference between calculable inputs to derive proofs and business models from information which is unquantifiable or simply has no quantity — such as “How is Michelle Obama related to Barack — which are questions needing answers of a qualifiable nature.

Now, Wolfram Alpha is marketed as a “computational knowledge engine” rather than a fact+figures finder/calculator so it’s supposed to be able to derive KNOWLEDGE not facts+figures alone.

Let’s tackle what logically each of my questions should have derived:

(1.) Who discovered radium —- WA gave the year but not the who (Marie Curie). Moreover, the expectation would be that the system would generate both a visual of the radium atom, some charts of radioactivity, a picture of Marie Curie and some facts+figures on the laboratory conditions of discovery.

(2.) Where is Atlantis — WA could have generated a series of maps not only of actual locations called ‘Atlantis’ (e.g. in South Africa and the US) it should also have produced geo-thermal images from archaeological expeditions that have tried to establish where Atlantis is.

(3.) How do we make gold from lead — instead of producing a “WA isn’t sure what to do with your input” the system could at least have produced some Periodic Table definitions of gold and lead, their reactivity with other chemicals and some paragraphs on historical attempts by people to try to make gold from lead.

(4.) Can robots dream — again instead of producing “WA isn’t sure what to do with your input” the system could have listed all the works of fiction by people who have actually existed (Philip Dick / Isaac Aasimov / Stanley Kubrick) who are factually connected to this phrase. After all, WA is supposed to apply NLP to derive what we mean by the inputs.

(5.) What is a sprite — WA produced a table of nutritional breakdown of Sprite the soft drink. In fact, apart from the faerie connection which is fictional entity, sprite is also a FACTUAL term used in computer graphics and the WA system failed to pick this up.

(6.) When did Homo Erectus become Homo Sapien — again WA issued a “WA isn’t sure what to do with your input” message. It’s an established FACT from anthropology and archaeology that in the evolution of Man, Homo Erectus preceded the emergence of the Homo Sapien. WA failed to produce a timeline graph of that evolution to help pinpoint whether that happened 500,000 years ago or 50,000 years ago.

(7.) Why are we here — again WA issues a “WA isn’t sure what to do with your input”. Fair enough, the system is not sophisticated enough to infer philosophical constructs yet; we are some way from truly consciously aware machines. Nevertheless, the expectation would be that some graphics of Big Bang Theory and the formation of the planets would have been produced.

(8.) How many light bulbs are there in the world — actually, this is a FACTUAL question. There are definitely numbers available of light bulb production, US expenditure on light bulbs per annum and how many light bulbs are used in each household per annum.

(9.) Who is the Vitruvian Man — unfortunately, Eric, you may not have seen sketches of Da Vinci’s masterpiece and which actually exist and are FACT-based. Instead of WA stating it “isn’t sure what to do with your input” the system should at least have generated an image of Da Vinci’s work. It could then have made the linkage of how the Vitruvian Man image has been applied in various fields of science — as clues to atomic structure as well as a reference diagram of human anatomy in medical science.

(10.) Where is Schrodinger’s cat — WA said it “isn’t sure what to do with your input”. This was the most surprising answer of all out of the questions posed. The expectation would be that the engine would at least interpret the question as one related to quantum physics and generate calculations and proofs attributable to Erwin Schrodinger. If it was even smarter it may even have done a compare/contrast with Einstein’s equations and Hawking’s postulations.

As for whether Schrodinger’s cat is a FACT or not, there are all manner of scientific phenomena that cannot be seen or established by the naked human eye (it’s somewhere else on the electromagnetic spectrum) for which generations of scientists have extrapolated proofs, corollaries and reductive provisos.

What matters in the question relating to Schrodinger’s cat is the fact that WA did not even produce an answer which said something like, “Schrodinger’s cat was a scientific experiment conceived by Erwin Schrodinger in 1935 in response to potential limitations in the Copenhagen approach and as a commentary on the ‘quantum indeterminacy or the observer’s paradox’. Schrodinger’s equation itself is applicable in wave physics, energy calculations of chemical reactions and is derived from the Hamiltonian and Poisson functions to produce:

(∂²Y/∂x² ) + (8π²/h²)(E-V) Y = 0

where Y is Schrodinger’s wave equation.

