Archive for Technology
The LifeStraw - safe drinking water to the world’s poor
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Tonicgen.com posted a very interesting article on a technology that would help provide safe drinking water to the world’s poor. That technology is called the LifeStraw and here’s a quick description of it:
The LifeStraw is a portable water purifier for prevention of common diarrhoeal disease – and can be carried around for easy access to safe and clean drinking water. It is deemed so innovative that it received the Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World-Changing Ideas this past February.
This really is an innovative technology and is a concrete solution to a complex problem!
You can visit the LifeStraw website for more information or read the article at tonicgen.com
Link it to UFOs, no matter what
Posted by: | CommentsIndia Daily posted an article regarding last week’s NASA findings about the Earth’s magnetotail. You can have a look at my last week article about this for more information. I was reading their article and I thought that for once, it was a “normal’ article not filled with BS. Unfortunately, I was wrong. The article is not too long so I’ll post it here:
Scientists are baffled with the data from NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which recorded big changes in the lunar night side voltage, jumping typically from -200 V to -1000 V.
Every month, around the time the moon is full, it gets hit by Earth’s magnetic tail. As a result of the moon’s contact with the large ”plasma sheet” of hot charged particles that are trapped within our magnetic tail, scientists say, the night side of the moon climbs to hundreds or even thousands of volts in energy. Further, there is growing evidence that in such a period, the fine particles of moon dust actually begin to float because of electrostatic repulsion.
Because the moon could encounter the plasma sheet many times during a single pass through the magnetotail you can imagine how dynamic the charging environment on the moon is.
The bigger question is who created the dynamic charging environment on the moon?
many scientists now believe the anomaly can be explained by strange extraterrestrial bases in moon. Many scientific think tanks believe that US and Russia avoided moon since 1970 after they found evidence of extraterrestrial bases in moon.
Now, I want to point this sentence: The bigger question is who created the dynamic charging environment on the moon?
And then, this conclusion: many scientists now believe the anomaly can be explained by strange extraterrestrial bases in moon.
Ok, so this really doesn’t make sense. First of all, nobody created that dynamic charging environment on the moon, it’s just something that happens for scientific reasons! I mean, we could go on and on with that kind of arguments: “Who created magnetism?”, “who created electricity?”, etc. It’s not something that is created, these are phenomenons that can be explained by science and are the result of a complex interactions between molecules/atoms. You can get an explanation of the dynamic charging of the moon on the NASA’s website, just follow the link at the top of this post.
That kind of conclusion was of course to find a way to link the aliens to this story. That’s pure India Daily, link it to UFOs, no matter what.
Software engineers don’t learn about you, the customer
Posted by: | CommentsI was trying to figure out today why most of the softwares we use everyday aren’t really customer oriented. I mean, I’m pretty sure 50% of the softwares you use do the job, but aren’t really that pleasant to use. So why it that? Well, the answer is quite simple: most software engineers don’t learn about building customer driven solutions at school, they just learn to build more efficient programs.
I’d say 75% of software engineers work like the customer was their own computer. Is it because you deal with computers 90% of your work day that the product you deliver is for the computer itself? No, there’s a third layer there and it’s called the customer. It’s easy to forget who you really work for when you never see its face. It’s also really sad because when you hear programmers talking, they’ll usually talk about the nice algorithm they’ve used and how efficient the code they’ve written is. This is all OK, but you’ll rarely hear a programmer talking about the great user experience he has managed to provide. I know programmers who still don’t believe in graphical user interfaces and who think we should still be using the old command line. That is not understanding customers’ needs and that usually ends up with softwares users hate to use.
Fortunately, this is slowly starting to change, as customers expect more and more from softwares and that is also why Microsoft is struggling with end users at the moment. This is great news and that will eventually force schools to not only focus on the technical side of computing, but also on the end user experience.
As a software engineer, I try to concentrate a lot on the user experience. Some purists will say performance and optimization is more important but I simply say do both. As a customer, keep asking better software!
