AI Infects the IPod

A company has developed an app/plugin for the IPod that analyzes the songs you skip to avoid the songs you don't want to hear (thus, playing the songs you do want to hear) at the moment.
From the article:

Instead of a random shuffle, our ’smart shuffle’ uses some cool machine learning to analyze what music you want to hear based on the songs you skip and the ones you don’t. Within just a few skips, we can play the songs that fit your current mood and activity. Whether you’re working out, walking in the park or road-tripping with your friends, our new Instinctiv Shuffle will be able to understand what you want to hear within just a few skips

I have seen it work, and the most interesting part is that it doesn't bog down the IPod, yet doesn't require any song preprocessing either. So it must be analyzing song attributes and building its database in the background.
hmm, I wonder how it works...

Commentary on The Neuroscience of False Beliefs

Daily Kos recently posted an article on the neuroscience of false beliefs.
I think it should provide people with some much-needed insight into themselves.

My brief take (maybe I'll elaborate later):
I think the article and the science behind it, illustrate my premise that four of the most valuable characteristics with which people can endow themselves are:
1. Skepticism, both with your ideas and the ideas of others.
2. Self-awareness. If you are aware of how you work, you can actively prevent undesirable behavior.
3. Open mindedness or willingness to discard/refine your current beliefs with discovery of new, factual information.
4. Empathy for others. Armed with the knowledge that everyone is acting on their model of the world, and understanding that it is NOT necessary that their model coincide with your own, you might be more likely to understand others' intentions as just different, and likely not malevolent.

I think there's a lot more to be said, but for me, time is always an issue...

Cheers,

Water-Powered Car

Google it.

The Grass is Greener...

So I came across this site while listening to the StackOverflow podcast yesterday. Joel from Fog Creek was talking about their new offices (wherein every employee gets a private office) and comparing them to various others, including Google Zurich.

I saw this as a testament to the synergy (excuse the catch phrase) between treatment of employees and their productivity in the early stages of a software startup's life. Really makes me wish older companies would compromise on these benefits. I'm sure they increase morale.