What is Dirtch?
Dirtch is a service that lets you check out if there is “dirt” on a name you enter, e.g., illegal activities, legal problems, frauds, scams, shady dealings, bad reputation or very negative comments about a person or related to a person in government records, websites and in social media. You can set up a monitor on a name and get alert daily, weekly or monthly when new results are found.

At this time in beta testing, Dirtch will show you results based on the name only, which may include results of different people who have the same name. So you need to figure out which results are of the person you are checking on.

What can I use Dirtch for? Can’t I just use a background checker?
You can use Dirtch find out if there is any bad rap on you on the web, or check up and monitor anyone, e.g., your boss, your business partners, your neighbors, your employees, or anyone you deal with.

A background checker only checks government records. Many things such as a person’s reputation in social media are not in government records. Plus, background checkers charge a hefty fee for each name you check and for each time you check it.

Dirtch checks government websites and all other websites including social media. Dirtch can automatically alert you when it finds new results. Plus, Dirtch is free, at least for now.

How does Dirtch do it? Can’t I just use Google?
Dirtch performs thousands of searches on each name you enter and semantically analyzes hundreds of thousands of results to pick out the most relevant ones to show. It takes time to do all the semantic analysis. That’s why it may not show you results right away unless it is a name that has been searched before. For a new name, it will email you the results when it is done, which usually takes a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how busy the server is and how many results it has to sift through.

Yes, you can do it with Google, if you are prepared to do thousands of searches on a name and sift through hundreds of thousands of results to find out the relevant ones.

So in summary, Dirtch is a cool service for monitoring your reputation on the web and run background checks on people.

AdMob surveyed over 1,000 of  iPhone, iPod Touch and Android users to find out more about their interaction and download behavior with apps.  Here is what they found:

Xerox will pay $63.11 for each ACS share, roughly a 34% premium to Friday’s closing price. ACS stockholders will receive a total of $18.60 in cash and 4.935 shares of Xerox stock for each of their shares. In addition, Xerox will assume ACS’s debt of $2 billion and issue $300 million of convertible preferred stock to ACS’s Class B shareholder. ACS shares jumped 13.42% at last check to $53.60, while Xerox skidded about 16% to stand at $7.53.  The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010.

Some say it is a bold move by CEO Ursula Burns, but it may also be a desperate one.  On a call with analysts, Burns said buying ACS is a “game-changing initiative.” Business-process outsourcing, or BPO, is a $150 billion market and is growing at about 5% a year. The market is large and growing. However, will buying into a market work? Competing with offshore companies that do nothing but BPOs will be tough. Game changes at large companies typically do not work well. There are too much baggage and inertia, and too much difference in ways to do business and in culture.

Completion has been projected for 2015 but due to delays the tunnel may not be completed before 2018. With a breakthrough in one of the tunnels achieved on June 15 2009, an opening date for the tunnels during 2017 seems likely since work currently is progressing at a higher pace than projected.

The project is designed to feature two separate tunnels containing one track each. The tunnel is part of the Swiss AlpTransit project, also known as New Railway Link through the Alps NRLA which also includes the Lötschberg Base Tunnel between the cantons of Berne and Valais. Like the Lötschberg tunnel, it is intended to bypass winding mountain routes and establish a direct route suitable for high speed rail and heavy freight trains. On completion it is expected to decrease the current 3.5 hours travel time from Zürich to Milan by one hour. It will also reduce the time between Zürich and Lugano to 1 hour 40 minutes. The two portals will be near the villages of Erstfeld, Canton Uri and Bodio, Canton Ticino.

Nearby are two more St. Gotthard Tunnels: the 1881 Gotthard Rail Tunnel and the 1980 Gotthard Road Tunnel.

At the award ceremony,Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in an interview with Reuters that Netflix plans to send video streams to Sony PlayStation PS3 and Nintendo Wii. Netflix is already streaming videos to Microsoft’s Xbox 260. Hastings said they “want to be on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs. So we are working in parallel with all of those efforts. Currently our Xbox deal is exclusive and we haven’t characterized it more than that.”