Predictify: A little something to keep predictions’ gurus busy
Posted by: | CommentsIf anyone likes to predict stuff and is good at it, try this website: Predictify. It’s not as fun as predicting the end of the world and stuff like that but you can get paid for it. The website offers you a list of things for you to try to predict and if you are right, you can even get paid. In fact, Predictify describes itself as follows:
Studies have shown that large groups of regular people are often more accurate than a small group of experts at predicting the outcome of future events. Predictify is a prediction platform that harnesses this collective wisdom.
Predictify provides a simple, fun way to engage in current and future newsworthy topics. You can research, discuss and predict the outcomes of real-world events, challenge your friends to private prediction contests, build a reputation based on your accuracy, and even get paid real money when you’re right. Best of all, it’s free – no points or bets required. Click on the Predict tab above to get started.
So I can get paid, right? But how much? Well, according to the website:
By accurately predicting the outcome of Premium questions. Predictify charges Premium question-askers a fee of $1 per response and shares a portion of this fee (the pot) with the predictors based on their accuracy.
So, the price you get paid depends if it’s a premium question, how many answers there are and how many good answers there are. I haven’t tried the concept so I can’t tell if it’s worth it but it’s certainly a nice thing to try if you are a guru in a core sector like finance.
I think it’s a nice initiative and concept, but at the same time there’s probably a big company behind that trying to use the community to make money. Let’s admit it, you probably don’t get paid a fortune for your answers but I’m pretty sure the information extracted from the community’s answers is really worth it and worth a lot of money.
Anyway, see this as an entertainment if you like that kind of stuff.
Web bots - There’s no magic
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a follow-up to my previous article about the web bot. In that article, I briefly explained what the web bots are and if they were able to predict anything. I strongly suggest you read the article but it’s not a prerequisite to this article. In that first web bot post, I made a slight mention of the “2012 prophecy” and guess what? Most of the comments are about the 2012 prophecy and whether or not the world will end in 2012. I won’t be talking about 2012 in this article but I will focus on the limits of the web bots because there’s a really important concept we all have to understand: Web bots scan man-made information. This article might look similar to my previous one, but is shorter and more focused on limits of web bots. It is a reminder of the core concept of web bots.
Web bots scan man-made information
This is the most important concept of web bots because it sets the limits to what the web bots are able to predict. This also explains why it’s impossible to predict any end of the world prophecy. Why is that? The main goal of a web bot is simply to crawl the web the same way Google would do it to extract important information from websites. That important information is usually the most relevant keywords on a website put with a certain algorithm that is able to get the meaning of the sentences the keywords are used in. This information is then put in a large database and the final goal is to compare similar topics to determine if they each point towards similar conclusions.
So, if we put all the pieces together: The web contains information written by humans, the web bots crawl that information, find correlations and make predictions. If the web bots take its information from man-made sources, then what can it predict? Only things humans can predict or have control over. Does that includes the end of the world? No. There’s nothing super-natural in web bots. It’s computer technology at its best: Gather, keep and interpret information the human brain can’t.
Sure someone can argue they sometimes predict the stocks market, but I know people who are damn good at this too. They can try to predict a whole lot of stuff, but it cannot go any further than what we can predict.
We have to be careful here, because web bots do have a power we don’t have: to merge all that information across the web and try to find a correlation. So, they can go a little further than what a single human can do, but they can’t go any further than what’s possible to predict by humans.
If it was really possible to predict incredible stuff, Google would have the answer to every question. Wait a minute…They do! Seriously, it’s possible to extract relevant information from the web but it has a limit. Google use the data it collect to do a lot of other stuff than giving you search results, but they wouldn’t be able to predict things humans don’t have control over if they tried. That’s the same thing for web bots, except it’s much more smaller than Google.
Put everything in perspective
Web bot is a really nice project but I think it’s going to be one more argument for doomsday prophets in the future. It already started with videos about the end of the world and web bots predicting it would happen in 2012. There are certain things we don’t have control over and we have to accept it. There are certain parts of our lives we don’t control and we have to accept it. Computers are useful but they’re not God. I think the web bot project has a nice future but always keep in mind the web is man made and the bots crawl the web: there’s a limit to their capacities, it’s no magic.
Some examples
What’s best than a couple of concrete examples?
