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A few more problems for Watson on the second game. Mostly, I think the humans were realizing just how fast they needed to be on that buzzer. A smaller lead, but still a solid win. The switchoff between Ken and Brad for second was interesting.
I’d like to examine how Watson did across the various categories. That will take some work.
One of the things I figured about Watson was that when he knew the answer, he’d be right on the buzzer. Yep.
Did very well last night, building up a very solid lead against two people who are quite obviously capable. One very good “Watson moment” too.
For those (like me) who missed it last night:
Not a bad showing at all. They handled the background on it all well too.
Shared files: SAGA FAIL
Sharing a file is supposed to let several people open, work on, and update/save a file at the same time. A tall order, but somehow it’s always worked in Excel 2003.
However, 2007 just breaks. Claims it’s locked when opening. Saying ‘notify me when it’s unlocked’ gets it into shared status after a couple minutes, when it notifies you it’s unlocked. However, trying to save at that point locks up Excel for a couple minutes (during which you can see the standard title bar peeking out from behind the new style they put over it), and then tells you the file is locked. If it’s shared it can’t be locked, that’s the entire point.
Feh.
(And yes, you can quote me on that.)
I typically don’t talk about work, here or elsewhere. One, it just isn’t a big part of my mental space, and two, it’s a very good way to stay out of trouble.
However, this needs pointing up:
http://www.notebookshopper.com/
(And click on the ‘blogs for students’ link…. ^_^)
It’s an effort to get around just how big and institutionalized things can get, and experiment with new ideas on a lighter, flexible website.
On another note at work, they’ve been busily upgrading everyone to Office 2007 around here.
General first reaction? Yuck.
To be fair, if I had gotten used to the new UI first, I think I’d be fine with it. There are some very nice things to go along with some not-so-bright choices.
Basically, they’ve gotten rid of both the top menus and the little customizable button bars, and replaced them with a ‘ribbon’. It’s a nice bit of UI overall, basically being a graphical version of the old menus, and does a good job of clearly presenting a lot of options that were buried before. One fun fact: When you hit ‘Alt’ on a Windows machine, it wants to go into the menus and is expecting shortcut inputs from there. On this version, not only is this true, but the actual letter shortcuts appear on the ribbon, so that you can actually figure out how to use it.
But it is new, and different, and a lot of things are not immediately obvious. Also, the old buttons were fully customizable, and the ribbon is set in stone. All you can define is an extra row of quick buttons along the top.
Also, there is a new default font for all portions of Office, Calibri. It’s designed to display well on LCD monitors. I kind of like it, but… 1) I have a CRT at work. 2) I do not care for the idea of a sanserif font being the default for Word.
So, ‘shows work, needs thought’ so far. I feel no need to upgrade from Office 2000 at home.
Yanked from Fanthropology:
Analytics performed upon Star Trek episodes confirm that the red-shirts die much more often than anybody else. However, if Captain Kirk “makes contact” with an alien woman, the red shirts are much more likely to survive. Full text of the article is here: http://www.clicktracks.com/insidetrack/articles/kirk_analytics.php?source=nws072007 . It is totally worth reading and the graph just killed me 
Hilarious, but informative….
Thanks to a co-worker, I saw this the other day:
And it was just too silly, so I had to share it. Click on the image to see a large version where you might actually be able to read the smaller captions.
A while back, a friend of mine had the idea to put all his DVDs into a database so he could keep track of them, let his friends know what he had to borrow, and keep track of who had borrowed what. A noble idea, the project eventually collapsed under its own weight.
In the meantime, it had sparked an idea of my own that was a bit more grandiose, and therefore collapsed under its own weight even faster. In my case, it was also the realization of some problems that I’ve never been able to reconcile.
My project was a database of magazine articles. Between the three of us here (at that point), we have a fairly good library of reference materials. And it’d be nice to spread the wealth around. Locating a particular book is not too hard. But, I also have magazines with articles on various interesting subjects. How (even for my own purposes) do I find what I want in those?
As a good example, I have a good number of National Geographics. When Smudge or Baron want reference to, say, cheetahs, it’s nearly impossible to find the right one, even when we know we all read an issue featuring them relatively recently.
So, the original idea was to record each article, with the magazine and issue number, and for sorting purposes, a general category (history, astronomy, nature…) and a short specific description of the subject matter, equivalent to what you see on the spine of a Nat Geo.
Not a bad idea, as far as it went, but too limited to be a great search tool. Part of the idea was to make it easy to fill in the data and thereby make it possible that the project could be competed. But some articles defied an easy description, and some things that a person might want to find, may not just live in obvious subjects. If National Geographic does an article on the African savanna, and there’s there’s some really good photos of elephants in it, when Baron wants photo reference, he won’t see the article it if he looks for elephants in the database.
I suppose a list of keywords might be better. In a way, what I want to do is create a card catalog for magazine articles.
Actually, what I really want is a magical way for someone to find information on a subject if the household’s combined library has anything on it (yes, that includes the books). @_@ There’s a lot of stuff in there, and I’d like it to be more visible.
So, I’m pondering the subject again, and wondering if anyone has any bright ideas.
I was driving home from work yesterday, when an ad for something like “Memprove” came on the radio. It’s supposed to be a short-term memory enhancer. Anyway, it rather pompously states, “developed by a pharmaceutical company (sic) over the last 10 years with proprietary neuro-peptides.”
0.0
I had several conflicting thoughts. ‘There’s no way I’m letting you play with my brain chemistry.’ ‘Why should I trust you when you won’t even own up to the name of the company.’ ‘I hope they paid the neuro-peptides for their work.’
A minute later I was wondering when we’d have open-souce neuro-peptides.
Legos are wonderful things, they can be put to so many uses.
One fellow has gone so far as to create a simple difference engine entirely out of Legos. Difference engines were popular in the 19th century as they were handy for compiling solutions tables for complicated functions like logarithims, books of these were essential for many disciplines until the advent of modern calculators, and had generally been plagued with errors when computed by hand. He has obviously spent a lot of time on the project, and it sounds like he’s accounted for the natural problems of trying to do something precise with plastic Legos, and made it pretty robust. Smarter than I….
Another person has come up with a set of Lego-mechanical logic gates, the essence of modern computing functions. It sounds like they have a lot of problems, and hooking together more than a couple will immediately run into slippage ‘errors’. I wonder if anything could be done about that, but they already look pretty darn complicated.
I’ll also admit that the only thing I truly follow in both of these is the math theory of differences. I follow the general plan and function of the difference engine itself, but that’s only because Andy Carol has done a good job of explaining it all, and I didn’t entirely follow all of that. I generally understand logic functions, but the mechanics of these things are completely beyond me.
Still, it’s very fun to see what some people will do with their spare time!