Chocolate Cubed

Yesterday David Brooks wrote a very funny op-ed piece in the NY Times that I wanted to share.  The piece is titled “Lord of the Memes” and is a great satirical piece about our culture and the general need for people to be part of the “in” crowd or doing the “cool” thing.  His last paragraph really defines “cool” in today’s society.  Brooks says that the goal is to be an early adopter and an early discarder.  

I really loved the article because as a kid everyone wants to be in the hottest crowd, but then during college I assumed I grew out of it.  In truth, I haven’t.  In the beginning of April I bought a MacBook Air thinking it is time to become a mac user and also buy the lightest one they were selling.  According to Brooks, I am just trying to be cool and become an early adopter of one of the hottest new toys on the market.  Now the question is can I afford to be an early discarder?

This morning, while reading the NY Times, I came across two articles that are somewhat related and started me thinking.  The first is titled “If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?” by Brad Stone.  In this essay Stone informs his readers about a site that was just unveiled last month: CriminalSearches.com. The site is owned by PeopleFinders and allows anyone to search public criminal records about anyone else.  All you need to know about the person is their first and last name.  This means you can look me up by just entering Jordan Salvit in the search and can see that I have no criminal offenses to my name.  As Stone points out in his blog post, “Is ChoicePoint a Model of Restraint in Releasing Criminal Records?“, people can easily judge their peers with access to this potentially incomplete information.  In his essay, Stone notes that if you have the records corrected they will be fixed immediately on the site.  So if you had a traffic violation removed from your record in Virginia it will no longer appear on CriminalSearches.com.  The problem is that nothing ever gets deleted from the internet.  Once content is posted on a site and then crawled by Google and cached in their system or by Archive.org someone can always find it.  After finishing the essay the privacy advocate in me was screaming to shut this site down.   Read the rest of this entry »

This morning’s New York Times had an op-ed piece by David Brooks titled “The Biggest Issue” which talked about education in the U.S. and how the biggest problem facing us is the education slowdown.  Brooks makes the point that the United States education rate has slowed drastically, causing a gap between the rich and poor and stagnating growth as a society.  I agree with Brooks completely:  education is the key to our success as a country, but how do we get back on track?  How do we get more people to get higher educations?  How do we interest people to train and do better?   Read the rest of this entry »

This morning’s Editorial Notebook in the NY Times had a piece by Lawrence Downes titled A Disappointing Truth.  It seems I am not the only one thinking about the effects of marketing on worldly matters.  In my post last, I referred to Al Gore’s work and marketing efforts as positive and helpful to the cause.  Downes takes a more critical look and says that they are doing a poor job at marketing the cause.  Downes makes a good point, saying that we need new ideas and need to bring more of the best faces and thinkers together in a room to help.  He even made reference to the Axe body spray marketers, hoping they would run the campaign.  

For the climate issues, I think we should have the people who created the Truth campaigns do it.  They have been successfully riding a very fine line with their campaigns.  They are all witty, educational and make people aware of the hazards of smoking cigarettes, marijuana and doing drugs.  

On the other hand, for AI I would love the Axe or even the Mac marketers working on our cause.  They could make it sexy and cool and then all the kids would want to be working on it!

This post is kind of a followup to my last post on marketing AI.  I have been thinking of other causes that have been expedited or have benefited from good marketing and global warming came to mind.   Read the rest of this entry »

In this month’s AI Magazine there is an article titled “The voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?” by Doug Lenat.  Doug lists what he calls the top 12 reasons why AI hasn’t taken off to its fullest potential and where many already expected it to be by now.  I am not going to address all his 12 points, I am going to focus on one:  The Media and the Arts.

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Despite the overused title, Hello!  Over the next few days I hope to start posting about some of the things that interest me.  Just to name a few:  ai, machine learning, pastry, web 2.0, online privacy.  To start, I am going to post all the images that used to occupy my homepage and maybe give a short description.