Could the web bots predict:
- Natural disaster: There’s not much chances, unless it’s a natural disaster we can predict. We sometimes know in advance of a tornado and are able to predict the disaster. In that case, a web bot could do the same by gathering information from websites talking about a possible disaster on a certain date.
- End of the world: Unless it’s a very obvious situation or caused by humans’ actions, no.
- Terrorist attacks: Yes. at least it can help.
- Stocks markets: Yes it can help.
- You get the idea.
Hope it’s clear
I hope it clears everything up so that it’s now obvious that it is impossible for a web bot to predict things humans have no control over.
The future of Internet Advertising
Posted by: | CommentsI posted an article about the future of Internet advertising on my technology blog Adopt A Packet and I think it might be of interest for a lot of persons at Daily Common Sense.
Internet Advertising has reached a certain limit and Google experienced it recently. They’ve recorded a drop in the number of clicks on their banners displayed all across the web. Even if they say it’s because they’ve increased the quality of their ads, which means they’re more targeted, they have to face the reality: There are more “ad blind” people than 5-10 years ago when Internet Advertising all started. Continue to read The future of Internet Advertising - AdoptAPacket.com
Introducing my new blog - Adopt A Packet
Posted by: | CommentsJust to let you know that I’ve launched a new blog: Adopt A Packet. It’s mostly aimed at techies and there’s little chances of you enjoying it if you’re not in the computer industry! It’s funny stories about the inside life of packets. Anyway, check this out. It’s fresh from today so there’s not much content but it will grow and will only get funnier with time!
Alien bible found…and translated
Posted by: | CommentsI came across an interesting article located here: Alien Bible Translated. Once again, total nonsense at its best. Fortunately, it comes from a “fake” news website. I find it reassuring as it looks totally fake and that’s the purpose of the website. The real danger is that I realized people are actually believing this, without even checking where the news was coming from. Here’s a summary of the article:
WEEKLY World News sources have confirmed that a professor at Webster University — the birthplace of the world-famous English dictionary — is in possession of a book that was printed on another world. What’s more, the thick volume isn’t a cookbook.
“It’s an alien bible,” said 41- year-old linguistics professor, Dr. Emmanuel Johnson, whose skill with foreign languages has earned him the nickname “Magic.” “And wait till you hear who their god is!”
Back in his library, Dr. Johnson opened the container.
“Being whacked against the foreman’s head had loosened the top,” Dr. Johnson said. “It popped right off. I began to wonder if, in fact, that was how the aliens opened containers on their world. If so, they must have suffered brain damage over time.”
Inside, Dr. Johnson found a small, thick book. The cover illustration showed a constellation that bore the unmistakable likeness of Oprah Winfrey. Stunned, he opened the book, which consisted of multicolored, cloth-like materials. The writing glowed when the professor looked at it.
“It was an illuminated manuscript,” Dr. Johnson explained. “I was immediately able to translate the title, which is called Their Eyes Are Watching Me. The book was comprised of two sections: A Sacred Alien Testament: Written and a Sacred Alien Testament: Oral.”
“The Oral Testament actually speaks to the reader,” Dr. Johnson revealed. “Naturally, it talks in the authoritative but reassuring voice of Oprah.
“It begins with a section called ‘Syndication,’ which encourages aliens to do good deeds on other worlds, including the Earth,” Dr. Johnson continued. “We suspect that the alien visitors who owned this bible were missionaries, members of Oprah’s ‘The Angel Connection.’ It instructs acolytes on the basics of worship, including the use of something called ‘the remote.’
Please, we really have to stop that kind of things as it makes every UFO believer lose credibility. I know it’s fake news, but people are sadly actually believing this. I know it’s a small majority of people, but that’s too much.
I particularily enjoyed: “The cover illustration showed a constellation that bore the unmistakable likeness of Oprah Winfrey.”
Anyway, I thought it was a funny article, but unfortunately, some people believe it.
Google: Don’t be Evil…For now.
