Just a note that Freebase is now open for reads - you can view the site, and use the API, without an account.
Here are a few links to topics in Freebase to get you started:
Yo La Tengo (band)
Jack Black (actor)
You still need an invite to edit, so send me a note or post a comment if you're interested.
In previous posts, I liveblogged about Powerset's presentation this evening of Powerlabs to a select group of journalists, technologists, and bloggers. The big idea is that Powerlabs (launching in September, ahead of Powerset's search engine) will be a Digg-like site where community members can suggest and vote on Powerset features. Powerset aims to be incredibly open - as Steve Newcomb joked, the only thing stealth about them is that they're in stealth mode.
What Powerset is shooting for is ambitious, and has the potential to greatly improve how we find information on-line. Google has a lot of talent and smarts, but all the major players are doing variants of the same thing - statistical analysis on top of keyword search, an idea that goes back decades to Salton's work on document indexing. Powerset's approach has its roots too - decades of linguistic research and development at Xerox PARC - but turning even the best research platform into an internet search engine requires a lot of work. One example - the core engine they licensed originally took over a minute per sentence to index Wikipedia entries - now, with optimizations, it's down to a second or less. Still pretty CPU intensive, but as Steve Newcomb pointed out, indexing costs are small compared to the normal runtime costs of a popular search engine. At Google scale, Powerset would be profitable even with the increased compute needs.
Steve also made a point of saying that Powerset has never called themselves a Google killer. Still, they're trying to do something that's very cool. If they can do what they demod tonight on a grand scale, I'll switch.
Part two of my liveblogging from Powerset. They're talking about how they differ with respect to indexing. This helps them with both matching documents and ranking them.
In indexing, they parse each sentence on the page. For example:
'Sir Edward Heath died of pneumonia.'
Here's how they index this sentence.
- extract entities and semantic relationships.
- - expand to find similar entities and abstractions
-In this phase, they understand that:
1. Sir Edward was a UK prime minister - a politician
2. pneumonia is a disease
3. if you died from something, you were killed by it
This is a big change from the search we know (Google). It lets the user phrase their query in a lot of different ways. For instance, Powerset can answer the following:
- 'what killed edward heath'
- 'which prime minister died of pneumonia'
- 'what was sir edward heath killed by'
- 'what politician died from pneumonia'
- 'politician died from disease'
Powerset has so far indexed NY Times corpus, Wikipedia, and is working with Freebase.
Powerset is giving a demo for about 35 partners, journalists, and bloggers right now in San Francisco. I'll be liveblogging this event.
The core team members are introducing themselves now. John Lowe from AskJeeves, Tim Converse from Yahoo, Kevin Clark who's their lead Ruby developer, along with a lot of other Powerset linguists and developers in the room.
Steve Newcomb is about to go into the demo. More in a bit.
At work around noon we heard many sirens and then saw twelve police cars tearing past CNET heading towards 2nd and Market. It looked like the chase scene from The Blues Brothers (vid).SFGate had nothing, but Latchkey on Flickr already had a photo of the police arresting the driver they were chasing. Update: Latchkey's photo is of a different arrest (also a silver car) several blocks away.
CBS5 says the driver is accused of shooting a pedestrian in SOMA. Update: more from KCBS and SFgate.Original photo here from Flickr user Latchkey
Newsweek: Docs Change the Way They Think About Death
The best treatment for a heart attack might be to slowly reintroduce oxygen, as the heart cells remain alive for an hour after being cut off from oxygen, but immediately die when oxygen is reintroduced suddenly. One study showed an 80% survival rate with the gradual reintroduction of oxygen, compared to only 17% under normal procedures (jolt the heart with paddles and get it beating fast).
Excerpts:
Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.
* * *
"It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."
Word is that while OQO is shipping some OQO 02 models now, direct-ordered top of the line models with Verizon EVDO have been delayed an extra two one to two weeks over Sprint EVDO models, and that the expected ship date for pre-orders of Verizon OQO 02s is now early May (up from an earlier announced date of mid-March to mid-April).
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee is in the process of putting 3000 pages of scanned emails on-line. These are emails the US Department of Justice handed over in relation to the firing of eight Attorneys General. The documents are linked to from the front page, in the "What's New" section.
Here are direct links to what's on-line at the moment. The printed emails are still being scanned, so check the Justice Department page for more. And remember, if you find something interesting, you'll be doing everyone a favor by posting it.
