The Week in Geek™ – Feb. 25, 2011
Not Just Talk
More Tech for Good. Mobile phones are the world’s most widely distributed computers, and even in the developing world roughly two-thirds of the population have access to one. How can all those those “pocket-brains” help? Consider this terrifying stat: counterfeit drugs may make up a quarter of medicines sold in poor countries. Take a bogus powder to fight malaria and you might not survive. But HP and Ghanan advocacy group mPedigree, have teamed up to create a mobile-phone solution. Drug packaging is now printed with a scratch off label containing a code that patients can text for confirmation that legit drugs are inside.
Mobile phone use in sub-Saharan Africa is advancing rapidly and is creating a hothouse of innovation. Kenya’s MPesa offers mobile banking while KenyaBUZZ runs one of the larger local websites in east Africa, using mobile phones to sell tickets to sporting and cultural events. A Kenyan effort, Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili), was founded by a group of activits after the nation’s 2008 disputed elections. The service leveraged text messages to create a website map of violence reports, and it captured ‘good works’ as reinforcement of local heroes. The site is now used for everything from elections monitoring to natural disaster coordination. One group, Stop Stock-outs, has used Ushahidi to plot where vital medicines are sold out. Farmers Friend in Uganda sends out text messages with market prices and agricultural information – potentially improving crop yields, feeding more through better distribution, and allowing farmers to earn greater profits and waste less. SAP’s South African office has developed a smartphone-based job market to help promote small businesses. Another provides ordering service for rural shop owners. India’s Babajob.com is a pocket employment service, listing low-skilled jobs. Another Indian service issues government documents directly, cutting out a layer of corrupt government officials who often ask for bribes in exchange for doing what’s supposed to be their job. In Bangladesh, over 3 million people have used the BBC Janala service, spending about two cents for three minute over-the-phone English lessons. Some of this innovation comes from within my home state. Txteagle (created by MIT & Harvard profs) leverages mobiles for crowdsourcing, rewarding nurses for texting bloodbank supplies, and tapping into local expertise for “translating words into a local dialect and checking street signs for a satellite-navigation service.” And while we’re on the subject of technology targeted at emerging regions, I wanted to draw your attention to Soccket.com. I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Hemali Thakkar. She and her three Harvard undergrad teammates have come up with a soccer ball that’s also a power-source. Kick it around for five minutes and you’ve generated enough juice to power a small light for 3 hours (yes, the ball is equipped with an outlet plug). Here’s a video!
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
This is a great read! Massachusetts native Ray Kurzweil says “I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I’ve looked at the numbers, and this is what they say.” The numbers show that the average cell phone is “about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of, and a thousand times more powerful than” the state-of-the-art computer he used at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that equation forward a few decades and we reach a point called the technological singularity. That’s a time where computers become far more intelligent than humans – an all-bets-are-off event that will utterly transform our lives and our species.
What’s the singularity mean? Some of the freaky speculation suggests we may merge with technology, “using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities.” On the face of it this sounds comic-book fringe. There’s an “intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs.” But the Time cover story is thoughtful and thought provoking. Google already functions, as Dibert creator Scott Adams puts it, as an ‘exo-brain’. The device many of us carry in our pockets harnesses millions of servers worldwide and launches skyward what we’d otherwise expect from our education and memory. Will someone figure a way to move the exo-brain from inside our pocket to the inside of our skull? Today 30,000 Parkinson’s patients sport neural implants, and melding the brain to vision and hearing sensors is already helping the blind see and the deaf hear. Google has built cars that can drive themselves (an exciting prospect for someone like myself, who lacks the vision to pass a driver’s test). There are already more than 2,000 robots fighting alongside human troops in Afghanistan, and Watson crushed the most worthy human adversaries in our most popular public brain face-off. Sure, today Watson’s 90 servers fill up a room, but run the Kurzweil curves forward and in a decade (says VC Brad Feld) Watson will “fit on a chip”. Run the exponential increase in power and decrease in price forward, and roughly around 2045 we should arrive at a point where the “artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.” Futurists speculate we’ll be able to hand over computing advances to the computers themselves – meaning the ultraintelligent machine may be the last invention man need ever make.
Kurzweil is considered by many to be the high-priest of the singularity. Many others also think he’s a kook. But he’s got serious geek cred. As a teenager in the 1960s he “taught” a computer to compose music. He holds 39 patents, has invented a slew of technologies from tools for the blind to music synthesizers, he holds a U.S. “National Medal of Technology”, and Bill Gates has called him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”. And Kurzweil is hardly a loner in speculating about the AI future. Singularity University is co-backed by Google and NASA. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence counts Facebook investor & former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel as an adviser. There’s even a Singularity Summit that attempts to push the linear-wiring in our brain to think about a world of exponential advancement a gathering Time describes as a “curious blend of Davos and UFO convention”.
