Futurist

There are 396 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 27 of 40).

Launch of TV News Search & Borrow with 350,000 Broadcasts | Internet Archive Blogs


For a while now I’ve wanted to build a search engine that would index TV shows by the shows’ closed-captioning transcript. Now I don’t have to, because the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) has built it for me!

The Internet Archives TV News Search & Borrow is amazing! It’s a catalog of news video which is searchable by keyword. Now anyone can do the video research that the wizards to on shows like The Daily Show do, right from their own desks. Obama made a speech about indefinite detention? Find it in seconds. Want to see Romney mixing up Randy Owens of Alabama with Lynard Skynard? A few clicks and it’s in front of you.

Give it a try and see for yourselves. It’s addicting.

Today the Internet Archive launches TV News Search & Borrow. This service is designed to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs.

The Internet Archive works to preserve the published works of humankind. Inspired by Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive project, the Internet Archive collects and preserves television news. Like library collections of books and newspapers, this accessible archive of TV news enables anyone to reference and compare statements from this influential medium.

via Launch of TV News Search & Borrow with 350,000 Broadcasts | Internet Archive Blogs.

Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are wrong about teacher evaluation – The Washington Post

The Washington Post deconstructs why standardized testingis bad for education.

I’ve often wondered why politicians have felt the need to meddle with education when few or none of them are education experts.

The Times can say that using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers is a sensible policy and Obama can say it and Education Secretary Arne Duncan can say it and Emanuel can say it and so can Bill Gates (who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop it) and governors and mayor from both parties, and heck, anybody can go ahead and shout it out as loud as they can.

It doesn’t make it true.

via Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are wrong about teacher evaluation – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post.

Blogging on and on

The kids and I attended a stream monitoring workshop put on by the City of Raleigh on Saturday. It was great learning how to measure the water quality of our city’s streams and we look forward to doing our part.

The workshop included field time and the group practiced in nearby Little Rock Creek. As I was wading around in the middle of the creek, a fellow participant wandered over to me.

“Are you the blogger?” he said.

“Excuse me? Am I the what?”

“The blogger, www.markturner.net?” he answered.

I laughed and introduced myself to my new friend, Sandro Gilser, blogger at The Daddy Weekly. You should check it out.
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My local urban woods to become subdivision

Urban deer


I received confirmation yesterday that the Weatherford property, the beautiful 10+ acre woods beside my neighborhood, is under contract by KB Homes. I believe their plans call for a 40-home subdivision with upscale homes similar to the ones in my neighborhood.

Checking KB Homes’s map of its other subdivisions in the Triangle area, this will be the first to be positioned so close to a downtown. That makes me wonder if we’ll see smaller, fancier, less car-centric homes to appeal to the new generation of homebuyers.

I will miss the nearby woods, though. I’ve grown used to mornings quiet enough to hear the call of barred owls, and the occasional encounter with urban deer grazing near my yard. I’m also expecting increased traffic as the dead-end street I live on gets extended to the new neighborhood, bringing more traffic through my neighborhood.
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Profile slamming

I was thinking that there isn’t much out there that describes what I believe Mitt Romney’s campaign (or one of its allies) is doing to surreptitiously set Facebook accounts to like the campaign’s page. Is it account hijacking? Hacking? Vandalism? What do you call it?

Then I recalled telephone slamming, the practice where unscrupulous telephone companies steals the customer of another telephone company by switching that customer’s long distance provider without their knowledge or consent. This happened to a company I once worked for and stunned me in its audacity.

I think that manipulating someone’s social media profile without their permission is similar in some ways to telephone slamming. Since no one else seems to have come up with a name for this practice, I will call it “profile slamming.”

The Cheapest Generation

Here’s another look at the dramatically changing demographics taking place in America. Raleigh leaders, take note.

In 2009, Ford brought its new supermini, the Fiesta, over from Europe in a brave attempt to attract the attention of young Americans. It passed out 100 of the cars to influential bloggers for a free six-month test-drive, with just one condition: document your experience online, whether you love the Fiesta or hate it.

Young bloggers loved the car. Young drivers? Not so much. After a brief burst of excitement, in which Ford sold more than 90,000 units over 18 months, Fiesta sales plummeted. As of April 2012, they were down 30 percent from 2011.

Don’t blame Ford. The company is trying to solve a puzzle that’s bewildering every automaker in America: How do you sell cars to Millennials (a?k?a Generation Y)? The fact is, today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

via The Cheapest Generation – Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic.

Update 1:38 PM: The authors cite the same thing I did back in March: that technology is making travel less necessary than it was before.

Smartphones compete against cars for young people’s big-ticket dollars, since the cost of a good phone and data plan can exceed $1,000 a year. But they also provide some of the same psychic benefits—opening new vistas and carrying us far from the physical space in which we reside.

“You no longer need to feel connected to your friends with a car when you have this technology that’s so ubiquitous, it transcends time and space,” Connelly said.

In other words, mobile technology has empowered more than just car-sharing. It has empowered friendships that can be maintained from a distance. The upshot could be a continuing shift from automobiles to mobile technology, and a big reduction in spending.

Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica

Dan Goodin of Ars Technica wrote an eye-opening piece on the astonishing state of password cracking. Passwords once thought a few years ago to be safe enough to outlast a century of cracking attempts can now be broken in a matter of days (or even hours) – with a $1000 computer, no less.

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.

A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.

via Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica.

Google Image search is creepy powerful

Google Image Search can read T-shirts


When I want to see if a particular photo on the web is of a real person or just a stock photograph (also of a real person but a model, of course), I like to plug that photo into Google Image Search (GIS). Google can now search the web for similar images and often if several duplicates of an image show up there’s a good chance that image is a stock photo.

In an effort to see if he is who he says he is, today I searched on an image of a man wearing a T-shirt. Google did not find any matching images to the one I provided, which was somewhat expected. What was not expected was that the Goog was able to identify the man’s T-shirt and provide links to stores selling that same T-shirt! Google’s search actually read the wording on this shirt and matched it up with others!

This capability is quite astonishing, and also quite worrisome. Google’s motto is “don’t be evil.” If the company chose, it could become the best friend of any repressive government.

The future of energy

My brain finally put together the puzzle pieces about our energy conundrum today. All the things I’d been pondering finally fell into place.

It started yesterday when a Facebook friend of mine knocked our space program as a waste of money. She and I agree on many points, so I was a bit taken aback at her lack of appreciation. I made the point that many new technologies came out of the space program, though I didn’t name any specifically.
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Twitter, Guy Adams And The Cost Of Being A User – Forbes

Twitter suspended the account of journalist Guy Adams over his tweeting an NBC executive’s publically-available work email address. This heavy-handedness is another example that social media platforms where you are the product aren’t necessarily going to have your best interests at heart.

Maybe you thought Twitter exists to be a community. Or a tool. It doesn’t. It’s a media company that outsources the vast majority of its content. But outsourced doesn’t have to mean agnostic. In fact, it will mean that less and less as more partnerships emerge.

But maybe you thought you were Twitter’s customer. Or a partner. You’re not. You don’t pay, you don’t vote, you use. Like almost all social media sites, you are a user. And that distinction matters. NBC, for instance, is both a customer and a partner. The difference has been fairly clear the last day or so.

via Twitter, Guy Adams And The Cost Of Being A User – Forbes.

Update 9:29 PM: NBC withdrew its complaint and Adams’s account was reinstated around 2:30 today. Twitter explains on its blog (though the statement still claims the email Adams shared was private when it was not).