Google Treks extends Street View to places you can only access on foot. It reveals some remarkable scenery, and takes you to places you’ve always wanted to go, such as the Himalayas or the Canadian Arctic. It also reminds me of some important facts about travel. Behind the camera We seasoned tourists tend to blind ourselves…More
Monthly Archives: October 2015
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I have a daily quota of clicks to dispose of. I’m frugal with these minimally interactive units. George in The Jetsons (1962) must have left an impression on me. I recall this office worker of the future complaining to his boss on one particular day of having to press too many buttons. George was only contracted to press one a day. Pressing a button was all…More
AI and imagination
Does society need machines that show intelligence, empathy or act like human beings in other ways? I think that we are best served by well designed computers and good interaction design that makes clear the distinction between the person and the machine. Much of the enthusiasm for AI-based human-computer interaction assumes that people desire a seamless blending…More
Big corpus
UK publishers produce over 180,000 books each year. (About one third are in digital formats.) So that’s a lot of words, even before the outputs of other countries are taken into account, and all the other words generated online — self published, or unpublished — and journal, magazine and newspaper articles. These large text corpuses are more than…More