Month: July 2022

Watson, Jeopardy and an End to Search Engines As We Know Them?

This week on Jeopardy (an American Quiz show) man takes on machine. IBM’s super computer “Watson” will take on two previous long-term winners (winnings in the multiple millions of dollars) and is expected to win. There are of course echoes of the “Deep Blue” saga where for a long-time human beings played chess better than a computer, though no more as in the end we couldn’t keep up with the raw processing power of the hardware. But what does this mean for search engines and more importantly Internet marketing?

Jeopardy is an interesting challenge for a computer, unlike most quiz shows where the format is Question followed by Answer, on this show the answer comes first and the player must decipher the question. What this means in practice is that Watson must be able to place information in context to deliver an answer. The machine cannot just have a million encyclopaedias uploaded and then scan them for an approximate fit to the answer; it must take the answer and evolve the question.

Current search technology is based on the ability to answer a question, and often not very well because there’s no real contextual understanding in search engines. So they use a few tricks based on credible referrals, viewer statistics etc. to try and deliver that context. It doesn’t work very well though and often the highest ranked search items aren’t necessarily best for the question posed of the search engine.

Watson may be a ridiculously expensive supercomputer today, but as we all know over time the cost and power required to deliver the same performance will drop – rapidly. That means in the long run the same kind of information understanding, can and will be developed for use in Internet search.

This is great news for content providers, if you have something useful to say and you’ve developed top quality content that actually answers questions and provides useful information in the long run you’re going to win the search war against the SEO keyword spammers. Because once your information can be interpreted for what it is, there’s no place to hide.

Affiliate marketers who rely on stuffing the net with “thin” content are in trouble a quick scan will reveal their content to be low value and they’ll begin to spiral to the ends of the world in search terms.

So in the race of man vs. machine let’s hope that Watson emerges victorious and that the technology swiftly becomes affordable for adoption by the search engines.…

Tips For Buying a Great Projector

Buying a new projector can be a great addition to your house, business, or even classroom. But because this can be an expensive purchase you want to make sure that you are getting your moneys worth. Here are some features to consider when buying your new projector.

Brightness it is one of the major considerations you should think about when you go about buying a projector. Brightness in projectors is measured in lumens, and normally anything over 2000 3000 lumens is more than adequate. Some cheaper projectors have less than 1000 lumens, but this produces a very dark display.

A second factor you should consider is the resolution of the projector. The resolution is simply the number of pixels per square inch of the image produced; the higher the resolution the clearer the image. So if you are going to be doing presentations that have a lot of graphics then you should shop for a projector that has a high resolution.

If you’re going to use this projector for business or education than the connectivity of it is very important. Connectivity means simply that the projector is able to be hooked up to different data sources whether it be a computer, a USB key, or any other media source. It is important that projector has the correct data ports so you can use it optimally.

One last thing you should consider before buying the projector is if they offer customer service. If you are not very good with technology you might have to depend a lot on customer support since this is an important factor to your buying decision.…

Why Guitars Are An Outdated Instrument

For many years, the guitar has been hailed at the icon of rock. But is the guitar holding music back? In this article I will address this issue and look and the positive and negative aspects of the guitar.

The Image of the Rock God

Whenever we think of the rock star, we nearly always think of a guitar player. Although singers get a lot of attention too, it’s the lead guitarist who is the enduring image of the rock hero. Why is this?

One reason may be the visual aspect of a guitar player, seeing them stood up there on stage with their guitar hanging down by their knees, playing all these cool riffs. It could also be that the guitar can be a difficult instrument to play well. This may be one reason why people have a fascination with watching someone play something impressive on a guitar – because you wouldn’t be able to do it. Maybe it’s the same reason we enjoy watching magic tricks or any other kind of impressive performance.

It’s All About the Performance

Whatever the reasons, it has to be said that there is something entertaining and captivating about a good guitar player. Guitars are played in a way which means that you can easily see what they are playing, which is in contrast to a piano or keyboard player, which isn’t so easily on display. Guitars are also a very emotional instrument. Electric lead guitar playing can have a real emotional expressiveness to it that isn’t so easily achieved with many other instruments.

The Limitation of the Guitar

However, despite all this “rock star hero” and “it’s all about the performance” talk, we have to face facts here. The guitar is a very outdated and limited instrument. If your goal with your music is to create the most interesting and beautiful sounds, then using a guitar will hold you back.

A guitar has only one main sound, which although it can be varied considerably using various effects, it can only go so far. So, if you’re less bothered about the performance aspect of music, and more concerned with using a wide variety of sounds, then leave the guitar well alone.

The Future of Music?

It has to be said that computers running software synthesizers are the future of music, as they contain an infinite range of sonic possibilities. Their sounds can either be played using a MIDI keyboard or programmed in on the screen.

But what about the performance aspect? Well, there are options. During the 80’s the keytar was popular, but it has since gone out of favour. There are also guitar MIDI controllers, which enable the musician to play it like a guitar but use it to control synthesizer sounds. It’s these kinds of performance instruments which need to be developed alongside computer synthesizer technology, so that we can have the best of both worlds – the performance and the wide range of sounds.

I can’t decide which website I prefer out of The Information Zone or Laughing at the Sky. What do you think?…