"I'll take boring for $500, Alex"

By J. Thomas Duffy

I've been on the DL the past few days and didn't have a chance to weigh in on the -- if you want to believe the Technology Geeks -- the greatest event since sliced bread, that being the Jeopardy - IBM Watson Computer hose job.

So now I am...

BORING!!!!!!

One night would have been more than enough, but they dragged this thing out over three nights.

And the annoying graphic, showing the three most-likely answers the computer is considering...

BORING!!!!!!

But the Tech Geeks all got woodies, as evidenced by the L.A. Times tech blog:

After a "Jeopardy" viewing party at USC's Gateway Pass dormitory Tuesday for the second episode of the man vs. machine match with $1 million at stake, USC research associate professor Eduard Hovy spoke with the Technology Blog about the successor to Watson, which may or may not make future TV appearances. The viewing was hosted by IBM and USC's Information Sciences Institute and School of Cinematic Arts.

"USC didn't have a direct role in Watson -- no other institution did," Hovy said. "Now we're working with IBM, and with others, to build the successor to Watson, a new program that does deeper reasoning and inference and intelligent sort of question-answering -- and the system is called Racr."

[snip]

So we asked the computer scientist the question that has been burning for many of the Technology Blog's readers and commenters -- are Watson and Racr steps toward the doomsday scenario of Skynet in the "Terminator" films, or will this lead to computers that make our lives better and potentially lazier such as in "The Jetsons"?

"I think if you're afraid of technology this is the path to Skynet," Hovy said. "But if you look and you say, 'You know, technology is there to serve us and it makes our world better. It's better to have a motorcar than a horse carriage. And it's better to have a computer and run your banking affairs than no computer and doing everything very slowly through humans and so on. It's better to have an ATM machine than having to stand in line' -- I think this is a big advance for us."

Advances for the greater good of humanity, sure...

One gigantic, three-night infomercial for IBM, spare us.

And in the "How-Gullible-Do-They-Think-We-Are" Department, while is was viewed as an error, Watson blowing a Final Jeopardy question question, I think was a sandbag, a "let the human win one" and that the computer (or its programmers) tanked it:

To the credit of IBM engineers, Watson almost always did know the right answer. Still, there were a few bloopers, such as the final Jeopardy question from yesterday (paraphrasing): "This city has two airports, one named after a World War II hero, and the other named after a World War II battle." Watson's guess, "Toronto", was just laughably bad -- Lester Pearson and Billy Bishop fought in World War I, and neither person is a battle. The right answer, "Chicago", was pretty obvious, but apparently Watson couldn't connect Midway or O'Hare with WW II.

Give me an f'ing break!

One of the panelists on yesterday's NPR radio program, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me offered that, when the day comes that computers start hunting us down, we should all go to Chicago, as the safest city, since Watson will be sending them to Toronto.

Ken Jennings, the formidable Jeopardy champ, offered in his piece "My Puny Human Brain":

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer. Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the "thumbs" is an electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn't be beaten on speed.

Adrian Chen at Gawker, also not impressed, had some fun with it:

Now that computers are better than humans at Jeopardy, we must quickly replace all human contestants on Jeopardy with computers. It should just be computer-vs.-computer. Maybe a special episode could be a Blackberry duking it out with an iPhone. This will free humans with freakish trivia minds from having to spend thankless hours preparing for and appearing on Jeopardy. They'll be able to use their talents in more fulfilling ways, like impressing women at parties, or helping to build even more advanced Jeopardy-playing computers.

Why stop there? IBM's next task should be developing a Jeopardy-hosting computer. (That is, if Alex Trebek isn't already a computer; it's hard to tell sometimes.)

[snip]

Next, IBM AI scientists should develop Jeopardy-watching computers to replace human Jeopardy fans. This should be easy, as it will essentially be a dumber version of the Jeopardy-playing computer, disinterestedly calling out answers that are mostly wrong.

[snip]

If IBM is successful, we may some day look back in horror at the days when humans were involved at all in the thankless tasks associated with producing and consuming game shows. This will be a good day.

What I don't fear is more computers on Jeopardy!.

We should groan at Jeopardy!'s greed, in whoring itself out to IBM for three days, and it'll do it again.

What say the Florida Citrus Organization decides to pony up millions of dollars so that Jennings, or some other champion, can stand next to a giant orange smiley face squeezing out the questions to Jeopardy!'s answers?

Oh wait... wait...

Even better, Budweiser pays millions to get, what else, "The King of Beers" to take on other breweries, placing the classic tall brown bottle in the middle against its competitors, hauling in even more millions for Jeopardy!.

Maybe make that one competitor, with the third player being SNL's Sean Connery-on-Jeopardy character, to torture Alex Trebek.

Bonus Riffs

They've Got To Give It HAL's Voice!

(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

Bigotry will destroy Glenn Beck before porn or paranoia

By Nicholas Wilbur

On a brisk Connecticut morning in November, Glenn Beck mastered the art of multitasking by simultaneously praying to God, reading from Psalms, and thinking (a difficult enough task unto itself) about all of the conspiracies his left-leaning critics might create in order to ruin his reputation, get him fired, and destroy the wonderful "fusion of entertainment and enlightenment" he provides to the American masses on television and radio every week.

Thinking aloud during a Nov. 12, 2010 radio program, the 46-year-old talk-show mogul explained that he is not into drinking or drugs (having overcome both addictions in his 30s thanks, in part, to Mormonism). Then he said this:

I—uhh—you know—I'm not—I'm not into ch—I'm not even into—I was going to say I'm not into child pornography. I'm not only not into child pornography, I'm not into pornography. I'm not into any of it.

