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21 Nov 2011

Siri, Please Teach Google Voice to Listen
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Sometimes using one’s smartphone is like playing a game of, well, “telephone.” Half the time no one can hear you and when they can, the message gets lost in translation – even when it’s not actually being translated. I’m convinced that mine is actually a “smart-ass phone” given how it willfully drops calls, truncates texts and creates general mayhem in my personal and professional lives. “Can you hear me?” becomes “Gland doo deer meat?” I sound like a Martian ordering venison.*

Perhaps I shouldn’t complain. The fact that one can speak into a rectangular hunk of plastic that beams one’s voice to the heavens and back to whomever you’re calling is pretty damn marvelous. Except when it’s not. And what truly doesn’t work is the voicemail transcription on freebie messaging service Google Voice. Again, I shouldn’t complain – the Mountain View search giant takes my voice messages and spits out text to my phone so I can take action without taking the call. For free.

The problem is that their translation mechanism works more like a game of MadLibs with an emphasis on the “mad” part, as in “mad as a hatter” or as Google Voice interprets it, “Man has gone splatter.” This man has nearly gone splatter off a few rooftops after simply hearing my own name gargled by the Google bots. As one might imagine, “Daedalus” is a voice-recognition time bomb.

On a recent occasion, Google Voice assumed my name was “metal brush.” I don’t even mind “Metal Brush,” which sounds like an ’80s hair band gone literal. What I mind is getting gibberish texted to me instead of my messages. So, I’ve turned off the automatic dispatch and instead check my voicemail like someone from the last millennium. Fortunately, iPhones let you scrub through your messages without having to listen to every second. This is godsend since, no matter, how much my outgoing message emphasizes “leave a brief message,” I get a soliloquy. It’s like having Hamlet call with a question and no intermission in sight.

Google’s been trying really hard to work out their voice recognition for some time. I remember when they were still operating Google 411, which purported to be a telephone directory when in fact it was a huge voice data acquisition tool. Since it knew where you were calling from, it could assess and catalog the nuances of your regional accent. And it was probably recording us so that somewhere there’s a record of me stammering my request for an Indian take-out number in my twee-transcontinental accent (this was before there was an app for that – the curry, not the accent).

Meanwhile, Siri, Apple’s answer to the question, “Can voice recognition just work, for crissakes?” was recently born into a few million iPhone 4Ses. Sadly, this came on the eve of the passing of Steve Jobs (whose name is probably the English translation of whatever language “Siri” is).

Consequently, she lost a little of her limelight, though she’s been more than compensated with fawning reviews and loving fan tributes. As can be expected, some wags have made videos of themselves tricking Siri into saying naughty notions chiefly by hacking their own IDs so the phone thinks their names are four-letter words, making it unclear who the joke is really on. I have yet to upgrade so I’m unsure as to how Siri will destroy the pronunciation of my name or transcribe mine or others’ words. I do hope, however, the next time Hamlet calls she’ll cut him off with a brisk, “That’s the question, isn’t?” and hang up. *Some of these examples have been made family-friendly.
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10 Nov 2011

Tipply Tributes: Celebrity Beer Names
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For your typical celebrity, it's to be expected that one day someone is going to name a sandwich or some other edible after you. Every deli menu in Hollywood boasts some kind of transubstantiation of stars into grub. In the world of cocktails, oddly, they're usually of the non-alcoholic variety ("Shirley Temple," "Roy Rogers").

On the Isle of Beer, however, it's becoming customary to borrow the names of the well-known—if often deceased—for the sake of branding a brew. Topping the list is Samuel Adams, the American statesman and founding father who is fourth down the list on his own Google search.Number one, of course, is Boston-based brewing behemoth Samuel Adams. It also numbers two and three, though I think competing for search engine optimization with a dead guy is no real triumph. A more obscure naming reference is Pliny the Elder, a super-hoppy double IPA that packs a whopping eight percent alcohol. It's named for Gaius Plinius Secundus, which is Latin for "Unpronounceable After a Couple of Beers."

