orlow Exclusive A form filed on Friday with Companies House show that Russo was appointed as a director of SpinVox Limited on June 2, 2009. No announcement was made to the press at the time. However, yesterday Spinvox disclosed that Russo was no longer a director of the firm. Russo left on August 10. Russo became … Read more
“ The anti-copyright gaggle has an insatiable need to feel victimized. Injustice burns deep, and is triggered by the merest hint that “The Man” might be tampering with one’s “bits”. Another example of technology utopians trying to bypass politics and claim victimhood – the Net Neutrality” campaign – shows very similar characteristics.” A while ago … Read more
Yesterday’s technology demonstration by SpinVox at its Marlow HQ reminded everyone just how hard it is to do voice to text machine translation, and how far away anyone is from automating the bulk of the voicemail translation in the real world.
All of the messages supplied by our small group of visitors tripped through to a human operator. The event was unnecessary and humiliating for all concerned. SpinVox shouldn’t have had to lift its skirts; we didn’t need to be there.
To Marlow, where SpinVox today hosted a demonstration for journalists of its technology to convert voice messages to text: two groups of four journalists, to be precise. For a full report on the demo, see this report.
Not long after the presentation had got underway, the door opened and in came the chief executive and co-founder Christina Domecq. Any questions? Well, a few, actually – but we had time for just one. Here’s the exchange in full.
The Register has built up a picture of the company that makes believing SpinVox’s revised claims extremely difficult. Sources suggest SpinVox, a privately held company, is employing a far larger number of transcribers than it publicly states, even today. These sources also point to extreme difficulties in maintaining its operations as the company scaled, winning … Read more
Apollo space program as a triumph of power and industrial might. The superpowers’ space programs were, of course, political and chauvinistic, designed to showcase national wealth. But there’s a better way of looking at the program, Dennis Wingo reminded me recently. Masses of money helped put man on the Moon of course, but the Moon … Read more
The Creative Commons initiative fulfilled a major ambition last week – but it’s taken only days for the dream to turn to crap.
Google granted the wish by integrating the ability to search images based on rights licences into Google Image Search. Yahoo! Image Search has had a separate image search facility for years, but Google integrated the feature into its main index.
The idea of making the licences machine-readable was a long-standing desire of the project, and lauded as a clever one. It was intended to automate the business of negotiating permissions for using material, so machine would instead negotiate with machine, in a kind of cybernetic utopia. Alas, it hasn’t quite worked out.
As Daryl Lang at professional photography website PDN writes, the search engine is now choked with copyright images that have been incorrectly labelled with Creative Commons licences. These include world-famous images by photographers including Bert Stern and Steve McCurry. As a result, the search feature is all but useless.
Since there’s no guarantee that the licence really allows you to use the photo as claimed, then the publisher (amateur or professional) must still perform the due diligence they had to anyway. So it’s safer (and quicker) not to use it at all.
What’s gone wrong, as Lang explains, is the old engineering principle of GIGO, or Garbage In, Garbage Out:
“The system relies on Internet users to properly identify the status of the images they publish, Unfortunately, many don’t… Many Flickr users still don’t understand the concept of a Creative Commons licence, or don’t care.
“It’s time consuming to put a different label on every image [in their collection], and there are no checks in place [our emphasis] to hold users accountable for unauthorized copying or incorrect licensing labels.”
So Google won’t take responsibility for the accuracy of the licensing metadata, and Creative Commons, as a small private internet quango, says it can’t afford to. (The disclaimer on the website is simple: go find yourself a lawyer.)
Just as we predicted, in fact: the filtering is less than perfect, and it’s a lip-service to creators. Now, why did it have to fail?
Did you know people in Haiti, Burma and Armenia are all better off than in Britain? And the Congo is happier than the USA? That’s what the London think-tank New Economic Foundation reckons in its second “Happy Planet” rankings. But even NEF admits that its “happiness” rating or HPI doesn’t really measure human happiness, and that it’s sacrificing truthiness for the publicity its reports can generate.
Like the notorious Carbon Calculator, the Happy Planet Index is an advocacy tool for limiting, rather than promoting, human health and happiness, and it too is based on the idea of an ecological “footprint”. This Neo-Malthusian concept was developed by population-control advocate William Rees, a professor at British Columbia University, and his splendidly-named pupil Mathis Wackernagel. The latter has since turned it into a successful consultancy business.
NEF uses older surveys where people expressed happiness, multiplies it by life expectancy, and divides it by the “footprint”. Factors such as crime, freedom, or infant mortality rates are not considered.
So not surprisingly, given this skew, the “Happiness Index” produces some very odd results. The last survey was topped by the Republic of Vanautu. The south sea nation has a population of just over 200,000 and an infant mortality rate of one in 20 – about 10 times that of the UK.
The authors urge industrialised economies urgently need to become more like the underdeveloped. In human terms, that would mean over 300,000 unnecessary child deaths in the UK each year. Such is the price of happiness, NEF argues.
NEF also frowns on India and China for improving the material welfare of their people. Accompanying the report is a spreadsheet which hindcasts the NEF “happiness” figure retrospectively. It tells us that since 1990, China and India’s “HPI rating” has fallen.
In the latest survey Costa Rica tops the poll, and Vanautu has dropped out completely. Jamaica ranks third, Columbia is at six, Bhutan (with 74 deaths per 1,000 live births) and Laos (89 per 1,000) is in the Top 20 – far higher than any OECD country.
It’s too bizarre even for some anti-capitalist environmentalists. Writing on his blog, the activist Derek Wall, author of Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-capitalist, Anti-globalist and Radical Green Movements observes that:
“Colombia comes in at number six on the index out of 143 countries… yet death squads commonly clear peasants from the land for biofuels. Doesn’t sound that good a place to me.”
“But maybe I am just one of those old fashioned left greens who worries about little things like human rights and the environment?”
Meet the Carbon Cult, Derek.
No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google’s vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business, although both will obligingly huff and puff about how serious they are about this new, phoney OS war. Since both of these giants are permanently … Read more