Who am I?
I'm a Market Research Manager in iTunes at Apple. Before that, I co-founded a teddy bear company called FanZanimal. Before that I went to Harvard Business School. Before that I worked for Bain & Company. Before that I went to Brown University and played lacrosse. Before that I went to Milton Academy. Before that I went to Meadowbrook. Before that I had nothing to do but root for the Red Sox.
See also: AlexBain.com, Twitter, Goodreads, Flickr, Vimeo, Last.fm, TripIt, Facebook, LinkedIn, Furio, My “favs”, & email
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We find out the gender tomorrow. I’d love to hear some guesses.
If you’re wrong, no one will ever hold it against you. If you’re right, you get to pretend forever that you knew what would happen.
Boy or girl?
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Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.
But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.
Cool article about Google’s Translation Tool. The list of projects that might be easier to takle with billions of data points instead of rules is endless, & probably includes fields like healthcare, meteorology, calling football plays, etc.
via Andy McAfee
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How to Become an Insta-Expert
The author nailed every Oscar pick just by watching prediction markets.
I’ve been doing this with American Idol so far this year. I’ve watched ~30 total minutes of the season, but because I’ve been watching the futures market for the contestants, I actually have opinions about how things will turn out.
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My friends, the Barneses (sp?), put together this fantastic 20 second video of their son Jack’s first experience with crawling.
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Time to update my 3 year-old tradition of documenting how I’m wished happy birthday by medium.
Some thoughts:
- Some friends sent along well-wishes via more than one medium. I double-counted them. I thought about only counting the first, or counting each one as a half, but figured that this exercise isn’t intended to gauge my own popularity so much as the popularity of each medium.
- Similarly, I thought about plotting it on a 100% axis, but liked that the absolute axis made two points:
- Facebook appears to be stealing “share” from email, but not other mediums.
- There seems to be a static amount of kindness generated by the combination of email, Facebook, and in-person greetings, and the other platforms are additive.
- This year was the first year that IM and Tumblr appeared on the list. IM may have been bigger in the past, but I was never signed on. Now I’m attached to IM almost all day long. Tumblr just recently turned on a “replies” feature sort of like comments, and my cousin-in-law, Sarah, took quick advantage.
- I wish there were an easy way to control for things like day-of-the-week and social media connections. I’ve got way more Facebook and Twitter friends now than in 2008, but I don’t have a great record of the historical counts. Oh well.
The whole thing is also a fun reminder of how lucky I am to have such great friends/family.
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The birthday plan
I don’t usually make a big deal of my birthday (especially a funny number like 31), but Lisa very kindly does. She suggested an itinerary for the day, that we tweaked a bit together. Here it is:
- Jog along the water (while she catches some extra Z’s)
- Chai lattés from Coffee Bean
- Hitting the neighborhood indian buffet for lunch
- Practicing the piano together (she’s normally resistant, because she doesn’t like playing on my unnaturally weighted keyboard)
- Reading together at a nearby café
- A nice walk along the water
- Head out to the East Bay for dinner with Lisa’s fam, where there’s a rumor that her mother’s famous applesauce cake may make an appearance.
This is a great way to usher in my 32nd year.
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”The “Notes” app on the iPhone will forever be a simulation of a legal pad; the similar app on the iPad is a legal pad.
This quote from an article on
iPad Application Design stuck out. I hope a lot of the best apps we’ll see for the iPad will have real life metaphors that will feel natural. Reading this made me wish I knew how to write software.Via Gruber
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Just received an email from Tumblr today reminding me that this site just turned 3!
I’m a bit surprised, actually, because my first post here was in July of ‘07.
Back then, I thought Tumblr would be a complement to my Typepad site, but I quickly discovered it was just so much easier to use, and that the Tumblr team was just so much stronger than anyone else out there working in social media, so I wanted to hitch my wagon to their horse. Today’s email from them is a perfect example of the little things Tumblr nails.
Likes
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News flash
A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week,...
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mommy got a new lens cap (saran wrap no longer needed)
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Business in front; party in the back!
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Apparently the book was Shrunk & White.
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(via cattycamehome)
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©2010. Postage by Greg Cooper. Icons by P.J. Onori. Thanks to Jamie Cassidy & Panic.
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