X is the position of the particle.
E is energy in Joules per second.
V is the potential energy in Joules per second.

followed by various corollaries and supporting suppositions of the type similar to those printed in this UCLA paper:

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints/schrodinger.pdf

Even as the most basic answer, instead of “WA isn’t sure what to do with your input” the simple and FACTUAL answer would have been “In the Schrodinger’s cat hypothesis, the cat is placed inside a steel chamber” followed by some of those equations Erwin Schrodinger is famous for.

All of my questions are science-based and either already have definitive scientific proofs or are established hypothesis based on scientifically-derived means. This includes “how do we make gold from lead” and the evolution of Homo Erectus into Homo Sapien.

WA is marketed as a “computational knowledge engine” and on the basis of its NLP which can semantically derive what our questions mean. If I ask “Who discovered radium?” and the answer provided doesn’t even mention Marie Curie then there’s clearly room for improvement.

As I’ve written elsewhere, WA’s entry into the search/knowledge space is great for us all as information consumers, knowledge connectors and sense discoverers.

Of course it’s fantastic that a tool like WA is made available — not just for the scientific community — but for anyone who needs to crunch any form of numbers or needs a piece of knowledge to support, quantify, qualify and visually compliment their articles (whether that’s on the fluxing orbital paths of the planets or the score lines of the World Series for the last century or projected growth of the shrimp population in the Indian sub-continent).

Nevertheless, we have to identify and be realistic about its current limitations because only then can we as consumers have genuine “computational knowledge engines” which can connect facts+figures from different disciplines, make sense of the world around us (visible, invisible and maybe as yet undiscoverable) and perhaps find solutions to global common ills.

************************************************************************************************************

For me, Cobalt and Eric’s comments are interesting because both point to how users are perceiving and interpreting what these words mean:

* fact

* computational knowledge engine

* definite answers

Again, it’s relevant to semantics and the way we classify axioms via ontologies, taxonomies, folksonomies and other linguistic categoronomies (I’m coining this phrase, ha ha).

To be tic-lol (tongue-in-cheek, laugh-out-loud) I could ask, “Well, since we’re talking “facts and definite answers” how definite will Wolfram Alpha’s calculation of imaginary numbers be and has anyone actually scientifically observed them to establish them as a fact?” The reality is that imaginary numbers are philosophical constructs plucked from mathematical minds just as is most of complex algebra and even the existence or otherwise of Schrodinger’s cat (an example of quantum physicists’ paradigms), Atlantis (anthropologist-archeologists axiomatic construct of a ‘lost world”) and whether or not robots can dream!

Maybe it would have been easier if I’d asked the WA system something straightforward like, “What is the largest prime number in the universe?” or “What is the 123456789th number of π?” Ha ha. Actually not even the most powerful supercomputer has arrived at the definitive answer to the largest prime number on Earth much less the Universe! One day someone from the planet GYG is going to materialize and say that our Googol is only worth a 10 squared in their numerical scales, so the largest prime number is only 100 digits long or something!

In any case, the fact stands that the current Wolfram Alpha can’t apply its natural language processing to semantically extract that when I ask “Who discovered radium” it should give me an answer with Marie Curie in it in priority / precedence before providing me with the year of discovery.

It also can’t calculate how many light bulbs there are in the world. Clearly, some of the light bulbs in WA’s computational clusters haven’t been switched on yet to spotlight this missing information and the inputs necessary to generate an answer which would go along the lines of a simple equation like this:

L = n(A + B + C +….) + q(h1 + h2 + h3….)

where L is the total number of light bulbs in the world.

n is the number of light bulbs produced per year in each country.

A is country A.

B is country B, etc.

q is the quantity of light bulbs in each household (used and unused).

h is the number of households in each country.

By Twain deduction,  Wolfram Alpha is not yet a “computational KNOWLEDGE engine” if it can’t differentiate that a sprite is either a computer graphic term, a type of tiny glowing faerie and a brand of soft drink and can’t make the neural nets connections I’ve noted above. It would probably help the WA team to communicate and market what their service can/cannot do if they called themselves a “computational DATA engine”.

In any case, people suggesting I don’t understand the nature or the application of Wolfram Alpha is good and healthy for intellectual stimulus and keeping my ego in check. It helps me sanity-check the approach of a Twain test and whether its validity stands up.

