A recent study has shown that in the UK a large number of children are swapping music using their phone.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

For music execs the news gets even worse:

Almost a half (45%) of children who said they did not swap music via their phones said they would like to.

The article states that most of the youths used bluetooth, without any drm in sight. This seems to make the Zune file sharing moot functionality. Why would I buy a Zune where I can only share things for 3 days or three plays no matter what the copyright of the media is when my mobile phone can do the same with no restrictions? I think that Microsoft is really missing the boat on wireless p2p sharing. If they just allowed unfettered copying of uncopyrighted material the Zune would have a chance. With YouTube coming to mobile phones, soon there will be a lot of mobile videos that could be passed around. That could make viral videos really viral.

As seen on Slashdot, but worth reposting. The AMS (American Mathematical Society) has an accessible article on the PageRank algorithm.

“Google’s PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content. In fact, Google feels that the value of its service is largely in its ability to provide unbiased results to search queries; Google claims, “the heart of our software is PageRank.” As we’ll see, the trick is to ask the web itself to rank the importance of pages.”

The Computing Research Association reports on results from the latest NFS data on Computer Science degree production in the US. Specifically, the 30 US institutions that awarded the most bachelor’s degrees in computer science in 2003/20004, followed by one for those that awarded the most PhDs in 2004/2005. We were very pleased to see that UMBC made both lists. We are seventh for undergraduate degrees produced and tied for eighteenth for PhD production. Not surprisingly, the top ten undergraduate positions are dominated by non-research institutions such University of Phoenix at number one. Overall, the University of Maryland System shows very well with three institutions on the top undergraduate list (UMUC #6, UMBC #7 and UMCP #9) and two on the PhD list (UMCP #12 and UMBC #18)

World champion chess grand master Vladimir Kramnik has lost his six game match with the computer program Deep Fritz 4 games to 2. From a NYT story:

Mr. Kramnik fell behind in the match when he lost Game 2 by walking into a checkmate in one move with hardly any pieces remaining on the board, a mistake that ranks as one of the biggest in championship-level chess history. Needing a win today to tie the match, Mr. Kramnik took some chances, eventually lost a pawn, and was then outmaneuvered by the computer.

This is the second time that the reigning world human chess champion has lost to a computer — Garry Kasparov lost a 1997 six-game match against IBM’s Deep Blue. It may also be the last time for such a Man vs. Machine match over chess. The raw power of computer systems continues to increase and our software only gets better. The action is likely to shift to games that are still a challenge for computers to play at the highest level, such as poker or go.

I think it won’t be the same, though. Chess was iconic as a game for the brainiest and most intellectual of people. 40 years ago the very idea that a machine could play chess was still astounding. Now you can buy Deep Fritz, or at least a version of it, for less than twenty dollars.

Let’s break out the booze and have a ball, If that’s all there is.

A long feature article in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Open-Source Spying, discusses how Web 2.0 technologies like wikis and blogs might be useful in the intelligence community and asks “Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?”. The article brings out a number of themes.

One is that young people working in the intelligence community grew up with the Internet and Web. They understand and rely on tools and systems like IM, forums, Google, blogs, wikis, photo sharing sites, etc. When they find these lacking in their workplace, they are frustrated and feel unproductive.

Another is the idea that we are moving from the need to know concept from traditional access control and security toward a need to share culture that privileges cooperation, collaboration and distributing information.

A third is that the current information infrastructure of the intelligence community is not well organized for sharing and collaboration and is slow to take advantage of technology improvements and new ideas like social media.

“So the C.I.A. set up a competition … called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?”

A year ago, the US intelligence community began constructing Intellipedia, a set of wikis that intelligence employee with classified clearance can read and contribute to.

“By this fall, more than 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages. Chris Rasmussen, a 31-year-old “knowledge management” engineer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, spends part of every day writing or editing pages. Rasmussen is part of the younger generation in the intelligence establishment that is completely comfortable online; he regularly logs into a sprawling, 50-person chat room with other Intellipedians, and he also blogs about his daily work for all other spies to read.”

There is a lot more in this long article, it’s a good read.

Now there is a great pitch line!

As reported in Techcrunch, Swivel is expected to launch heir site later this week.

“the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. … Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmarked by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data. But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof).”

