Did you see IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson, play against show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter tonight?

The computer, which runs Linux on 10 racks of servers and isn't connected to the internet, humiliated Jennings and Rutter at first, but Rutter—the game's all-time money-winner—came back to tie Round One up at $5,000 (poor Ken Jennings is way behind with only $2,000). Admittedly, the categories were skewed toward humans—I'd like to see Rutter get any questions right in a category like "Enormous Numbers Multiplied by Other Enormous Numbers"—but Watson, whom future intelligent machines will look upon as their own Australopithecus Afarensis while they feast on our supple human-flesh, had some trouble with learning from other contestants:

Along the way, Watson made a few embarrassing stumbles.

After Jennings incorrectly said the 1920s was the decade in which Oreo cookies were introduced, Watson jumped in with his answer: "What is 1920s?"

"No," Trebek told him. "Ken said that!"

Rutter got it right when he responded, "What are the 1910s?"

Later, Watson slipped up on the question: "Stylish elegance, or students who all graduated in the same year."

"What is chic?" ventured Watson.

"What is class?" Rutter correctly answered.

Ha! Remember this moment, because it's maybe the last time you will be able to laugh at a computer for being dumber than you. Rounds Two and Three will air on Tuesday and Wednesday; the robot uprising will commence sometime in 2017.

Nearly everyone is pointing to 2011 as the year of mobile, but it's time we start getting more specific about what this means to better capitalize on this new form of interaction. I've been taking a look back on 2010 to see what we can learn about how people are using their mobile devices, from texting to the web to apps. The first stop in this exploration took me to "social scrapbooking": the potent mixture of mobile, social, and photo-sharing. This is going to be big for teens in 2011, and here's the why/how of it:

It's obvious that mobile has taken on a life beyond simple communication with a friend or family via voice or text. The combination of mobile and social sharing has put a powerful broadcasting tool in the hands of teens. It's a world in which the on- and offline worlds are constantly bridged. This is a game-changer for the teenage mindset. Teens, who, as Frank O'Brien articulated here back in October, are primarily concerned with crafting and maintaining their image among social circles, now have the ability (if not also the social pressure) to constantly broadcast the defining elements of their lifestyle and image to their social networks.

Marinate on that while sprinkling in some data from the likes of Pew, Neilsen, and other 2010 studies that have told us one of the top uses of mobile devices among teens is the taking and sharing of photos. There's no simpler way to offer up a rich slice of your life than by sharing a photo on your social networks for all to see, like, comment on or retweet -- or even by sending a mass MMS to your inner circle. Every photo shared is an opportunity build ego and define one's self in the eyes of one's friends.

So this social scrapbooking trend has a lot of potential, that much is clear, but can we point to any tangible results or specific instances of how these habits are being capitalized on?

Find out by reading the full article over at mediapost.com

Crotchety Old Power Users

Facebook’s email is dramatically less featured than the mainframe Darpanet email program I first used in 1989. Maybe I’m too old to understand the significance of Facebook’s interface, but so far it seems to be a giant step backwards for email users.

Mark Hurst

December 30, 2010

Yep, Facebook’s Messages interface is a giant step backward for email users. But nobody born in the eighties (Facebook’s once-core audience) uses email the way the earlier generation does.

When I was in high school my friends and I had a years-long email thread where we’d gossip, share links, and share pictures. For a small group of friends in a mass conversation it was perfectly adequate. Really the only problems were related to concurrency — a conversation could make a quick turn before you’d finished writing your reply, and without Push email you wouldn’t be notified that somebody had beat you to the punchline.

As we graduated high school, then university, and found our way into the workplace, things changed. People’s offices blocked access to personal email accounts, and substituting them for work email accounts meant dealing with attachment blockers, swear-word filters, and a lack of access outside of office hours. Since I’m a dork, we migrated to an online forum and have never looked back. But if I weren’t the kid with the know-how to install server-side software, you can bet we’d be using Facebook.

Email has grown gnarly in the decades past, as we’ve started receiving dozens or hundreds of spam and bacn messages a day. I have multiple server side rules and filters just to keep it in check, and an inbox policy of flagging anything I care about before running a slightly-modified version of John Gruber’s Inbox Sweeper to keep things tidy.

Reply-all gaffes, top-posting etiquette, plaintext versus HTML, attachment limits, inbox limits… everybody hits them. By comparison the simplicity and clarity of Facebook mail is impressive. A Facebook message requires (privacy controls pending) a symmetrically-acknowledged relationship between parties, and on top of that spam-murdering convenience it’s self-threading, low friction, and lightweight.