Better known as Pliny the Elder, the philospher was quite the gadfly about ancient Rome who penned an encyclopedia of natural history and is the uncle of, yep, Pliny the Younger. Exacty why Santa Rosa-based Russian River Brewing Co. named their concoction after a dead Roman was probably lost with the brain cells spent during its first taste trials. Perhaps in an attempt to out-Ruskie the Russian River Brewing Company, Fort Bragg's North Coast Brewing Company poached the name of Siberian-born "Mad Monk" Rasputin, ostensibly to honor the tradition of "18th century brewers who supplied the court of Russia's Catherine the Great." Hmm.

Though the story is about as frothy as the tan head of its Old Rasputin Imperial Stout, it certainly extends the cult of personality the creepy mystic has enjoyed since the days of the czars. The brew itself extends one's appreciation for imperial stouts—great beefy beers that top out at nine percent alcohol and handily kick populist stouts (read: Guinness) to the floor.

Then there are the dead musicians. North Coast has a Brother Thelonious, named for Thelonious Monk, and Delaware's Dogfish Head Craft Brewery rolled out an homage to a boundary-breaking jazz legend last year with its Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. (The name had been waiting to grace a beer label since Davis' album of the same name was released in 1970.) Petaluma's own Lagunitas Brewing Company mounted a similar effort with a series of brews named after classic Frank Zappa albums. Of course, when the Boss croaks, we'll raise some Bruce SpringSteins in his honor.
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1 Oct 2011

How to Use the Cloud as a Writer
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“Skywriting by Word of Mouth” was a posthumously published book of prose penned by John Lennon that I was gifted a quarter-century ago. It was writing born of an anarchic love of language that sufficed as depth when I was 14 and sometimes still haunts me. Well, at least its title haunts me.

When general awareness of so-called “cloud” computing burst into media consciousness in recent years, I couldn’t help but think of Lennon’s book title and it’s reference to skywriting. Though the term is usually reserved for daredevils with an airplane, it’s become my personal metaphor for writing directly into the “cloud.” Whether that was with Google Docs, or ever increasingly, Evernote, the idea of putting words into some ephemeral-sounding digital mist appeals to me.

Moreover, I can access it anywhere and on any device. Now, moments otherwise lost waiting for the train or between bouts with baristas for refills could be productive. I could “skywrite” my columns, my blogs, bits of books, scenes in screenplays when I would otherwise be twiddling my thumbs, or more likely, using my thumbs to scroll through the Facebook or in engaging some other digital distraction.

Now, my thumbs are producers, world class hacks, hunting and pecking these very words you’re reading. What’s interesting to me is that writing to the cloud makes the creative act both incidental and opportunistic — with the right device in hand (an iPhone in this case), writing is like spackle filling the fissures in one’s schedule. Many a colleague might bristle that I’ve not ennobled the act of writing with it’s own appointment in my Google Calendar. Mind you, I do occasionally make a date with the muse but as a man with a toddler and a full-time career writing hokum on the clock, I have to let any “extracurricular” writing spring like weeds from the cracks in the concrete.

Writing into the cloud allows me to do this into a single document, always waiting for me in the sky when inspiration strikes. Of course, the “cloud” is just a server farm in an air-conditioned warehouse but by the same token, one’s muse is more neurochemistry than a visitation from the divine but we can romance it all the same.

Of course, I haven’t yet bothered to extend the cloud metaphor to its logical conclusions, namely the various forms of digital precipitation that might occur if Google flipped the wrong switch. Would words rain from the heavens? Not likely, but the waterworks would be real for me and thousands of other bawling scribes who entrusted their work to a couple of Stanford dropouts in Mountain View.

