This past holiday season I was amazed at how efficient Amazon.com’s operation has become. As this was my 8th year doing the majority of my holiday shopping online this was the first that every gift came 48 hours after ordering from Amazon.com. On the other hand the two gifts that I bought from Buy.com did make it prior to the holiday, but it took an unremarkable 5 days. It should be noted that my use of the term “efficiency” is used in the terms of time alone. As far as eco-friendliness Buy.com did beat Amazon.com as they sent one box for every three items bought verse Amazon’s 1 to 1 gift to box ratio. Although the pile of Amazon boxes did make a great fire which saved me from turning on the oil heat.
*Update: I was made aware that burning cardboard is not a great idea as it can increase the likelihood of a chimney fire*
In recent week there have been great examples of data collection for a greater good. The first example I found out from the PBS show Wired. It was about the history and future of CAPTCHA. Luis von AhnA from Carnegie Mellon University explained the confusing acronym means “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. As Carnegie Mellon owns the trademark and rights to most technology in use on millions of forms on the web it was interesting to find out that this simple security technology is actually doing a lot of good.
Every year Merriam-Webster names one word the new word of the year, this year they selected w00t. For those non-gamers a w00t exclamation of happiness, which originally was an acronym for We Owned the Other Team. This is the first time a electronic shorthand word has been selected by the folks who document our living language. Having had the joy of helping grade 9th & 10th grade history exams I see our language changing in the next 10 years rather drastically. Thankfully English is a living language, but at this rate this post in 2017 will read :
evry yr Merriam-Webster names 1 wrd d nu wrd of d yr, dis yr dey selectd w00t. 4 doze non-gamers a woot exclamation of ^^. dis S d 1st tym a electronic shorth@ wrd hs bn selectd by d folks hu Dcumnt r livN lang. havN had d joy of helpin grade 9th & 10th grade hx exams IC r lang changiN n d nxt 10 yrs rthR drastically. Thankfully en isa livN lang, bt @ dis r8 dis post n 2017 wl read:
In the High School work that I have seen using text lingo is a normal occurrence across all types of students; w00t to that!
Today Google released their hard work from the summer and gave Boston the Street View feature seen in San Fransisco and New York 9 months ago. The squad of cars seemed to have roved the city during the month of August by the looks of it. The mixture of the Navisite data and the GPS enabled car matched well, even on Boston’s crazy road system. Here is a great example that I deal with everyday in Watertown MA that has 6 roads converge into one mass of pavement. Boston and the idea of using island dividers to filter traffic is still a foreign idea:
