December, 2009

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30
Dec 09

What Stargate Universe could have been

I’ve already watched Cube. It’s a pretty decent movie. If I want to watch it again, I’ll go get out the DVD. Disappointingly, Stargate Universe (SGU) has been created around the same basic plot: a crew of military and scientific personnell are stranded on an Ancient spaceship travelling to some unknown destination millions of light years from Earth.

It’s the classic “stalled elevator device” which is often used in film and TV dramas: trap your characters in a confined space to force character development. Simple. If you’re pressed for time, throw in a real annoying bastard (such as Robert Carlyle’s character) for some added tension to speed things up. However, after three episodes, SGU hasn’t moved past this basic device. If Wright and Cooper plan on stretching this to multiple seasons, no amount of pit stops on random, cliched planets, or dodging close calls with the Sun will make this format sustainable.

The next logical progression of the Stargate franchise became obvious to me after watching True Blood. Here’s a series in which vampires are “out of the coffin” as they put it, meaning the existence of vamp-kind is a fact, and also public knowledge. The series is thus speckled with parallels to historic struggles for minority equality. This results in a portrayal of the “vampires are real” world which is actually convincing, and believable.

The Stargate franchise needs to burn those NDA’s and just go public already! A few episodes in SG-1 touched on the idea, mostly via trips to planets whose Stargate program has already gone public. The challenge would be to develop this idea beyond “Stargates are glorified airports” while minimising the amount of political drama. District 9 showed us that seemingly far-fetched science fiction concepts can be handled with effective realism by drawing parallels with historical events (e.g. refugees).

At this early stage, I’m ready to applaud the creators for daring to diverge from the classic Stargate format: a power struggle between humans and an oppressive alien force. Defeat one, and another one comes along to replace it, and keep the series going. In SG-1, we had the Go’Ald, the Replicators, and finally the Ori. In Atlantis, it was the Wraith. If SGU reverts back to the power struggle format, I’ll stop watching.

Another potential direction, which would likely be more interesting, could be a prequel of sorts following the “Ancients”, their culture, technology (and the creation of the Stargates), and ultimately their path to ascension. If the series was different enough to its predecessors, it could work. It could explore themes such as “with powerful technology, comes great responsibility”, something we know defines the Ancients, who are always held up as the perfect race. With their superior genetics and technology, ultimate wisdom, and curious intervention restraint, they are an example of something we humans should aspire to become. So let’s see it, already! The ascension story arc could also deal with more “spiritual” themes, which would be something refreshing for the franchise.

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22
Dec 09

Ukulele Boy meets Guitar Rig

This kid shot to “Internet” fame to the tune of 7.5 million views in a little over 2 weeks for his adorable rendition of “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz on the ukulele. I stumbled onto his equally impressive performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. The middle of the video contains 44 seconds of seriously hardcore jamming. I felt it was just begging for the Guitar Rig treatment to truly express this kid’s inner rock legend! Enjoy!

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16
Dec 09

Captain Conroy, your Censorship is taking on water

Today, Stephen Conroy announced that he would introduce blacklist Internet filtering legislation. Shortly thereafter, Google publicly voiced their concerns in a blog post, citing their  reasons against the filter. I personally take anything Google says about censorship with a great heaping bucket of salt given their previous actions in China, but Google’s complicity was commercially motivated (albeit unethical) so I can understand why it happened.

Now don’t worry friends about this ever getting through parliament. The motivation is most probably a grab for conservative votes, and if it pisses too many people off, the lost votes will offset any gains. So we’ll most likely see some form of watered down filter, which may not be entirely evil.

In its current form, the filter simply has too broad a scope, which is the main point raised by  Google, and one I half agree with. While a tightly scoped filter (as used by Germany and Italy) which excludes specific material such as child pornography may appear to have benefit, it does not address the real crime, which is the fact that this material is being created in the first place. What are the governments of the world doing about that? Blocking child porn sites is akin to the government putting fingers in its ears and going “La La La! If I don’t know about it, it isn’t happening!”