Here’s the business model, according to TechCrunch — Swivel will provide a free service public data and charge a fee for data that is kept private.

I’m anxious to see their data model and to compare it to an RDF approach. I suspect that Swivel does not provide a way to annotate the data with semantic information, so any correlations will have to be driven by people. There is a lot of room for the Semantic Web to contribute to this kind of system.

Inspired by Matt Hurst’s post and following up on our own note on the mean time to index (MTTI) for blog search engines, we’ve done a simple experiment to measure the speed at which a blog post makes it into various search indexes. We made a test post at 13:20 (GM+5) on Saturday 2 December 2006. We used queries to monitored Google, Google Blog Search and Technorati to try to determines how long it took added to their indexes. Here are the results:

Lag in H:M:S	Where
00:01:40	Google blog search
00:08:30	Technorati
02:02:00	Google blog search alert
21:00:00	Google search

The post made it into both Google blog search and Technorati very quickly. There was about a two hour delay before the Google alert we had set up was triggered. The post appeared in Google’s main index in under a day. As I had previously mentioned, I have seen many cases in which our blog posts show up in the Google index in about twelve hours.

Its just a single data point, of course, and these numbers will be sensitive to the day of the week and the time of day. We also did this manually, so the times are approximate. We don’t know how Google’s main index is populated. Our suspicion is that one source of new URLs is Google’s blob search system. But it’s speculation. I don’t think that this experiment provides strong evidence for it, but its certainly very consistent with the idea.

Implementing a program to automatically monitor and publish the MTTI of major search engines might be a nice simple project for someone who has an urge to put up a useful Web service.

… there is nothing to see here. googlemtti

Bell Labs, the 81-year-old crown jewel of American technological innovation, is now part of a French company. 

After several months’ merge operations, “Alcatel and Lucent will operate under the new name of Alcatel-Lucent beginning Friday, trading under the ticker symbol “ALU.”

(source: http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3646576)

Matt Hurst of BuzzMetrics blogs in A Round Trip To Google about Google’s blog search engine’s mean time to index (MTTI).

“If you publish a blog and subscribe to Google’s blog alerting, you can - by using the real time option for altering - get an idea of how long it takes Google to get each post.

• I posted Weekends At The Movies at 5:18 AM on December the first. The alert from Google came at 3:48 PM, a delay of 10 hours and 30 minutes. …

These figures suggest a substantial round trip time for blog publishing, indexing and alerting. Given that Technorati claims to have a mean time to index of 5 minutes (something which I personally doubt) Google seems to be pretty slow. …”

We’ve noticed faster times when checking for a blog post via their search, but with a lot of variability. We’d expect some lag to be introduced via their post alerting service, maybe it’s significant.

More interestingly, it seems like links are quickly moving from Google’s blog system into the main Google index. We first noticed this just a few months ago. Through informal sampling, it seems like our blog posts are getting into Google’s index in about twelve hours.

Of course, it’s only speculation that this is the mechanism: ping -> Google Blog Search -> Google. It could be that The Google thinks our blog so significant that it crawls it daily, but we think that less likely. It makes a lot of sense for Google to take advantage of the push from feeds to get pages indexed more rapidly.

If this is true, the news is both good and bad. The good part, of course, is that a major search engine is taking the feed based world of blogs and other sources more seriously and their indexes will be a more accurate picture of what’s on the Web right now as opposed to last week. The bad news? Splogs will become even more tempting as a way to get spam into search engine indexes.

Google has recently abandoned its answer service (http://answers.google.com/answers/)

We’re sorry, but Google Answers has been retired, and is no longer accepting new questions.
Search or browse the existing Google Answers index by using the search box above or the category links below.

The analysis from Forbes suggests that “represents a rare victory for rival Yahoo”. Instead of charging dollars for answers, Yahoo started free answer serivces one year ago. It’s market share is now “24 times greater than Google’s service” which has been in service for four years.

Another article worth to read is Adieu to Google Answers from Google’s official blog.

I percieve this as another victory of Web society, as the previous ones such as open source code, Wikipedia, and blog. Many people would volunteer their spare time in adding more knowledge on the web to gain their web reputation. Such “Free labor” work will get pay off becuase the value of a famous ID on the web is as valuable as big name in real world.