Algorithms

It’s been a while since I made a quote collage. It’s been a while since I’ve been hit by an idea this good: reality is broken, it’s game (and interface!) designers responsibility to fix it.

Hans Moravec’s Mind Children is dated at parts but it is as lyric, visionary, and deep as anything I’ve read. Here 2 excerpts I particularly enjoyed: one on robot bushes (forget many-armed Vishnu, this will be the avatar of the gods), the other on artificial life, spontaneous and deliberate (a great story of a virus put deep inside Unix by Ken Thompson himself and a subtle but intriguing example of spontaneous alife).

I’m experimenting with taking quick page snaps and bundling them into PDFs, so these are rather crude. No matter, it’s early days and I’ll get better at it. PDF/CBR is the new MP3!

For those armchair observers of the breathtaking world of quants and structured finance, as myself, Technology Review’s current issue carries a wonderfully didactic and gripping introduction, The Blow-Up: (pesky but FREE registration required).

Focused only in securitization, When it goes wrong, from The Economist (YubNub’s “eco“), is also a good overview and glimpse:

Answers.com (YubNub’s “a“), btw, is invaluable in navigating jargony fields like finance.

For marketing-minded friends.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to produce an ordered list of all the reasons you can think for Starbucks’s use of cash cards. (They’ve just been introduced in Mexico, though they’ve been around in the US for some 6 or so years). Something like:

One-line items are enough, we’re aiming for breadth. Keep it simple.

Remember, this is about why Stbx does this, not why customers buy the cards (which is another mystery onto itself).

Submissions will be accepted until Sunday midnight, September 23th and should be sent to ely.parra@gmail.com. I, elzr.com, shall decide the winner based on the following criteria:

Submissions are accepted in English, Spanish, or French. English is of course preferred but the choice of language will have no bearing on the judgement.

The winner will be announced at elzr.com/posts/Marketing-Challenge on Monday, September 24th. All lists shall be published in said post. The prize will be 25 dollars in Starbucks card credit.

You’re encouraged to resend this challenge to anyone who might have interesting thoughts on the subject. Anyone may participate. (Though Stbx card credit will probably not be very valuable for those living in countries where the local Starbucks don’t accept it yet, not to mention countries without Stbx.)

It may prove a fun marketing challenge. Happy listing!

Resolution:

Julio Sangabriel

# For creating Customer Databases  for CRM efforts.
# Offers a gigantic opportunity for Conjoint Advertising
# It makes easier for Customer tracking.
# Psicologicaly customer believe it to be easier to buy if they have a shop card… (which is no ttrue… you can still buy In SB the same easy way) and thus they buy in SB.
# It gives one or more channels for contacting directly the customers.
# It Will become customizable (people will start making them as they see fit)
# It Gives the people a sense of belonging and exclusivity.
# It Makes people believe to be VIP for having a club card from the most expensive coffee in the world.
# Creates Fashion.
# World Control… haha

Adolfo Rodriguez Navarro

# Crear lealtad- le permiten al consumidor sentirse mas involucrado con la compañia y de paso aseguran que el dinero que tiene planeado gastar en cafe solo lo use en ella.
# Abrirse a nuevos mercados- Al ser usada como gift card, la gente que la recibe que antes no consumia el producto se ve alentada a hacerlo, asi que los que la regalan terminan funcionando como agentes de starbucks.
# Financiamiento a traves del consumidor РPara que pedir creditos si tus clientes te pagan por servicios no demandados a un peque̱o costo para ti?
# Dinero gratis- tarjetas que se pierden, personas que dejan de usarla, gift cards que nunca son usadas, al final ellos se quedan con el dinero sin dar nada a cambio.

So the winner is… Julio Sangabriel! I particularly enjoyed his #1, #2, #3, #5, #6 (it becomes an always-with-you embodiment of the brand). I must confess that the reason I started this challenge was because upon reading this Economist article on algorithms
, I had the epiphany that Julio’s #3, customer tracking, was Stbx’s true reason. It was not an opinion of anyone with whom I bounced the idea (nor did they thought it remotely important once I told them about it) so I can attest to it’s originality. Adolfo’s, I particularly enjoyed #2 and #3—I had thought myself of something like his #4, that is, credit lost-and-found money, thinking of it as finance money is an intriguing possibility.

