Give a Water Buffalo

You know those gifts for poor families that you can by proxy, like where you pay for a goat for a family in an African village or something like that? Well apparently sometimes nobody actually gets a goat; the money goes into a development pool. So if you thought you were sending a direct gift, well not actually. There's a guy called Robert Thompson who lives in Yunan province in China. He's American and he went there with his Chinese partner to get married. He's also a violinist and he's doing a tour over there. Anyway he saw a story on Philip Greenspun's blog about this guy who bought a water buffalo and then realised nobody actually got a water buffalo. You can see the comment from Bob Thompson under the blog post and then you can see the resulting video (pretty professional) on Thompson's site. I came across this on Jason Kottke's site.

John Coltrane

John Coltrane (1926-1967) is one of my favourite jazz musicians and has been for a long time. I think him and Miles Davis were the Kings of Jazz for a while and when I first heard their music at college I thought it was the best thing ever. The Official John Coltrane site has (Flash movie, with no controls - you have to close the browser to stop it) a cool set you can listen to while reading up about his life (though his life was really just the music). There's not so much to say about Coltrane except that he was a great musician who produced some fabulous music (particularly A Love Supreme), not always appreciated in his time. His wife, Alice Coltrane, also a jazz musician, recently died.

Breaking Taboos in Drag

I saw this story linked on Reddit. It's about Salim Ali, a drag artist in Pakistan who presents a television show. There's also a selection of clips from her shows on YouTube, e.g. this one. It reminded me of a South African comedian called Pieter-Dirk Uys, who lampooned the Apartheid Government as the socialite Evita Bezuidenhout. I also found an article at the BBC about a Zimbabwean drag artist called Kudah Samuriwo. Perhaps drag is particularly effective in macho countries, but these artists are obviously pretty brave with it; imagine the intimidation they get from their countrymen! The African girls seem more radical and have now shifted their fight as much against HIV/AIDS as their governments, whereas Salim Ali is more mainstream. She is able to do this by virtue of the ambiguity of being a man dressed as a woman; women would not be allowed to do the same thing, yet she can take on this role and flirt with her guests in a way that would otherwise be unacceptable.

Church Bloopers and Richard Dawkins

The Daily Nooz blog has posted some old "church bloopers" that were circulated by email years ago. My favourite is this one: The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 P.M. Please use the back door. Made me laugh. This made me cheer (quietly) though. Richard Dawkins has been named "man of the year" by this blog.

Clever Guy, Very Cool Job

Google do Tech Talks and publish them on Google Video. I found a very interesting talk called (video link) "Human Computation" about how they are going about the task of tagging / labelling images so that image searches can retrieve accurate results. The clip is over 50 minutes long, so I'll give a summary, but if you're interested it is quality stuff, definitely worth watching the whole thing. The solution they've come up with is to get people playing games that use image tagging as part of the game. Ingenious idea, well actually there are several creative solutions to problems in this talk. Clever guy Luis von Ahn, but they still spell his name wrong (Louise!?) in the subtitles.

In the video Luis talks about "captchas", which are those images of text that you have to read and copy in some web forms in order to prove that you're not a software agent trying to hack the form. He says that spam hackers have found a way to hack the forms, which is they pass the image of the text back to a porn website and interrupt users with a message saying "you must copy this text before you can continue watching". When the user enters the text it can be passed back to the form. So that's a hacker solution that gets humans cooperating with computers, albeit unawares. Luis uses games to involve people in the task.

So anyway, Luis and his team have built a game where an image is displayed on the screen. Two players are teamed together by the system and they get points when they both tag the image with the same word - thus tagging the image. The only communication between players is when they win a round because then they know the other player used the same tag. Several tags can be useful for one image, so Luis and co. have started to make some tags "taboo" for each image after it has been labelled with the same tag several times.

Luis says that the game has been very popular and a lot of images have been tagged. His team can now also use tagged image as a second level check that players are genuine. In theory a group of sabateurs could join the game together and respond with the same tag to every image. That would damage the accuracy of the tags if it was successful, so the team have started to include test pictures; images that most people label with the same tag; if players gets all these wrong, their tags may be treated as suspect.

There are several other cool solutions to sub-problems of this general area in the clip. That is one clever guy.

Michael J Fox

Michael J Fox appears on tv, but this time is different. Apparently he has Parkinson's Disease. I don't know much about Parkinson's, but the clip made me feel respect for Michael J Fox. He looks like he's been pretty badly hit by the disease; I didn't know he had Parkinson's and at the very start of the interview you're thinking "What's going on?" because the interviewer doesn't say anything and mjf is trembling a bit. It looks pretty humiliating to let the public see you like that, but he's trying to stand up to it. The interviewer mentions a cheap shot from Rush Limbaugh because Fox was doing pro-Democrat commercials; Limbaugh said he thought maybe Fox had not taken his medication in order to be more obviously suffering on the ads, so that he would get more public sympathy. Sounds like you just don't get an easy ride from everybody no matter what.