There are rumors that a Netflix app is already on its way to the App Store. However, when asked, Hastings did not give a timetable and said “we are not focused on mobile yet, but on the TV, on Blu-ray, and on the video game consoles. We will get to mobile eventually, including the iPhone.”

Netflix also announced Netflix Prize 2 at the award ceremony. It will focus more on helping customers early in their experience with Netflix, drawing on many more sources of data to try to find just the right movies.

Background:

More than 51,000 people worldwide competed for the $1 million Netflix prize for three years, trying to improve the accuracy for predicting what movie a person may like to watch based on what movies he liked in the past and what movies people with similar tastes liked in the past. Netflix said that the winning solution will make the movie predictions twice as good as before.

Bellkor used matrix factorization models for their algorithm. This winning shows that matrix factorization models are superior to classic nearest-neighbor techniques for producing product recommendations, allowing the incorporation of additional information such as implicit feedback, temporal effects, and confidence levels.

Using TopicScoop is like any other search engine: Enter a keyword(s) into the search box, click Search. Within seconds, TopicScoop analyzes hundreds to thousands of tweets containing your keywords in real-time and extracts the topics people are talking about in these tweets. The topics are shown in the right sidebar. An orange bar in front of each topic indicates its popularity. The taller the bar, the more popular that topic is. What is impressive is that TopicScoop is doing language processing and clustering in real-time.

The topics discovered by TopicScoop enables you to find out in a quick glace what people are talking about on any subject of interest to you. This could save you a lot of time. Now, you do not need to read hundreds or thousands of tweets to find out what people are talking about. A quick glance of the topics tells you that. You can then click on a topic of interest to you to narrow down the tweets to only those that contain both your search keyword and the topic.

A brand may use this service to monitor what people are saying about them. For example, enter “Coca Cola” or “Blackberry” into the search box, right away, you see the topics people are talking about these brands. If there is any topic requires attention, you can click on the topic to drill down and see who are tweeting on the topic. All these without reading through thousands of tweets mentioning the search keyword.

The multiverse theory describes the continuous formation of universes through the collapse of giant stars and the formation of black holes. With each of these black holes there is a new point of singularity and a new possible universe. The multiverse (or meta-universe [metaverse]) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including our universe) that together comprise everything that physically exists: the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them. The different universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes. The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationship between the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered.

The multiverse exists in higher dimensions than what we can perceive: space and time. One way to measure the effect of the higher dimensions is gravity, which can traverse through universes. With the higher dimensions and multiverse, instant travel and teleport
become feasible. The problem is forces or being in higher dimension can affect us, but how do we affect the higher dimensions that are outside our space and time dimensions?

As a technologist, I ask the question: can we find a way to affect higher dimensions that are outside our space and time dimensions and make use of it to our benefit?

To learn more about multiverse, check out this book Universe or Multiverse?

Both sponsored tweets and ad.ly put their bets on celebrity Twitterers and are based on a cost per tweet model. The pay is  quite high, hundreds to tens of thousands per tweet based on the number of followers you have. Since many of these tweets use a bit.ly link so anyone can  track the number of clicks using a link like this: http://bit.ly/info/41vuMB

We tracked 20 such tweets that were posted over the last 4 weeks or so and estimated the average cost per click is $52! That is based on the click counts on bit.ly, but bit.ly counts bot clicks. There are many bots tracking links on Twitter, such as tweetmeme, powertwitter, twitturly, etc., trying to index and rank the links on Twitter. These bot clicks can account for 80 to 95% of clicks on a link in a Tweet. Take this into consideration, the average CPC can be $250 or higher for real human clicks. Now figuring in sponsored tweets or ad.ly’s cut at a conservative 30%, the real cost to advertisers is in the range of $72 if you consider all bit.ly counts are real human clicks, or $357 per click or higher if you discount the bot clicks in the bit.ly counts.

