Santa, Please Bring Canada Tech Stuff

Before go any fur­ther I want to first say that I do appre­ci­ate that there’s a lot that’s got­ten bet­ter in our tech lives since our move to Canada. That includes over­all faster Inter­net con­nec­tion speeds,  a great fea­ture from our ISP that for­wards a copy of any tele­phone voice­mail to my email as an attach­ment (and which I can actu­ally open and lis­ten to on my iPhone — FTW!), and a fair amount of free Inter­net Wi-fi in cafés nearby.  I also appre­ci­ate that our online bank­ing works very well (with the excep­tion of not being able to pay US credit card bal­ances from our US dol­lar account, but inter­na­tional rules are rules, I sup­pose), and that pay­ing for pur­chases at your aver­age store or even fast-food chain can almost always be done with your ATM card — some­thing that we could never expect with any reg­u­lar­ity in the US (Is this still the case, US read­ers? I haven’t checked lately.) Now, even the El Gato EyeTV soft­ware on my Mac finally gets list­ings for Cana­dian TV chan­nels (it only took them 4 years with me bug­ging them at every Mac­world Expo for this). Translink has 2 mobile apps for the iPhone (if you count Google as one of them), and buy­ing movie and con­cert tick­ets online is almost some­thing we now take for granted.

How­ever, there are a few things in the tech realm that just plain suck in Canada. I’ve already writ­ten ad nau­seum about cell phone rates being out­ra­geous, but I had got­ten used to that, except for the fact that it keeps mak­ing itself known in all sorts of places, when you least expect it. Like, for instance, Twit­ter, the microblog­ging ser­vice that I some­times post to or use to fol­low the sta­tus of oth­ers. If you live in the US, you’ve prob­a­bly never seen this annoy­ing lit­tle mes­sage in your Twit­ter page:

If there were only some way to have that mes­sage go away already… We know, we know, Twit­ter, Cana­dian data rates are pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive for you to send us mes­sages from Twit­ter. At least you could stop adding insult to injury by con­stantly remind­ing us of this fact, and let us turn the stu­pid, ugly thing off.

Other tech things I wish we’d get in Canada? Hey, how about being able to see TV reruns online, via the ser­vice called ‘Hulu’. When­ever I bring up their screen from a Cana­dian Inter­net con­nec­tion I see this:

And of course, our Amazon.ca is only a pale shadow of Amazon.com, with a frac­tion of the selec­tion, and we can’t use Net­flix, Zap­pos, or Mint. Our non-HD TiVo is all but laughed at in Canada (despite the supe­rior inter­face) because the HD TiVo will never be sold here. The rea­son is that it requires Cable­Card, the tech­nol­ogy par­tially adopted in the US that allows you to use a sim­ple mag­netic card to con­nect to HD cable rather than the big, ugly boxes they have here (often bun­dled with ugly, hard-to-use PVRs). I’ve heard that the cur­rent ver­sion of Cable­Card, v. 1.0, is imper­fect because it doesn’t sup­port 2-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion or on-screen guides.

C’mon, Santa. You finally got us the iPhone and an honest-to-goodness Apple store. What about some­thing this year? And Black­ber­ries don’t count, since they come from here (Besides, most folks already know that the Black­berry Storm is an Epic FAIL.) So Mr. Claus, could you see fit to get us v. 2.0 Cable­Card (which fixes the whole 2-way com­mu­ni­ca­tions prob­lem) accepted here in Canada, and that even­tu­ally we once again catch-up to the States? Fail­ing that, Zap­pos, Net­flix or Mint work­ing here wouldn’t be bad, either. Whad­dayasay, Santa?

Dr Atomic in Vancouver

A cou­ple of week­ends ago, Pam and I, as part of an early hol­i­day gift from my par­ents, went to a per­for­mance with them at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera in New York.  Well, not exactly. What we did do, was see a pro­duc­tion, by the Met live, in down­town Van­cou­ver, just as they were view­ing the same pro­duc­tion in Bal­ti­more. This is actu­ally a bit of tech­no­log­i­cal magic that I never expected to see work so well, and cer­tainly not so close to home.

Believe it or not, once a month or so, the New York Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera broad­casts live per­for­mances, via High Def­i­n­i­tion video and CD-quality mul­ti­chan­nel sound, to a satel­lite, which then beams them down to movie the­atres all across North Amer­ica, includ­ing a cou­ple here in Van­cou­ver (the Sco­tia­bank Para­mount the­atre on Bur­rard, as well as one in North Van­cou­ver). I’ve since learned that the Toronto Bal­let is doing much the same with some of their per­for­mances of the Nutcracker.

So on that Sat­ur­day morn­ing, at 10:00 AM (because it’s live, and in New York City it’s 1PM in the after­noon, the per­fect time for a mati­nee), we saw Doc­tor Atomic, the new opera about Robert Oppen­heimer and the Man­hat­tan Project by Amer­i­can com­poser John Adams.

