On Solving Solved Problems

Grok Headline matches for On Solving Solved Problems

Contests as the path to solving complex
technological problems

Contests as the path to solving complex
technological problems 02/13/2004 03:48 PM
Perhaps one of the best ways to get the US economy going again is for the Government to dive into the business of contests.  Simply, cash awards to organizations that engineer and demonstrate breakthrough technology that solves specific problems.  We have seen a few minor efforts in this direction recently.  NASA has launched their "Centennial Challenges" program with $20 m for key technological breakthroughs.  DARPA is even getting into the act with a $1 m "Grand Challenge" for an autonomous ground vehicle that can navigate between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  These contests compliment the now famous privately funded X-Prize that will award $10 m to the first organization that can get 3 people to 100 km above the earth and back twice within two weeks.  What do you think about contests (or a sequence of increasingly difficult contests that build on each other) for the development of unmanned Mars missions (at much less expense than the $820 m spent on Spirit and Opportunity), extremely low cost hydrogen fuel cells, 20 hour laptop batteries that cost less than $100, and more?  In my view, a billion $$ spent this way over the next couple of years would prove true McLuhan's dictum that for every great problem there is someone that doesn't see it as a problem.

BTW: there needs to be a lot of academic work done on how to make these contests effective.

Real-Life Problems Solved in New IBM Ads
(Reuters)

Real-Life Problems Solved in New IBM Ads
(Reuters) 01/07/2005 01:49 AM
Reuters - IBM , the world's largest computer company, is putting a human face on the services it offers in a new U.S. brand campaign illustrating how technology can help doctors, lawmakers and young schoolgirls alike.

Partner: Ten Steps to Solving Cooling
Problems Caused by High-Density Server
Deployment

Partner: Ten Steps to Solving Cooling
Problems Caused by High-Density Server
Deployment 04/13/2005 05:53 PM
Download this white paper

CSS Problem-Solving

CSS Problem-Solving 04/09/2004 04:01 PM
Save your sanity. After spending an hour debugging CSS with Tim Bray this morning, I've written up some of my handier CSS problem-solving techniques.

AI Has Been Solved

AI Has Been Solved 04/01/2005 08:46 AM
Mentifex writes that the sideways integration of sensory input with a conceptual mindgrid is the solution to artificial intelligence.

Solving comment spam

Solving comment spam 01/27/2004 10:57 PM

There are two main schools of thought concerning comment spam: the optimists and the defeatists. Optimists believe that comment spam can be beaten with technology; defeatists (maybe I should call them pessimists) believe that comments are as doomed as email and we're all going to hell in a hand basket.

The story so far

I fall squarely in to the techno-optimist category. Back in September I started blacklisting domains linked to from spam comments, defending against return visits from spammers and allowing others to syndicate my block list to run on their own site. Then in October I tweaked my comment system to eliminate PageRank from links in comments, making spamming for search engine optimisation a futile exercise. Of course, this measure only works if spammers realise it's there (I know at least one has) which is why I'm personally very happy to see that the latest release of Moveable Type has adopted the technique - to mixed reviews from the MT community.

There have been a whole bunch of other technological innovations over the past few months. Sam Ruby has implemented throttling to ban people who post three consecutive comments, and has some great ideas about guarding against strangers. Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist makes the blacklisting concept available to a wide audience. Meanwhile, James Seng's MT-Bayesian introduces trainable spam filters adapted from the fight against email spam.

The challenges ahead

So those are the solutions so far; the critical question is whether they work. The amount of spam I've been getting has definitely decreased, but as I run a completely custom blogging system I'm safe from the automated scripts that target more widespread systems - other sites make easier targets. Now that the less ethical search engine optimisers have started to catch on to the potential of comment spam to improve their PageRank the amount of spam can only increase. Some bloggers have already started to disable comments entirely (thankfully Dan turned them back on again shortly afterwards), setting a worrying precedent for the elimination two way interactions comments allow between bloggers and non-bloggers.

