Thursday, February 17, 2011

Photo retouching revealed!

http://jezebel.com/#!5762410/models-real-faces-before-the-photoshop-magic

The unreal world of beauty photography exposed. Does knowing this make you any less insecure about your own appearance? Of course not!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Insights and Inside Info on IBM's meat-killing Jeopardy machine

Much of the power comes from IBM's carefully curated collection of data. Jennifer Chu-Carroll, one of the scientists who has worked on the project since it began over four years ago, says that Watson excels, predictably enough, when the answer is a detail stored in its database.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/business-intelligenceanalytics/how-ibms-watson-hammered-its-jeopardy-foes-798?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2011-02-16

Corollary article:

Lest we get too enamored with our technological prowess, however, the authors make some comparisons with biology. “To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/world-computer-data/

Thursday, February 10, 2011