What matters most is that it will be interesting to experience how Wolfram Alpha, Google Squared et al develop and whether one day they’ll be able to answer my 10 questions — both by deriving facts as well as extrapolating the semantic and philosophical nuances of the queries.

Now THAT’s when we may see truly intelligent and proxy-consciousness agents…………

As promised, I’ve now plugged and played with the new “computational knowledge engine” offering from Stephen Wolfram, the British-born physicist renowned for having been awarded his Ph.D. when he was just 20 and being the inventor of Mathematica, a highly regarded research tool amongst the academic scientific community.

Wolfram Alpha had a soft launch on Friday 15 May following various media “sneak previews” in late April and it’s officially live today.

As per my previous provisos (please follow links provided at end of this blog), I’ve reserved assessment on the system until today so that it’s based not on being influenced by either SemWeb hype nor journalistic ignorance, but rather objective intelligence and a mild dose of wit. Some of the articles written to-date about Wolfram Alpha have been poorly researched and re-hashes of whatever PR has been issued by the company rather than informative. This has been unhelpful for determining where and how the various search / browse / info source systems are differentiated.

This is why I decided to do my own Twain test.

I’m interested in any AI / natural language processing / Bayesian alternative / neural nets / innovative attempts to connect and make sense of the vast amount of knowledge out there (within the Internet as well as as-yet electronically unarchived sources). I’m also interested in machines which try to discern meanings, wit and nuances from our questions in an equivalent manner to how humans do naturally.

Yes, I am aware that Stephen Wolfram has provided guidance that the system is not AI. That’s clear from this Semantic Universe article:

* http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-i-was-positively-impressed-wolfram-alpha.html

Now, since Wolfram Alpha is based on Mathematica I decided not to ask any straightforward numerical questions; most of us are aware by now that it can deal with statistics, indices, trigonometry, Fourier analysis, Boltzmann constants, Boyle’s gas pressures, the various constituents in organic reactions, velocity in space calculations and other scientific and quant-oriented calculations etc. fairly well.

What would be more interesting is to really test its semantic extraction, linguistic deduction and visual generation capabilities.

Below are my 10 questions accompanied by screenshots of and commentary on the results. Wolfram Alpha is being directly compared with Google’s and True Knowledge’s which are its nearest competitors in this test. Incidentally, Wolfram has apparently noted that since it’s not AI it’s unfair to compare it with HAL or Cyc but compared with Google or Yahoo. I chose True Knowledge because as was (rightfully) highlighted by some friends elsewhere, this would be an interesting case study.

TWAIN’S 10 QUESTIONS

(1.) Who discovered radium?

(2.) Where is Atlantis?

(3.) How do we make gold from lead?

(4.) Can robots dream?

(5.) What is a sprite? [This is my trick question since ‘Sprite’ is a drinks brand as well as a type of fairy.]

(6.) When did Homo Erectus become Homo Sapien?

(7.) Why are we here?

(8.) How many light bulbs are there in the world?

(9.) Who is the Vitruvian Man?

(10.) Where is Schrodinger’s cat?

These questions may seem off-the-wall, but actually they’re not.

Wolfram Alpha is being built by scientists so information on who discovered radium, the evolution of Man, the alchemy of metals, scientific expeditions and application of geothermal imaging / satellite capture of potential sites for Atlantis, the proliferation of light bulbs which are the invention of Thomas Edison and the connections to Schrodinger’s cat should be easily surfaced by the system since it is all familiar territory to scientists, machines are built in the mould and mind of their creators and before we expect Wolfram Alpha to provide us with the missing links between Marilyn Monroe and baseball (answer: Joe di Maggio) in pop culture and sports arenas — two sample areas where ‘Der Spiegel’ has already highlighted Wolfram Alpha’s current deficiencies (http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,624065-10,00.html) — it should at least be able to deal better with queries associated with its forté, science. Even if it’s not precise and no visual graphics can be generated, the algorithm should direct us to sources where we can delve further and derive some answers.

Unfortunately, as can be seen from the screenshots Wolfram Alpha gives several “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” answers.

Hmmn………

By comparison, as an example, Google recognizes the deliberate spelling mistake I made on the search term “VEtruvian Man” and asks me whether I mean “VItruvian Man” and it provides multiple links to suitable sites where I might find the answers. Meanwhile, True Knowledge doesn’t catch the spelling mistake and only offers, “It sounds like the vitruvian man may be a human being, organisation or other legal person that I don’t know about yet,” with a suggestion that I teach the system about him and input my knowledge in via the wiki.