Of course “The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn’t exist yet.” Despite Watson’s watershed event, it’s not even close. We also know we’re approaching the limits of what we can squeeze into silicon, and we’ve yet to find a technology to push the miniaturization that makes fast-cheap computing beyond the barriers we will certainly reach in my lifetime. Naysayers also say there are likely things going on in the brain that simply cannot be duplicated electronically, no matter how much electronic horsepower is thrown at the problem. But there is no denying that we’re on an unpredictable path where (as our Moore’s Law Chapter points out), the impossible will regularly and repeatedly become possible. By the way, this Time cover story was written by Lev Grossman, the same guy who wrote the superb “Person of the Year” profile of Mark Zuckerberg.
After Man vs. Machine on ‘Jeopardy,’ What’s Next for IBM’s Watson?
At the end of a three-day Jeopardy tournament, IBM’s Watson won $1 million (winnings were donated it to a children’s charity). Watson’s accomplishment represented a four-year project that involved about some 25 people across eight IBM research labs, creating algorithms, in a system with 90 servers, “many, many” processors, terabytes of storage, and “tens of millions of dollars” in investment. Winning Jeopardy makes for a few nights of interesting TV, but what else can it do? Well, the “Deep QA” technology behind Watson might end up in your doctor’s office. Docs could likely use that kind of exo-brain. As WBUR’s Curt Nickisch reported, on average primary care physicians spend less than twenty minutes face-to-face with each patient per visit, and average little more than an hour each week reading medical journals. Now imagine a physician assistant Watson that could leverage massive diagnosis databases while scanning hundreds of pages in a person’s medical history, surfacing a best guess at what docs should be paying attention to. A JAMA study suggested that medical errors may be the third leading cause of death in the United States, so there’s apparently an enormous and mighty troubling opportunity in healthcare alone. IBM is partnering with Massachusetts voice-rec leader Nuance Communications (the Dragon people) to bring Watson to the doc’s office. Med schools at Columbia and the U. of Maryland will help with the research effort. Of course, you wouldn’t want to completely trust a Watson recommendation. While IBM’s baby put the trivia-game hurt on Ken Jennings & that other guy, it missed a final Jeopardy answer of “Chicago” because it named Toronto as a U.S. city. As NPR’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” advises – if the robot overlords rise to conquer humans, hide out in Chicago, they’ll never find us there! Or perhaps Watson’s even more clever than we realize and has a “pander” algorithm (Jeopardy host Alex Trebek is Canadian). GMSV points us to a video of IBM researchers discussing the DeepQA Project, the tech behind Watson.
Dirty Little Secrets of Search
NY Times uncovers what one search engine optimization (SEO) expert called “the most ambitious [link farming] attempt I’ve ever heard of.” For months the organic search results for a whole slew of keywords pointed users to J.C. Penny. JCP is a big retailer, for sure, but the Times suspected something was up when the company’s site came out tops for scores of terms as broad as “dresses”, “bedding”, “area rugs”, “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture”, and “table cloths”. The phrase “Samsonite carry on luggage” even placed Penny ahead of Samsonite’s own site!
As readers of our Google case know, the search giant’s algorithms rank links largely based on how many pages link to that item. But a firm working on Penny’s behalf was link-farming. “Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.” And there’s little question it was blatant link farming with site operators paid to link back to JCP pages. Dress keywords linking to JCP were coming from such non-dress sites as nuclear.engineeringaddict.com, casino-focus.com, and bulgariapropertyportal.com.
When Google discovers a firm engaged in link farming they drop the hammer, and in this case the firm’s search quality leader, Matt Cutts, arranged manual demotion (as well as launching algorithmic improvements) that within two hours caused JCP links to freefall in some cases from first to seventy first. J.C. Penny has been at e-commerce for a while and their website gurus almost certainly knew they’d receive the Google “death penalty” if they’d misbehaved. Even our freshmen know this. J.C. Penny claims they were the victim of a rogue behavior by SEO consultant SearchDex (which they’ve since fired), and that JCP was otherwise unaware of the unethical behavior. That said it is surprising that the internal JCP team didn’t see their ultra-stellar organic search results as a red flag that something was amiss.
Getting a top spot is a big deal “on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice the percentage that went to No. 2.”. Penny downplayed impact, stating that only 7% of its traffic came from Google organic search (JCP also runs massive online ad-campaigns & is one of Google’s largest advertising customers – sometimes paying Google nearly $2.5 million a month for ads). However repeatedly showing up at the top of results may also convey brand halo on JCP, making it seem like a strong, more highly endorsed destination than it really was.
J.C. Penny isn’t the first firm busted. In 2006, Google discovered so-called black-hat SEO was being used to push BMW up in organic search rankings. Google was merciless in retribution and BMW.de was virtually unfindable via the world’s largest search engine. But this also raises not only ethical issues within a firm’s existing digital marketing staff, it underscores points we make in several chapters of our book regarding vetting and regularly auditing the performance of supply chain partners (see the Zara Case for info about the Fair Factories Clearinghouse, and the Security Chapter for insight on fraudulent advertisers leveraging nytimes.com “see All the News Fit to Print: Brought to You By Scam Artists”). Victorious warns of the unethical techniques deployed by some digital marketing agencies that are to be avoided by the plague if you’re trying to conduct SEO for your business; it has come to be known as black hat SEO.