In Pennsylvania your laptop display watches you. Personally I though that in the design meeting where they decided to start locating web cameras where they are on laptops that someone would have mentioned Orwell… [Boing Boing] [Slashdot] [Class Action Filing]
The Hard Reform
January 27, 2010 – 8:36 pm
In a post last April put forward a case for considering more responsible ways of using information in markets. I would like now to address a problem that stems from Gramm-Leach-Bliley which may have played a larger role in the current market collapse than problems of information, the lack of necessary interdependence between different financial institutions that arose out of cross sector integration.
When Gramm-Leach-Bliley repealed the restrictions from Glass-Steagall which prevented several different types of financial institutions from merging, each class of which performed different market functions, it removed and important barrier which served to assist in preventing bad transactions and toxic securities. That barrier was the need to do business with other institutions to accomplish certain kinds of transactions. The merging of differing types of financial players into single businesses allowed internal transactions to take place which created securities that would not have been created had these securities had to have been created through the cooperation of several different businesses.
Site Changes
January 19, 2010 – 6:29 am
I have decided to move the whole site over to WordPress for a more uniform look across the site. As become better acquainted with WordPress the look and feel of the site may change tremendously from what it is now, and some of the content I have yet to move over should gradually return. In time images will be placed into posts missing them, 301 redirects will fix broken permalinks, and missing posts may be recovered.
Google may or may not be using Quantum Computer
December 14, 2009 – 4:48 pm
From the files of the potentially scary while potentially exciting comes news of Google’s venture into what may or may not be quantum computing using technology from D-Wave company who may or may not be marketing the technology that they claim to be.
There’s a lot of coverage out there already, but I just find it interesting where a lot of the commentary is putting out comparisons of this implementation of maybe or maybe not quantum computing to neural networks. If this connection is realized further, it would support some hunches that I have had for some time. On the other hand it it creates a computer that is too brain like, we probably will have a good idea as to how an actual implementation of a Skynet like system may or may not differ from its portrayal in fiction. Hopefully it will be more concerned with why the Google team used such elementary school-type branding on its predecessors than having the world all to itself.
Considering especially the application of this new technology towards image recognition, a task at which people tend to perform very well, the nature of this technology as possibly more of a cousin to cognition than earlier computing technologies sounds rather possible. Considering also on the other hand the difficulties associated with building quantum computers in academic environments and the consideration offered in other commentaries on D-Wave that its products are likely frauds, jokes, or some form of joke there is the possibility that the Google team is working on its most elaborate April fools day project yet.