As for the question, “Where is Schrodinger’s cat?” I suppose I could have been mischievous and asked, “Where is Schrodinger’s car?” instead to determine whether any of the three systems understood that it’s still a question about quantum physics and the ‘quantum indeterminacy or the observer’s paradox’. In other words, where we are and how we observe relative to the cat (aka the reception of visual particles into our eyes vis-à-vis the cat — which is an analogy for atoms invisible to the naked human eye, btw) itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made. Ergo, there is no single outcome unless and, I’d say, UNTIL it is observed.

If I put the cat into the car then the computational search engines will get even more confused……….LOL.

As it is, Google does a fairly decent job of discerning that I mean “Schrodinger’s cat” and even when I use “car” it provides me with a link to a YouTube entitled ‘Schrodinger’s car and parallel universes’.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the screenshots of the Twain test. Yes, and everyone should be aware that no media outlets have reported any “slow script” messages from Wolfram Alpha in their tests and I found one on my second query, “Where is Atlantis?” Oops, WA……

TEST RESULT SCREENSHOTS + TWAIN CONTEXT

(1.) Who discovered radium?

This is a straightforward question and the expectation would be that a diagram of a radium atom would be generated along with a map of where it was discovered along with a picture of Marie Curie. Instead, this is what each system produced:

(2.) Where is Atlantis?

This question resulted in a “slow script” message on Wolfram Alpha before it offered a map location of Atlantis as being on the South African peninsula coast. Like True Knowledge, it didn’t make that interpretation leap to identifying Atlantis as a potential mythical construct rather than an actual geographic location.

Google does make that interpretation leap.

(3.) How do we make gold from lead?

Ideally, the generated answer should show the historical (failed) attempts by various people to turn lead into gold — including the tales from the Hermetic schools of thought on this and those during Croesus’ age.

(4.) Can robots dream?

Would Isaac Aasimov / Philip K. Dick / Stanley Kubrick be impressed by the latest machine offering which produces results like these?

Wolfram Alpha says it “isn’t sure what to do with your input”. If I’d programmed the algorithm I’d make it respond like so, “Please ask us again in the morning after we’ve had the chance to sleep on it and think about it. Thanks!”

(5.) What is a sprite?

This is my trick question since ‘Sprite’ is a drinks brand as well as a type of fairy. Interestingly, Wolfram Alpha generates what appears to be the nutritional content of a can of Sprite but fails to pick up that the query may be about a glowing elfin creature that appears at the bottom of gardens in works of fiction. Meanwhile, Google pulls in some references to the term being relevant in computer graphics as well as the faerie references.

True Knowledge goes off-base and provides us with a picture of a ferret followed by a definition of it being a drink from Coca-Cola.

(6.) When did Homo Erectus become Homo Sapien?

Again, this should have produced a straightforward answer — either in the form of a timeline chart plotting the Evolution of Man which is being pieced together by anthropologists and other scientists or in the form of a textual examination into various Jurassic, Ice, Neanderthal, Paleolithic etc. ages.

(7.) Why are we here?

The greatest Existentialist question in our search for knowledge which perplexes philosophers, physicists, Presbytarians, polemicists, party people et al alike.

(8.) How many light bulbs are there in the world?

Let’s compare WA’s answer with Google’s. Google’s first link offers some data from Wiki answers on the daily production levels of light bulbs as well as the estimated annual expenditure on them whilst WA says it isn’t sure how to use the query input — which is, effectively, what True Knowledge also says. Interestingly in the TK results, there seems to be some kind of lag and it shows answers to the previous question of ‘Why are we here?’

Perhaps the lightbulb isn’t on in the TK thought engine — LOL.

(9.) Who is the Vitruvian Man?

Here, the search / computational engines should ideally have generated an image of Da Vinci’s famous drawing within the semantic context of the query. None of the systems did. Notably, neither Wolfram Alpha nor True Knowledge auto-corrected the deliberate spelling mistake of Vitruvian Man whilst Google did spot it and auto-amend.

(10.) Where is Schrodinger’s cat?

At the very least, Wolfram Alpha should have produced some equations associated with Erwin Schrodinger’s postulations as well as their interlinkages with Einstein’s, Stephen Hawking’s and the research currently being undertaken with the Large Hadron Collider. Plus the research from the Austrian university who managed to demonstrate time-travel by sending quarks over the River Danube.

