Author Archive for Jarred

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From The Archives: reCAPTCHA and Spare Cycles

Published by Jarred on September 16, 2009 in Computing, Google and Web 2.0. View Comments

This morning, Google announced that it will be acquiring reCAPTCHA, a company devoted to putting the few seconds you spend solving CAPTCHAs – those funny puzzles you fill out on Ticketmaster and other sites to verify that you’re human – into good use. As announced, Google will integrate reCAPTCHA’s technology into its own spam and fraud countermeasures, and will use the human output of those puzzles to advance its Book Search and Newspaper Archive scanning efforts.

One of my first posts on Tropophilia profiled the founder of reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, and his efforts to harness otherwise-wasted human effort. Given today’s announcement, I thought it made sense to repost it in order to put into context this acquisition and the “spare cycles” philosophy that it engenders.

Disclosure: I am an employee of Google. I was not an employee at the time this post was originally published. All views expressed in this post are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Google.

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“Spare Cycles: Distributing Computing Among Machines and Minds” - published January 19, 2008.

A few weeks ago I read an article in The Economist about distributed computing, defined by Wikipedia as “a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.” Basically what you do is download a program that, when you’re not around, uses your computer’s processor (which would otherwise be mostly idle) to crunch data sent to it from a central server. Your computer joins thousands of others crunching data at any one time, forming a giant networked supercomputer with each unit working on a different piece of the puzzle.

What’s the puzzle? It can be anything, or at least anything that requires a whole lot of computer power to figure out. Some puzzles are humanitarian in nature; for example, the World Community Grid (sponsored by IBM) currently has projects tackling cancer, AIDS, and Dengue fever research, as well as African climate change. Others are more geeky (or, should we say, scientific), like the SETI@home project which is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing radio telescope data.

So the bottom line is this: while one way to save the planet and contribute to science is through the donation of time and money, another way is through the donation of your computer’s processing power. Why let your computer idly sit while you’re at work or school all day — occasionally using a small processor burst to throw the next picture from your hard drive onto your screensaver, which no one but your dog is watching — when you can have it use its full capacity to solve some of the world’s toughest problems?

The buzz word for this phenomenon is “donating spare cycles.” Basically, a cycle is the process your computer goes through to retrieve a command from its memory and execute that command. It’s how your computer works and, in a way, it’s how our minds work too. A human cycle, then, would be the process our brain goes through to retrieve and process information from our memory. But do humans have spare cycles to donate? You bet.

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Go Put Your Records On: A Review of iTunes LP

Published by Jarred on September 10, 2009 in Apple, Business and Music. View Comments

A while ago, I suggested that physical books may become to reading what vinyl records have become to music: produced in limited numbers, used by the very few who know it to be the best quality experience, but mostly collected for their nostalgic value. It appears that this comparison may be inapt, because record companies, with some help from Apple, are trying to bring the vinyl experience back to life.

I am a pretty rabid fan of a little music ensemble called Dave Matthews Band. You might have heard of them. I just returned from a trip with my brother to the ostensible Mecca of DMB fandom: the band’s annual three-night stand at The Gorge Amphitheatre in central Washington. Counting this weekend, I have been to 16 of their concerts. I have all of their studio albums, most of their official live releases (they number in the double digits), and countless (legal) amateur recordings of other shows. The total track count in my iTunes library for the band and their side projects numbers over 800.

But if you think those numbers are sickening, try these on for size. I am such an unabashed fanboy of the band that when they released their latest studio album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, I ended up buying it in two different formats:

the iTunes Pass version ($20), because along with the album tracks it also came with (so far) 16 extra pieces of exclusive video, studio audio, and live audio content delivered piecemeal over time;
the (physical) Deluxe Box Set ($60) which included the same extra studio audio as above, did not include video or live audio, but added in extra artwork and photos.

Let’s pass over the rather obvious and self-admitted fact that I have obsession issues. The interesting thing about the information above is that I had to pay $80 – eight times the album price – to get what might be called the total media experience available in physical or digital form. Isn’t there a way to merge these two, and make it less expensive (and therefore more attractive) to feel like you truly own not only the music, but the album experience itself? This is the question Apple has asked as sales of entire albums in the iTunes Store have dwindled, with consumers instead opting to buy tracks piecemeal. Their first answer was a service called iTunes Pass.

iTunes Pass was Apple’s first attempt at solving the riddle of how to replicate the experience of buying a box set or, to go even further back in time, a vinyl. You pay twice the normal album price, but in addition to the entire album itself, you get extra “special” content: early track releases ahead of the full album sale date, demo tracks, live tracks, the entire cover leaflet, videos, and more. What makes it more interesting is that this extra content is not delivered all at once, but it is sent to you over time. So every week or two, you have a nice little mini-Christmas when you find a new video or exclusive track to enjoy. This rolling delivery method also enables access to content that might not otherwise be available on the album release date — like, say, live versions of tracks from the band’s tour.

