Scott Bush

Though not really a “game” per se, I’ve whiled away more time than I care to admit “play­ing” Google’s Image Labeler. In it, you and a part­ner (cho­sen at ran­dom from a pool of oth­ers also using the ser­vice) gen­er­ate applic­a­ble labels describ­ing an image pre­sented to you. Sounds easy, but a few con­straints increase the challenge:

1. Excluded labels — On some images, you’re not allowed to enter com­mon labels listed on screen, just like the off-limit words in a game of Taboo (except there’s no hor­ri­ble buzzer if you do enter them, they just don’t count).
2. Timer — You’ve only got two min­utes to play each round, and the timer is right there mak­ing you nervous.
3. Points — You’re awarded points for the speci­ficity of the label you and your part­ner match on (and per­haps also how quickly you match.) The image shown here, or exam­ple, net­ted me 140 points, but some­thing sim­pler like “car” might only reward 50 points.

When a round is done, you’re pre­sented with a grid of the images you and your part­ner labelled along with the images’ size and loca­tion on the web if you were intrigued by one of the images and want to learn more about it. You also see what label you matched on and your partner’s other guesses, which makes the expe­ri­ence a bit voyeuris­tic. There’s been times when I thought “what was that guy smok­ing?” or “wow, is that what that was?!” As for the points awarded, I heard that Google may at some point offer a way to redeem them for prizes but for now it seems they’re just for brag­ging rights and “iden­ti­fy­ing con­tri­bu­tions from par­tic­i­pants.”

So what’s this game/service/tool/“thing” all about? Improv­ing Google’s image search index, of course. By lever­ag­ing real human beings’ con­cep­tual mod­els, Google can apply ever-improving labels to the mil­lions of images it cat­a­logues. That way, con­duct­ing an image search for “toy car” may now bring up the image above, whereas with­out Google Image Labeler that image might only be asso­ci­ated with “car” or “nascar” or other less-specific labels. Of course, no online ser­vice would be com­plete with­out some­one try­ing to break it, which appar­ently hap­pened.

It’s a pretty inge­nious way to take a task that might oth­er­wise have very lit­tle par­tic­i­pa­tion and turn it into a game with much inter­est. It’s another exam­ple of Google’s inge­nu­ity improv­ing the expe­ri­ence of find­ing, using, and—in this case enjoying—information. To fin­ish up, take a look at my favorite image:

Cer­tain words, I’ve noticed, have a way of acquir­ing extra let­ters or odd pro­nun­ci­a­tions in a man­ner sim­i­lar to a mol­e­cule bond­ing to elec­trons they’re exposed to. If you’re in the North­west, you’ve prob­a­bly heard air­plane man­u­fac­turer Boe­ing called “Boe­ings,” as in “I work at the Boe­ings plant.” Wrong, and strange. (I won­der if the same thing is hap­pen­ing in Chicago now that the company’s head­quar­ters are based there?)

Another one that comes up more often than it should is “acrost,” as in “I went acrost the lawn and picked up my news­pa­per.” Hmmm… weird. That word is “across” and where that erro­neous T comes from I’m not sure. If you find your­self using this one, you should ax your­self why, and try to stop.

Chivalry isn’t dead when it comes to open­ing doors for peo­ple. Not just ladies, either. You go through a door and you turn around and hold it open. Regard­less of if you do it for your spouse, friends at work, or a stranger at the store, I’ve noticed a very com­mon occur­rence: they push the door open, too. What’s dead, it would seem, is door trust.

I’ve been keep­ing a very loose tally of my expe­ri­ences. Prob­a­bly three-quarters of the time I go through a door and hold it open for some­one, they put their hand out and “push” the door, too. Why? I’m stand­ing right there. I’m not talk­ing about the sce­nario where a big group exits a room and kinda keeps their hand out so the door stays open. I’m right there, turned around with my foot against the door and my hand on the han­dle. Why is that? At first I thought, “wow, my friends think I’d let this close in their faces,” and then I real­ized: what if they think I’m not strong enough to keep the door open for an extended period of time (we’re talk­ing 10 sec­onds here, peo­ple)! That was bad. But it got worse: maybe they fear I’d inten­tion­ally slam the door on them just to watch them bleed from their noses or spit chicklets?

Per­haps I am just overly sen­si­tive. I’ve noticed they do that regard­less of who’s hold­ing the door, so it’s not just me in whom they lack door trust. So that’s some­thing, at least. But next time some­one holds a door for you… relax and walk through with a hearty “thanks man!” (or “thanks lady!” but that usu­ally doesn’t go over as well for some reason).

Early Sep­tem­ber marks one year since I began train­ing at North­west Mar­tial Arts. It’s been a very quick year in some ways, yet my steady improve­ment shows how much I’ve learned. Not that I think I’m any­thing but my white belt, don’t get me wrong, but my instruc­tors have done a good job steer­ing me along the path.

I remem­ber how we—my wife and I—started train­ing. We’d just had din­ner at the nearby Main­street Ale­house and, arter­ies thick­en­ing with our meal of nachos and potato skins, we took a walk. I had answered my phone when we passed the dojo, and I was sur­prised when Crys­tal crossed the street to grab a flyer from the A-board out front.

“I think we should take karate,” she said when I was off the phone.