LAist reports that the UCLA student tasered by police for being in a library without student ID has filed a suit naming UCLA, the UCLA police department, and the individual officers involved as using excessive force, illegal use of a Taser, and violating the students rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
After seeing the video a student made of the incident, I think the school and the police are going to have a very difficult time coming out on top here. I certainly hope they change their policy of allowing use of Tasers as a cattle prods - a policy that is at odds with those of every other UC school, where Tasers are only allowed in situations of self-defense and real imminent harm, rather than possible non-compliance with an order.
In another interesting angle, Jessamyn on Librarian.net asks why we haven't heard from UCLA's librarians about what they think (possibly because the school is still investigating the incident). However, the American Librarian's Association did write a letter condeming the way the UCLA police acted.
More coverage here:
FOX News - Iranian-American Student Zapped by Taser in Campus Library Files Suit
LA Times - UCLA Student files suit in Taser incident
The Financial Times reported on Jan 15 that the US government has its first conviction in the HP pretexting case.
Excerpt:
Bryan Wagner, 29, who was charged with two federal felony counts on Wednesday, admitted that he illegally obtained the social security numbers and private telephone records of two journalists and two former HP board members and their family members as part of a plea deal. He faces up to five years in prison on the identity theft charge.
"Kazakhstan's largest chain of cinemas, Otau, said in September it will not show the film."
The Smoking Gun has an 18 page internal Hewlett-Packard memo describing how HP conducted its investigation. This memo was released to the media by the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Commmittee, which subpoenaed HP CEO Mark Hurd and ex-Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, along with Larry Sonsini, investigators Ron DeLia, Joseph Depante, and nine other people who were active in HP's search for the source of leaks to the press.
Update: BusinessWeek has published more documents, and they don't look good.
According to the Mercury News, Bryan Wagner, one of the investigators involved in Hewlett-Packard's pretexting scandal told investigators he used a hammer to destroy the computer he used for his research. Wagner worked for Action Research based out of Melbourne, Florida. Action Research's site appears to be down, but it's on the Internet Archive. Action Research describes itself as "America’s #1 Information provider" and continues:ALL OF OUR INFORMATION IS 100% CURRENT AS OF TODAY!
Any guesses how they get that "100% current as of today" information? The "no databases" claim strongly suggests they get the data live from the source.
NO DATABASES OR MONTH OLD INFORMATION HERE!
Two of the services they provide are "landline and cellular phone breaks" and "telephone research."
According to the archive of their site, Action Research's Florida (investigative) license is "A 9300021." The Florida Division of Licensing search page gives the the owner and contact information for the company. Action Research has two addresses, one in West Melbourne, FL, and the other in Melbourne. Joseph DePante is listed as the president of the company, and the company website lists his son Matthew as an employee.
While Access Research's site is down, Process Server Canada's page for Action Research is up and, among other things, gives the AOL email address for Action Research. DePante's address is on this page.
updated 5 Oct 06, originally posted 29 Sep 06 4:13pm
CBS news reports that the California Attorney General will seek felony indictments in charges filed today against former HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, former HP Chief Ethics Officer Kevin Hunsaker, private investigator Ronald DeLia, and outside investigators Joseph Matthew DePante and Bryan Wagner.
The New York Times and BusinessWeek are also covering the story.
News stories about HP's ill-conceived investigation of board members' and reporters' phone records now identify the "pretexting" private investigator as Ronald DeLia, owner of Massachusetts-based Security Outsourcing Solutions.
Targets of HP's investigation included HP board member and Kleiner Perkins co-founder Tom Perkins, who quit the board and then wrote a letter to HP describing how investigators fraudulently accessed his personal phone records by using personal information such as his social security number.
DeLia pled the Fifth rather than testify before Congress today on the issue, but in 1999, he was very clear about the matter. In the July 1999 issue (pdf, mirror) of his Corporate Homicide newsletter he quoted an identity theft victim, "when somebody gets your Social Security number, they have the key to your front door forever." The article concludes, "Congress made identity theft a felony [in 1999]."
See also: HP emails not good for Hunsaker, HP investigator destroys his computer with hammer, HP spies on reporter's family, and Congress releases HP investigation internal memo.
Other sites covering the story:
- BoingBoing: EEERNGH! EEERNGH! Irony overload alarm activated!
- Wired's 27B Stroke 6: HP Investigator warns that identity theft is a felony
- Robert X. Cringeley: The buck stops where?