I'll put it in writing now: I will never disable comments on this blog. In the past few months the comments here have proved far more interesting and valuable than my actual posts, and I really appreciate the quality of the discussions that have arisen here. I will take whatever steps are necessary to keep this a useful environment for discussion.

Many people have hailed user registration as the ultimate solution to spam. It isn't, because the value of PageRank is just too high - and writing a script to automatically create accounts (even with email confirmation required) is child's play to anyone who is competent in an internet-aware scripting language. Even accessibility-impeding captchas are no defence against spammers who can afford to employ cheap labour to defeat them - and with search engine rankings as critical as they are there's no shortage of spam dollars.

With those ruled out, let's look at the remaining solutions:

The killer

Without links, comment spam has no purpose. To eliminate spam, eliminate links. Redirecting them through a PageRank killer already achieves this, but proves too subtle for spammers intent on spreading their links as widely as they can. Too truly eliminate spam, strip out links and anything that even looks like a URL and force the spammer to preview their carefully crafted advertisement before hitting submit. Seeing as hyperlinks are the single most important feature of the web this may seem draconian - and indeed it is. But on a site that serves more as a discussion forum than a farm and where the alternative to killing links is killing comments entirely this could be the saving factor.

For most blogs however links are an essential part of the discourse - I certainly wouldn't want to disable them here. Now only do they add huge value to the discussions, but more importantly they act as a "signature" for many commenters - knowing a comment is by "Dan" is far less useful than knowing that it's by Dan from www.simplebits.com.

Finding a compromise

Draconian measures such as the above wouldn't be necessary if spammers would wise up to the fact that their carefully crafted missives were having no effect on their precious PageRank. The real challenge then is to make anti-PageRank measures obvious to even the most brain-addled viagra peddlers. I've taken the first step towards this by turning on compulsory previewing for comments, which should have the added benefit of reminding legitimate commenters to use paragraph tags. I'll be working on ways of making the anti PageRank measures more obvious over the next few days, as and when work permits.

I've seen people argue that depriving legitimate commenters of PageRank is a poor compromise. I disagree: if the only cost of eliminating the incentive to spam is the loss of some Google ego then I see it as a price well worth paying. Of course, I say that as someone who's already built up their Google ego but at the end of the day it's my blog, my rules. One solution I've considered is creating a whitelist of sites that frequent commenters use in their signatures, causing them to be displayed without a redirect.

Comment spam is a solvable problem. Furthermore, blogging about comment spamming is almost as dull as blogging about blogging. Let's hurry up and solve it so we can go back to blogging about cats.

Solving the gay marriage mess

Solving the gay marriage mess 03/06/2004 01:59 AM
Massachusetts' old-style (= corrupt) House Speaker, Thomas Finneran, no longer backs a compromise amendment to the state constitution that would permit civil unions but ban same-sex marriages. Instead, he wants two amendments. The first would say: "It being the public policy of this Commonwealth to protect the unique relationship of marriage, only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Massachusetts." According to the report in the Boston Globe, the second amendment "would include language saying that the Legislature 'shall establish civil unions,' but would call for the Legislature to define...

Solving Puzzles with LM-Solve

Solving Puzzles with LM-Solve 11/17/2003 07:51 PM
A great many puzzles and games, such as Solitaire or Sokoban, are of the form of a "logic maze" -- you move a board or tableau from state to state until you reach the appropriate goal state. Shlomi Fish presents his Games::LMSolve module, which provides a general representation of such games and an algorithm to solve them.

E-mail: Solved

E-mail: Solved 03/13/2003 10:22 AM
Brad Choate wants a better E-mail client. I can understand him. For a long time, I thought e-mail permanently had ended up in the land of uselessness.

Mystery Solved

Mystery Solved 11/12/2003 01:31 PM
Mystery Solved. Somewhere in the Catskill Mountains, two nature filmmakers are busy shooting a documentary on rabbits in their natural habitat. In the morning dew they are about to meet something considerably bigger than a rabbit... [Flash and safe for work]

"Mystery Solved?"