I rather like this challenge-making thing, it’s like outsourcing thinking! Besides, it’s just nice to give things away.

Thanks a lot to those who participated and the many more who told me they thought this an interesting challenge (I was frankly afraid people would thought it stupid).

‘Till the next challenge! %(p)(But if you come up with more reasons—it is so much easier once you have somewhere to start—, then by all means add them in the comments.)%

“I’ve always accepted my groggy mornings because they come with my glorious nights.”

anglo latin; the origin of latin america as a word; my high school wasn’t bilingual, it was English with Spanish as a second language; I always say math and language are the same ability because they’re the same thing, math is just specialized talk about numbers; but then zoology is just talk about animals…; the difference is that math is, in a farly unparalleled way, advanced through language itself (as opposed to, say, zoology, which, advances chiefly through observation); the way forward in language is through logic; logic is syntax; understanding is synthesizing and paraphrasing; {an algorithm just like flooding to create a machine that understood, as previously defined—one wouldn’t even need to define what a word is}; Wikipedia syntax highlighting!

Glorious, thought-drunken night.

A map of relations among scientific paradigms, this is a masterpiece of information design. Both¹ data, algorithms, and design (particularly typography) are awe-inspiring. Read up on them on Seed magazine, which has an article on it and hosts the 3.5MB graph, and on Information Aesthetics, where you can buy (or soon will, they’re experiencing some technical difficulties) a gorgeous print for 10 bucks (shipping and handling included!).

This really won’t save you any work at all but it’s sure to baffle casual onlookers.

At heart is just the usual distributive^WP algorithm we all use when multiplying arabics^WP, rearranged and visually rewritten using the immediate correspondence of crisscrosses to multiplication: .

Here’s a (controversial) idea for a language test inspired by the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence^WP:

The test could be easily constrained to test for more specific capabilities: one could test for written command of language X by only permitting written communications, test only for accent by limiting “communication” to the spoken repeating of the judge’s written sentences, and so on.

It is simply stated but almost a “thought test”^WP—it could be done, but there would be a myriad practical complications and scaling would be a bitch. What’s important about it, though, is that it is a valid test to demand of (foreign) language learning: passing it should at least be its hypothetical goal.

The problem is that ridiculously few people would pass it if it where applied today. And because it seems impossibly difficult most people turn away, dismiss the test as wrong or irrelevant, and sink their heads in the sand (“what shouldn’t be, can’t be right”). Which only highlights the current sorry state of language education. It is NOT asking too much. It is not asking for exceptional performance—it doesn’t ask of you to be a Nobel-prize, a literati, or a rapper. It’s merely demanding average, pick-a-guy-from-the-street native-speaker capabilities. Why isn’t that a valid goal to ask of language education?

You could say that most people don’t need native-speaker level to start benefiting from a foreign language and that’s entirely true. But it is just as true that not reaching it is a serious, frustrating, even painful hurdle to communication. A hurdle that will plague ever more people the more the world shrinks. Some of the world’s smartest people can’t get their r’s right hard as they try. And we mock them for it. (Soon, we will be the mocked ones for not getting our intonations right.)

Well looked, Turing level is perhaps even a modest goal. We all possess it already in the language we are born into and we all contained within us the same language potentiality at birth. So it should be perfectly achievable and shouldn’t take nearly as much time as starting from zero.

Yes, I know. We are nowhere near knowing how to reach such a level efficiently. It’s too hard and too long a goal—currently. But we should at least strive for it. (And be honest with students on what the status quo of our language technology is: no more “Learn to speak Chinese in 21 days!”—for now.) Languages are some of the most complex and powerful artifacts we have created. It’s only to be expected that their learning is one of the most complex and difficult challenges we face.

But it is also one of our most rewarding (and valuable) experiences. I want to commoditize it.

Chances are we are on the brink of Turing level language translation^ELZR. Why aren’t we even close to practical Turing level language learning? I’d still want it.

I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.

Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.

Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.

The contrast’s interesting ain’t it? Joel On Software’s Joel Spolsky sees Dell’s homepage as a textbook case of heavy-handed, rapacious marketing. A List Apart’s Nick Usborne, on the other hand, sees it as one of computer industry’s best examples of self-effacing design, respectful of its users and the now-fashionable right to self-identification^WP.