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been saying it for the past year and I think this year is the year Google will start its first Evil year. The point is that Google’s shares are now crashing. Until now, Google was getting revenue fairly easily from their advertisement business and was spending without limits. Google’s reality is different today. They have share holders to satisfy and a board of greedy administrator looking for constant growth of the company. Google is already huge and by far dominating Internet advertising business. With their current situation, growing more can’t be done without a little bit of an evil touch. They have to flood you with ads a little more to show revenue growth and for that it means you’ll start having Google ads on cell phone when they fully gets in the business and shortly on YouTube. They are already scanning your Gmail account to show you relevant ads. Also, today Google acquired DoubleClick, another Internet advertising business. The deal wasn’t seen as a good thing for competitors as it would mean a total domination from Google, but it was concluded anyway. That’s the kind of thing you can expect in the next year: more controversial decisions by Google and a larger presence on the Internet which has to be accompanied by a little evil touch. The greedy administrators will expect constant revenue increase and Google will have to invade the Internet a little more each time. They are very creative and will do it in a very cleaver way I presume, but still, it’s a big corporation.
Google is still one of the most ethical company in the business, but I think their motto “Don’t be Evil” might loose significance over the next couple of years. This is mainly because Google is now a big corporation and a monster in internet advertising with a board of greedy administrators.
How come conspiracy/scams websites are all Web 0.1?
Posted by: | CommentsThis is truly amazing. The more respect you seem to gain is in direct link with the ugliness of your website when it comes to conspiracy/scams website. I say web 0.1 because it seems so far from the web 2.0 websites we see today. I mean how do they plan to get respect from rational people with that kind of web design? You just don’t feel it’s an honest website!
You just have to search for “2012″ in Google for example and you’ll see the ugliness. The worst thing is that these websites are appearing on top Google search results, which means they have some sort of reputation. It’s the same story whenever I get on a conspiracy theory website.
Alex’s Chiu’s website is the ugliest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. When you search for “Conspiracy” on Google, the first result is http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/ and once again it confirms the theory. India Daily is ugly as hell also and I could go on and on.
I feel better now…
How Does Google Rank Websites?
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Everybody use Google and it’s by far the best and most popular search engine on the Internet. Have you ever asked yourself how does Google decide which site ranks first and which site appears on the last page of the search results? Of course, it use your keywords to determine which site is the most relevant to your query, but how does Google decide between two sites with the exact same title? You can even push it further: How would Google decide which site to rank first between to sites with the same content and same title?
Google ranking algorithm is called PageRank and was developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Standford University. This is the core of Google’s ranking even if a lot of other aspects will influence the rankings. Here’s how Google define their PageRank algorithm:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
So there you go, the more back links a website has, the more chances it has to be highly ranked. The quality of the websites pointing to another also has a lot of influence. I think it’s probably the best technique so far as your search will return you the site that seems to be the most popular for the query you entered. This is where it gets tricky as more popular doesn’t necessarily mean best quality. Let’s say you build a new website about technology with a lot of quality content and that is built with the highest standards of the industry. Now you write a new website about the new MacBook Air hoping to get some traffic when people search for MacBook Air on Google. Even if your website is the best available for that keyword, it will be returned on maybe page 15-20 of Google search results. Why? Because you don’t have any links pointing to your website, so poor PageRank. It might be also almost impossible for you to rank on the first Google search results page because you might be competing with websites having millions of back links.
That’s where Google ranking gets tricky. Most of the users don’t go any further than 30 results and sometimes you could be surprised by the quality of the links you would find on page 7-8. The websites might be a little less popular but that doesn’t mean they don’t offer quality content. It’s hard work today in the Internet industry to get a good rank on Google because you fight with people and companies that wants to be first on Google and have full time employees whose job his to optimize the rankings. There’s a lot of techniques to improve your rankings other than back links and it’s called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is out of the scope of this article though.
So there it is, that’s how Google works and how it decides which site should be ranked first for specific keywords. It has a lot of advantages but at the same time, smaller websites with quality content struggle to get decent traffic. That’s the downside.
The day only computers will understand CAPTCHA
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It’s starting to get annoying and I’m talking about CAPTCHA. What is CAPTCHA? It’s the little annoying ‘text’ images you see all around the place when you register/sign up to something on the Internet. It usually looks like the images around.
