IBM program and supercomputer to take on 'Jeopardy'

Alex Trebek, host of Jeopardy Show. Photo: Flickr.

IBM wants to replicate its success they had with Deep Blue in defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov by creating a program to conquer the popular TV quiz game show “Jeopardy”.

IBM is planning to announce today about this new program to compete against “Jeopardy” contestants. It will probably be similar like its highly successful “Deep Blue” super computer but have to face entirely different challenges. IBM developed a chess-playing program and ran it in their supercomputer Deep Blue, which went on to defeat the then world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

Some of the challenges the new program faces are it should be able make comparisons and interpretations of different statements it is given and also has to respond quickly with competing humans in the contest.

IBM’s team leader for this research, David A. Ferrucci, an artificial intelligence researcher told New York Times that it still has a long way to go to fully develop this new program.

He said the team is not trying to create a thinking machine but rather a new class of program that can “understand human questions and respond to them correctly”.

Despite significant advances in artificial intelligence research, we are yet to develop a machine that can understand the language and interact with humans fluently.

IBM has been working on this project for the past three years and has 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval.

In the proposed contest between the IBM computer and the competitors, Jeopardy producers will host the competition. To make it easy for the computer, the producers will give the questions in the form of text and its competitors will see the questions in text as well as hear the questions from the host, Alex Trebak.

The competition will be done in real-time, no internet connection will be allowed for the proposed IBM supercomputer “Blue Gene”. It will base its answers from the knowledge base it acquires prior to the show.

The Jeopardy producers and IBM haven’t announced the date of this competition but said they both are working on it. There is a possibility that they may bring in Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy contestant who won a record 74 times and collected $2.52 million in 2004.

In a demo witnessed by the New York Times, IBM showed a brief glimpse of the program. They found the computer did well in some areas but did poorly in others.

Will “Blue Gene” succeed like “Deep Blue”?

Egyptian Cleric Wants To Shut Down Starbucks In The Arab And Muslim World

An Egyptian Muslim cleric complains that Starbucks is using “Esther” the Queen of the Jews in their logo and wants all Muslims to boycott the shop and wants the King to shut down Starbucks in Mecca and Medina.

Starbucks already has plenty of worries less sales and too much competition, now it has to worry about another one from Egypt.

Safwat Higazi, an Egyptian cleric said in his speech to his TV audience that they should all boycott Starbucks for offending the Muslims by using the Hebrew Biblical character “Esther” in their logo.

He said in his speech:

"The girl in the Starbucks logo is Queen Esther. Do you know who Queen Esther was and what the crown on her head means? This is the crown of the Persian kingdom. This queen is the queen of the Jews. She is mentioned in the Torah, in the Book of Esther. The girl you see is Esther, the queen of the Jews in Persia."

He urged his followers not only to boycott the Starbucks but also ask others to stop going there. But at least he is decent by advocating peace protests, he doesn’t want his followers to use violence to promote this boycott.

Higazi requested the Saudi King to shut down the Starbucks located opposite the King Abdul Aziz Gate in Mecca and opposite the Al-Majid Gate in Al-Madina. He also wants the Starbucks shops in Cairo to be shut down as well.



He narrated the “Queen Esther” story to make his point. King Xerxes chose the Jewish Esther from a group of seven beautiful virgin girls. After the King selected Esther, he placed a crown on her head making her the “Queen of Persia”. Higazi claims the crown in the logo resembles the crown of Esther and hence wants all Muslims to boycott Starbucks.

He closed his speech with the following:

"We want Starbucks to be shut down throughout the Arab and Islamic world. We want it to be shut down in Mecca and in Al-Medina. I implore King Abdallah bin Abd Al-‘Aziz, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques: It is inconceivable that in Mecca and Al-Madina, there will be a picture of Queen Esther, the queen of the Jews."

The original logo of Starbucks was conceived in 1971 and it represents a mythical two-tailed mermaid. It is based on Greek mythology, a half-fish/half-female (a mermaid). The original version had a semi-nude figure and later it was transformed to a cleaner and public-friendly current image version we see in Starbucks.