“Really?” I asked, surprised.

“I know you’ve wanted to start tak­ing it again for a while. I think it would be fun to do it together,” she answered. That was it. We called and said we wanted to come by to try it out and haven’t looked back. After a month of karate only we began train­ing in aikido, too (this sum­mer I began study­ing goju-ryu karate once a week, too). Prac­tic­ing mar­tial arts is such a great expe­ri­ence. It brings focus, men­tal and phys­i­cal exer­tion, self-confidence, bal­ance and coor­di­na­tion, friend­ship, flex­i­bil­ity, appre­ci­a­tion of Japan­ese his­tory and cul­ture, goal set­ting, and yes, some­times some pain and bruises. All of this is more true when you’re for­tu­nate enough, as I am, to share it with your spouse (and another close friend).

You can read my other posts about mar­tial arts, but to sum up after a year, here’s what I’ve accomplished:

• Passed two belt tests; one in Feb­ru­ary 08, the sec­ond on 28 August 08 (when Crys­tal passed her first);
• Can per­form Heian Shodan, Heian Nidan, and Matsu kata well, and know the basic move­ments of Heian San­dan,Tekki Shodan, and Saifa (a goju-ryu kata);
• Learned Sanchin kata (YouTube video of one style; Wikipedia entry) and have glimpsed the sta­bil­ity, power deliv­ery and power accep­tance train­ing dili­gently in it can bring;
• Improved my punch­ing abil­ity from extremely weak to “not too embarrassing”;
• Worked on occa­sion with Hiroo Ito Sen­sei, who wrote the intro­duc­tion to The Way of Sanchin Kata
• Par­tic­i­pated in two demon­stra­tions to the public;
• Begun get­ting com­fort­able mov­ing in, rather than away, when an oppo­nent attacks; and
• Become aware of and started work­ing on reduc­ing my facial expres­sions (twitches, etc.) and unnec­es­sary move­ments (shoul­ders ris­ing, etc.) that tele­graph my intentions.

So far, the only real injuries I’ve had are a lost big toe­nail on my left foot (it was stepped on in April and is just now about 90% grown back) and some burned feet (hot mats + bare feet = ouch). Bruises, on the other hand, I’ve had plenty of.

I’ll fin­ish by thank­ing my excel­lent instruc­tors, Yamamoto Sen­sei (karate), Krohn Sen­sei (aikido and karate), and Malik Sen­sei (goju-ryu) for their ded­i­ca­tion and instruc­tion. Here’s to another year!

Are the come­di­enne and the Repub­li­can VP nom­i­nee really the same per­son? If so, that would be such a great SNL sketch writ large. No, I’m not being crazy (unlike some oth­ers out there who are look­ing for Palin con­spir­a­cies): I’m just trust­ing my eyes:

At a glance can you dis­tin­guish these three images? (Hint: two of the three are Palin.) See what I mean?

And not to attack the lady, but did you hear her list off her kids’ names? Bristol’s uncom­mon, but fine. Wil­low reminds me of a small war­rior. Piper’s good, too. But Track and Trig? Sounds like two aspects of high school I’d like to forget.

Soft­ware used to come shipped in boxes as big as cereal box. Why? Well, to hold that 400+ page man­ual of “help” that soft­ware users duti­fully placed on their shelf where it ready to answer any ques­tion that may arise (read: gath­ered dust). Well, that was the 80s and 90s and online help has come a long way. Much soft­ware doesn’t have a printed com­po­nent any longer because it’s cheaper and (often) bet­ter to pro­duce help that’s viewed on screen.

Going beyond on-screen read­ing of text, help has become more and more inter­ac­tive. At first it was sim­ply hyper­links that allowed you to peruse “related top­ics” or “sim­i­lar ques­tions” eas­ier than you can in a printed man­ual. Con­tex­tual help (infor­ma­tion and expla­na­tions that appear near the fea­ture or tool in ques­tion) became the norm, usu­ally pre­sented as a small ques­tion mark or “what’s this” text link (see an exam­ple from Google Ana­lyt­ics at right).

The next step in this evo­lu­tion of online help is truly inter­ac­tive, where a help sys­tem actu­ally guides the user not with sta­tic images within the help doc­u­ment, but actual visual cues to the process being explained. I ran across an excel­lent exam­ple of this the other day in Microsoft’s Office 2008 for Mac.

I wanted to add a drop cap to the doc­u­ment I was work­ing on. Rather than look­ing through menus, I went to the Help menu and this was how I found what I wanted:

1. Easy search — Lever­ag­ing Mac OS X’s built-in Spot­light search tech­nol­ogy (which in itself is pretty great), I searched
   for “drop” and before I could type “cap,” Spot­light had shown me what I wanted.
2. Menu acti­va­tion — When I clicked what I wanted, “Drop Cap…” the appro­pri­ate menu within Word came down.
3. Visual cues — To my sur­prise, not only did the menu item high­light, an unmis­tak­able blue arrow floated gen­tly next to the item to ensure I couldn’t pos­si­bly miss the result of my help search.

Now that’s use­ful help. No won­der soft­ware doesn’t come with a three-inch-thick pile of dead tree. If paper man­u­als could dream, they would  do so about pro­vid­ing this sort of con­tex­tual, rel­e­vant response to a user’s query.