- InformationWeek: Congress takes HP to the woodshed
- Silicon Valley Watcher: When lawyers play spies
- Infectious Greed: Watching the HP detectives
- Wall Street Journal: Probing the pretexters
- Rob Hyndman: The HP saga: focus on Hurd, Hunsacker on ethics
- St. Petersburg Times: Congress calls on pretexters to testify
- Rocky Mountain News: HP scandal reaches state
- Chron.com: HP whistleblower Nye tried to avert scandal
- Law.com: Hewlett-Packard, Wilson Sonsini part ways in Calif. probe
- ZDNet Between the Lines: Hurd says he will re-build board and fix the process
- Rob Hyndman: HP scandal: the buck stops where?
- Mercury News: Incredulous lawmakers grill HP managers
- ABC News: HP chairs agree company behaved horribly
- Mercury News: Hurd becomes focus after HP's top lawyer resigns
- The Financial Express: Dunn says DeLia employed since 1990s
- Macworld: Lawmakers grill HP execs in pretexting hearing
- AP: Lawmakers compare HP scandal to Enron
- SV Confidential: Who's pleading the fifth
- Silicon Valley Watcher: Morning questioning of Dunn and Sonsini
- Reuters: Former HP executives invoke right not to testify
- Bloomberg.com: Hurd says leaks weren't his top priority
- Time Magazine: Is the HP spying scandal another Enron?
- WSJ Law Blog: Kona: Far from paradise for Dunn
- Glenn Fleishman's Glennlog: Dun Dunn
- CNET: Congress to subpoena private investigator
- boqpod.com: Ex-HP Chair says others knew of probe
Further reading:
While Security Outsourcing's web site no longer gives a phone number lists a phone number that's actually for their lawyers, Gilberg Kurent & Kiernan, earlier archived copies of the site here and here (via the Internet Archive) have the original contact information. The first link is for a recent version of the site and gives a phone number that is listed under DeLia's name and address in Needham, MA. The second link is for a much older version of the site from 1999, and gives a different number that is listed under DeLia's wife's name in South Dennis, MA.
Tom Perkins' letter to HP contains details about the fraudulent access of his phone records. The requests were made using two email addresses: mike@yahoo.com and redsox9855@yahoo.com, the latter being slightly less of a smoking gun than doing-an-investigation-on-behalf-of-hp-from-my-home-in-needham@yahoo.com. The on-line requests for access came from a single IP address, 68.99.17.80, which belongs to Cox Communications, and which may be for a computer in the Omaha area (based on a reverse lookup and traceroute). The Rocky Mountain news reports that this IP address may have been used by Bryan C. Wagner, a Littleton, CO investigator. Wagner has lived in the Omaha area.
In the May/June 2000 issue (pdf, mirror) of Corporate Homicide, DeLia writes about using Anonymizer to visit web sites and send email without leaving an identifying trail.
DeLia's is the only name on the masthead for Corporate Homicide.
HP's documents quoted recently only say they provided investigators with names and phone numbers. Here's an excerpt from one internal company communication:
We provide DeLia the names and telephone numbers we are interested in, he passes the information to the third-party company, and they then make the pretext calls to the phone service providers,'' Hunsaker wrote to Baskins on May 1.
(updated 3 Oct 06, first posted 27 Sep 06 @ 11:14PM)
CNET reports that HP targeted a reporter, his wife, and his mother and father in its investigation, retrieving not only phone records but also a yearbook photo of his mom. Here's an excerpt.
*
According to a government investigator, the company pursued the home and cellular telephone records of reporter Stephen Shankland as well as those of his father and his wife, a former News.com reporter and current Associated Press correspondent. The company also obtained a yearbook photograph of Shankland's mother, a high school teacher ...
Clear sailing from Europe to the North Pole.
PARIS (AFP) - European scientists voiced shock as they showed
pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last
month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly
outpost to the North Pole itself.
SGI files for Chapter 11 protection according to CNet. It was a long time coming. I looked at SGIs financials a few years ago, and it looked grim even then -- many quarters of consecutive losses with no new markets in sight, and (I was guessing at the time) only service contracts to existing customers (government?) keeping them afloat.
I hope SGI comes out of Chapter 11 as a compelling company. In 1995, they had the machines -- 16-processer Onyxs with amazing graphics, back when the PC was a 100MHz Pentium. The first ISP, world.std.com, used an Onyx as one of their servers.
But the days when SGI could make large sales dwindled as Sun, Microsoft, and Linux dominated the server market, Macs took the graphics workstation market, and Linux renderfarms eventually took over in Hollywood.
Now, besides OpenGL and devices like Linksys's wireless access points with processors descended from SGI's MIPS, I'd be hard-pressed to say how SGI influences the typical user.
Here's hoping that they can figure this out.