Apple: App Store Reaches 1 Billion Applications Total In 9 Months

Apple’s iTunes App Store sells its 1 Billionth application. The store has more than 25,000 free and paid applications and reached this total in less than 9 months.

Apple has set a high bar with iPhone and it’s App Store. Apple announced today that it reached the incredible 1 billionth application download mark.

The applications downloaded from the iTunes, has been increasing at a rapid rate since it launched its App Store last year. It reached 300 million downloads in early December, and reached the half billion mark in January, 16, 2009, which means the next half billion applications were downloaded in just three months.

Apple has posted a special page after the 1 billion mark was reached.

Apple sells 1 billion applications in 9 months Apple.com.

Apple said whoever downloaded any application from the store during the past two weeks will be eligible to win $10,000 iTunes gift card, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule and iPod Touch.

Google Labs Launches 'Similar Images' And 'Google News Timeline'

Google Labs has come up with two new excellent features “Similar Images” and “Google News Timeline” that will make our searches more efficient.

Google Labs hosts many applications that were developed through Google’s "20 percent time” policy, where Googlers can work 20 percent of their time on any project they wish. Some of the novel projects that came of Google Labs are Google Maps, iGoogle and Google News.

This two new features will most likely be implemented with existing Google Images search and Google News search.

How does “Similar Images” work?

Just like when you search a term, Google recommends similar terms to aid your search, this “Similar Images” work similarly, and helps you find the right image among thousands and thousands of images.

For example suppose if you search for “jaguar” image, you will either get the actual cat as well as the Jaguar car. You will get search results like the following:

A "jaguar" search gives car and cat images. Googleblog.blogspot.com

But if you wanted just one of them, then click the “Similar images” link you see below the images to get the same type of images.

Google Labs lets us see only cat images in search. Googleblog.blogspot.com

But if you want only the car images then click either the “Similar images” link or click this one.

Only Car images are seen in Google search. Googleblog.blogspot.

This “Similar images” search will be very useful when you are trying to narrow down your choices.

The video explains this feature.

Another feature Google Labs introduced was “Google News Timeline”.

Google blog states the following about this new feature:

Google News Timeline organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or just including a time period in your query (i.e., "1977").

Here is one example when you search “Steven Spielberg” in movies, you will find a time line as shown in this link.

The Google News Timeline has some bugs in it, so the results are not perfect but it gives a rough idea about the search subject.

For now these two features are available in Google App Engine but later I am sure they will be incorporated in the main Google search.

Check it out and leave comments whether you find these two features useful or not.

The happiest children in Europe are in Netherlands, Scandinavia

Glanerburg School in Netherlands. Photo: Johan Koolwaij.

According to a British study, the happiest children in Europe live in the Netherlands and in the Scandinavian countries. Britain is ranked 24th among 29 countries.

The research was compiled by York University at northern England for the Child Poverty Action (CPAG) and used data from 2006.

The researchers focused on youngsters aged up to 19. They compared the 29 European countries and used 43 different criteria such as infant mortality, obesity, poverty and housing.

The study showed the happiest children lived in Netherlands, which scored high in all categories.

The Scandinavians (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland) came next. The researchers noted the children in these countries are less prone to risky behaviors such as early sexual intercourse, smoking and drinking than their counterparts. They also had low level of children deaths caused by accidents.

Norway heads the list with the best housing and quality of neighborhoods, vital for raising children.

Germany finished eight, France finished 15th and Britain was ranked higher only above countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta.

CPAG reported despite Britain being one of the leading economies in the world, they ranked lower because a high number of children were living in families where neither parent work.

CPAG chief executive Kate Green wants government to include more measures for child wellbeing in the budget. She told AFP:

"We cannot afford a 'do nothing' Budget for children. The report shows a clear link between high levels of child wellbeing and low levels of child poverty.

"If we fail to protect families during the downturn, progress on child wellbeing could go into reverse."

