The fact we may find this unpalatable says more about our modern sensibilities than about our forebears.

"Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them."
Fernando Rozzi, Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique

Why not? Just because to our eyes Neanderthals look like us is not to say that earlier Homo sapiens didn't see them as food. If you eat meat you should be prepared to eat any meat, not just the creatures we've stupefied for the purpose. Why is the eating of cow or a pig any more acceptable than dolphin or human? The article refers to the eating of Neanderthals as the socially taboo act of cannibalism. Perhaps we owe the Great Leap Forward that happened around this time to our ancestors eating brains; this act ringing down the millenia in our collective unconscious as our fear of zombies risen to devour us as the Neanderthal was hunted by hungry humans. Comments on this over on BoingBoing.

1 original comment:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1535
Comment by Joe — 10 June, 2009 @ 10:52 pm

Apparently MPs knew this was coming down the pike for a good few years. If I was a third party who, in the public's eyes and apparently also in their own, don't stand a chance of getting into power I might have had the foresight to do the honourable thing and not claimed expenses en masse. Then when the two main parties impaled themselves on this issue I'd have made damn sure that being unimpeachable we'd have ridden this all the way to the next election. Jon Snow posts on his blog that:

"According to one of my well-informed sources, David Cameron’s greatest fear about this continuing crisis is that a credible group of people will come forward and form some sort of party that will contest the next election on the basis of campaigning for one term only, to clear out the current sleaze, institute wholesale parliamentary reform, and then leave the field."

A credible group of people... the Lib Dems should be kicking themselves that this group isn't them.  Nick Clegg's defence of Andrew George looked pretty weak as well it might from someone who was rinsing the system as much as possible.

More of my time is being spent preparing reports on what people are talking about on the web. There are a number of companies offering tools that do this kind of thing. The way they work is by identifying keywords in a dataset and pulling out pertinent information around the word(s) such as date of mention, where it occurred, on a webpage fitting what kind of recognised format, etc. This data is then presented in the form of a 'dashboard', i.e. a few charts, possibly with some sort of 'score' attached. I prefer to work with the actual data retrieved by a crawler for particular keywords rather than use an automated summary as I want to be able to check the accuracy of the underlying information. There doesn't seem to be an offering out there that doesn't provide some sort of bell-or-whistle that tracks 'influencers' or 'emerging trends' or promises the dreaded ability to analyse sentiment... however:

Algorithm-based sentiment analysis doesn't work accurately

If it were possible then natural language processing would allow me to have a friendly chat with Google when I wanted something and not have to parse my requests into a few pithy search terms. The reason sentiment analysis is a key part of tracking is that most of us who use these tools would like to believe the promise that they can discover when people are saying good or bad things about the topic we're interested in. Unfortunately this knowledge is not perceived as valuable enough to have a real live human read and assess every mention that has been discovered so inaccurate methods are employed in an attempt to achieve useful results. Conversations on the web are human conversations with all the nuance and multiple meanings afforded by the language used and the context in which the conversation occurs, e.g. correctly identifying sarcasm is at present an impossible challenge for a computer. If you're looking into using one of these tools then ask these questions of the supplier:

• Can I export the data to CSV, XML, etc.?
• How do you identify and remove spam?
• On average what percentage of mentions identified constititute spam?
• How accurate is your sentiment analysis?
• Please may I see the human assessed sample of mentions versus machine assessed sentiment that you used to produce that figure?
• Which academic / research papers would you suggest I read to find out more about the fields of natural langauage and sentiment analysis?

Dashboards and scorecards are only as good as the data that lies behind them so if you can't see the actual data or easily compare 'scores' across multiple keywords and understand what the differences mean you should run a mile. I've been through and am still going through trying to make monitoring work effectively and am currently working on an efficient way of working out sentiment that is not subject to the flaws outlined above.

Yeah, so they all 'obeyed the rules', but with rules as lax as those governing MPs' expense claims wouldn't the intelligent person think carefully about how those claims might be perceived. Of course, if everyone is at it and the government actively tries to block such information coming into the public domain then then why not stick your snout in the trough. It's all you can eat at the Westminster club. These servants of the people haven't simply offended common decency; for this they should all be hounded from Parliament for undermining the public's faith in such an important office. It's major incidents like this and all the minor ones that we tolerate, but shouldn't, that chip away at the foundations of a society, that dissolve the ties of trust that pull us together. For this they should be facing punishment. As it is no one is saying sorry and the police are being asked to investigate the crime of who leaked this information to the press. Of course they are. Because them's the rules when you have the power.

The Guardian is reporting that "Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to New's Corporation's websites within a year". The man himself is quoted as saying:

"The current days of the internet will soon be over."
Rupert Murdoch

Big words. Also technically incorrect words. This may seem like a minor quibble but does show a lack of understanding of what he's talking about. Perhaps he thinks that people care enough about the content put out by his tabloids and broadsheets to pay for it via the web. I think that's a huge misjudgment and one I hope to witness given the general level of unpleasantness displayed by News Corporation's properties. They may try another tactic as there are rumours that they are planning to release a Kindle-like in a bid to get people paying subscriptions for content, which will inevitably mean trying to lock things down. News Corp has a track record of flailing around online, not really getting it and claiming otherwise. The takeover of MySpace was heralded in many quarters as a brilliant $580 million move based on a revenue model of being able to target adverts at users. Unfortunately they completely missed the point of why this works for Google but doesn't work so well for a social network.

Update: I guess News Corp's desire to develop their own Kindle-like device is driven by Amazon reportedly taking "70 percent of subscription revenue from newspapers" as well as the rights to republish articles to other devices from those who wish to use the Kindle platform.

I've mentioned J.P. Morgan before on this blog, one of the investors in the Wardenclyffe Tower project, but don't think I've mentioned my admiration for Nikola Tesla. Admiration is an understatement. I am in awe of the man and his achievements that have gone unsung for far too long. The New York Times has an article that Gizmodo have picked up on saying that the land on which the tower sat, along with the adjoining laboratory is up for sale. The ruins could be demolished to make way for development, which would be a shame as I would love to see the site where Tesla was betrayed by people driven by profit turned into a celebration of all of his achievements. To give you an idea of the man I include my favourite quote by him below:

"Really, we are something different, like waves in subjective time and space and when these waves disappear, nothing remains of us. There is no personality. We cannot see that waves in the ocean have individuality. There is only an illusionary sequence of waves, which go one after another. We are not the same as that which was yesterday; I am only a sequence of relative existences, which are not similar. This sequence is the thing which creates an effect of continuity, not my subjective and mistaken understanding of my real life."
(Note: I need to confirm the source of this)