"Mystery Solved?" 04/07/2005 02:32 PM

Solving the "what you're looking at"
problem with Video Conferencing

Solving the "what you're looking at"
problem with Video Conferencing 06/30/2004 11:07 AM

Great article in the Beeb News about a research project which is actually reaping great benefits.

For years - I believe one of the things holding up video conferencing was that the viewer sees the other person either looking up or to the see - there's no eye contact, as the camera on the others side is NOT the screen. This creates a very disturbing anomaly that (IMHO) has prevented everyone but very geeky people to utilize this breakthrough technology.

So now.......

i2i, in development at Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge, UK, is a two-camera system which very carefully follows an individual's movement.

It uses a specially developed algorithm to fuse what each camera sees to create an accurate stereo "cyclopean" image.

This means it looks as if users are looking each other in the eye. It can also display floating 3D emoticons.

"We were able to come up with an algorithm that was able to take two images and capture a corresponding map in 3D," said Antonio Criminisi, lead researcher of Microsoft's Machine Learning and Perception Group.

"Using this powerful technology, we can now synthetically create an image as if the person is looking at you."

I don't necessarily buy the synthetic character angle, but just getting cameras to show you eye contact is huge....

So whwther or not thsi works - will depend on the issue of "are peopel willing to trade off and NOT see teh actual human (but a synthetic one) - all for the purpos eof seeing that person - in the eye.

But WAIT@! It's a synthetic person, so why....

[via techdirt]

Solving NI's policing dilemma

Solving NI's policing dilemma 04/15/2005 10:06 AM
BBC News website reports from Belfast on the thorny issue of policing.

Solving the in-home TV distribution
problem

Solving the in-home TV distribution
problem 03/29/2005 06:51 AM
The “Triple Play” chorus has become deafening. Everyone and their brother has a triple play strategy – big telcos, little telcos, PTTs, IOCs, just about any size, shape or form of telco wants to head off the cable guys at the pass with a TV strategy.

Statistical Education Through Problem
Solving

Statistical Education Through Problem
Solving 03/27/2005 08:10 AM
Statistical Education Through Problem Solving
http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/st eps/

Statistical Education Through Problem Solving (STEPS) was a collaborative project between seven universities throughout the United Kingdom "to develop problem-based teaching and learning materials for statistics." The materials draw on specific problems arising in Biology, Business, Geography and Psychology to help students learn that statistical issues are "important natural parts of the process of reaching conclusions." The software developed as a result of this project, which utilizes the computer and graphical illustration to support learning, is available to educational institutions free of charge and can be downloaded from this website. (Note that other organizations are expected to purchase the software.) A glossary of statistical terms is provided in the software program as well as on this website. Although the funding for the project ended in 1995 and the website was last updated in January 2004, the material is still current and useful for teaching statistics. The authors note that the STEPS modules are intended to be used to support existing coursework, and "not intended to replace lecturing staff or to provide a self-study course in statistics. This has been added to Statistics Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. [From The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2005. http://scout.wisc.edu/

Gmail problem solved

Gmail problem solved 06/21/2004 12:17 PM

Sweet! After trying a couple registry hacks that didn't quite work, this program did what I wanted. It opens a new window with just the new message window populated (without the rest of the gmail "chrome") but I'm sure Google will create some sort of toolbar extension that does the same.

Has The Poincare Conjecture Been Solved?

Has The Poincare Conjecture Been Solved? 12/31/2003 10:45 PM
Zack Coburn writes "An article in the Boston Globe alludes to the Poincare Conjecture being solved, possibly. For those who are unfamiliar with the conjecture, ...

Riemann hypothesis may have been solved

Riemann hypothesis may have been solved 06/09/2004 03:42 PM

Internet Problem Solving Contest 2004

Internet Problem Solving Contest 2004 05/20/2004 02:43 AM

Solving and creating captchas with free
porn

Solving and creating captchas with free
porn 01/27/2004 08:37 PM
Someone told me about an ingenious way that spammers were cracking "captchas" -- the distorted graphic words that a human being has to key into a box before Yahoo and Hotmail and similar services will give them a free email account. The idea is to require a human being and so prevent spammers from automatically generating millions of free email accounts.

The ingenious crack is to offer a free porn site which requires that you key in the solution to a captcha -- which has been inlined from Yahoo or Hotmail -- before you can gain access. Free porn sites attract lots of users around the clock, and the spammers were able to generate captcha solutions fast enough to create as many throw-away email accounts as they wanted.

Now, chances are that they didn't need to do this, since optical character recognition has been shown to be readily tweakable to decode captchas without human intervention -- that which a computer can generate, a computer can often solve.

My cow-orker Seth Schoen points out that human-generated captchas are much harder to solve: say, picking out a photo of an animal, at a funny angle, in a cage, and challenging attackers to correctly identify it. People can do so readily, machines probably can't.

Except, of course, that getting people to pick out pix of animals at funny angles doesn't scale. Unless, of course, you offered them free porn to do so ("Want free porn? Identify the animal in this cage!").

Which suggests a curious future, where commodity pornography, in great quantities, is used to incent human actors to generate and solve Turing tests like captchas in similarily great quantities.

E-gov experts emphasize problem-solving
skills over IT

E-gov experts emphasize problem-solving
skills over IT 09/14/2004 08:26 PM
ITBusiness.ca Sep 14 2004 10:46PM GMT

Galactic pancake mystery solved

Galactic pancake mystery solved 04/07/2005 05:59 PM
Astronomers figure out why small satellite galaxies surround the Milky Way in the shape of a pancake.

Milky Way�s �Satellite Problem� Solved

Milky Way�s �Satellite Problem� Solved 06/14/2004 12:47 AM

The Mystery of Datch Waifu, Solved!

The Mystery of Datch Waifu, Solved! 04/30/2004 07:50 AM
When Gizmodo asked our readers to help us understand why exactly it was Japanese love dolls were called 'Dutch Wives,' you beautiful, pervy people answered in spades. The short answer? 'Dutch Wife' describes a rattan bolster used in hot, humid countries to keep a sleeper's limbs suspended away from their...

Contribute / ProFTPd problem solved

Contribute / ProFTPd problem solved 11/19/2003 06:55 PM

After further analysis of the Contribute problem described earlier, we discovered that Contribute was opening a new FTP connection every time we clicked a link within the application even before we had hit the "edit page" button to fire up the editing mode. Switching the connection over to use SFTP instead of FTP had the same problem, with a secure connection being opened for each link we clicked instead. The connections remained open until we shut down Contribute.

My hunch is that this could be an obscure bug that only surfaces when Contribute is used with ProFTPd 1.2.9. At any rate, we've solved the problem by setting the MaxClientsPerUser directive in the ProFTPd configuration file. Contribute doesn't seem to mind in the slightest.

Russian May Have Solved Poincare
Conjecture

Russian May Have Solved Poincare
Conjecture 09/06/2004 09:49 PM

The Black iPod; Update: Solved!

The Black iPod; Update: Solved! 07/14/2004 12:06 PM

So a car company, which I'll call Jaguar (if I may be so bold), is offering up a chance to win a black iPod to promote its X-Type automobile. And what's interesting, besides the chance at a mythical black iPod, is the fact that there was once 75 of these custom-painted devices, at least according to MacCentral. But why? I presume that the other 74 had something to do with Jaguar, too, but where did they go? Were they given to other X-Type buyers? If you know, please share.

My guess? I think the original iPods were black, and then were later changed to white, just like they did to Jesus.
Read< /b> - Jaguar offers limited edition black iPod [MacCentral]
Read - X-Type Product Page [TheXType]

Follow up inside.