The full list of ranking is as follows:

1. Netherlands
2. Sweden
3. Norway
4. Iceland
5. Finland
6. Denmark
7. Slovenia
8. Germany
9. Ireland
10. Luxembourg
11. Austria
12. Cyprus
13. Spain
14. Belgium
15. France
16. Czech Republic
17. Slovakia
18. Estonia
19. Italy
20. Poland
21. Portugal
22. Hungary
23. Greece
24. United Kingdom
25. Romania
26. Bulgaria
27. Latvia
28. Lithuania
29. Malta

Thriving Amazon Ant Colony Has No Males

Mycocepurus smithii ant colony has no males. Photo: Eol.org.

A University of Arizona biologist has found a rare ant colony in the Amazon jungle with no males and has virtually no sexual organs. But their colony thrives compared to other ant species.

Anna Himler, a University of Arizona biologist and her team studied an ant species, Mycocepurus smithii, after she heard about their successful colony. Many ant varieties keep domesticated “farms”, where they breed different types of fungus for food. But “Mycocepurus smithii” ants have far successful farms compared to others.

Himler found the farms of this particular ant variety contained more fungus and also more varieties of fungus than other ants.

Himler and her team wanted to find out what makes this particular ant species more successful than others. They found that there were no male ants and their sexual organs virtually disappeared. The ants reproduced by cloning.

They found the fungus in the ant farms also reproduced using cloning method.

Himler gave the following reasoning for this ant behavior. Himler told BBC:

“It avoids the energetic cost of producing males, and doubles the number of reproductive females produced each generation from 50% to 100% of the offspring.”

All the ants in the colony were clones of the ant queen.

There are advantages and disadvantages with the all-female population. The advantages are without men in their midst the women can spend more time and energy to produce elaborate type of farms. The disadvantage is if the queen responsible for cloning becomes vulnerable to pandemics, then the entire colony becomes vulnerable because of inheriting the same immune system.

Himler said she has seen many ant varieties that have unusual reproductive strategies but the “Mycocepurus smithii” ants are very rare in nature.

YouTube Launches CaptionTube: A Caption Editor For Videos

CaptionTube editor helps you add captions to YouTube videos.

YouTube is introducing a web based application “CaptionTube” that lets you add text to the videos in either one or multiple languages.

Previously adding closed-caption text in videos is a tedious process and some might require third parties to add the texts. The user has to submit time codes and captions in a separate .SUB file along with the video. Now with YouTube’s web based application “CaptionTube”, anyone can add captions online easily.

CaptionTube is a new feature under YouTube’s “TestTube”.

Once you logon to your free CaptionTube account and link it with your YouTube account, you can get the YouTube URL and start editing. You can add text and specify the duration (how long you want each caption to appear in the video).

You can add caption not only to your videos but also other videos. You can also add multiple languages in CaptionTube.

If you want your videos to become more popular, adding captions helps by making your videos searchable to a wider audience.

This feature along with “AudioSwap” feature, which lets you add music to your videos, is very useful if you want to edit your videos and make it look more professional.

How to Add Captions with CaptionTube?

Read Articles For Free In iPhone With Wall Street Journal App

Wall Street Journal App for iPhone.

Unlike other newspapers, Wall Street Journal charges its subscribers to read its articles over the internet but now they are free for the iPhone readers via its new App.

When News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch purchased Wall Street Journal (WSJ), he wanted to drop the “Online Paywall” and make all its content free for everyone, but quickly changed his mind and decided to keep the subscriptions.

If you try to access the WSJ.com directly only a select number of articles will be available for free, others are available only for paid subscribers ($103 per year for online version and $140 per year for online and newspaper versions).

WSJ now wants to make it contents free for iPhone users. They have introduced a new iPhone App, which will make all of the WSJ’s articles readily accessible.

Surprisingly, WSJ offers online subscription for Amazon Kindle users ($9.99 per month). For a 24 month Amazon Kindle subscription, you can get an iPhone instead and read WSJ articles for free.

Wired.com says WSJ is doing this in iPhone to broaden up its user base and try to get the money from advertisers instead and keeping the subscriptions alive for internet subscribers.

If you have an iPhone, you can start reading the WSJ articles with this App link.

New Gmail Labs Feature Adds Photos In Email Message

Previously, we were able to attach images in emails only, we were unable to insert them in regular message. With the new Gmail Labs feature, we can insert images from the computer or from the web.

