When your smart phone plays editor

The autocorrect function can create some real howlers. Here's how Google intends it to work.

If you type “kofee” into a search box, Google would like to save a few milliseconds by guessing whether you’ve misspelled the caffeinated beverage or the former United Nations secretary-general. It uses a probabilistic algorithm with roots in work done at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1990s. 

The probabilities are based on a “noisy channel” model, a fundamental concept of information theory. The model envisions a message source — an idealized user with clear intentions — passing through a noisy channel that introduces typos by omitting letters, reversing letters or inserting letters. 

“We’re trying to find the most likely intended word, given the word that we see,” Mr. Paskin says. “Coffee” is a fairly common word, so with the vast corpus of text the algorithm can assign it a far higher probability than “Kofi.” On the other hand, the data show that spelling “coffee” with a K is a relatively low-probability error. The algorithm combines these probabilities. 

I guess if you try to tweet that you're having coffee with Kofi Anan you're in real trouble.

Will a computer replace you?

Algorithms are producing a growing number of articles for newspapers and websites, such as this one produced by Narrative Science:

"Wall Street is high on Wells Fargo, expecting it to report earnings that are up 15.7 percent from a year ago when it reports its second quarter earnings on Friday, July 13, 2012," said the article on Forbes.com.

While computers cannot parse the subtleties of each story, Phys.org reports, they can take vast amounts of raw data and turn it into what passes for news.

"This can work for anything that is basic and formulaic," says Ken Doctor, an analyst with the media research firm Outsell. And with media companies under intense financial pressure, the move to automate some news production "does speak directly to the rebuilding of the cost economics of journalism," said Doctor.

Scott Frederick, chief operating officer of Automated Insights, another firm in the sector, said he sees this as "the next generation of content creation."

The company generates news stories from raw feeds of play-by-play data from major sports events. The company generates advertising on its own website and is now beginning to sell its services to other organizations for sports and real estate news. 

To mimic the effect of the hometown newspaper, the company generates articles with a different "tonality" depending on the reader's preference or location. For the 2012 Super Bowl, the article for New York Giants' fans read like this: "Hakeem Nicks had a big night, paving the way to a victory for the Giants over the Patriots, 21-17 in Indianapolis. With the victory, New York is the champion of Super Bowl XLVI." 

For New England fans, the story was different: "Behind an average day from Tom Brady, the Patriots lost to the Giants, 21-17 at home. With the loss, New England falls short of a Super Bowl ring."

Not much different than human sports writers.

A sign of the times

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said. 

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project. 

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Gutenberg first used moveable type 573 years ago. The World Wide Web opened for business 21 years ago. I got all of this post from the Web. You will read it on the Web.

You can't prop a door open with an e-book

Luddites unite!

I read everything online these days, except books. I don't have a Kindle or an iPad. I have a smart phone, which is smarter than I am, but I don't read anything on it.

E-books are here to stay, it seems -- Amazon sells more e-books than print books. But John Abell, writing in Wired, points to several reasons why they haven't replaced paper books. The one I like is this:

E-books can’t be used for interior design. Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It probably began that time you toted The Cat in the Hat, trying not to be dispatched to bed during a grown-up dinner party. 

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

I like to just stand at a bookcase and look at the books. Apparently, Abell does too.

You can’t keep your e-books all in one place. 

Books arranged on your bookshelves don’t care what store they came from. But on tablets and smartphones, the shelves are divided by app — you can’t see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. There is simply no app for that. (With e-readers, you are doubly punished, because you can’t buy anything outside the company store anyway).
Apple doesn’t allow developers to tap into root information, which would be needed to create what would amount to a single library on an iOS device. If that restriction disappeared, there would still be the matter of individual vendors agreeing to cooperate — not a given since they are competitors and that kind of leveling could easily lead to price wars, for one thing. 

But the way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we’ve arranged and pick something out. In the digital equivalent, we would see everything we own, tap on a book and it would invoke the app it requires — Kindle, Nook, Borders, etc. With the current sequence — open up a reader app, pick a book — you can easily forget what you own. Trivial? Try to imagine Borders dictating the size and shape of your bookshelf, and enforcing a rule that it hold only books you bought from them, and see if that thought offends you even a little bit.

Good. I've been predicting the demise of print since I got in the publishing business about a thousand years ago, but I've long since given up expecting anything.

The surge in e-books

E-book sales for January to August are up from $89.8 million for 2009 to $263 million in 2010. This 193% increase in sales means that electronic books now account for almost 10% of consumer book sales in the U.S., up from just 3.31% in 2009.

Amazon already sells more Kindle books than hardcover texts, and in the overall market, sales of hardcover books were down 24.% in August when compared to last year (the AAP does not release monthly numbers for paperbacks). 

This is not your father's note-taking

As a reporter I've spent my career in search of the perfect combination of pen and notebook. I'm still looking. I use a digital voice recorder today, but now I'm starting to look at these fancy new digital pens.

Wired has a review of Livescribe's Echo.

Packed with an ARM 9 processor, an infrared camera, a built-in speaker and mic, the Echo lets you write, record and then seamlessly transfer all your notes (with the help of the company's free desktop software) to your Mac or PC.

Well, of course that's impossible. Of course I'm old enough to remember hearing about some called a "CRT" (cathode ray tube), a TV-like screen on which reporters could type and letters would appear. Impossible, I said.

You're looking at something around $200 for the Echo, depending on how much memory you want -- and depending on the memory of how much you have left in the bank. However:

The real allure of the Echo remains the way the software and hardware work together to make your life easier. Yes, there's something immensely satisfying in seeing your deranged scrawlings rasterize onscreen. And for college students and journalists in particular, the Pencast option is quite simply a Godsend. Simply hit the record icon on the included paper and start taking notes as you usually would. Once you've finished the lecture/meeting/interview, you can not only replay the entire recording, but also instantly move from one section to another by simply tapping on a specific note. The pen will automatically play back the audio from that precise moment. This has the obvious benefit of helping you navigate long, meandering lectures, but it also frees you up to write random or tangential thoughts without the fear of missing important information. 

I feel like a new toy coming on.

Also posted at My Skunkworks