I'm normally the type of person who would favor add-on tools like
Google's Autolink. But then I remembered a site I read
several months ago that used Intellitxt. Google has a good reputation,
but I fear their software will be imitated by others and pretty soon we'll
have
a companies like Juno and Netzero adding Intellitxt-type
advertising to everything through a default browser plug-in.
This got me thinking about where to draw the line.
I start by making a distinction between:
Explicit links - are visible links which encourage the reader to follow them
Implicit links - are potential, invisible links which are activated
by an action of the reader. (ie right clicking)
If Google Autolink is only providing a useful service,
it shouldn't mind being part of the right click menu instead
of part of the page. But if Google Autolink is really about advertising and
affiliate dollars, they will be tempted to go explicit.
I imagined a "link fight" back in November of 2000, but I
didn't anticipate that it would be initiated by a major vendor
like google.
In the future, I'd like to see new features like highlighting added (more later) to
the browser, but I think it's important to draw a line somewhere.
For me the line is: no third party explicit links.
There are a lot of tutorials on the net that provide a basic introduction to SQL, but few that get into advanced techniques. I'm a fan of Cross-Country running and I've worked as a database programmer for the past 4 years. Here's a problem that combines two of my interests into a puzzle that uses advanced joins and subqueries.
What is Cross Country?
Cross Country is team distance-running sport. Unlike track, it is run on grass or dirt. Each course is different. Some are hilly. Others flat.
How is it scored?
The places of each team's first 5 runners are added together. A teams next 2 runners can "displace" another teams runners, raising the other teams score. The lowest score wins. In the event of a tie, the team with the faster 6th runner wins.
Dual-Meet Scoring
In a meet with 3 teams, each team is matched against the other teams as if it were a dual meet.
Large Meet Scoring
When the meets get large, the scoring method is changed. Scorers no longer separate out the teams because it would be too much work and it is more likely to result in ties.
The result is that scoring of the 4th and 5th runners become especially important. In a dual-meet scored match, teams are often able to win on the strength of their first 3 or 4 runners. A poor 5th runner is a limited liability because the maximum number of points a weak 5th runner can score is capped at 12 (7 opposing runners + 5).
But in a large meet, a poor 5th runner could score 200 points, effectively eliminting even the best team from from medal contention.
The Challenge
The challenge is to take a large meet, separate out each team and score it the same way that 2-way meets are scored. I've chosen the 2003 Pennyslvania Distric 3 meet for the sample data. There are 55 teams, resulting in 1456 pairs of matches.
There's more that one way to solve the problem and I'd be interested in hearing from people that have non-SQL solutions as well (perl, pyphon, lisp, etc).
In evaluating a solution, I consider:
Simplicity - is it easy to read and understand.
Performance - does it run in under 30 seconds. Faster is better.
Portability - does it use vendor extensions to "standard" SQL
Just so you don't think that you're doing my homework for me, I've posted a solution. I'll eventually open the solution section up, but for now, you have to demonstrate that you've solved the problem yourself by answering this question:
How many wins, losses and ties did Conestoga Valley have:
W
L
T
If you're looking for other similar challenges, check out the "Yak Challenge".
Note: photos taken by the author at several PIAA District and State meets
Some readers of my proposal for
Spam Guarantees believe that
my solution is too complex or costly. I concede that simpler approaches,
such as authentication will be tried first,
and will provide temporary relief, but ultimately a
market-based solution will be necessary.
When such a market is created, it will appear gradually, and
it will need to use real money, or it will be unable
to police fraud.
It will not eliminate all spam, but offer a way for
legitimate senders to avoid becoming spam filter false positives.
Here's an overview of my views on whether market-based solutions should
use "Computer-Time" or "Real Money". The issue reminds me of Hayek
and the "Calculation Debate".
Anti-Spam Currencies: Computational vs Monetary
Two of the biggest obstacles to implementing a market-based solution to spam are:
Expense: the cost of administering and billing for each email transaction; and
Fraud: the inevitable attempts to capture the newly created currency
Expense
The "computational" school of thought argues that a postage or guarantee system
that uses real money will cost too much to administer.
Accounts will need to be created, tracked, and billed. With so many transactions,
the overhead will be enormous.
A system that requires computers to solve a math problem will
require no accounts, tracking or billing.
Fraud
Both approaches are vulnerable to fraud.
If the system uses real money, hackers will surely attempt to steal
a sender's key and use it like a stolen credit card.
If the system treats computer-time as currency,
hackers will surreptitiously
commandeer computers to poach the postage.
Scope Modesty: Certified Mail for the Web
With my proposal for email guarantees, I don't pretend to
the immediately eradicate all spam forever. Imagine instead a system that
starts as a premium service, much like current-day
certified and registered mail.
