Suing Craigslist

The latest news about Sheriff Thomas Dart suing Craigslist because he claims it is the "largest source of prostitution" seems quite absurd. Since he is a Sheriff I can't help but think he is too entrenched in the problem to realize the possibility that Craigslist isn't generating more prostitution, but merely exposing how much really exists. Also, the quote "Dart claimed the traffic it generates accounts for the bulk of the web site's popularity" is quite an outrageous claim without an analysis of the web logs.  Seems like a classic case of "shoot the messenger". Next, will he sue car manufactures because so many automobiles are used to commit crimes?

All of this said, my bet is that Sheriff Dart is just being politically savvy. By suing Craigslist and making such unsubstantiated claims he is drawing attention to the problem that will hopefully build public pressure to see that the Sheriff's department gets more taxpayer funding to attack the problem.

Serendipity of Search

Erin McKean's TED talk, Redefining the dictionary, is excellent. Her comment:

... in fact online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability. And when you improve searchability you actually take away the one advantage of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult.

reminded me of popular quote by Franklin P. Adams:

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

GOOG-411

I really like the GOOG-411 service and have come to use it instead of looking up numbers online. However, today my daughters unintentionally launch a local denial of service attack against me as I used it. I called to place an order at our local zpizza (yes, just like their demo video ). As it was giving me my one selection my oldest was talking to her sister about wanting "to go back to ballet", upon which the service went back to the top menu. I didn't pick up on this at first and was completely confused as to why the system was jumping around without me saying anything, but eventually stepped out of the car into the quite outdoors to complete my order.

I remember reading InfoWorlds interview with Marissa Mayer about how the goal of the service is to build a training set for speech models. She states:

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

This is such a brilliant idea. I really can't think of a better way to get a huge group of people to help associate the words they pronounce with its text equivalent at such a low cost (to Google). But I also wondered about the bias they would need to deal with in the training set. When I use the service I do find myself pronouncing the words more clearly, also the distribution of phonemes in place and business names might be significantly different from common words. I suspect that these are minor issues that are mitigated as the data set grows larger.

One Step Closer ...

Yesterday I showed my support for the Howard County Autism Society by participating in their One Step Closer walk around Centennial Lake, in Columbia, Maryland. My daughters wanted to also partake but couldn't make it, so I took some photos of the educational signs along the footpath with my iPhone during the walk to show them. I emailed the photos to my Flickr page as I took them. Unfortunately, when I emailed them the geo-location information was not included or ignored by Flickr. However, when I upload them via my computer the geo-location information was included and automatically mapped by Flickr. This is the first time I experienced this technology, and I'm amazed at the accuarcy of the geo-coordinates, the photos on the Flickr map follow the footpath very well. Every camera should have a GPS!

Google News Queries Returning Foreign Language Results

Mahesh KM's post to the Google News blog states:

Occasionally, sources in other languages may have extremely relevant results for your query. With this feature, we want to offer stories from these sources to you when they're helpful.

So if I type a query in English I may get very relevant results in Chinese? Mahesh points out that since there are so many English sources of news it is rather unlikely to get a foreign language result with an English query. One of the examples is searching for news about the G8 Summit from the Spanish news version. I'm surprised they did not include a link to Google-translate the foreign language results into the language of the query.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this feature. I interpret it to mean that they are translating each news article indexed into various languages and returning the most relevant from the original and translated articles. Anyone know if this is the case?