Gmail has added a new feature “Inserting images” in Labs, once you enable it you can insert images in your email messages easily. Previously, we were able to attach images only.

Logon to your Gmail account and go to “Settings” --> click “Labs” --> click enable button in “Inserting images” feature --> Click “Save Changes”.

You will now see an image icon when you compile a new message as shown below. Click the icon, you can either insert an image from the desktop or you can insert an image from the web (type or paste the URL where the image is hosted).

Insert photos and images in Gmail message. Photo: Googlesystem.blogspot.

Once the image is inserted, you can then resize it by clicking the edges, just like you do in the MS Paint program or click the image once, you will see “Small”, “Medium” or “Large”, you can choose any one of the sizes.

Other email programs like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail doesn’t have this “insert image” feature.

Indian woman sets record by eating 51 of world's hottest chilies

An Indian woman set a Guinness Book of Record by eating 51 of the world’s hottest chili pepper in under two minutes. The previous record was 8 jalapeno peppers by a South African.

“Bhut Jolokia” is considered the world’s hottest chili by the Guinness Book of Records in 2007. It is also called as “ghost chilies”.

The ghost chili has more than 1 million Scoville units, the unit of measurement used to rate the spiciness. The nearest chili, Jalapeno peppers has spiciness between 2,500 and 8,000. Even the hottest sauce, Tabasco sauce has only 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units.

Anadita Dutta Tamuly, 28, housewife in Assam, India ate 51 ghost chili peppers in less than 2 minutes in front of chef Gordon Ramsay, who was monitoring her Guinness Book of Record attempt.

Ramsay, who is currently in India taping his show for the Channel 4 British program, also ate one of the “ghost chili”. But quickly gave up eating it and screamed for water.

Tamuly, after eating 51 bhut jolokia peppers, then shocked her audience by smearing handful of the seeds from bhut jolokia into her eyes.

The previous record holder was a South African, who ate eight jalapenos in one minute in 2002. Tamuly beat that record handsomely.

Tamuly told Telegraph that she has eating bhut jolokia since her childhood days.

"When I was five I had a sore tongue and my mother applied a chili paste to cure the infection. Since then I developed a penchant for chilies...After that I found eating chilies was a great way to stay healthy. Every time I have a cold or flu I just munch on some chilies and I feel better.

Tamuly was disappointed however that she couldn’t eat 60 chilies, which she was able to do in practice sessions before the world record attempt.

Gmail Feature Tells You Whether Your Contact Is Asleep or Awake

Gmail adds a new Labs feature that shows whether the time zone of the email sender is daytime or night time, so you can either send or delay the email message accordingly.

This “Sender Time Zone” labs feature will help you to react properly to messages instead of disturbing them late at night.

In some case we tend to respond by calling them right away but it may not be the appropriate time to call them, this Gmail feature helps us by showing their local times.

To activate this feature, do the following sequence of steps:

Click “Settings” --> Click “Labs” --> Enable “Sender Time Zone” --> Click “Save Changes”.

Once you enable the feature, your messages will show as follows with “phone” icon next to their names. A green phone icon shows the people are probably awake (between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender’s local time zone) and red phone icon implies they are either sleeping or out of the office. When you see the red phone icon it is better to wait until the next day.

Gmail shows Sender's Time. Gmailblog.blogspot.com

Another thing you will notice in Gmail is the time the message was sent and what is the current local time there, which will help you plan accordingly to call them or not. You can see this by clicking the “Show details” next to the email.

Gmails shows time message sent and time zone. Gmailblog.blogspot.com

Gmail is able to show these time via the message headers from the emails received, which shows the time sent and time zone information. If they don’t contain the time information, Gmail will not show the phone icon and time zone information.

It is a useful feature to have if you work in a global environment or even within local environments like the US, which has four different time zones and countries like Canada and Australia.

Bottled Water Requires 2,000 Times More Energy Than Tap Water

A new study has found one liter of bottled water uses as much as 2,000 times more energy compared to the public tap water.

Despite knowing that bottled water is only marginally different than tap water and costs thousand times more, still people are consuming bottled water in large numbers. From 1976 to 2006, the average amount of bottled water sold per person per year in the United States jumped from about 6 liters (1.6 gallons) to 116 liters (30.6 gallons).