This is where a healthy denial mechanism is useful. Having lost an opus or two to various snafus (I once watched the lone copy of a terrible play I’d written wash out to sea), one might think I’d reconsider my precious “skywriting” notion and commit everything to good old pen and ink. Try emailing a page from a notebook sometime. I try to keep about a hundred miles between me an my editors for safety’s sake, so emailing is the only option for deadline writers like myself. And if by some miracle particle physics I was able to email my handwritten scrawl it would be unintelligible anyway. My carefully-keyed missives are borderline as is, so I don’t want to push it. For now, I’ll keep putting my words in the sky and hope they don’t get lost amongst the Lucy’s and the diamonds.
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10 Jul 2011

Phone Drones: Virtual Agents Answer Customer Service Call of Duty
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That a large portion of one’s customer service call are outsourced to India or other exotic locales is old news. We’ve all been patched through to a phone bank half a planet away to speak with someone trained to suppress their native accent and make references to your local weather and high school sports rivalries. Some fast food chains even outsource your drive-up burger order to countries like India where eating cow is verboten to a substantial portion of population. Lately, tax breaks and a surfeit of college-educated English speakers have attracted blue chip companies like IBM, Shell and Hershey to the Philippines, creating a customer service economy that, due to the 9-hour time difference from its American customers, operates predominately at night. Companies like MyCyberTwin, however, are anticipating yet another shift in customer service outsourcing – one that won’t require a legion of nighthawks in Manila, nor pretending to be American – just human. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, avatars (or, “virtual agents,” to use industry parlance) can answer complex questions and use rational and logical thinking. Think “Spock in a Box.” “By combining sophisticated ‘brain’ technology with state-of-the-art animation, MyCyberTwin brings a distinct and advanced virtual specialty to businesses,” explains CEO Liesl Capper. The secret sauce behind “brain technology” is the virtual agents’ ability to learn as they go, “allowing them to consistently get smarter and function at a higher level as time moves on,” Capper adds. NASA has recently implemented the technology suggesting a real-life HAL might not be far behind. Chat bots have existed in various forms since the mid-60s. MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum is credited with creating one of the first, ELIZA, a program that used a primitive form of natural language processing to simulate a real conversation with its interlocutor via text-based exchanges. Thousands of so-called “chatterbots” have spawned since with customer service implementations facilitating millions of monthly “conversations” (San Francisco-based VirtuOz claims12 million such interactions a month for clients in the Fortune 1000). But can a virtual agent pass the Turing Test? Developed in 1950 by researcher Alan Turing, the test was originally devised to answer the question “Can machines think?” and uses natural language conversation with a human as its principle gauge. Though the test has been criticized by such heavy weights as philosopher John Searle for conflating rhetorical manipulation for cognition, the test remains something of a gold standard if only for proving the fallibility of an artificial intelligence’s human interlocutor. The goal of companies like MyCyberTwin isn’t to fool people into thinking their product is human but rather improve the customer experience but interfacing with them in a manner they’re most accustomed – like humans. As online insurer Esurance proclaims in its current ad campaign “People when you want them, Technology when you don’t.” Ultimately, however, most consumers would prefer not to have to communicate with customer service at all, whether that be in Manila or on with HAL on some customer service odyssey. The virtual agent will surely learn this long before the companies who employ -- but then again, they can't hear you scream in virtual space.
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24 Jun 2011

Why Do Men Put Their Penises Online?
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“To tweet or not to tweet?” – that should have been the question for former U.S. representative Anthony Weiner whose infamous social media snafu made him and his briefs-ensconced boner a household name synonymous with “moron.” Not only did Weiner’s foray into softcore porn (and subsequent revelations about “sexting” with numerous women) provide a wide berth for dick jokes and puns of every stripe (which he’s probably endured since grammar school on account of his name), it cost him his career in politics.

The argument that what one does in one’s private life is should not be subject to public scrutiny went out the window when Weiner made his privates public by inadvertently posting them into his Twitter stream rather than as a direct message to 21-year-old Washington state woman.

It begs the question, “Why do men put their penises online?” Respond to any ad on Craigslist and, as many can attest, one stands a one in five chance of receiving a poorly-lit jpeg of some dude’s cock. It’s a wonder that no one has started an amateur porn site called “Craig’s Dicks” comprised exclusively of prick pics culled from the personal ads juggernaut. Chatroulette, the video chat service that randomly pairs participants in two-way tet-a-tets is notorious as veritable museum of male masturbation.The site rapidly cycles through chat pairings with either user given the option to hit “next” and move on to another chat – usually within seconds. After cycling through eight live images of users in front of their web cams – Bingo! – a crotch shot at the ready.

