This is not your father’s Macbook.

This one is going into the ebiquity research archives.

John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?, American Association of Wine Economists, AAWE Working Paper No. 36, April 2009.

“Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.”

It puts a new spin on the concept of eating your own dog food.

While we can use Twitter for news or reports on unfolding events from the field, it’s a noisy channel. As usual, Randall Munroe captures it well. I especially like its highlighting how Twitter’s search page lets you know there have been dozens of new matching tweets since you searched a moment ago. It seems that the flu-related tweets are arriving faster than anyone can read them.

The common observation that correlation does not imply causation is a cold and cruel idea that knows no mercy.

I thought this cartoon from a recent issue of the New Yorker offers an accurate comment on modern life.

No doubt about it, President Obama is a polymath.

Maybe I should turn off the Firefox Adblock plugin and enjoy this new form of machine humor.

From M. Turk via Time’s Swampland.

The new Macbook Wheel is really pushing the Human Computer Interface envelope.

Stack Overflow has a popular question asking Whats your favorite programmer cartoon?. Nearly 150 have been submitted to date, commented on and sorted by community votes. You’ll recognize a lot of these — XKCD and Dilbert dominate — but I saw many I’d never seen before.

Here’s how Stack Overflow describes itself.

“Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. … We don’t run Stack Overflow. You do. Stack Overflow is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers. Once the system learns to trust you, you’ll be able to edit anything, much like Wikipedia. With your help, we can build good answers to every imaginable programming question together. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home — better programming is our goal. Stack Overflow is as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it. We believe finding the right answer to your programming questions should be as easy as falling into the pit of success. And maybe even a little fun along the way.”

It’s a bit overwhelming, but it’s fun to check in on the questions that are most popular, like the cartoon question. You can follow questions about your own narrow interest by subscribing to the RSS feed for appropriate tags (e.g., python, AI, or Semantic Web.). You can also search for questions based on a set of key words, like those mentioning games and AI

I guess this is the ultimate question for a Turing Test. At least for this Fall.

Reporter Will Pavia of The Times was one of the judges a the 2008 Loebner Prize competition last week. In a story in The Times yesterday, Machine takes on man at mass Turing Test, he revealed his question that gave away one of the cold, lifeless, mechanical bots.

“The other correspondent was undoubtedly a robot. I asked it for its opinion on Sarah Palin, and it replied: ‘Sorry, don’t know her.’ No sentient being could possibly answer in this way.”

Of course, this could have been an ironic response from a clever person who was mocking VP candidate Palin’s stock question of “Who is Barack Obama?”.

(spotted on Languae Log)