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Looks like the pressure will continue for the Chinese Yuan to revalue. In true stupid amateur punter mode, am looking at a few possible investments.
Maybe I should be reckless enough to buy stock in a dotcom like Ctrip.com (CTRP), a consolidator of hotel accommodations and airline tickets in China.
They would benefit from Yuan revaluation in the short term if they don’t buy too many Aeron chairs or hire people who used to work in enterpise software.
Andrew Orlowski writes:
“A new study conducted at Cornell University suggests that we think in analog, not digital. It’s a bold claim which, if true, threatens to make thirty years of linguistics and neuroscience metaphors look very silly indeed.”
The fact that our cats can calculate the required muscle flex and velocity to leap onto a table with food, but don’t understand the meaning of ‘no’ and can’t do simple arithmetic has always puzzled me.
However it makes sense that any system based upon learned statistical reaction to sensory input would create sophisticated responses without understanding them. In this instance ability to extract logical rules would be based upon a enormous amount of analog input that produced binary certainty as an emergent phenomenon.
The Reverse Turing test or ‘captcha’, usually contains a noise filled image of a password with warped fonts is used to filter humans from computers, to stop spam. In this instance a very simple digital message is encoded in a very analog way.
As captchas have become more sophisticated, in an arms race against algorithms designed to crack them, humans often make errors reading them. The fact that these errors become pronounced may indicate that we use statistical responses to patterns rather than an internal algorithm for reading captcha’s - this would tend to indicate that our brains work in analog mode.
In other words, if we had an algorithm for reading captchas then it would be likely that we would either be entirely able or unable to decode any captcha created with the same algorithm, there would not be a statistical chance of failure.
The interesting thing about a captcha image is that it does not compress very well, while retaining fidelity - in other words the ratio of bits required for the analog message to the equivalent digital message is very high.
Current SETI searches assume that a signal would not have deliberate noise - that it would be separated from natural phenomena by its ‘artificial’ simplicity. One of the problems with this is that we have to look in areas that are naturally quiet, it is difficult to differentiate between a signal caused by a known or unknown natural phenomenon such as a quasar pulse or WOW signal and a deliberate message.
But what if someone were to try a Reverse Turing Test on us?
The Internet allows you to protest directly against unethical advertisers by clicking on ads you don’t like.
Traditionally people have protested against hate media such as Michael Savage’s radio show by encouraging people to boycott advertisers on the show. The problem is this is indirect. Without direct penalties, shows like Savage’s actually rely on the ‘all publicity is good publicity’ phenomenon of having large audiences of people who listen just to be outraged. Advertisers gravitate towards low end brands where negative feelings against them are outweighed by the fact that some percentage of overall listeners will convert to buyers.
It occurred to me that the Internet allows you to do something much more direct, to penalize advertisers by clicking on text ads and not buying anything. This doesn’t just lower revenues it actually costs the advertiser directly. The ‘all publicity is good publicity’ goes away.
One could go one step further and encourage people to gang together and click on certain ads in the manner of an ad busting flashmob.
For example, Steve Rhodes emailed me today to point out that Michael Savage:
“came back from his vacation early to rant on his show that not one penny should go to the tsunami victims. He also implied it might be punishment by god of Muslims along with men who went to Thailand to have sex with children.” (Steve said he will post a transcript on his blog)
Now Amazon know that Michael Savage’s book sold a reasonable number of copies, so they bid on the phrase ‘Michael Savage’ on Overture and link to his book.
If enough people were to search for Michael Savage on Yahoo, click on the Amazon ad and not buy anything then Amazon would soon drop the ad.
Of course, I would not encourage anyone to do this now.
Here’s a thought, regularly I pick up second hand vinyl LP’s for $1 from the wondrous Amoeba records.
So why do I have to pay the same per track for MP3s to avoid getting legal action from record companies? What is to stop me buying or selling MP3 tracks ’second hand’ for 10c.?
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