In the pantheon of paraphilias, exhibitionism is perhaps the most benign though clinicians describe it as “coercive” since it usually involves forcibly imposing one’s genitalia into another line of sight without their consent. The notion of an old-school trench coat-clad flasher is damn near quaint compared to the lone gunman taking aim at a webcam.

Albeit, confronting an exhibitionist in the flesh is surely a harrowing experience, however, it does permit one the ability to express one’s revulsion, reciprocate with bodily harm or perhaps even flash back (any of which, may or may not be the offenders goal). The online penis parader, however, uses social media to broadcast their exhibitionism from the comfort of their own homes. It combines the privacy end-users of porn expect from direct delivery of content to their laptops (no more embarrassing visits to the “adult” section of the video store – hell, for that matter, no more video stores!) with the inversely proportionate ability to broadcast oneself freely, cheaply and nakedly to millions with relative anonymity and without retribution.

This is perhaps one reason that everyone from media pundits to House minority leader Nancy Pelosi came down so, um, hard on Anthony’s weiner. It was if he received the aggregate slap back awaiting all the faceless exhibitionists lurking on the Internet. Consider his monkey spanked. To gauge the size of your "e-penis" click this humorous if NSFW link, which uses your Twitter handle to measure your size online.
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13 Jun 2011

Zombie-Proof House Exhibit Opens
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We’ve all heard of “panic rooms” and backyard bomb-shelters but when it comes to domestic fortresses, few, if any, have addressed the possibility of a zombie apocalypse. Leave it Robert Wuilfe of Napa’s uber-gallery di Rosa to curate a major exhibition of post-apocalyptic-themed works under the comforting title “Zombie-Proof House.” Billed as a is a “meditation on anxiety and hope in a troubled time,” "Zombie-Proof House" includes works in sculpture, video, photography, interactive installations and a web project. The gamut of End Times scenarios are explored including “notions of shelter, architecture, borders or fortification...” explains the exhibit’s PR. “From examining the personal losses of the financial crisis or questioning anti-immigrant rhetoric, to addressing the climate crisis, or providing step-by-step guides to political protest, the projects in Zombie-Proof House ask viewers to recognize that a future guided by fear is not inevitable.” Though having your brain eaten by the undead might be. Zombie-Proof House opens in di Rosa’s Gatehouse Gallery at 6 p.m., Saturday, June 18. The di Rosa is located at 5200 Carneros Highway, Napa, CA.dirosaart.org. Artists include Anthony Discenza, HalfLifers (Torsten Z. Burns and Anthony Discenza), Suzanne Husky, Inka Hoots (Joshua Short and Joel Dean Stockdill), Packard Jennings, Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao, Whitney Lynn, Julio Cesar Morales, Lucy Puls and Carol Selter. Curated by Robert Wuilfe
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9 Jun 2011