I am not aware of how successful iTunes Pass has been, but it apparently was not satisfactory. Yesterday, Apple supplemented that service with the long-rumored iTunes LP. Both Apple and the record labels were interested in going beyond iTunes Pass to renew the “retro” experience of going to a store and buying a big, beautiful LP, and combining that with the feeling of exclusivity that comes with owning an exclusive content-filled box set.

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A Geek Out Moment: Our Tiny Blue Atom Planet

Published by Jarred on September 9, 2009 in Space. View Comments

I opened up a Google Earth link on the web today called “Satellite Database” (Google Earth required to view). I patiently waited a few seconds for the program to open and load the file. When the screen populated, this is what I saw.

Click that image and view in full size, or better yet, click the link above and view this in Google Earth yourself. In short, we have an astonishing number of satellites orbiting our world. Thousands upon thousands. Those are not stars in that picture. Every single one of those little bitty particles surrounding our planet is a human produced mechanism. Those that are not inactive are beaming radio waves between each other and to the surface. Some are equipped with cameras, some with telescopes. How are they not colliding? How is the International Space Station not being torn to shreds? I know the answers to these questions, but still… it is nothing short of incredible that we have managed to distribute this many machines into orbit around our planet, when just over 100 years ago we had not even figured out how to sustain powered flight on Earth.

You can click on any satellite and have its trajectory mapped (hence the several colored lines swirling around the planet). What’s more, the positions of all the satellites are updated every 30 seconds. I want to keep this open on my side monitor all. day. long.

I have no philosophical or other insightful point to make here. I’m only trying to say one thing, and it is the following.

Damn.

Turning The Wrecking Ball of News Into A Bola

Published by Jarred on August 9, 2009 in Business and News. View Comments

The buzz over the future of news and the fate of newspapers has exploded since I last wrote about the topic in February. I’ve been following the conversation carefully as it has continued to manifest itself across the web as well as in print, but I’ve been reluctant to write too much about it. Hardly an article is written without either a wholesale indictment or wholesale exoneration of Google for blame in this drama, so I decided it was best to keep my thoughts to myself.

This is too important and fascinating a debate, though, for me to be content sitting completely on the sidelines. So I thought I would take some time to write not an argumentative post, but a prescriptive (or at least predictive) one that offers what I think might be a successful model for the future of written journalism.

A little over a week ago, Mike Arrington posed a fairly radical hypothetical: what if the best 5-10% of the New York Times‘ reporters walked out and started their own company? A lean staff count and modest production expenses for this web-based enterprise would allow plenty of budget for investigative journalism and other expensive reporting. ”How many private equity funds would kill to put $100 million behind the ["New" New York Times] to make sure the company had plenty of money until it reached profitability?” ponders Arrington. ”My guess is plenty. [...] And I know a couple of hedge funds that would be right there, too. I know this because they’ve pitched me on a vision not much different than this one.”

Arrington’s proposal was inspired by a recent fascination with Politico, whose leadership he met prior to their interview with Charlie Rose. Profiled by Michael Wolff in this month’s Vanity Fair, Politico is the web-based Bible of political junkies that rose to prominence during the 2008 election season and has sustained more modest, but nonetheless impressive growth. Both the article and Rose’s conversation with some of the staff are worth checking out.

Arrington fails (or declines?) to draw the connection between Politico and his own web publication, TechCrunch, and as a result does not recognize the disconnect between their shared model and his “New New York Times” proposal. It is indeed an innovative idea to take the cream of the journalistic crop, free them from the burden of a bureaucratic and expensive print-based publication, and set them on a new (and hopefully profitable) course of news reporting. But the Arrington hypothetical only addresses one of two major problems with written journalism today.

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Debugging Earmarks

Published by Jarred on July 22, 2009 in Politics. View Comments

earmarks

One of the big buzzwords around Washington and the rest of the country since November 4th, 2008 has been “transparency”. President Obama was widely prophesied as the harbinger of a political culture of openness and honesty. He has also been expected to be the first to leverage the Internet as a chief means of communication and collaboration with the American people.

So far the President and his administration have made promising steps on both fronts (see data.gov, for example). But what is important to remember about the web is that it’s designed to let the novice user contribute just as much as the elite power players.

WashingtonWatch.com, a website maintained in his spare time by Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, has started an initiative to let the average Joe and Jane identify pork spending buried within federal legislation. Wired.com’s Epicenter blog notes that the site, in partnership with the Sunlight Foundation, will be rewarding the top citizen watchdogs with Amazon Kindles, iPods, and other prizes.

This is a perfect example of what the New York Times recently referred to as “focused crowdsourcing.” If you want to put the mob to work, you need to do a few things. First, identify a market where there is a thirst for action. Then provide a specific and realistic objective, ideally one that is measurable and that can be registered in discrete steps (so as to lure both the curious and the committed). Offer users the tools and rules of the game, and provide worthy incentives. Next thing you know, you’re harnessing the wisdom and effort of the crowds to (hopefully) do some good in the world.

Harper has followed this model to perfection. The contest ends either when all earmarks have been entered, or when the fiscal year ends in October. Here’s hoping for robust participation from a digital citizenry hungry to see and make some change.