A recent government study found the cost of bottled water is 2000 times the cost of the public tap water in New York.

Department of Environmental Protection told New York Times that city tap water costs $5.99 per 100 cubic feet, eight ounces of New York water cost five one-hundredths of one cent, or $0.0005, including the cost of treating the wastewater. That makes the same size eight ounce bottle of Poland Spring check in at 2000 times the cost at one dollar.

The new study conducted by the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development Environment and Security in Oakland, California found bottled water consumes as much as 2,000 times more energy than tap water. The study also found the total bottled water consumption in the U.S. consumes 32 to 54 million barrels of oil in 2007.

Americans purchased more than 33 billion liters of bottled water and worldwide more than 200 billion liters of bottled water was sold.

The appetite for bottled water is growing at a high pace, since 2001, bottled water sales have increased by 70 percent. Consumers buy more bottled water than either milk or beer. The increased consumption of bottled water has increased the consumption of energy. If we add the total amount of plastic waste discarded into the environment, the costs will be even higher.

Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute and his team compared three case studies, water bottled and used in Los Angeles, water bottled in South Pacific and shipped to Los Angeles and water bottled in France and shipped in different ways to Los Angeles.

They found that for local bottling company, the energy-intensive step is in producing the PET plastic bottles and for longer trips transportation consumes more energy.

They advise to drink water locally, which will help save more energy and costs less.

Gleick told Discovery:

"We have very good tap water in this country...It's cheap. It's readily available. And it's much lower in energy use."

The study’s findings are presented in the current journal Environmental Research Letters.

How many more studies need to be done to persuade people from drinking bottled water that costs more, consumes more energy and produces more environmental waste?

Google Chrome Is That Simple

If you are not using Google Chrome, you should.

The video shows at the start how your current browser looks and in the end it shows how Chrome is simple.

This was produced by Google Chrome team in Japan.

You can download Chrome here.

Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter

Twitter - Micro-blogging service.

Sources close to Michael Arrington, TechCrunch say Google is in the late stages to acquire the popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.

Google is in the final stages of negotiations to acquireTwitter for an estimated value of $250 million according to sources close to Michael Arrington, TechCrunch.

Facebook tried to purchase Twitter few months ago but it was rejected by Twitter because it was offered overvalued Facebook stocks instead of just cash value.

In Google’s case, they will most likely offer cash as well as Google shares, which the owners can exchange for money if the deal goes through.

Twitter has gained immense popularity from a broad range of users. In some cases the news shows up first in Twitter before it appears in the main articles. Michael Arrington recently said Twitter can be used as asearch engine for trends.

It will be ideal for Google to make this purchase. If the deal goes through, Twitter founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, will be making their second sale to Google. Previously they sold the Blogger.com to Google five years ago.

The deal between the two looks serious, another source has confirmed to Arrington that the two sides are working together to incorporate Google search engine in Twitter and acquisition discussions are ongoing between the two parties.

'The Simpsons' TV Show Get Postage Stamps

The characters of “The Simpsons” show will be featured in the new stamps to be released on April 9. The United States Postal Service (USPS) is honoring the 20th anniversary of the TV show.

The Simpsons first appeared on the Fox channel in December 1989 and since then they have been going strong and has become the longest-running prime-time comedy show. They have recorded more than 400 episodes so far.

The USPS will honor with a special set of stamps honoring the characters in the show.

Matt Groening, the creator of the show, will provide artwork for the new stamps, which will be available for preview from April 9 on the USPS website (http://www.usps.com).

Mark Saunders the USPS spokesman told BBC:

"The Simpsons are American icons, quite frankly...We're excited about it, and we think America will be, too. It's a great opportunity for us to reach a new generation of stamp enthusiasts."

According to Saunders, this is the first time they are issuing stamps for an ongoing prime time show.

If you are a stamp collector or love the show then you can buy the first day cover of “The Simpsons” at the USPS store link here after April 9.

The stamps will be sold at $0.44, the new postage rate for a First Class stamp beginning May, 11, 2009.

The date for the public sale of “The Simpsons” stamp will be announced soon after April 9.