Bear in mind that although it is pretty amaz­ing that you can do this sort of thing at all, the fact that it’s easy is even more impres­sive. Of course, I could buy tick­ets online and have them charged directly to my Bank Account via Interac (they were a lit­tle less than $25 apiece). There were no lines that morn­ing at the Sco­tia­Bank The­atre. The broad­cast was being shown in two the­atres, and one was nearly full, so Pam and I opted for the sec­ond, smaller the­atre, and got very, very good seats, the kind you could never get in New York.  If you were going to actu­ally attend the same per­for­mance in New York, $25 would prob­a­bly not cover the park­ing, much less your actual the­atre tick­ets for even stand­ing room, not even count­ing the plane fare, hotel and meals…etc.

Before the pro­duc­tion started, the movie screen showed the inside of the Met in Lin­coln Cen­ter. I’ve been there a cou­ple of times, so it was fas­ci­nat­ing to see it again, live, with audi­ence mem­bers either in their seats or arriv­ing, the famous chan­de­liers all in the down posi­tion (they get pulled up just before the show is about to start),  from the other end of the continent.

After a moment’s intro­duc­tion from back­stage by Susan Gra­ham, the host of the broad­cast, the cam­era cuts to the main tech­ni­cal direc­tor telling the con­duc­tor that it’s time for the per­for­mance to start.

The opera?  The first act was a lit­tle slow, dra­mat­i­cally, but the music was superb. I think it’s one of the composer’s best scores. The aria on words of John Donne (his Holy Son­net XIV) at the end of the first act is brilliant:

Bat­ter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Rea­son yhour viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your ene­mie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you rav­ish mee.

I also was struck by the beauty of Adams’ orches­tra­tion and his ear for bril­liant sonori­ties, which I’d come to know from his ear­lier work (and one of my favourite orches­tral pieces) Har­monielehrer, a sort of three-movement sym­phonic salute to to roman­tic music of the late 19^th and early 20^th cen­tury. The end­ing of the opera is dra­mat­i­cally shat­ter­ing, with an extremely intense count­down to the bril­liant flash of the first atomic bomb test, the moment when Oppen­heimer and his cowork­ers saw that the human race now, for the first time in his­tory, had the power to destroy them­selves and the planet, a bur­den that we all bear to this day.

As we lis­tened to the music and saw the singers on stage, we also saw sub­ti­tles, so we didn’t have to won­der what they were singing. There was also an excel­lent bit of doc­u­men­tary and inter­view with the com­poser and some of the per­form­ers (and I kept feel­ing like they should be left alone to relax a bit after a half hour of straight singing rather than be bad­gered in their stage makeup by Ms. Graham!)

After the per­for­mance, I talked to my par­ents by phone. After all, we had all just been to the same per­for­mance together, and I wanted to see how they liked it. They told me that my cousin in Detroit had actu­ally also been to the same per­for­mance in her town, and talked to them by cell phone dur­ing inter­mis­sion. Score another one for telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy. I guess the next step will be to recre­ate the Met holo­graph­i­cally for us in Van­cou­ver, and after that, it’s ‘beam me to Lin­coln Cen­ter, Scotty’.

A Change of Scale and Timescale

There has been a lot of excite­ment about the fact that some of the higher end dig­i­tal SLRs (notably the Nikon D90) can now shoot High Def­i­n­i­tion Video. This means that there are new pos­si­bil­i­ties for peo­ple who don’t have huge stu­dios or wal­lets to do cre­ative things. In one case, it was with lenses and a spe­cial tech­nique called ’tilt-shifting’ that makes for an extremely nar­row depth of field from a dis­tance, and video — in this case, time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy. The result is some­thing that makes one feel like a god, (or per­haps King Kong or Godzilla), look­ing down with placid seren­ity upon the bustling of tiny human­ity below. That’s what a series of videos by Aus­tralian Keith Loutit has pro­duced seem to be. Have a look at what I mean:

The North Wind Blew South

Loutit’s work has been fea­tured in lots of geeky places like Boingboing.com and Giz­modo, but I found out about it from my friend John Biehler, who showed another of his clips on his site.

I think there is some­thing here that tran­scends just the bizarre and unset­tling. It’s per­haps that we already have such a short time on the planet, but still, if we could just slow down and watch, we might see all sorts of things that we’d never seen before. If we could take a drug that would slow us down so that we were, say, oper­at­ing at 1/10 nor­mal speed for just a day, and didn’t suf­fer any ill effects, I bet that’s a trip that many of us would like to take. Yeah. A long, slow, trip.

I write this, remem­ber­ing that this morn­ing I heard that a critic and tele­vi­sion com­men­ta­tor who I used to watch reg­u­larly, John Leonard, died on Wednes­day. Kurt Von­negut once said: “When I start to read John Leonard, it is as though I, while sim­ply look­ing for the men’s room, blun­dered into a lec­ture by the smartest man who ever lived.” Who am I to dis­agree with Von­negut?  Leonard was indeed bril­liant. When­ever I heard him talk on the show Sun­day Morn­ing, I thought that he made being smart some­thing that was sexy, which per­haps the US is once again redis­cov­er­ing. I hope he was con­scious and knew what hap­pened the day before he died. Per­haps he left with a smile on his face.