iCloudius: Apple's Man in the Sky
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When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the weather whimsy, simply refers to information stored in remote servers and accessible via your device of choice anywhere there is a decent Internet connection. Though the concept isn’t new (telephone companies once used the metaphor to describe their early forays into “virtual private networks”) its implementation in tech quarters gained real momentum in 2006 when Amazon introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that obviated the need for expensive server systems and paved the way for a bevy of start-ups. It was Google, however, that brought the cloud to civilians with its suite of document creation tools (aimed squarely at Microsoft’s bread and butter). Now, with iCloud, Apple has also entered the consumer cloud market, touting synchonization of one’s digital data – docs, email, calendars, iTunes library, videos and plans for world domination, between one’s MacBook, iPad, iPhone and beyond. And it’s free. Heretofore, one’s computer was like the sun in a private digital solar system around which all other devices orbited and depended for data (through increasingly arcane syncronization rituals). Conceptually, iCloud collapses this solar system into a single celestial body accessible, anywhere, anytime by whatever piece of gear happens to be in your hand. It’s as if you’re opening a wormhole into the fabric of your virtual universe andt hough other companies offer aspects this “unified field theory of your stuff online,” including Amazon’s “Cloud Drive” and Google’s Gmail inbox (sort of), none offers total integration of everything in a single service that’s hardware-agnostic. This is the crux of Jobs’ plan, “demoting” the “PC” and even his own company’s iconic Mac line to mere, as he explained, “devices.” Of course, to those who’ve eluded induction into the cult of Apple, the company’s products have always been mere devices. For true believers, however, they’re tantamount to religious talismans that signify belief in a higher being – namely Jobs. His conceptual downgrading of his stock and trade might prove as revelatory a moment in the history of personal computing as Macintosh did for user-experience in the early 80s. It takes the way we deal with data, the ones and zeroes that comprise much of our quotidian experience not to mention whole flanks of our self-concept and moves them from the concrete to the abstract, from “there” to “everywhere,” in a manner analogous to going from the corporeal to the spiritual (which, by some accounts, Jobs might be soon doing). The device, like the body, is but a vessel. “We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” Jobs beamed. It’s not hard to imagine him hovering there too – lightning bolt in hand.
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4 Jun 2011

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
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When those of a certain generation first hear of the "Filter Bubble," they might reflect on that brief two weeks in the mid-'90s when the band Filter was kind of popular. These days, the Filter Bubble, according to former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser, is the means by which the Information Superhighway functions more like a private driveway upon which only targeted and personalized information travels at the expense of the broader range of knowledge. This shift to personalization raises as many questions about one's online privacy as it does about censorship, whether it's intentional or the result of an algorithm trying to give you what it thinks you might like - or buy. As Pariser explains in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, a personalized world is one that only serves to confirm our existing beliefs as determined by the digital breadcrumbs we've left along the way. When we only receive information aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, "It's difficult to maintain perspective," suggests Pariser. Or, as he whimsically put it during a recent chat at Seattle's Town Hall Center for Civic Life, "When you step to the side for a new perspective, it's as if the world moves to meet your gaze." In an Amazon Q & A, in which Pariser credited the bookseller for its relative transparency as regards its product suggestions with the apropos example, "We're showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984," the Internet activist explained, "Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop." "The technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in," Pariser said to The Atlantic. "It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience." Of course, the Filter Bubble is more the unintended consequence of a business strategy than an insidious plot on the part of a gaggle of geeks in Silicon Valley to control your Internet experience and by extension your thinking. The fact is, in some cases, we're censoring it ourselves. As Pariser recently explained on KQED's Forum, "Because Facebook mainly uses how many people 'like' something as a means of figuring out what they should show other people, what that means is that you see well-liked news on Facebook." Google, however, has 57 different ingredients in its secret sauce. Even when logged out of your account, Google gleans signals from your online behavior and applies them to a profile that it uses to tailor results more to your liking. Consequently, like a fingerprint, no two search results are the same for different users. Try it - it's spooky. It should be noted that the sources for this piece came entirely from links presented through the various mechanisms Pariser describes, so it's likely only part of the story - the part the robots intended to be seen by someone in the media to be shared with those it knows are reading that media. When I asked him personally what content producers could do to override the algorithm, Pariser essentially said we're SOL: "Content creators are at its mercy." Time to crank the Filter.
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21 May 2011