People and businesses who really value the email they send will
set up accounts to guarantee their mail. This will ensure that
their messages make it through the spam filters unscathed.
Not all transactions will need to be tracked for billing purposes,
only those messages
unwanted by their recipients.
Monetary Incentives
Because senders have to pay for "cashed" email, they will limit the
unwanted messages they send, limiting the transaction load that their
Credit Company needs to process. The Credit Companies can charge a fee to
cover the cost of processing the "cashed" email.
To limit the amount of fraud, Credit Companies will track the amount
of guarantees that have been collected. Accounts that reach their limit
will be frozen.
Credit Companies may offer to absorb the cost of stolen keys, provided
that account holders follow certain security practices. If not, the account
holder would be liable, up to the limit of their account.
Computational Incentives
In the computational model, senders and computer owners take no
responsibility for securing their systems.
A hacker could install a program on my computer that
allows him to offload email computations to my computer.
If my credit card is not being charged for the postage he
counterfeits, and the hacker is smart enough not to make my
system unusable, I am unlikely to devote the resources necessary
to:
avoid getting the program in the first place
removing it, once I have it
Holding someone liable for poor security creates an incentive to limit
the exposure of currency and tighten up security.
Some people may decide that their security is so poor that
they are unable to offer a guarantee.
Their messages may still make it through the spam filter,
but they run a greater risk of being overlooked.
Technical approaches to spam such as authentication and bayesian analysis are useful
in the short term, but ultimately an economic solution is needed.
I propose guaranteed email: email whose sender offers to pay
if the recipient is unhappy with the message.
Others have proposed electronic postage as a way to price the junk out of the market.
That's essentially what I propose except
no money changes hands if the recipient is happy with the message.
money is paid to the recipient, rather than a third party
like the postal service or Microsoft
Example
I write an email to Dave Winer.
Dave gets a lot of email and I want my message to stand out from the
spam and other unsolicited "great ideas".
If I were sending Dave a letter, I would be willing to pay
the postal service 37 cents; but to make my email stand out I offer 67 cents.
Economists call this signaling.
My email client attaches a file to my email and names it guarantee.xml.
This file follows a standard format
Dave's email client already has filtering software built-in.
It would take extra programming, but this filtering software could be modified to parse the
guarantee.xml file, lookup and verify the signature, and factor-in the
guarantee amount.
To increase Dave's trust that I won't default on the 67 cents, my Credit Card
(or some such) agency signs my key in a similar way that I signed the email,
asserting that they will back up any email guarantee, for up to (say) $7.50.
"Cashing" unwanted Email
If Dave "cashes" his email, my Credit card company will bill me.
If I don't pay my bills, they will revoke their signature on my key.
Since there are a smaller number of Credit agencies, Dave's filtering
software can set up a "trusted" set up Guarantors. (This key signing
is similar to the way SSL Certificates work).
Email Clients
Ideally every email program will have a button to "cash" an email. Barring that,
people could forward the email on to an address to receive payment. Microsoft's Outlook and
Hotmail are the biggest email clients. Plugins to these would go a long way in
gaining momentum.
Credit Companies
As for the "Credit Companies", this is the most difficult part of this whole proposal.
It's going to take a company with experience dealing with fraud and billing, who is also willing
to deal in small transactions. I think Paypal might be a good fit. They're not a conventional
bank and it would be a great way to add customers.
The upside of this is that they could charge a small percentage for every "cashed" email.
That's gotta be worth something.
Related
ZDNet Discussion: skeptical of any scheme proposed by Bill Gates that involves collecting money
In many cases, fathers -- and sometimes even mothers -- single out their youngest son to do the killing, Boehmecke said, "because they know minors will get lighter sentences from German judges." In some cases, these boys are revered by their community and fellow inmates as "honor heroes"
When Bush confronted his Russian counterpart about the freedom of the press in Russia, Putin shot back with an attack of his own: "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS."
It's not clear how well Putin understands the controversy that led to the dismissal of four CBS journalists over the discredited report on Bush's National Guard service. Yet it's all too clear how Putin sees the relationship between Bush and the American media—just like his own. Bush's aides have long feared that former KGB officers in Putin's inner circle are painting a twisted picture of U.S. policy. So Bush explained how he had no power to fire American journalists. It made little difference. When the two presidents emerged for their joint press conference, one Russian reporter repeated Putin's language about journalists getting fired. Bush (already hot after an earlier question about his spying on U.S. citizens) asked the reporter if he felt free. "They obviously planted the question," said one of Bush's senior aides.
It also illustrates how the family is a countervailing force in society. Public life is individualistic. It's oriented around goals like self-development, self-advancement and personal happiness. (This is, of course, even more true in America today than in the Russia of the 19th century.) The goal of family life, on the other hand, does not revolve around individual choices but around the unconditional union of souls. When we get married, and then when we have kids, we learn, sometimes traumatically, to say farewell to the world of me, me, me.