RBC says computer glitch to be solved
Monday

RBC says computer glitch to be solved
Monday 06/06/2004 10:13 PM
CTV.ca Jun 7 2004 2:18AM GMT

2 Issues solved for Farcry 1.2 Patch

2 Issues solved for Farcry 1.2 Patch 07/23/2004 09:32 AM

The black hole riddle -- solved!

The black hole riddle -- solved! 07/22/2004 09:38 AM
Stephen Hawking does a U-turn on his theory of the parallel universe �- and loses his bet in the process.

Boats and deckchairs: a mystery solved

Boats and deckchairs: a mystery solved 03/19/2003 10:26 PM

Stephen Jay Gould

When I Googled for necker cube yesterday, I found an image embedded in an amazing article entitled Boats and Deckchairs, written by Stephen Jay Gould and Rhonda Roland Shearer and published -- in December 1999 -- in the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. I used the image to illustrate yesterday's item, and linked to the article. Later in the day, I noticed the link had been shut down, so I swapped in a different image. But in fact, you can still find the article at http://to utfait.com/issues/issue_1/Articles/boat.html. It's a worthy entertainment that reminds me how diverse Gould's interests were, and how much he is missed. ...

Academy Piracy Case Solved

Academy Piracy Case Solved 01/25/2004 10:32 AM

FBI makes arrest in Oscar screener piracy: Kind of a sad story here. A "friend" of an elderly Academy member convinced him to send him the screeners he got every year. The videos were promptly pirated.

Carmine Caridi admitted in an affidavit released Thursday that he sent every so-called "screener" videotape he's received for the past three years to an acquaintance in the Chicago area, Russell W. Sprague.

Sprague, 51, was arrested at his home in Homewood, Ill., on Thursday after a search of his home turned up hundreds of films, many of which had been converted to DVD format and had the Academy's encryption code erased, along with an array of duplicating equipment, authorities said.

One thing we learned is that the Academy's tracing technology works. They tracked this all back to the source via a digital watermark on the movies which indicated who they had been sent to.

Click here to comment on this entry

Microsoft counsel sees shift in problem
solving

Microsoft counsel sees shift in problem
solving 05/02/2004 05:50 AM
SiliconValley.com May 2 2004 10:41AM GMT

Creativity techniques and creative tools
for problem solving

Creativity techniques and creative tools
for problem solving 09/07/2004 07:43 PM
Creativity techniques and creative tools for problem solving (lots)

mycoted.com/creativity/techniques
track this site | 3 links

Demo 2004 offers new ideas for IT
problem-solving

Demo 2004 offers new ideas for IT
problem-solving 02/17/2004 05:18 PM
A hand-picked group of 67 innovative IT vendors began showing wares yesterday, hoping to pique the interest for their nascent products with those in the audience of around 550 enterprise IT leaders.

Electronic Replicas of Newspapers:
Solving a Non-Existent Problem

Electronic Replicas of Newspapers:
Solving a Non-Existent Problem 05/07/2004 12:06 PM

jack Shafer (Slate): Honey, They Shrunk the Newspaper: Reading the electronic versions of the New York Times and Washington Post.. That these editions induce claustrophobia, even when displayed on a large flat-panel monitor, cannot be denied. For a sense of how poorly the facsimile of a broadsheet newspaper translates onto a computer screen, imagine reading a newspaper through a six-pane colonial window in which five of the panes have been blacked out. I haven't had this sort of tunnel vision while reading since the last time I endured newspaper microfilm at the city library.

Solving the mysteries of Mercury with a
probe called Messenger

Solving the mysteries of Mercury with a
probe called Messenger 07/31/2004 07:07 PM
US News Jul 31 2004 10:18PM GMT

Russian may have solved great math
mystery

Russian may have solved great math
mystery 01/10/2004 01:35 AM

Notes and Tips: Newsletter Problem
Solved

Notes and Tips: Newsletter Problem
Solved 06/28/2004 09:54 AM
An AppleWorks workaround provides an easy way to get a newsletter produced.
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On Solving Solved Problems