Venture Capital: Start Me Up
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Money makes the world go around—really, really fast—which is why one's head tends to spin with each new billion-dollar valuation and smug twenty-something on a magazine cover. This isn't anything new; it's even something of a Bay Area tradition. Or at least that's the impression one might get watching Something Ventured, Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's documentary exploring the history of venture capital and the men who first saw dollar signs in Silicon Valley. "We start at the back, and if the numbers are big, we look at the front to see what kind of business it is," laughs the dapper Tom Perkins, early in the film. Perkins is the gimlet-eyed partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who successfully funded companies like Google, Amazon and Genentech. The film, which screened earlier this month at the San Francisco International Film Festival, serves to remind that not only did these swaggering money men make possible companies like Apple, Atari, Cisco and Intel, but they're responsible for recasting the American dream with a geek sensibility. At the Founder Conference in Mountain View last week, the geeks were in full force, attending panels and seminars with titles like "Can You Really Raise Angel Money with One Email in 2011?" (I wasn't able to get the answer.) Presented by Foundrs.com—that's not a typo, but rather a spelling both predicated on the availability of domain names and a hip, post-dot-com disregard for vowels (think "Flickr")—the conference was crammed. According to its romance copy, organizers promised a "simple alternative to incorporating for Web 2.0 startups," which came in the form of meet-ups and some order of "virtual company product." Whichever way companies surely sprang from the event, it was evident that cash was flowing. The numbers, it's worth noting, were not in the obscene, let's-buy-a-foosball-table amounts of last decade, but rather sober seedlings of cash that almost seemed quaint. I overheard a sharp-dressed man talking loudly on a mobile phone, insisting to his interlocutor that he "can get you $50,000 in seed money right now, if that's all you want. People love the concept—you're a candlemaker in Marin!" Sure, candlemaking might not be Facebook material, but here was a guy in a suit obviously excited about the notion. This is what the Bay Area does best—it takes little ideas, infuses them with passion, smarts and drive, and turns them into big ideas. Even my toddler son seemed to get the bug. He filched a penny from my coat pocket and promptly threw it in the fountain—a small investment that turned an otherwise banal water feature into a wishing well.
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29 Apr 2011

Publish Your Goddamn Book Already
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Publishing is dead. Long live publishing. Or at least, self-publishing, which, thanks to a plethora of services and a general de-stigmatization of the so-called vanity press could be entering something of a golden era. So where are the literary breakouts? The through-line from Gutenberg's invention of movable type to the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-'80s to our present social-media megaphones, which permit instantaneous publishing of any thought to traverse from one's temporal lobe to one's fingertips, can be graphed with a zigzag darting between the authors and publishers and whoever thinks who is in charge at any moment. Turns out, the author has always been in charge. Moreover, the social acceptance of blogging and other forms of essentially self-published writing has fomented a sea change in the minds of authors who once fretted whether their work was legitimate or not if it hadn't passed through the hands of a third party. Remarkably, until the 20th century, most literary works were author-published, an MO that seems to be returning thanks to a myriad of new publishing solutions that have emerged in the past decade. Besides the ubiquity of print-on-demand services like CreateSpace and Xlibris that provide an a la carte menu of services to escort one's work from a manuscript file to a printed paperback, the burgeoning eBook phenomenon is rapidly becoming where one is most likely to find the next Jonathan Franzen or Sarah Vowell. Electronic readers are approaching market ubiquity. At present writing, at a cafe, three of the four people reading on the patio are doing so on electronic devices—two Kindles and one iPad; the lone analog holdout is reading a yellowed, dog-eared paperback that looks as if it were rescued from a recycle bin. Apple's online iBook store, Amazon's Kindle Store and Barnes & Nobles' Nook store are among the throng of new venues for the written word now available to authors. Pushing written content to readers online has been here since day one of the internet. But the ability of readers to push real dollars back up the pipe to the author, conveniently, safely and instantly is something else entirely. New companies are springing up to facilitate these transactions and deliver "creator-owned" content (as they say in the indie comics trade) into your digital devices. Among them is independent music stalwart CD Baby, which took its music marketing model (they aid direct-to-consumer music sales for bands via downloads and on-demand CD delivery) and retooled it for authors. Book Baby is among the latest ventures serving this emerging market, helping authors place their creations on iPads and alike for a nominal fee. It's high time the would-be literati exhume their treatises and tracts, tell-alls and tomes from the virtual drawers of their laptops and begin the next renaissance in letters. The sound the next literary lion makes won't be a roar so much as a click.
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