Tolstoy's novella came back to me while I was reading, of all things, The Wall Street Journal. The paper's Work and Family columnist, Sue Shellenbarger, had a piece last week reporting that the number of couples who now have separate checking accounts is rising rapidly. Roughly half of all married couples now keep multiple accounts, according to a Raddon Financial Group survey.
Two months after Forbes.com ended an experiment with such keyword ads, citing unease among its reporters, The New York Post is considering adopting the practice for its site. In the process, the newspaper is raising questions about the ethics of keyword advertising online.
Articles scattered with paid advertiser links could create the impression that advertising shaped the reporting, Mr. Colón said. That, in turn, could undermine the value of advertising in those articles in the first place, he said, adding, "advertising wants to be associated with a news product that has integrity."
The Post is not the first to use the system, called IntelliTXT, to wring extra ad revenue from its Web site. About 400 online publishers have so far adopted IntelliTXT, said Doug Stevenson, chief executive at Vibrant Media in New York, which developed it. But if The Post adopted IntelliTXT in its daily reports, it would stand out among news organizations, particularly after Forbes.com restricted IntelliTXT to non-news areas of its site in December.
Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.
Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.
Europe's problems -- its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed -- are all of Europe's making. By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches -- and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature.
Marginal notes, footnotes, and conventional commentaries are merely the clearest examples of the ways that writing continually provokes more writing and that texts provide context for each other. (Imitation, parody, pastiche, allegory, and plain plagiarism are, of course, others.) From turned down pages, to notes on a dust jacket, to academic essays, to fan zines, to direct quotations and indirect allusions, to stories lifted for future retelling without attribution, we are always commenting on texts, which continually intertwine in a process grandly known as "intertextuality." Documents are not, then, independent. Like biological organisms, every document is always related to some other.
Indeed, writing on writing is both literally and metaphorically an important part of the way meaning is negotiated. Annotation is a rich cultural practice which helps, if only by the density of comment attached, to signify the different cultural importance of texts and parts of texts. The thin trickle of original text overflowing a vast dam of commentary, the long introduction, and the separate subject entry in a library catalog offer clear indications that a particular text is socially and culturally valued.
In Bechtolsheim, Larry and Sergey had found their first big brother. In short order, they found several others, from whom they collected $1 million in seed money. But Larry and Sergey knew that a million bucks wouldn’t last long in the boom-era Valley, so they made their way up to Sand Hill Road, where the Valley’s venture capitalists cluster in a kind of multimillionaires’ ghetto.
But two VCs felt differently: John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, and Mike Moritz, of Sequoia Capital. Doerr was arguably the most important venture capitalist in the Valley, and Moritz was the VC who’d backed Yahoo. With Moritz behind them, Larry and Sergey reasoned, Google would have a line into a company they badly wanted to do business with. Similarly, they saw Doerr and his firm as an avenue into AOL, which Kleiner had financed.
So Doerr proposed that the boys take a little tour around Silicon Valley. He would arrange for them to meet and discuss the matter with some of the industry executives they had long admired. The names on Larry and Sergey’s itinerary comprised a high-tech murderer’s row: Intel chairman Andy Grove; Amazon.com’s Bezos; Sun chairman and CEO Scott McNealy; Intuit founder and former chairman Scott Cook—the list went on and on.
The prospect of putting up with it became more palatable when Doerr heard back from Larry and Sergey. Having gotten Socratic with their heroes, they were finally prepared to acquiesce in the hiring of a CEO. Their definition of acquiescence, however, was neither unconditional nor expeditious. “If Larry and Sergey were given clear instructions by a divine presence, they would still have questions,” Moritz says.
He also found himself frequently occupied with grounding Larry and Sergey’s flights of fancy. There was the time the boys suggested having Google enter the business of low-cost space launchings. And the time Larry reportedly tried to ban telephones from a new Google office building.
Doerr and Moritz, both sitting on funds that had been hammered by the collapse of the bubble, were keen to cash in their Google chips, while employees who’d been slaving for years were eager for a payday that would put rental housing behind them. On top of that, there was an SEC rule that would require Google (due to the number of shares it had given out) to start publishing its financials in April 2004. Public or private, the veil of fiscal secrecy was about to be lifted.
“The biggest frustration among institutions was that they weren’t getting inside information from Eric, Larry, and Sergey. Normally, a company says, ‘We can’t give you forward projections, but talk to our bankers.’ But Google didn’t do that. They followed the rules. They got a bum rap.”
everywhere I read about Google's AutoLink, I never see the essential detail that Google did right: links are only added after the user pressed the AutoLink button. It's not a toggle button, you have to press the button every time you visit a new page for the links to show up.
