Oddhead Blog

The Last Analogs were born after commercial color TV (1953) and graduated high school before Mosaic (1993), roughly spanning from Steve Jobs to Larry Page.

Last Analogs like me grew up in the dawn of the digital age, yet had plenty of experience with VHS, walkmans, card catalogs, and film before the Internet shifted the revolution into hyperlink drive.

I recently had a Last Analog moment: A holiday card I sent to a friend was returned undelivered.

He had moved and I had sent it to his old address.

It turns out I actually had the correct address filed away in an email folder — he had kindly sent it to me months earlier — and I had even tagged the email as “contact info”. Yet my address book failed to reflect it, mostly because my address book doesn’t read or process email, but rather expects me to do it.

This is an inherently Last Analog problem.

The new address books — the Facebooks and Plaxos of the world — solve the problem gracefully. On Facebook, I don’t keep my own separate copy my friend’s address; instead I keep a pointer to my friend and all his data and let him do the updating. My friend doesn’t need to email me and I don’t have to transcribe anything (or, in the early days, call and write), and repeat the same for all his friends. He updates his own information and everything else happens automatically.¹

There are a ton of inherently Last Analog problems, including not knowing how much money you’ve spent in a month, how many calories you’ve burned or eaten, where your car or key or friend is, or where you are. A Last Analog could be living and working near an old college buddy and not even know it.

But perhaps the most unfortunate Last Analog problem is our impaired collective memory. Last Analogs grew up without the benefit of all the little digital trails that people now leave automatically as they go about their lives: the emails, twitters, geo-tagged photos, walls, groups, friendlists, and blogs that form a searchable, hyperlinked diary.²

For Last Analogs to catch up still requires considerable effort: for example, digging out old boxes of print photos and scanning and geo-tagging them by hand. Presumably even this process will become cheaper and easier, but in the meantime the online map view of my post-college European tour is fifteen years in waiting and counting, memories of metadata fading, and the slide show at my 20th high school reunion this spring will be only as complete as busy schedules allow.

Too bad the wayback machine doesn’t go that way back.

I guess its time to get over my First Digital envy and get to work scanning uphill both ways in the snow.

Yahoo! Research just published its list of key scientific challenges facing the Internet industry.

It’s a great resource for students to learn about the area and find meaty research problems. There’s also a chance for graduate students to earn $5000 in seed funding, work with Yahoo! Research scientists and data, and attend a summit of like-minded students and scientists.

The challenges cover search, machine learning, data management, information extraction, economics, social science, statistics, multimedia, and computational advertising.

Here’s the list of challenges from the algorithmic economics group, my group. We hope it provides a clear picture of the goals of our group and the areas where progress is most needed.

We look forward to supporting students who love a challenge and would like to join us in building the next-generation Internet.

Well, geeks are certainly inheriting my earth.

On January 13, my company named Carol Bartz, a self-avowed math nerd and former punch-card carrying member of her college computer club, as its CEO. In her own words:

I was a real nerd. I love, love, love, love math. Back in the late ’60s, math meant being a teacher if you were a woman. I wasn’t interested in teaching. Then I took my first computer course. It was crazy. It was like math, only more fun. I switched to computer science.

Exactly one week later, on January 20, my country turned over executive control to Barack Obama, a CrackBerry addicted comic book geek. In his inauguration speech, Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place”, “wield technology’s wonders”, and even addressed “non-believers” — wording that in any sane universe should be entirely unremarkable, yet in ours appears to represent an unprecedented milestone.

I can’t recall a two-week span filled with so much geek pride and cautious optimism.

Back to the Carol Bartz quote. Reading it brings a smile to my face. It also reminds me of my mom, who, convinced it was her only option, taught middle school for a few years before returning to medical school to pursue her passion, enjoying a successful career as one of the first women radiologists.

I highly recommend Bartz’s essay, which mixes biography with prescience and insight. Bartz describes how technology and the Internet are transforming collaboration and improving productivity, at the same time ushering in an era of information overload, email bankruptcy, and misuse of the extra time technology affords. Remarkably, she wrote about these things in 1997!

It’s amazing to think how things have changed since 1997. My own first web experience, courtesy Mosaic, came in 1994, the same year Yahoo! was founded. In 1996, PayPal predecessor and public company First Virtual wrote their own keystroke-sniffing malware as a stunt to bolster their urgent call to “NEVER TYPE YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER INTO A COMPUTER”. Ebay was founded in 1995, PayPal in 1998. In 1997, Friendster had neither come nor gone, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was 13.

Yet Bartz’s words seem more relevant than ever today.

As I alluded to previously, I seem to be getting “intelligent spam” on my blog: comments that pass the re-captcha test and seem on-topic, yet upon further inspection clearly constitute link spam: either the author URI or a link in the comment body is spam.

Here is one of the most clear cases, received on January 9 as a comment to my post on the CFTC’s call for proposals to regulate prediction markets:

Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 01:28:01 -0800
From: Matt.Herdy
New comment on your post #71 “A historic MayDay: The US
government’s call for help on regulating prediction markets”
Author : Matt.Herdy
Comment:
Thanks for that post. I’ll put a note in the post.

1. It’s nothing new. The CFTC will just formalize the current
status quo.
2. We are prisoner of the CFTC regulations and the US Congress’
distaste of sports “gambling”. As for the profitability of prediction
exchanges in that strict environment, I don’t see how you can deny that
HedgeStreet went bankrupt even though it was well funded. Isn’t that a
hard fact?
3. You’re right, but all “pragmatists” should follow a business
plan and make profits. See point #2. Pragmatists won’t make miracles.

<a href=”http://www.stretch-marks-help.com/”>Removing stretch marks</a>

At first blush, the comments seems to come from a knowledgeable person: they refer to HedgeStreet, an extremely relevant yet mostly unknown company that’s not mentioned anywhere else in the post or other comments.

It turns out the comments seem intelligent because they are. In fact, they’re copied word for word from Chris Masse’s comments on his own blog.

Chris Masse’s page has a link to my page, so it could have been discovered with a “link:” query to a search engine.

Though now I understand what this spammer did, I remain puzzled exactly how they did it and especially why.

1. Are these comments being inserted by people, perhaps hired on Mechanical Turk or other underground equivalent? Or are they coming from robots who have either broken re-captcha or the security of my blog? (John suspects a security breach.)
2. Is it really worth it economically? All links in blog comments are NOFOLLOW links anyway, and disregarded by search engines for ranking purposes, so what is the point? Are they looking for actual humans to click these links?

In any case, it seems an intriguing development in the spam arms race. Are other bloggers getting “intelligent spam”? Does anyone know how it’s done and why?