I’m really sick of all that CAPTCHA thing as I think it’s really ruining the user experience and most users don’t really understand the use of it. So what is it for really? CAPTCHA is actually a technology to detect if the user is a human or a computer. Without that kind of technology, it would be easier for someone to develop a software that could automatically create accounts on Hotmail or Gmail for example. With that kind of image, it’s hard to write a program that can detect the text in it. So this way, you ensure the sign up comes from a human being. The problem is that it’s affecting everyone and most people don’t give a damn about automated sign ups. They just want to register to a service without the pain of having to guess what the text inside the image is.
Let’s face it, it’s not always easy to guess what’s in the CAPTCHA image. It’s not rare to try 2 or three times without success and it’s really frustrating. The problem is that CAPTCHA is becoming more and more complex to read because of people being able to develop software capable of reading complex CAPTCHAs. Soon enough, you’ll need a computer to decode the true meaning of CAPTCHA, no longer the human will be able to read and decode it. That kind of spoil the whole purpose of CAPTCHA…
Lets all agree, CAPTCHA is a pain. There’s a big need for something better and not annoying for the regular end user who doesn’t give a damn about automated sign ups. At least, Google understood and has a readable and uncrackable CAPTCHA text. It’s still a really annoying piece of technology but a company is making a step forward to a better CAPTCHA.
Google comment on Microsoft’s “hostile” bid for Yahoo!
Posted by: | CommentsAn interesting post was published today on Google’s official blog and it’s written by
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
I encourage you to read the full post here: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet
Of course Microsoft answered to that and it’s quite a reasonable answer. In a statement, Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith said:
The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising, the alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.
Smith argues that Google already has three-quarters of the paid search market and about two-thirds of U.S. search queries and 85 percent in Europe.
While I really like Google as a company and a service, I find it quite strange that they publicly criticize the potential deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft. I must say I agree with Microsoft’s answer. Since Yahoo! received the offer from Microsoft, it considered a partnership with Google and I don’t see it to be a better thing. That would obviously raise important antitrust issues and they would have to play with the definition of “partnership” for that to happen. Google has a fixation on Microsoft and while it’s really funny that they go out publicly and say Microsoft is evil, they have to be careful with that. Google is now one of the biggest company with a lot of influence on the way information is spread and they have to act like it.
Overall, the best thing for everyone is not Yahoo! to be bought by anyone. With a Microsoft deal you get that Microsoft philosophy being the biggest Internet portal and I don’t like it. On the other hand you get the biggest search engine already dominating the Internet take control of the biggest Internet portal. The best solution is to leave Yahoo! alone and keep a third competitor.
Microsoft and Yahoo potential deal
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Microsoft has just made an offer to buy Yahoo in a effort to intensify its presence on the internet already dominated by Google. It’s kind of funny that such an offer is made a couple of days after I wrote my article Why Google succeed where Microsoft fails.
Microsoft is offering $31 a share for the internet company, in a cash and share combination for investors. This is valuing Yahoo at $44.6bn and is offering a 62% premium compared to Yahoo’s share last night’s closing price of $19.18.
There’s still possibilities of the deal not taking place as it’s only a proposal and it’s not the first time Microsoft and Yahoo talk about such a transaction. But now it seems to be made a bit more seriously than usual. I guess we’ll see in a couple of days where this proposal leads.
It’s definitely in the best interest of Microsoft to acquire Yahoo because they really struggle to beat Google. Yahoo is also falling behind Google in term of search engine but they offer a great alternative to Google in term of News/entertainment/Search/Finance/etc. We have to remember that according to Alexa, Yahoo is still the number 1 in terms of traffic and that’s an interesting thing for Microsoft who is in position 4 and 5 with msn.com and live.com. That would increase their presence significantly.
I personally don’t see it has a good news if it was to happen simply for the good reason that Yahoo was a really good alternative compared to Google and Microsoft. They had a different perspective about the web than Microsoft and Google and that wasn’t bad. If it happen it will come down to a Google vs Microsoft war and I don’t like it. It’s nothing personal with Microsoft or anything but I felt pretty good with having three option: Live, Yahoo and Google.
Anyway, we’ll see where the deal goes I guess!
Computer engineering student, web developer and Web strategist, 
