... should have just pre-ordered.
137 karma · joined May 9, 2009
... should have just pre-ordered.
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Quote: THE OUTCOME
My understanding is that the shows are taped and you obviously know the outcome. You made the recent comment on MSNBC that in order to win you had to play and bet recklessly. Do humans have an advantage in terms of betting (game theory) Your comment seems to be a tell that a human won, any guidance appreciated. – February 15, 2011 10:59 AM Permalink
A. KEN JENNINGS : I would say that Watson has the wagering edge--like you say, it's all game theory and math, and even a cheap PC is pretty good at doing math at high speeds. That said, a human player might be more willing to take risks that Watson is too smart to try. In the practice games I saw, betting big on Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy seemed like the only way to cancel out Watson's big buzzer advantage.
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HE DIDN'T ANSWER THE QUESTION! Is this confirmation that Ken Jennings wins?
1. Stockton, California *
2. Miami, Florida
3. Merced, California *
4. Modesto, California *
5. Sacramento, California *
6. Memphis, Tennessee
7. Chicago, Illinois
8. West Palm Beach, Florida
9. Vallejo, California *
10. Cleveland, Ohio
11. Flint, Michigan
12. Toledo, Ohio
13. Fort Lauderdale, Florida
14. Youngstown, Ohio
15. Detroit, Michigan
16. Washington, D.C.
17. Fresno, California *
18. Salinas, California *
19. Jacksonville, Florida
20. Bakersfield, California *
http://www.forbes.com/2011/02/02/stockton-miami-cleveland-bu...
ESL teacher: pregnant = "with child", but you can't just bandy the term about
Adioso.com is much better and more flexible, but their coverage is extremely limited.
If Hipmunk were as flexible as Adioso (i.e. queries that show me flights from "ICN to anywhere before February 12"), then I'd be all about Hipmunk. As it stands, doing exact searches in Hipmunk get me "good" deals, but not "great" deals.
If you want to search a subset of sites, then Google CSE is really all you need + whatever bells & whistles you'd like to add around it. I've done that here: http://searchESLCafe.com, adding "recent searches", search via wildcard subdomain (i.e. foo.searchESLCafe.com or bar.searchESLCafe.com or foo_bar.searchESLCafe.com, etc), and customizing the heck out of Google CSE's options.
Is there a demand out there for the search engine to parse the results into something informative at-a-glance? I'm not so sure it's the user's first priority. Or, to put it another way, there's plenty of hard-to-reach info out there that you can hand users via a customized Google CSE, and they don't mind doing the leg-work of clicking on the query results and finding their own answers.
It's a lot more important to have an accurate search algorithm than drill-down-related bells & whistles.
Google does a great job of returning solid results for any subset of sites, so why not let Google handle it, and concentrate on the other stuff?
I want to build a super-simple webapp that works like a mad-lib, preferably based on excerpts from Hitchhiker's Guide, in order to hang vocab on memory hooks, using the Greek mnemonic method. User enters a bunch of nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs to remember, and the app replaces them into the excerpt. User reads the passage a bunch of times, and the weirdness of the words in the passage helps to give the words some context when remembering them. [Example below]
I'm not a developer, but I built this thing in vb.net reasonably okay. It's really meant to be a webapp though, and I'll bet a lot of language learners would use it.
Wanna design/build it together?
Example
This 은행 has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the 고양이 living on it were 날씬 for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of 큰 pieces of 숙제, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the 큰 pieces of 숙제 that were 날씬.I live in Korea, where plenty of newborns notice me and stare specifically at me until I'm out of view. I'm definitely the first non-Korean they've ever seen.
This may be a stupid question, but is there a good OS X-based visual IDE out there for creating web apps?
I don't care if it's for PHP or Python or anything else - I want to learn to create web apps, and I have to start somewhere. I'm trying out both Django and RoR, but it would be awesome if there were a visual way to start putting the pieces of an app together, and then building up the code from within.
On the other hand, Koreans are never behind the state of the art - they do relish having the latest and greatest things to show off. You can count on one hand the number of second-hand stores in Seoul, mostly because new=good.
They simply have no problem conforming to the flock, which, in the case of internet security, is rarely a smart move. When eventually some high-level government official or TV channel will point this out, suddenly everyone will take notice, and they'll all move on, as a flock, to the next thing, and the next, and next.
What I can say is that we need to make it much more difficult to infect personal computers here.
If you show me a Korean government or non-trivial Korean corporate website, I'll show you a website that uses at least 3 activeX controls and is optimized for IE6. Most public computers and the majority of personal computers I've used here have been running IE6 or 7. I'll admit that in Seoul and larger cities like Pusan, Ilsan, and Gwangju, you'll sometimes catch people using Macbooks at Starbucks. Score one for security via obscurity, but non-IE folks can't use ANY banking website or government site (National Tax Service, National Pension, National Health, etc).
Even though I'm in the "most wired country in the world", the majority of high schoolers, uni students, and business people I've interacted with aren't more tech-savvy than your average grandma. Everyone runs the dubious AhnLab Anti-virus as a mandatory magical medallion that came with the computer.
We need to do better - Korea's great ability is overnight change on a massive scale. The day President Lee announces that all browsers should be upgraded to the latest version is the day that all browsers will be upgraded to the latest version. Seriously.
Barring that kind of concerted effort, should the day come when I see a non-IE browser or something other than WinXP/Vista on a Korean adult's primary/only computer, I will eat this hat. This one, right here.