If his critics hadn't previously thought to capitalize on Beck's real or imagined struggle with pornography, they did after he stuttered his way through this awkward on-air denial. Why diffuse arguments that aren't being argued? Why defend allegations that aren't being alleged? Why offer unsolicited defenses against invisible attackers?

Some might say he was covering his tracks and preparing his faithful, if ever-dwindling audience for an onslaught. Others might say Beck is a porn addict.

I say Beck is finally starting to believe all the fearmongering, the paranoid prattle and the anti-government right-wing conspiracies he spews daily on TV and radio.

As unfortunate as it may be for those who hoped and prayed that Beck had a kiddie porn dungeon in his multi-million-dollar mansion, it turns out that the Beck backlash has nothing to do with his allegedly non-existent porn addiction. His fall from radical right-wing grace will not come from personal problems but from the anti-Semitism, racism, and general bigotry from his own mouth.

From news reports last week:

Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), a charity that campaigns for social change, delivered a petition with 10,000 signatures to Fox News Thursday demanding that talk show host Glenn Beck get the pink slip.

The petition began in November, according to PoliticsDaily.com, after Beck hosted a three-segment program on philanthropist George Soros, whom Beck accused of ushering fellow Jews into the gas chambers as a 13-year-old boy and stealing their land.

Beck also made headlines last week when New York's WOR (710 AM), "one of the city's two biggest talk radio stations" announced it was dropping Beck's program due to poor ratings.

And these are only the most recent efforts to undue Beck's chokehold on sanity.

The website StopBeck.com began in July 2009 as a non-profit effort to "(hold) Beck accountable for preying on racial anxieties, employing vitriolic rhetoric, propagating sexism and disseminating willful distortions."

The goal – to persuade sponsors to stop advertising on Beck's programs – has paid off. According to The New York Times, Beck has lost about 300 sponsors since StopBeck began:

His show now averages two million viewers, down from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings. And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials not be shown on Beck's show (up from 26 in August 2009).

The Nielsen ratings for 2010 put Beck at 2,248,000 average viewers, but StopBeck has continued contacting sponsors directly and requesting that they discontinue their financial support of the vitriol Beck contributes to the national dialogue.

According to a Jan. 10, 2011, update, Beck's United Kingdom program has been running without ads for nearly 11 months because of these efforts.

Beck's conspiracy theory of how progressives are trying to ruin his reputation and "take him out" with a smear campaign on his character have proven mere products of his own paranoia. Devotees of the self-described "progressive hunter" should rest assured there is no such pornography conspiracy, although it is possible that one is in the works considering the prevalence of the subject in Beck's broadcasts.

This is the guy, after all, who coined the terms "common-sense porn," "conservative porn," and "Chris Christie porn" after frothing at the mouth over the New Jersey governor's rant against the education system and the prevalence of bad teachers.

This is the guy who acted out a potentially Oscar-winning orgasm on live radio after airing a clip on Sept. 4, 2008 of Sarah Palin, who was railing against the evil emperor of the Senate, Harry Reid:

Yes! Yes! Stop for a second. When she started to say this stuff, man, it was downright – it was conservative porn. This is as close as you get, yeah, thank you. Thank you! Oh, yeah. Now play the rest of that clip.

In a repeat performance on May 24, 2010, Beck once again came close to staining his Jesus jammies during an interview with Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, during which O'Reilly was offering some rather flattering feedback about Beck's occasionally accurate political hunches:

Keep talking, man. This is like porn to me... This is like Bill O'Reilly porn. Keep talking, Bill, keep talking.

This is the guy who titled the transcript of his Jan. 8, 2009 radio program, "Porn, yes... NYT no," and asked, "What's the difference between porn and The New York Times? I don't think there's any difference. Tell me, you read The New York Times; you read pornography. You feel dirty after doing both, don't you?"

Those who have experienced the wholly encompassing power of addiction know how easy it is to fall back into it. Beck is one such person, having struggled with and successfully overcome alcohol and drug addictions earlier in his career. So when Playboy magazine published an opinion column titled, "Why Glenn Beck is a Symptom of What is Wrong with America" in its November 2009 edition, it was not surprising that the rightly-guided Beck wouldn't even look at it – wouldn't even read the "hit piece" against him – for fear of the wandering eye and the successive gateway drug-like plunge into the depths of a (repeat?) pornography addiction.

He gave a quite vivid, even heartfelt description of how "deadly" porn addiction can be:

It's no longer like it's a magazine that comes, it's now the Internet and it's just a wormhole and you just start going down into this wormhole and you don't get out and before you know it, you know, the husband is downstairs at 2:00 in the morning spending, you know, a couple of hours online and then the whole relationship with the family just changes. And before you and it just gets worse and worse and worse. It's really dangerous stuff.

This is also the guy who described the TSA machines at airports as "porn scanners":

The enhanced patdown was created as an alternative option to the porn scanner. Remember a few weeks ago, none of us wanted to go through the porn scanner. So they decided, well you don't have to do that. We'll pat you down. You get the porn scanner or you get felt up.

This is the guy who mused during a March 8, 2010 program, "I don't know if I bought kiddie porn or what's going to happen now, but it was a great movie." He was talking about the Roman Polanski film, The Ghost Writer.

And this is the guy who, as recently as Jan. 13, 2011, couldn't help including porn stars in his letter to Americans after the Tucson shooting.

I challenge all Americans, left or right, regardless if you're a politician, pundit, painter, priest, parishioner, poet or porn star to... denounce violence...

All of this is to say that Beck doesn't have, never has had, and never will have any sort of obsession with or addiction to pornography.

To insinuate that he does is cheap, baseless, and dishonest – because everyone knows bigotry will destroy the Beck legacy long before pornography does.

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)