If we can agree (UN-style) on specific classes of materials that no one should access, and if filtering does not impact speed, then It might be OK. However, when dealing with the Internet, blacklist filters simply don’t work. They are impossible to maintain and proxy sites pop up faster than they can be blocked. I’ve seen 10-year-old kids circumvent the NSW Department of Education’s filtering system like they were punching through a wet paper bag. The Department switched to a whitelist filter in 2008, but that doesn’t stop VPN’s and future loop holes that haven’t even been discovered yet.

In schools, it then becomes a discipline issue. Filtering students inside the school network is a requirement, as there is a clear duty of care and it is not feasible to manually police kids on the internet, just as one can’t police everything they talk about in the playground. But restricting the surfing of every adult Australian citizen is a completely different ball game and dangerous territory. We are responsible for ourselves; it is not the government’s job to decide what information we should and should not access.

UPDATE: This is the ultimate irony:

Australia

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15
Dec 09

A Video Rebuttal to Eric Schmidt on Privacy

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”

FUCK. OFF.

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8
Dec 09

Google Reader Recommendations

Google have added a new “recommendations” feature to Google Reader. First I thought, “Oh great, they’ve stolen my idea.” But actually, it’s not even close to the goal of increasing the precision of my Google Reader inbox. Recommendations does not appear to be using any kind of classification (e.g. StumbleUpon), instead just clumping all users “likes” together in one big naive popularity contest.

The interface is simple. You can click an “I like this” button for each item. This is the most important UI feature Reader has introduced to date. Using the shortcut keys, I can read articles with acceptable speed and use the L key to quickly flag interesting items. However, what Google does with this “user X likes item Y” training data needs a lot of work.

Google Reader Recommendations

Here’s some improvements that need to be made, ASAP:

  • It shouldn’t show me items from feeds I subscribe to and have already read (syntactic duplication).
  • It shouldn’t show me reposts of news stories I have already read (semantic duplication). If a story is deemed relevant, show me the most authoritative reporting of it.
  • It shouldn’t show me useless no-content feeds that require you go to the original site to view the story.
  • If it’s going to recommend YouTube videos, then it should use the mountain of data it already has on the YouTube network already, not just recommend based on popularity.
  • Recommendations need to have much higher precision. Currently, I estimate its less than 0.1  (for every 10 items I read, 1 is relevant).
  • It should apply the relevance filtering to posts in my existing subscriptions, most of which have similarly low precision.
  • However, there are some feeds such as web comics which should not be filtered. I want to read every single XKCD whether I find it funny or not. If a system could predict which I find funny before I read them I’d be thoroughly impressed!
  • Ranking of items (by “magic”? please…) is NOT important. I want to read stories from oldest to newest. I want recall of 1.0 and precision of at least 0.8 or I’m not interested.

To be successful, it needs to merge StumbleUpon’s classification system (which has the logic right) with the Google Reader framework (which has the interface right).

To make a parallel with Gmail and spam classification, the reason Gmail’s anti-spam shits all over other spam classifiers is that Google added a simple “This is Spam” button to the web interface, effectively outsourcing the training of spam messages to its enormous user base. Similar techniques can be applied to Google Reader, but on an individualised basis.

Key to the success of such a classifier is social analysis, which is used by StumbleUpon and Last.fm recommends music I might like, based on what people with similar taste listen to.

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5
Dec 09

ABC’s New Invasive Popups

Shame ABC! Shame!

What have you done?! I can understand the need for invasive TV popups on a *commercial* station which relies on advertising revenue. With the growing popularity of PVRs which have ad-skipping capability, the traditional ad-breaks will become less effective.

But there is NO excuse for this shit on a publicly funded TV station! Kill the popups, ABC or kill your reputation as Australia’s only respectable broadcaster.