Brand advertisers may be lured by the celebrity Twitterers in the beginning, but at the end, it is the ROI that matters. How many advertisers would keep paying such high prices with a very negative ROI?  Why pay $50, $70,  or $250 per click, when you can get targeted clicks on search engine at a couple dollars or less? Or get Twitter clicks from Revtwt at $0.10 to $0.40 per click?

We are not alone in this assessment. Check this out Sponsored Tweets: a case study in Twitter marketing fail

The Twitter advertising solution offered by Revtwt appears to be the most practical. The key to their solution is a pay for performance CPC platform that is backed up by click filtering to filter out bot clicks and fraudulent clicks.  Advertisers are getting “an impressive ROI”, a review by marketingprofessor.com.

Moderator James Bottomley cited an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, which showed that Linux performance had dropped about two percentage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases. He asked “Is this a problem?”

Torvalds: “We’re getting bloated and huge. Yes, it’s a problem.”

When asked what the Linux community is doing about it, Torvalds chuckled “I’d like to say we have a plan.” The audience laughed and applauded his comment.

Torvalds further said “Sometimes it’s a bit sad that were are definitely not the streamlined, small hyper efficient kernel I envisioned 15 years ago. The kernel is huge and bloated and our iCache footprint is scary. There’s no question about that, and whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse.”

He maintains, however, that stability is not a problem. “I think we’ve been pretty stable,” “We are finding the bugs as fast as we’re adding them — even though we’re adding more code.”

Regardless, no one is arguing Linux’s success. It is now used in a much wider range of applications than when it was first envisioned, running web servers, desktops, corporate data centers, and smart phones.

Also, Linux is highly modular. Since it is open source, it can be customized and optimized to fit an application. So if an application does not need some of the bloated functions, they can be taken out.

Torvalds commented on using user-space driver frameworks to reduce kernel bloat: “But you certainly would not want to take an existing kernel file system and then move it into user space. that would just be crazy. That’s LSD trippy, kind of. Don’t do that. A lot of the time it gets way harder to debug, we’re moving things into the kernel out of user space because of issues like that. We’re doing kernel mode setting, and doing a lot more of the logic of graphics in kernel space, actually makes it a lot easier for everybody because now you don’t have two broken pieces that don’t have a clue what the other piece is doing, and trying to debug across that kind of divide is horrible. The debugging advantages of doing drivers in user space have always been kind of suspect. I don’t think it’s really been true, except in very early kind of bring up meaning. Now people can do. You can do block devices in user space, you can do character device drivers in user space, you can do file systems in user space. Go wild. It’s not, I think, relevant for any major file system or driver but it’s there if you want to.”

More than 51,000 people worldwide competed for the $1 million Netflix prize for three years, trying to improve the accuracy for predicting what movie a person may like to watch based on what movies he liked in the past and what movies people with similar tastes liked in the past. Netflix said that the winning solution will make the movie predictions twice as good as before.

The BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team was formed and collaborated over the Internet. The team met face-to-face for the first time before the award announcement news conference at New York. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt announced the winners, handed them a check of $1 million and an Olympic-size “gold” medal for each of the team members.

The BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team consists of:

Bob Bell and Chris Volinsky, members of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Research, and winner of the 2007 and 2008 Progress Prizes as members of team BellKor.

Andreas Toscher and Michael Jahrer, machine learning researchers and founders of commendo research and consulting in Austria. They won the 2008 Progress Prize as members of the team Big Chaos.

Electrical engineer Martin Piotte and software engineer Martin Chabbert of Montreal, and founders of Pragmatic Theory.

Yehuda Koren, Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research Israel, and winner of the 2007 and 2008 Progress Prizes as a member of team BellKor.

Bellkor only edged out the previous first ranked leader “The Ensemble” at the last few minutes of the contest.

Bellkor used matrix factorization models for their algorithm. This winning shows that matrix factorization models are superior to classic nearest-neighbor techniques for producing product recommendations, allowing the incorporation of additional information such as implicit feedback, temporal effects, and confidence levels.

Netflix now has announced Netflix Prize 2: It will focus more on helping customers early in their experience with Netflix, drawing on many more sources of data to try to find just the right movies.