ctrl.altered.mind

Feel like you could use a good joke? How about one custom-crafted to suit your exact taste of humor?

A team at the University of California at Berkeley has been running a collaborative filtering system for recommending jokes. It’s called Jester, and is currently at version 4.0 in its evolution. The idea behind Jester is to recommend jokes to the user based on their ratings of previous jokes. The system can begin recommending anecdotes once the user rates a training set of 8 jokes. Apparently my tastes make for textbook cases of classification, for I found the jokes served up by Jester to be spot on hilarious, right after the initial set. A significant portion of the content in the database has been in wide circulation, so chances are you have read them before - the system might eventually be expanded to allow user submission of content. Content-based filtering, which is a form of collaborative filtering, has become one of the central mechanisms behind pioneering current-generation applications on the Web today.

Jester uses an algorithm called Eigentaste 5.0, which dynamically adapts the order in which items are recommended. The basic filtering algorithm uses universal queries to apply real-value user ratings on a common set of items. Those familiar with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) will recognize the techniques applied to the dense subset of the ratings matrix. PCA helps reduce multidimensional data sets to lower dimensions for analysis.

The dataset used by Jester has been made freely available for research use, while the framework is also being used to develop new predictive applications.

Finally, here’s one of the anecdotes served by Jester that had me smiling:

A group of managers were given the assignment to measure the height of a flagpole. So they go out to the flagpole with ladders and tape measures, and they’re falling off the ladders, dropping the tape measures–the whole thing is just a mess. An engineer comes along and sees what they’re trying to do, walks over, pulls the flagpole out of the ground, lays it flat, measures it from end to end, gives the measurement to one of the managers and walks away.

After the engineer has gone, one manager turns to another and laughs. “Isn’t that just like an engineer? We’re looking for the height and he gives us the length.”

I have not ventured into the World of Warcraft (fearing I’ll end up spending much more time on it than I should), but those of you who do play the game might be familiar with the Draenei (I had to resort to Wikipedia).

Apparently, the Draenei have a dancing style heavily influenced by the moves in Daler Mehndi’s Tunak Tunak Tun music video. If you don’t know who (or what) that is, consider yourself lucky and get the **** out of here. Just kidding, here’s a link to the actual video (why should we be the only ones to suffer? :P). Enough digression, getting back to the point of this blog post - YouTube user AmandaJ3162 has submitted a video of the World of Warcraft Burning Crusade Draenei dancing to the song. Great job with the synchronization!

(link to video)

With nothing else to do last night, I thought I’d curl up in front of my laptop computer and watch an episode (or two) of The Tonight Show or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Hulu - however, I was just met with a tiny screen message saying the site was unavailable. I realized that they were preparing for the big day - Hulu went out of invitation-only beta today. So, if you have not checked out (or heard of) Hulu yet, here’s your chance.

I am impressed by Hulu’s simplistic, yet feature-rich website layout. The site design has been touched up slightly, and the biggest feature is an all-new Movies section (the beta phase only served up some episodes of TV shows - both obscure and popular). Hulu is running ad-supported feature-length movies interspersed with clips from big-name studio offerings.

There are quite a few TV shows to watch, as well. If you grew up watching Doordarshan as I did, you’ll be frolicking in nostalgic fervor once you hear that they have episodes of Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot! There’s no way I could sit through an entire episode of that now, but it was fun to just listen to the intro tune again!

Watching Dragon - The Bruce Lee Story on the side as I type this - interestingly, the movie was just interrupted by a DirecTV commercial. Too bad, for I’m not switching to a conventional TV subscription service any time soon.

LetterFrequency.org has a summary of the most commonly occurring letters of the English alphabet, in various writing contexts. It is interesting to note that the letter ‘h’ appears more often in every day speech and writing than it does in a list of dictionary words (aside: Lexus recently began an advertising campaign in the US highlighting the importance of the letter ‘H’, to promote their line of hybrid vehicles).

On a much more impressive note, author Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939 wrote a story of over 50,000 words without using the most common letter in the English alphabet. His book, Gadsby, is a lipogrammatic work of art and is famous for not containing the letter ‘e’ (except for the author’s introduction). The complete manuscript is available online, and is a must-read for students and enthusiasts of the English language.

The book accomplishes a literary task that to me seems daunting beyond belief. As the author himself puts it:

As the vowel E is used more than five times oftener than any other letter, this story was written, not through any attempt to attain literary merit, but due to a somewhat balky nature, caused by hearing it so constantly claimed that “it can’t be done; for you cannot say anything at all without using E, and make smooth continuity, with perfectly grammatical construction—” so ‘twas said.

Charming.

I just signed up for Jaman, a service that brings people access to movies from around the world, including Bollywood. The website attempts to build an online community around its large library of independent and international feature films and documentaries. Jaman was founded and is currently led by Gaurav Dhillon, the former CEO of Informatica Corporation - a company that provides data integration and delivery services. The name Jaman has been derived from the Hindi word Jamun, a tree and the purple plum fruit of the same name that it bears.

