Washington Post Puts Microsoft on Page A1 – For Good Research!

Stop the presses! Microsoft Research is getting national front page coverage!

The work of Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec got top coverage in major newspapers and news sites today.  With that fame, Eric will probably never again be willing to just while away a Friday afternoon with our Microsoft Institute folks, brainstorming some outside-the-box ideas for future work, as he did this week with us in Redmond’s Building 99.

Right after that meeting, I bugged out of Redmond for a red-eye to the east coast.  Back home in DC this morning (Saturday), I opened my Washington Post to find on page A1, “Instant-Messagers Really Are About Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon: Big Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory.”

Spellcheck only goes so far…

Technology is often only as good as the human using it 🙂

More funny “fail” pictures at FAIL Blog

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At Craigslist, “Traffic just keeps going up…”

Back in 1994-96 I was working for the Mayor of San Francisco (Frank Jordan, “the one before Willie Brown” as one friend persisted in calling him), and among other projects I was working on policies to nurture and promote the emerging  Internet economy, particularly the slowly burgeoning culture of Web startups – at times it seemed like the center of the universe was around South Park in the city’s South of Market neighborhood.  For the Mayor’s ’95 re-election campaign we put up one of the first political campaign websites, winning an award from “Campaigns & Elections” magazine. 

One of the cool people I worked with on innovative ideas for the nascent Web back then was Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Like many people in San Francisco, I remember when using Craigslist was synonymous with “finding local S.F. stuff,” and have watched with delighted awe as the site (nonprofit empire!) has grown over the years.  The model absolutely rocks, in its simplicity, consistent innovation, and its universality.

Is It Even Possible to Connect the Dots?

FACT: Among the inspired ideas of polymath Danny Hillis (pioneer of parallel computing) was establishing the Long Now Foundation, whose projects include the millennial Long-Now Clock (“the world’s slowest computer”) and the notion of “Long Bets.”  A Long Bet is an “accountable prediction,” meaning one that has a specified end-date and a testable, wagerable, proposition.  One of the early Long Bets posted wagers $2,000 that “By 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.”  That particular bet is one of many signs of scientific skepticism about string theory.

ANALYSIS: Even without the ease of hyperlinks, old-fashioned newspapers foster serendipitous connections between articles, particularly if you’re reading a Sunday morning paper with lots of sections. Sunday the Washington Post did me a service by placing in different sections a couple of articles which I connected, about intelligence “failures” and about stock-market prediction, leading me to some web-surfing about the questionable validity of string theory and some related observations about the difficulty of predicting human behavior.

In the Outlook section, the Post has an opinionated and thought-provoking op-ed piece by Mark Lowenthal, one of the most “intelligent” individuals in the recent history of the U.S. intelligence community (after all, he was the 1988 Jeopardy grand champion, as well as a former assistant director of CIA).

Update on Facebook-in-Egypt

FACT: According to a Sunday Washington Post front-page story today recounting the events leading up to May 4, a “day of strike” called for by social-networkers as a protest against government policies, “By late afternoon, of the 74,000 people who had registered on the Facebook protest page, only 15 – three men and 12 women – were still eager to gather for a protest.”  [Note: the Facebook page had only been launched in late March.]

ANALYSIS: Last week I wrote about media coverage of Egypt’s Facebook affair, and noted that the Post and others had only covered it on media blogs, not in the actual newspaper.

This morning I picked up my Sunday-morning Post and saw the story, “Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt,” right on the front page, which means that across Washington this morning, and other capital cities through clipping services, many in the foreign policy elite and punditocracy may be reading for the first time about the Web 2.0 facet of these events. 

Reporter Ellen Knickmeyer also posted today a related online “Field Notes” column about the challenges of covering the Facebook activists.

 

Media Says, IBM is Good for Government. Ah, Strike That….

FACT:  Federal Times, which was first to break the story, is reporting this afternoon that “IBM has been indefinitely suspended from doing business with federal agencies, according to a General Services Administration Web site.”

ANALYSIS: People accuse me of being too cynical.

I admit, I am something of the opposite of the great line from This is Spinal Tap, when the David St. Hubbins character says, in the random interview clips at the end of the movie, “I believe virtually everything I read, … and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human, than someone who doesn’t believe anything.”

I do have trouble believing things I hear and read from most mainstream sources at first blush. 

Wall Street Journal – Peering into the Future, Dimly

The Wall Street Journal ran a collection of think-pieces today on “Thinking About Tomorrow: How will technology change the way we shop, learn and entertain ourselves? How will it change the way we get news, protect our privacy, connect with friends? We look ahead 10 years, and imagine a whole different world.”

My take on the story, though, was “ho-hum.” Looking ahead 10 years should get the mind a little further than easily predictable stuff such as this: “Mobile devices will get smaller and more powerful, and will connect to the Internet through high-speed links. The result: People will be able to do anything on a hand-held that they can now do on a desktop computer. In fact, they’ll be able to do even more, as mobile gadgets increasingly come equipped with global-positioning-system gear that can track your every move. As you drive around, for instance, you might get reviews of nearby restaurants automatically delivered to a screen in your car — maybe even projected onto the windshield.”

Aside from the safety aspect of that type of projection, this scenario surely is only a year or so away – not 10.