Inauguration of Friday Links! I've decided to start weekly or bi-weekly short comments on links. This will be in addition to 1.5 posts per week that I've been averaging. After all, I spend a lot of time reading things like this on the Internet, so this really doesn't take extra time out of my day. Writing about these links just helps me solidify the information in my head.
So I used to think that Nigerian e-mail scammers either don't care that their e-mails are ridiculous or don't realize that their e-mails are ridiculous, because they had been receiving money from the extremely gullible either way. However, as the Microsoft research paper cited by NPR shows, ridiculousness is a huge advantage. Nigerian scammers deliberately make their e-mails ridiculous in order to filter out the non-gullible, which represent a far larger portion of the population. Essentially, if the Nigerians tried to make the e-mails reasonable (and hide the fact that they want bank account information up front), then a decent number of non-gullible people would respond expressing interest, but none of them would give up their sensitive information. That would waste all the Nigerians' time and they wouldn't get any money because they can't pick out the gullible ones.
I think this actually points to a possible solution: anytime Google detects a Nigerian scam via people's spam boxes, perhaps they should simply respond to the scammers using automated accounts, in order to flood the Nigerians' inboxes with false responses and fake bank account information. Then the Nigerians would no longer be able to pick out the ones from real gullible people. It would be easier than trying to track them down.
Cue is trying to do what would actually make Siri useful: the ability to scan, read and understand all the information across all your accounts (e-mail, flight info, Facebook, the cloud, your calendar). Rather than searching the web like Siri does, it searches your information and makes it personal. That way you don't need to manually juggle all the information in your accounts.
I don't think Cue would require any loss of privacy, given that Apple and Google already have all of your personal information.
Finally, I'm not even going to comment on this, just let it speak for itself:
From the Texas GOP 2012 official platform:
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Also, word of the day: gheegle (Filipino): the urge to pinch or squeeze something that is irresistibly cute.
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