CAT | Mobility
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Amazon shows exactly how much you actually own your E-Books
0 Comments | Posted by admin in Mobility
How ironic it is that Amazon would exercise their Big Brother like control over Kindle devices with George Orwell’s 1984. Apparently the publisher of the E-Book (MobileReference) decided that it didn’t want to publish Orwell’s “1984″ or “Animal Farm” anymore, and Amazon pulled the book from their Kindle store. This is all well and good. Publishers have rights regarding what they sell and Amazon really has no option but to abide by what publishers say, but where this really becomes scary is what amazon did after pulling the E-Books from the store.
During the night of July 16 Amazon electronically and without warning deleted all copies of both E-Books from all Kindle devices connected over Amazon’s Whispernet system. Amazon credited the accounts of the customers that had the book removed from their device, so this is an apparently legal action, but this brings up all kinds of questions about customer rights and what the future of the service might be.
The first major point is that Amazon’s advertising for E-Books talks about customers “buying” the novels, but if Amazon can pull the E-Book from your device at will are you really buying it or just renting it long term for a one time fee. Also if you “bought” 1984 through the Kindle store, therefore owning a licensed copy of the E-Book, and you chose to backup your device on your computer, do you own that backup copy or since you have been refunded for your purchase are your morally and legally required to delete that backup copy. Also is there going to be any kind of attempt to make sure that these backup copies are deleted.
Another much scarier idea of the potential of this newly shown ability that Amazon has over your Kindle is what happens is you purchase an edgy book and it, or parts of it, becomes banned (something that many countries have a history of). Will Amazon come into your device and delete it or replace it with a censored version without prior notification. And a case that fits even better into the Big Brother themes for 1984 what happens if Amazon does this replacement and never tells the customer that this has happened or that the edition of the book they are reading is any different from the original.
One might like to believe that in these modern times the ugly cloud of censorship has long passed, and the long warned of existence of Big Brother will be prevented by our publicly elected government and a citizenship that won’t stand for that kind of control, but as recently as 2005 the Department of Justice started the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force to surf theinternet and protect us from seeing anything that doesn’t pass the Supreme Court’s obscenity test, even if they acts portrayed are completely legal (as shown by the arrest and incarceration of Extreme Associates in 2009). I really hope that Kindle users will press this issue and demand some kind of guarantee about Amazon using this technology in the future instead of their promise to act differently in the future.
Relative link:
Very confused Kindle community over the deletions and subsequent refunds
3
Universal voice/text translator in the mist?
0 Comments | Posted by admin in Bona Fide Nerdasms, Mobility, Software
The U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency funds a research project it calls Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE). GALE is allowing companies like Dial Direct and Sakhr Software to produce software for smart phones that would allow you to communicate anywhere in the world, without years of language class. Here is a demo of their really neat translation app for the iPhone.
The languages that the government is focusing on are Arabic and Chinese, so that’s where the development is now, but once the ground work is laid it ought to be pretty easy to port of out to other languages, especially since Arabic and Chinese are two of the harder ones for English speaking people. The government is testing both speech to text and text to text translation (I guess they figure once you have the translation saying it is pretty eays) and they want 95% of a fluent humans “edit-distance” before this project is considered a success. Edit-distance is “The number of edits (modifications) that someone needs to make to the output of a machine translation system such that the resulting text is fluent English and completely captures the meaning of the gold standard reference.” They are using a few other methods to test the products automatically until they start to reach that 95% threshold but I don’t see any real need to bog you down with any more definitions that necessary.
The last published test of potential software was completed over January and February of 2008. The published results don’t look too promising. The leading scores in each category are as follows (score listed is BLUE-4 look in the link for more data on it but possible scores are between 0 and 1, 1 is perfect translation)
- Arabic to English: 0.4557
- Chinese to English: 0.3089
- English to Chinese: 0.4142
Those aren’t that inspiring, but they are and year and a half old (the results for 09 won’t be released till October 30th). The demo video shows just how far they have been able to come in that time. I don’t speak Arabic at all, so I don’t know how good the English to Arabic translation was, but the Arabic to English made perfect sense (yes granted it was one rather simple sentence, but hey what can you do). Just think in the near future you may actually be able to turn your smartphone into a business tool and not just a mobile gaming platform.
As usual Links and such:
NIST 2008 Official Results: http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/mt/2008/doc/mt08_official_results_v0.html
General Info about the GALE project: http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/gale/
Sakhr website (not very useful): http://www.sakhrusa.com/arabic-machine-translation-MT.html
21
Nokia makes a great step towards wireless power, really
0 Comments | Posted by admin in Bona Fide Nerdasms, Mobility
I know I’ve made my far share of “wireless power isn’t on today” jokes and made fun of more than a few people who are suffering power issues from “high impedance air gaps,” but Nokia is looking to charge their phones wirelessly in the future. This isn’t any fancy electromagnet setup you have to be within harmful radiation distance of, it is charging you phone in your pocket as you walk down any city street.
The basic idea here is that there are so many electronic signals out there (i.e. cell phone towers, satellite TV, radio stations, your wireless router, etc…) that one could literally produce energy from them. The waves will cause an oscillation and that in turn mixes with some laws of physics that I only got a C on after I cheated off the smart girl in class and they turn into enough power to do something useful with. Apparently this is much the same ways that RFID systems work where electromagnetic waves are converted into electric signal, the difference being that this system will store the energy from that signal rather than interpret it.
Right now they are only able to produce 3 to 5 milliwatts, but if they get a receiver as big as they hope, like from 500 megahertz to 10 gigahertz, they think they could get 50 milliwatts out of the charging system. This isn’t going to give you the power to stream all of Ozzfest to the internet from your iPhone, but it could charge a dead phone, or if you had a phone with pretty low power usage when it’s closed, you might even be able to slowly charge it as you go about your day which is pretty cool.
Harry Ostaffe, head of marketing for a company (powercast) that makes similar products says that it would take 1,000 strong signals to produce 50 milliwatts, but lucky for him more and more things that produce electromagnetic waves are built built (or plugged in) every day. As has been the trend of my last few posts, this is pretty cool to begin with, but holy cow this early technology could turn into something truly awesome with some serious R & D and even more imagination.
Here’s some linky goodness:
MIT Beta Technology Review: http://beta.technologyreview.com/communications/22764/
Nokia Blog On the Topic: http://conversations.nokia.com/2009/06/10/ambient-power/