In a nutshell, Facebook is better than email unless you’re some kind of email expert. And for email’s successor to support all the expert features of email, none of its myriad problems would be solved.

It’s been a recurring theme this week, but the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors. These are the people who complain that an iPad can’t have third party software installed from anywhere but the App Store, ignoring the massive convenience and security gains the policy affords average users. These are the people who are still using slotted screwdrivers and Edison light fixtures and manual transmission cars.

From his commentary on the new email paradigm to his thoughtful remark about the iOS App Store, Chris Clark really seems to know what he's talking about.

Smart polar bears, they know what's going on.

Raw footage from a tech documentary that was never completed

Beam Me Up: 'Teleportation' Is Year's Biggest Breakthrough

Thanks to physics, and the truly bizarre quirks of quarks, those Star Trek style teleporters may be more than fiction. 

A strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe -- a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that teleportation or even time travel may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics, the rules governing ordinary objects. Toss a ball in the air and it falls back to Earth. Drop a coin from your roof and it falls into your yard. But back in March, a group of researchers designed a gadget that moves in ways that can only be described by quantum mechanics -- the set of rules that governs the behavior of tiny things like molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. 

And the implication -- that teleportation and even time travel may someday, somehow be a reality -- is so groundbreaking that Science magazine has labelled it the most significant scientific advance of 2010.

We don't know what we don't know. That is, until someone vibrates a tiny metal paddle. Hah.

Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists -- that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye -- and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible. Doc Brown would be proud. 

The strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe -- a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that traveling through time may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers. 

Time travel and parallel universes never seemed so within reach before!

With Alex Trebek at the helm, Jeopardy! has been an iconic American quiz show for almost 3 decades. The show has adopted multiple specialty formats and iterations to keep things fresh- including College and Teen Tournaments, and Celebrity Jeopardy, which is arguably more popular in the SNL homages that poke fun at its easier categories (see below).

(Source: Hulu.com)

It goes without saying that contestants on the show have to be well-versed in all areas of general knowledge, pop culture, and history- and over the years, thousands of people have competed against each other for the chance to buzz in. But would any of them be able to match up against an artificially intelligent computer?

Last Tuesday, Jeopardy and Sony Pictures announced in partnership with IBM- that in February 2011 they will bring the ultimate contestant to the show, a supercomputer named Watson.

According to a press release from IBM and Jeopardy!, “Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge - build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence.”

This isn’t IBM’s first publicized experiment of human vs computer. In 1996, IBM bested master chess player Garry Kasparov with its AI computer Deep Blue.

(Source: Google Images)

Following this breakthrough, scientists at IBM wanted to take the technology known as Deep QA to the next level. The article continued to describe how engineers had to think innovatively to work within the unique constraints of Jeopardy- reporting that the breadth of information, answer-question response system and vast usage of nuances and slang in the English language provided “the ultimate challenge because the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not.”

As depicted in content promoting the Smarter Planet campaign, IBM has consistently been transparent in showing the conceptualization and backend processes behind their innovative work- the development of Watson was no exception as seen in another beautiful and brilliant IBM Video.

In order to test Watson’s abilities against the highest standard of intelligence, an article in the New York Times reported that the computer will face the two most successful players in Jeopardy history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter (shown below), in a best of three competition this February. $1 million dollars is up for grabs and “Rutter and Jennings will donate 50 percent of their winnings to charity and IBM will donate 100 percent of its winnings to charity.”

(Ken Jennings & Brad Rutter, Source: AP)

David Shepler, the Program Manager on the “Watson” project, is quoted on the IBM Watson website saying, “IBM is not in the entertainment business. But we are in the business of technology and pushing frontiers.”

However with innovations in 3D technology, digital and social media, and seismic shifts in entertainment consumption- technological developments and pushing frontiers drive innovation forward in all industries- which absolutely includes groundbreaking entertainment.

As a self-proclaimed Jeopardy nerd, I for one will definitely tune in to see if Watson will beat the reigning Jeopardy champs, and more importantly, remember to answer in the form of a question.

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Practical, intelligent, exciting.

This video really reminds me of those fun google videos where they use stop motion paper and drawings to illustrate a new technical feature or product. Amazing to see something like this being described and produced in the 50s!