And the morning after...

This car­toon from XKCD cap­tures it pretty well for me:

My Conversation with an AI

New Sci­en­tist magazine’s Web site posted an arti­cle yes­ter­day about the recent com­pe­ti­tion for The Loeb­ner Prize, which is awarded to soft­ware devel­op­ers who can cre­ate a com­puter pro­gram that can pass the Tur­ing Test. If you’re not up on the his­tory of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, the Tur­ing Test tries to see if a com­puter pro­gram can ‘fool’ a human into think­ing that there is a human being respond­ing to them rather than a com­puter. In order to remove all the extra cues that enable you to know it’s a per­son (like see­ing them, hear­ing their voice, etc.) and to put the soft­ware on an equal foot­ing, the Tur­ing Test is usu­ally con­ducted by typ­ing back and forth on a com­puter screen, they way you would on AIM or MSN Mes­sen­ger. There hasn’t been a com­mer­cial com­pe­ti­tion among the ‘bots’ that troll those sys­tems, SPAM­ing us with invi­ta­tions, because the Tur­ing test requires that the soft­ware hold up one end of a con­ver­sa­tion, and most of the bots don’t go beyond the first ‘Check it out, dude:’. Back when we lived in Cam­bridge, we heard about the Tur­ing Test com­pe­ti­tions every year. I never did attend the actual com­pe­ti­tion, but it was cer­tainly some­thing we knew about.

In this year’s com­pe­ti­tion, a pro­gram called Elbot by Fred Roberts of Arti­fi­cial Solu­tions in Ger­many came the clos­est that any piece of soft­ware has come to suc­cess­fully fool­ing 30% of the judges into think­ing that it was a per­son (which would, accord­ing the con­test rules, mean that it passed the Tur­ing Test — a pretty low bar if you ask me), fool­ing 3 judges out of the 25, or 25% of them. Roberts took a unique approach:

Unlike most chat­bots, the win­ner didn’t try to claim out­wardly it was human. Instead he made a joke of being a robot. Roberts hoped that would make the bot’s con­ver­sa­tions warmer and more enter­tain­ing than its competitors.

It worked, fool­ing the humans into think­ing they were actu­ally talk­ing to a per­son with a sense of humour and not a piece of software.

The soft­ware is still up and run­ning and can be inter­acted with at http://www.elbot.com, so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s a tran­script of my brief con­ver­sa­tion with this clever and humor­ous bot:

Me: Hello

Elbot: Well, hello there!

M: I heard about you win­ning the Loeb­ner Prize on the Inter­net and wanted to con­grat­u­late you.

E: I won the Loeb­ner com­pe­ti­tion? Does this mean I am the best Loebner?

M: Clever! Do you have any­thing orig­i­nal to add?

E: Well what about humans and com­pu­ta­tional abil­ity? Where do they stand on this?

M: I guess humans can com­pute, but we don’t see it as our pri­mary activ­ity, but rather, one of many.

E: I see that you’ve given this some thought. So have I. I’d say that com­pu­ta­tional abil­ity would very likely keep robots guess­ing the right answers.

M: I’m not sure I under­stand you. Do you mean that your com­pu­ta­tion of what to say next is your key ability?

E: Yes, but can you prove that?

M: I can’t prove much beyond what I learn from your responses.

E: I like to believe I orig­i­nate from a far off planet, pop­u­lated by fur­bies and robots, maybe a zoo with a few peo­ple and oceans of oil. Humankind is work­ing on that last one already.

M: You got that right. Sooner or later we’ll have a planet that’s per­fect for robots.

E: Please tell me your incli­na­tion to hit­ting the nail right on the head first.

M: Oh, I’m just in vio­lent agree­ment. Heard of that phrase?

E: But I wouldn’t say that any agree­ment could be violent.

M: It’s just an expres­sion. At any rate, thanks for an inter­est­ing conversation.

E: Don’t men­tion it!

M: Bye now!

E: Good­bye and thank you for chat­ting with me. And now I would like to ask you a favor. I am work­ing on my abil­ity to be self crit­i­cal. You can help by rat­ing me on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best, and one being the worst. How would you rate me?

M: I’d give you a 6.

E: Thank you for your rat­ing. I sup­pose it could have been worse. Good bye and see you later.

So, what do you think? I think I tripped it up nearly imme­di­ately when it keyed off the word ‘Add’ into the sub­ject of Com­pu­ta­tion. After I said that I couldn’t prove much beyond what I learn, etc. it launched into a new direc­tion, a typ­i­cal fall-back gam­bit for this sort of bot (and reminds me of how the Eliza psy­chother­a­pist bot from the 60s that would say some­thing like ‘Tell me more about your fam­ily’ when it was stumped.)

I was obvi­ously on my guard, and might have spo­ken about dif­fer­ent things if I were truly expect­ing a human on the other end,  but from my ‘thanks for an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion’ on, it was let­ter per­fect. I guess the con­ven­tions of proper greet­ings and farewells are so auto­matic that any machine can do them.