Search: what NFL games are on TV tomorrow?

An example of the challenge in current search vs natural language processing:

What football games are on tomorrow?

I want to know: NFL vs soccer; TV schedule and channels; tomorrow is 10/30/2011; I am in PDT and would like to know TV listings in my local time; sorting by favorite team and/or team nearest to my current location.

Tested on G and bing. Bing result included a Yahoo answers result in top 5 that had the right answer, but: I just wanted the answer, not a list of search results; the ‘answer’ was crowdsourced/turked; the resulting web page will be out of date for the ‘tomorrow’ question in < 12 hrs.

Could Siri do this? Can IBM'd Watson do it.

What if this is possible via a new answer engine? What happens to billions of value in b-models that are search and search-results dependent?

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

“The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Mr. Wozniak’s mother. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobbyist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illicitly exploring the nation’s phone system.” – John Markoff, The New York Times (Last accessed October 6, 2011)

The History of Phone Phreaking Blog has a scanned copy of the October 1971 Esquire magazine article “Secrets of the Little Blue Box.” (PDF 9.8 MB)

There’s an HTML / text version of “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” at lospadres.info.

What are you reading?

Here’s a link to an RSS feed of the articles I’ve read and recommend.

The Leisure Link’s Launch in Boston

From the The Leusure Link web site comes news of a cool event in Jamaica Plain studio of the “A Far Cry” players:

The Leisure Link’s Launch in Boston:
A Fundraiser for Take Back Your Time
with special guest John de Graaf, National Coordinator of Take Back Your Time

TBYT is a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

Event Details:
Thursday, October 8th, 6:30-8:30pm
A Far Cry, 146A South Street, Jamaica Plain
RSVP to alison@theleisurelinkconsulting.com or 917-626-0344; suggested donation: $8-24

Clayton M. Christensen’s MIT World Videos

Christensen gave a keynote address today at the World Innovation Forum, here are three talks he’s given at MIT that are available via MIT World. (MIT World has over 630 video’s of significant talks given at MIT dating back to 2001).

MIT World Videos

The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis

May 13, 2008
Clayton Christensen

China, Taiwan , and the U.S.: A Coming Conflict? Session Two

February 25, 2002
Moderator: Stephen W. Van Evera
Panelists:

• Stephen W. Van Evera
• Thomas J. Christensen
• Harvey Feldman
• Chas W. Freeman Jr.

The Innovation Economy: How Technology Is Transforming Existing Industries and Creating New Ones

May 23, 2002
Clayton Christensen

Business Insight article downloads from MIT Sloan Management Review

MIT Sloan Management Review (where I work) jointly produces a special report in the Wall Street Journal called “Business Insight”. It’s published in print and on WSJ.com & MIT SMR’s site.

For further reading on topics raised in Business Insight articles we include links to work SMR has published in the past. As part of the partnership, we “unlock” these articles and make them freely available PDF downloads (for a period of time).

Below is a list of the 17 articles from the archives that are currently available as free downloads.

Many thanks to this edition’s sponsor, MIT Sloan Executive Education, the authors and WSJ.com.

• Does It Pay To Be Good?
• Sharing Global Supply Chain Knowledge
• How to Win in Emerging Markets
• Using Corporate Social Responsibility to Win the War for Talent
• Measuring Brand Health to Improve Top-Line Growth
• A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise
• Creating Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks
• The High Impact of Collaborative Social Initiatives
• Managing Risk to Avoid Supply-Chain Breakdown
• Sustainability and Performance
• Understanding and Managing the Brand Space
• The Great Leap: Driving Innovation From the Base of the Pyramid
• The Hidden Leverage of Human Capital
• Building Competitive Advantage Through People
• Global Sustainability and the Creative Destruction of Industries
• A New Strategy Framework for Coping with Turbulence
• Managing Supply Chain Inventory: Pitfalls and Opportunities

MIT Sustainability Summit

Taking a break from the usual today and attending the MIT Sustainability Summit

The MIT Sustainability Summit, Discovering New Dimensions for Growth, brings together students, engineers, business leaders, academics, environmental activists, and public servants to discuss how we can most effectively support each other as we face the opportunities and challenges of transitioning to a sustainable world.

Will update with more photos from the day …

Raw audio from Panel 1, MIT Sustainability Summit (27mb)

Video of Shai Agassi Talking at MIT

MIT World: From IT to Cleantech: New Sources of Innovation

Shai Agassi presents an ambitious and dramatic plan to create a battery run car, a system of battery switching stations, and a subscription plan for drivers to buy miles the same way we buy cell phone minutes.

Agassi begins at 8 minutes in, talks ~1/2 hour and then Q&A is ~1 hour.

Wow, MIT World is at 620 full-length videos now. When I worked on that project I think it was < 300. The Idea Explorer is great fun too.

Need a new idea? They’ve got an “easy button” for that too.

Vertical Farming

“There are huge advantages to feeding people who live in the city, from the city.”

Small Can Be Big

Why Small Can Be Big

SmallCanBeBig.org is a new way to help based on a simple premise: give everyone a more direct, more personal, more local and more shared way to help those in need, and big things can happen.

In a single year, it costs the Commonwealth of Massachusetts $47,000 to provide shelter for one homeless family. For a fraction of that cost – around a thousand or so – donors at SmallCanBeBig.org can join together to keep a family from ever becoming homeless in the first place.