My first impression of Jaman’s website has been very favorable - it sports a polished, yet lean interface that is careful not to over-indulge in cliched Web 2.0 design elements. The movie catalog is easy to browse and is neatly categorized by genre, geographical regions, and ratings. Jaman also has a neat movie discovery feature that allows you to tune your preferences in order to find a movie to watch - complete with an ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button, as made famous by Google.

Jaman is however, primarily a movie rental service that employs its own DRM and P2P network platform that enables users to rent and watch movies in high definition on their Mac OS X or Windows computers. While the site is free to browse, the Jaman player needs to be installed in order to watch licensed movie titles (which come in at $1.99 for a 7-day rental, or to purchase for $4.99). New users get three free ‘movie tickets’ when they sign up, which can be applied towards rentals. You also get two free tickets for every friend that you introduce to Jaman (so please do let me know in the comments if you intend to sign up after reading this, and I’ll email you an invite :P)

The Jaman team has also developed an unofficial AppleTV plugin that lets you stream content from your computer to the TV (if you own an AppleTV, of course). While the AppleTV has received a tepid response thus far, that scene has been predicted to change come January, once Apple announces their much-anticipated movie rental service via iTunes.

I previously mentioned that Jaman has built a social network around its media collection - this network enables users to get in touch with other movie buffs who may share common interests, fans, as well as filmmakers. People can also submit and share their original professional-quality content for distribution via this channel.

I have to mention Bollywood too - while Indian filmmakers and movie studios are waking up to the command that Internet audiences have in terms of bringing in revenue, Jaman is perhaps the first to offer audiences access to (a few) Bollywood movies on the Web. Zeroing in on the Bollywood section on Jaman, I see about 48 movies currently available - these range from the 70s (like Sharmilee) to contemporary releases (like Black and Paheli). Hopefully, this section will grow over time as more people start using the service.

Unlike other free and commercial offerings on the Internet for video consumption (such as Babelgum, Hulu, Joost, and a slew of others), Jaman is focused on providing a Web-based alternative to the Hollywood-dominated mainstream, and simultaneously improve the meager percentage of world cinema that is available to movie enthusiasts in the US.

I think I shall use my first free Jaman movie ticket to watch Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories, a film by citizen journalist Mike Shiley.

This is the one game my PS3 is eagerly waiting for.

A new Final Fantasy XIII trailer surfaced on the internet this week, supposedly sourced from a new gaming dvd released in Japan. To say the least, the styling continues the Final Fantasy dream on the Playstation 3 platform, and the visuals are breathtaking.

The video is mostly pre-rendered, but has some tiny bits of preliminary in-game footage (if I’m not mistaken). Square Enix moved their White Engine development completely over to the PS3, which makes the Final Fantasy XIII set (there are three distinct games in this project) a PS3 exclusive. Expecting in-game footage of any kind would be a bit much to ask at this point, since no release date has been announced yet (although people are expecting it to be available end-2008 or early 2009).

It seems such a long time ago that my brother and I would plonk ourselves down in front of the TV every Sunday morning to watch Knight Rider with the Hoff. The show had a winning theme - the idea of a smart sports car that can think for itself, let alone respond to voice commands, would be lapped up by kids our age without much hesitation.

Naturally, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the famous KITT (re-christened as the Knight Industries Three Thousand) is making a comeback - and as soon as February 17th in the US, and the central character will be played by a 540-hp Ford GT500KR (with the voice of Will Arnett). David Hasselhoff will be returning as a much older Michael Knight, while the lead (human) character would be played by Justin Bruening. This time around, however, I hope the show can build some not-quite-wafer-thin plots around the central theme, compared to the ones in the 80s series.

(via Autoblog)

Joost is an exciting new platform that has the potential to revolutionize the way TV shows and other video content is distributed over networks. If a few more popular and informative TV networks join the system, I may never have to subscribe to cable television ever again.

If you haven’t the first clue about Joost, it’s a P2PTV-based program (by the founders of Skype and Kazaa) that lets you watch near-TV resolution video content over the internet, converting a computer into an instant on-demand TV set (without a set top box and its tight storage constraints).

Oh, and the program is still in beta testing, under the title ‘Joost for Friends’. As a beta tester, I do have a few invites, so if you’d like one, feel free to leave your name and email address in the comments. Don’t worry, I won’t send you spam. You’re not that important. Just kidding!

rs6 sent me this ad a few days ago. I just got around to watching it, and was instantly blown away.

view | Ads of the World

Sir Richard Branson’s very successful Virgin brand has stepped into the Indian comic books scene - a market that has been left untapped and neglected for a long time, since the glorious era of Indrajal Comics. Virgin Comics now takes a place along with DC and Marvel - but has the edge of catering to a larger audience with Indian superhero characters. Virgin Comics has a strong vision, tapping into the very influential Indian culture and westernizing it just enough in comic book form, to establish a unique genre in US and other western markets - and hopefully gain the same level of popularity as Japanese anime and manga. Virgin Comics has amazing talent on board, with the likes of Oscar-winning director Shekhar Kapur and lifestyle guru Deepak Chopra.

The (free) promotional copy of Virgin Comics #0 is available on IGN. Click here to read.