Sound-pattern recognition is an interesting subject - it’s really cool, everyone’s trying to capitalize on it, and it never quite works perfectly. Nevertheless, Microsoft just took out a patent on a voice recognition-based caller-ID system, and if it becomes widespread enough, could serve as a more accurate alternative to traditional caller-ID. Not to mention, it wouldn’t be fooled by those pesky teenagers that block their phone number from you. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be as easy for you to input voice patterns into your new caller-ID system, and (without a national voice recognition database) would only work on people that have called you before (meaning you’ll have to talk to your aunt Marge at least once before blocking her out completely).

Of course, more likely than not, this technology will never be picked up on a wide scale, pushed aside with all the other audio-recognition technology that failed. What I want to know is, whatever happened to that technology they were developing at MIT a few years ago, where you would input pitches and it would turn out music files that matched those patterns? It would sure be helpful when lyrics fail you in trying to find the name of that beat you heard at the mall…

via Wired

A teenager in China recently killed his mother and “seriously injured” his father. The catch? He was a supposed “internet addict,” and his government is blaming his online obsession for his violent behavior. In an even broader generalization, state officials are using the increase in popularity of the internet as the reason for up to 80% of juvenile crime. China has even prevented new internet cafes from opening in the past few months, in an attempt to restrict how long individual users are spending online every day.

Another kid has committed a violent act. What to do… blame the media, of course! It’s easy, cost-effective, and since there’s so much of it and is so abstract, who can really disprove it? But for every internet-obsessed, violence-prone teenager you give me, I’ll give you ten that have never committed a crime in their lives. This is a simple case of cause and effect - you could just as easily argue that the increase in radio waves coursing through our bodies in recent years is the reason for 80% of juvenile crime; the real causes of it are so diverse and widespread, that it’s impossible to disprove.

And if the Chinese government thinks that certain aspects of the internet are harming their youth, why not ban it like they’ve done with other sites such as The Learning Channel and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s website? Or would that be wrong?

This reminds me of a great book I used as research material for a 10th-grade paper on media as a scapegoat: “It’s Not the Media - The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence On Children” by Karen Sternheimer. She points out, among other things, that violent crime actually plummeted during the video game explosion of the early 1990s. Yet who was the frontrunner for any violent act? Video games. Just because one kid was influenced by a video game (or the internet, as it may be) to commit a violent act, it doesn’t mean that that’s the end-all source of crime. I could just as easily give you a kid that was driven to violent acts from being raised in an uber-religious household that taught their kids fear and shame.

It’s time we stopped using the media to distract our society from the real problems.

[By the way, while I was writing this post, I found a flash-ad on Wired.com advertising Andrew Keen's book, "The Cult of the Amateur - How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture." He talks about how "experts" in pajamas and digital piracy will be the end of us all. Your opinions?]

There’s been a lot of complaints over the past few days from gamers and bloggers alike over the Church of England criticizing Sony for using Manchester Cathedral as a backdrop in the video game “Resistance: Fall of Man.” A gun fight takes place in the cathedral, prompting the church to threaten legal action against Sony if they do not meet some or all of their demands, which include a “substantial donation,” removal of the game, and reworking of the portion of the game which includes the cathedral.

The central legal  issue of the case is, of course, that of copyright, and whether Sony had the right to use potentially private architectural designs in the game without the Church’s permission. The case has largely been moved to deal with the moral issue of the case, however, about the responsibility of Sony in promoting a game which could easily been seen as offensive to members of an essentially private institution. [An example of this responsibility was seen in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, where the creators of a Command & Conquer game reworked the package design, which originally included a picture of the World Trade Center in a war zone]

What are your thoughts?

I feel as though both of these issues could have been resolved fairly easily with one minor change to the game’s design. Had the developers created a generic cathedral in which the given level were to take place, the publishers could have avoided the legal issues of the case, which is truly the only basis on which the Church is resting their case. Otherwise, they have no basis in charging Sony with promoting gun violence or otherwise intentionally harming the moral values of a religious group. If we were to follow what the Church is advocating here, there’s nothing stopping us from taking Ayn Rand and Michael Crichton’s books off the shelves for promoting hateful an prejudicial thoughts. I consider Sony to have violated copyright in this instance, and should have been more sensitive to what is literally sacred ground to some. But at the same time, the Church is taking this opportunity to exploit the freedom of exchange of ideas; another example of a conservative power resisting the transfer of untraditional ideas.

I stopped using MySpace almost a year ago in favor of Facebook, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made (a slight exaggeration). But today, I will not be criticizing the famed social-networking site’s horrendous advertising, improperly formatted CSS, lack of W3C validation, or even the spamming by the “horny Harvard girls that want to friend U!” Today, I shall rant about music profiles.

Musicians who created MySpace profiles received several benefits: a free webpage, ability to share their music and put it on other profiles, and exposure to their friends (in more ways than one, depending on what “type” of band they are…). Aside from the sudden blasts of unwanted rap music internet users would receive when visiting a profile, this wasn’t a big deal. But what many didn’t expect what that MySpace would become a place for already well-known bands to set up shop and pump their shameless advertising everywhere.

Part of the intrinsic popularity of sites like MySpace is that it offers otherwise-clueless web users a chance to have their own website. But artists like Jem and The All-American Rejects already have perfectly flash-enabled websites, along with mailing lists to keep fans informed of upcoming tour dates. I’m a geek, so a well-designed website makes me respect a person (or band, as it may be). Conversely, a MySpace page whose tables explode when any standard web browser tries to load it just makes me get really annoyed at that person (or band). Upcoming artists think that a MySpace Music page makes them look professional; then again, well-known bands that create a profile just make themselves look unprofessional. And we’re ignoring the fact that those profiles are already updated less than their sparsely-updated “Official” pages.

“But it’s such an honor to be friended by Jem herself!” Honestly, who really believes that it’s the band members themselves that update their profiles? Most of them are written in 3^rd person, for God’s sake! I don’t know about you, but some 22-year-old with the band hitting the “Accept” button to my friend request doesn’t make me feel very special.

Then again, I operate under the notion that if I read more than a basic bio of a singer, I’m gonna be disappointed in them, so maybe no website at all would be best.

<as though speaking to a toddler>Who likes touch-screen keyboards?</>

What, no takers? That’s probably because keyboards are extremely difficult to operate with no physical feedback from the keys you press, but that’s not stopping Amex Digital from rolling out touch-screen, wireless keyboards for you to play with. According to them, the TSK-VX7 delivers “the ultimate in feel and response” (what response? It’s touch-screen…), and its rechargeable battery will last up to 2 months (of which I’m inclined to be very skeptical of).

In my opinion, you kind of defeat the purpose of “touch typing” when you can’t even feel where your fingers are… Plus, one look at the keyboard will tell you that the buttons aren’t exactly in standard relative location. Plus, no delete button!

You have to give it style points, however. And with a small hole that looks suspiciously like a microphone, this could lead the way to peripherals that do more than you expect:

via Aving