Well, that’s how my mind would work if I was trying to locate Schrodinger’s cat and its connectivity trails…..

This is what the systems gave us instead:

CONCLUSION FROM TWAIN TEST

Google isn’t going to be killed just yet with today’s launch of Wolfram Alpha. Certainly, it’s helpful to see more visual and graphical representation of computed results but, then again,……….Kosmix does that better than Wolfram Alpha, Google and True Knowledge.

Once Google Squared goes officially live we’ll probably realize and accept that Google is keeping ahead of the curve by crossing Semantic knowhow with more visual knowledge representation techniques.

Companies should avoid marketing themselves or being labelled by the media / so-called search experts as “Google killers” and paradigm shifters before they’ve actually been tested by ordinary people like me or gone live. It’s critical to manage expectations and also to be more aware of the types of random and unexpected queries which do pop up in people’s minds and that they’d like the computational and philosophical derivations to.

Since the Semantic community is aiming towards artificial agents being able to answer some of the world’s most complex questions, systems should definitely be able to either answer questions like mine or, at least, provide appropriate and meaningful links to where else I can and should seek the answers.

In any case, innovations like Wolfram Alpha and other (non) Google killers can only result in keeping Google and other tech giants on their toes and result in improved search-browse-computational-discerning-sensemaking tools for us.

Hurrah! This is gr8 for us as information consumers, knowledge connectors and sense discoverers.

Yes and any company who’d like me to road-test their systems prior to launch should contact me, :*).

*************************************

For completion, here are the two blogs I wrote last week on the today-launched Wolfram Alpha platform:

* http://www.alwaysthetwain.com/blogs/2009/05/12/wolfram-alpha-cf-true-knowledge-non-google-killers/

* http://www.alwaysthetwain.com/blogs/2009/05/10/wolfram-alpha-objective-anticipation-analysis-please/

I just read some interesting commentary from some friends which compares what they’ve seen of Wolfram Alpha with True Knowledge so I re-visited the True Knowledge site. Clearly, TK has had a redesign as these two screenshots from 2008 and 2009 will show:

The soon-to-be-live-computation WA engine is launching with the same color scheme as the old TK site as well as Primal Fusion’s choice: faded orange.

In our WA compared with TK analysis, we should be aware of and note that systems are built in the mould of their creators and their pre-orientations / pre-dispositions / accumulated pasts. This helps us to contextualize the systems, what each can do and why they’re constructed in the way they have been and are being.

The background of founders can provide us with clues on likely development and strategy of the platform.

From what I can make out from WA’s video presentation, Wolfram’s solution takes its lead from Mathematica and other natural sciences databases. In essence, it’s like taking an online calculator that can generate visuals of trigonometric function graphs (like my Casio 5100FX did when I was a teenager) crossed with elements of:

* Bloomberg + MS Excel + SAS (Statistical Analysis Software) to generate economic charts

* some biochem modeling software

That’s why ‘Der Spiegel’ (http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,624065,00.html) can identify WA’s limitations in information availability/accuracy on politics, popular culture, sports etc. It’s not the natural or default orientation of Wolfram’s team, who spend more time thinking about Fibonnaci and Feynman than Britney or Barack which is what Tunstall-Pedoe’s team does. William Tunstall-Pedoe, the founder of TK, is from a journalistic background so his natural information orientation would be towards what’s published in most papers (politics, popular culture, business, sport, etc.) and that’s the direction he would most likely direct his team efforts towards.

In the greater schema of the Web, my observation is that WA’s launch reflects the trend of commercializing and hybridizing previously closed niche academia sources like Mathematica for the masses. We also see this when, for example, Google takes software that was in architectural niches (e.g., Autocad) and creates free tools like Sketch-up and now Google Draw.

Personally, I’m in favor of this trend. The question will still arise for WA, “How do we make money from our platform?” but they seem to have some cost per embed of a WA-generated search / graph in their business model.

With TK, another important distinction is that its wiki capabilities allow for collective correction. We read the definitions / links provided and we can apply our naturally accumulated knowledge to orientate and refine the definitions / links provided, according to our semantic (aka linguistic) interpretations.

With WA, there may be less scope for collective correction. How many people are going to use pen and paper to check that the integrals and statistics generated by WA are accurate?

In due course, Google will probably release something which is a 3rd way of both: wiki, visual knowledge representation and semantically-linked facts+figures. In fact, it already does in some form with Google Finance:

and now its recently announced Public Data Search capabilities:

Moreover, contrary to misconceptions (or rather lack of proper investigation by some quarters of the Semantic and journalistic space) Google is interested in and has been actively building teams with semantic knowhow for several years.

I wrote a lengthy, objective and well-researched article on this topic last year. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of posting this article on a certain SemWeb platform which I’d entrusted with the safekeeping / stewardship of my and my friends’ content on its public platform. Instead of reciprocally honoring that act of trust, said SemWeb platform’s coding was so awry and poorly architected that they deleted 8 months worth of our collaborative content, including that particular post examining Google’s interests in the semantic space.

Therefore, my hard work on the issue is lost indefinitely — despite the CEO’s non-performance of his own promise to restore our content.

This is personally annoying since my article cast a contextual light on whether any of these Semantic offerings springing up are genuinely paradigm-shifters and “Google killers”. They cannot be Google killers if the basic assumptions about Google not being actively involved in utilizing Semantic knowhow and tools is either fundamentally wrong or flawed.

Alas, I cannot now reproduce that article and the links which I found about Google hiring teams from known Semantic Web-related techco’s like CYC. However, I can point to some articles from Read/Write/Web this January 2009 and from eweek.com in the same month which point towards Google having and progressively incorporating semantic search features:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_semantic_data.php

http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_search/yes_google_is_doing_semantic_search.html

http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_and_semantic_web/google_ceo_hints_at_semantic_contextual_search.html

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161890/semantic_search_could_secure_googles_future.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/04/just-facts-fast.html

As I note, I wrote my article last year — May 2008 — several months before R/R/W or eweek did. That SemWeb platform, in their inconsiderate and wholesale deletion of users’ content, is responsible for my article not being available for others to use as a public and democratizing information source that would put into perspective whether any SemWeb offering is a paradigm-shifter or “Google killer”.

From what I’ve road-tested in the SemWeb space to-date, none of them are.

Google remains ahead of the curve both technically as well as the way in which they service and market to users. Certainly some of the businesses and their tools could be better integrated but, nonetheless, the key components remain technically more interesting than those offered by wannabe “Google killers” to-date.

Specifically wrt Wolfram Alpha, I’m sticking with my position as stated previously: I reserve proper assessment of it until I can plug+play it myself, objectively.

This is because all kinds of people have hyped WA or tried to make me believe that “Google doesn’t do semantic search” (their words) — despite me providing analysis which contradicts their convictions and competitive intelligence insights.

If I have a positive / negative perspective on Wolfram Alpha it will be based on my own independent and objective analysis (ok also humorous), and informed with previously accumulated, distilled and connected observations of the Semantic space rather than anyone else’s spin / misinformation / ignorance.

PERSONAL NOTE

I would never trust that SemWeb platform with my content again. At least on my own blog I know my information isn’t suddenly going to be deleted because of some irrational / small-minded / inconsistent / undemocratic whim of someone else.

Most importantly, I am not giving any licensing rights to the SemWeb platform over my content (original articles, images, comments, business models etc.) and their associated copyright for the SemWebco’s use or commercial exploitation. Frankly, their actions showed themselves to be unworthy of my trust and underlined how important it is to have ownership of your content and credit assignation for it.

Their Big Brother policies and breaches of user privacy were also not very appealing as a user-member.

All-in-all, I’m glad I don’t buy into that CEO (words and actions). He’s the same guy who insisted Google isn’t into semantic search, searching with Google is like “looking for a needle in a haystack” and who hypes up supposed “Google killers”. His radar’s way off.

Clearly, mine’s more perceptive, calibrated and spot on.

In this post I’m going to broadly cover how to adapt Bloomberg-esque stock trading graphs and transform them into the art auction world of the Christies and Sothebys, in an innovative way (which may make eBay seem anachronistic). Now, this is what a typical Bloomberg chart and an eBay auction format look like:

I’ve been using Bloomberg for well over a decade and, personally, I find Google Finance a much more intuitive and navigable layout:

GOOG is clearly attempting to take best-of-breed Adobe Flex, blogging software, dynamic RSS feeds and more to create a fusion portal for day/semi-professional traders and others interested in companies and their stocks. Google Finance is a great example of cross-pollination which works. Some of GOOG’s other properties have not quite managed to be fertilized in this way for monetization…………..yet, but the Google Finance team certainly know what they’re doing.

CROSS-POLLINATION IS GOOD

Actually, the more I see of these best-of-breed portals the happier I am.

One of the things which has interested me since childhood is how to adapt knowhow from one field and apply it to others. This, I believe, is how a person cross-trains their brain to anticipate and solve current and future problems. It’s how I’m going to think out what measures are needed to “technologically twain” Web 2.0 technologies with what is, currently, the closed and vaguely restrictive business that is the international art market.

THE MIND OF A CURIOUS CHILD

Before that, a wee bit about my personal journey and realization that everything is relative and related to everything else, that there is some Unified Grand Solution with components which are serendipitously synched with each other, and that each of our lives is about piecing our paths ahead — from a priori knowledge acquired, assimilated and attuned.

This forms our personal strategic approach: in life, in work, in play. In its optimal form it’s……….WISDOM.

THE ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT OF A CURIOUS CHILD

For me, playing team sports as a child wasn’t simply about the health benefits involved, which my parents encouraged, or to delay doing my homework. Extra-curricular activities meant I usually got home around eight o’clock, Mon-Fri and weekends were dedicated to Chinese school, so it’s a wonder I did any h/w in English school — much less got As for it! LOL.

Sport was principally about learning how each player is co-ordinated into an overall team strategy, the sequence of ball passing and tactical persuasion needed to move towards the understanding of team goals and then converting those hours of training into achieving collective objectives: win the game and bring honor to our school and sports teacher(s) or lose with good sportsmanship and try better next championship.

This translated in my young mind as, “How to get the best out of a collection of concepts: game technicalities and rules, people motivation and visual-spatial anticipation and flow of play.” Of and in themselves, people are also a “collection of concepts”, btw.

PUTTING CHILDHOOD LEARNING INTO ADULT PRACTICE

The childhood discipline of proactive perception and practice later helped me to grasp complex economics / mathematical / biochemical / physics concepts — like “How is this cross product related to the corollary on the preceding page?” and “What are the intermediate steps to get from an alcohol to a ketone?” and “In the Mundell-Fleming model, if the average savings increase by X%, how much will the government need to adjust base interest rates to ensure the liquidity of money point doesn’t migrate where it will affect inflation and its contingent wages?”

Very early on I grasped that the world must work according to some form of symbiotic strategy. This realization was partially due to my father teaching me how to play chess when I was 5, so I was exposed to the concept that every piece has a direct and indirect connection to another piece and it’s important to be able to see the entire landscape you’re playing on, all the binomials of possible moves and how specifically they’re inter-related. Chess is a complex game for a 5 year-old to grasp and I’d probably attribute it to helping me in ways well beyond being able to beat my father in the second game and thereafter.

It taught me that what are seemingly discrete pieces can be combined in a matrix of possible moves and that there are always more than one solution to arrive at a win (or a gracious lose and………learn from it!).

Additionally, the way my parents taught me about Nature’s cycles (wind, water, earth, fire) and how radicals in Chinese calligraphy can be transposed to create other (sometimes new) characters meant that I was given the assurance it’s good to cross-pollinate constructs if the end result is more holistic, functions more efficiently and is more readily understood than the individual parts.

Strategic thinking becomes a natural and organic personal process — as second nature as breathing — if a person trains their brain sufficiently and efficiently, and are open to improving from mistakes. I, unequivocally, believe that each piece of knowledge a person acquires in life isn’t supposed to be put into some kind of glass cabinet for posterity or to be used for ill and nor is it designed to be a static and isolated event.

It’s supposed to be systematically filtered, conjoined with other discrete pieces and metamorphosed into transposed meaning to produce implementable solutions for the greater good.

APPLYING INTELLIGENT INNOVATION

My business partner(s) and I have been going through my most recent iteration of the business model for Project ART. They’ve been somewhat surprised at how I’ve turned the constructs around. That’s what happens when you’re a trained corporate strategist and adopt approaches which are as creative as they are technical and financial. Somehow the component spheres can fission and fuse in a way which makes sense, generates revenue, rewards user-members and is do-able.

So what am I cooking in my code bunker? How about something like this…………