I’ve been doing a great deal of reading on machine learning, collective intelligence and other applications for statistical analysis.

I’ve become one of those mouth-breathing weirdos that enjoys the statistics and methodology portion of their social science classes…and this frightens me. No funny smell or obnoxious verbatim quotations of Monty Python yet!

Here’s a analysis engine that would converge a number of algorithms into a coherent package that would scare the jibblies of a great many politicos.

In this case you would take news feeds, blogs, newspaper editorials, PR documents from relevant organizations and the like and feed them to a computer.

An initial filter would be applied to exclude irrelevant documents – this would be a supervised algorithm similar to those applied to spam filters. Only, in this case it would filter in all articles relevant to climate change.

So we’ve got a big pile of texts relating to climate change the next step is to cluster them in terms of their stance on specific issues. We would then create a clustering machine that groups articles together based on rhetorical usage. So articles written using the same keywords, phrases, sentence structures. It would, by its nature also group those documents which are similar in stance on particular issues (since people who share the same opinions TEND to use the same vocabulary to describe the problems and to cite the same facts). Since this clustering algorithm sorts on rhetorical usage it sorts people based more on how they view the problem than what particular solution they derive.

Two more algorithms can be applied to derive some valuable insight. The first is a timeline analysis – if you notice there’s a group of authors or content outlets whose use of language tends to precede that of the larger group you can correlate the two groups.

Moreover, you can also perform so-called stereotype analysis wherein an author is statistically HIGHLY representative of the group – knowing the variance within the group and the probability of a stereotype can really help identify what is and is not a highly mobilized group of people. This is especially useful for groups whose rhetorical leaders are different from official power structures.

Moreover, correlation is more useful than causation. When you can find individuals that correlate HIGHLY with the larger group you can use them to test stimulus on the larger group, this is idea behind focus groups – testing it on a small group of people reduces the risk of an individual product’s failure. A less-discussed aspect of focus groups is that even when participants reject or dislike the product, the process and procedure of the focus group program has by-far the greatest influence on their opinion of the company.

Taking part in the process improves sentiment MUCH more than receiving a high-quality product We intuitively understand this when we eat burnt homemade cookies or use wobbly shelves we made ourselves.

Everybody understand the value of a mouthpiece but mouthpieces are, in general, a result of the IMPOSED celebrity of a person, not necessarily the fidelity with which their message corresponds with their respective group – see Lou Dobbs on CNN speaking “for Americans” who are of course an entirely homogenous group of hivemind ants. Instead he’s a mouth piece because he uses the sympathies of his audience to insert NEW learned behaviours and mechanisms.

This “though leader finder” machine reverses the process by allowing media organizations to detect and selectively raise the profile of HIGHLY REPRESENTATIVE individual voices.

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Okay, so I haven’t actually USED the damn device but it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to look at a stack of paper 0.76 inches thick and imagine it an Apple branded paperweight.

What’s my beef? This “device” (I’m hesitant to call it a laptop or a UMPC) is so typically neo-Jobs Apple it makes me sick. As a rabid MacAddict (7 years worth of the very magazine – not a month missed) since way back in the Old Jobs days I can tell you that the decisions, while financially sound, have bankrupted the company of all that made it “insanely great.”

It’s become the bastion of antagonism to the open source movement – it capitalizes on, without contributing to the society by stealing the technology and releasing inferior overpriced merchandise, wrapping it in pretty aluminum and convincing nerds that having an APPLE laptop (rather than a ThinkPad) is more likely to get them laid.

MacOS X WAS brilliant, now it is just good. While its much heralded simplicity and ease of use is arguable, I’ll concede that it is at least more usable and stable than Windows and more usable than most Linux distros. It however, has become the largely useless feature-bloated Windows ME for Mac. My issue, however, is not with the operating system, it is with the hardware on which they release it.

The Air is a monumental exercise in cash burning and trust-fund child solicitation. No serious person who isn’t reprehensibly wealthy would ever buy this thing. It has the specification of a 2 year-old laptop – my ancient Toshiba (which I purchased brand-new for 3 hundred dollars less than the cheapest Air) outperforms the bloody thing on every front.

Apple actually states on the site that you don’t sacrifice performance for the slim form factor – that’s an outright lie, not just a marketing distortion, it’s a straight-up falsehood.

If the Air retailed for the same price as the bottom-end MacBook I might not be so disgusted with it – but starting at $1800 it is insulting to consumer intelligence.

Anyone who’s EVER studied people’s issues with laptops (I have) knows that thickness is NOT even close to people’s chief complaint. Weight, heat and battery life are virtually all people care about. Some people actually complain that old supposedly “clunky” laptops are too thin and feel fragile. Moreover, those people who avoid laptops do so because they can’t upgrade them in the same way the can their desktop, now Apple has done away with even that level of post-purchase customization.

Apple thinks it can pull another iMac by removing a device from the system that is considered ubiquitous – the removable media bay. When Apple turfed the floppy it did so on the logic that everyone would be using CDs – a superior replacement technology. Optical media hasn’t been replaced, it’s evolved. Apple, instead of taking a side on the format wars (Blu-Ray would’ve cut into profits) evades the issue and hurts the customer instead.

As someone who is seriously into technology that actually makes life better and provides services and features that do useful things and provide meaning – Apple has utterly dismantled my loyalty. It does what Windows and Linux did 2 years ago, gives it a pretty set of icons and calls it innovation. It takes what should be an open medium of exchange and devices that should be customizable, and closes the doors to customer input and locks out competition in reprehensible way.

The clean-line Apple fetishism isn’t a testament to their designers, since their products are in the long-term LESS usable than their PC equivalents, it’s a testament to their lawyers who attack like hungry wolves all comers who encroach on their style.

Apple used to rely on the old underdog sentiment for support and patience with their often bizarre foibles (see the eMac, Anniversery Edition Mac, Mac OS 8). Now they’ve managed to surround their products with some euphoria-inducing pixie dust that destroys any objective rational asssesment by their customers – see iPhone/iPod touch, neo-Nano, Mac OS 10.(X+2).

Hopefully, intelligent people who don’t like wasting money will take note and hold Apple to the wall – innovating in ways that make your products worse not better and putting on a marketing song-and-dance is dumb.

With the entry into the field of the ultra-cheap (Eee PC, XO) or the UMPC-category, the Air reminds me of the G4 cube, an engineering stunt not a useful product. Only now, Apple has managed to createa buzz machine that surrounds even their duds with mystique and wonder.

Everyone, rightly, mocked the Palm Foleo for being overpriced and underperforming (Palm pulled the Foleo before going to market). Somehow people have missed that the very same logic applies to the Apple Air – but the assessment is that Apple can do no wrong; it can and it has.

Both Palm and Apple, who are and were leaders in their respective design fields have to get out of fixing the problems their companies had in the 1990s. Jobs shut out third parties so he could easily reshape Apple into the monochrome-logoed ultra-chic corporation we know today, the logic then doesn’t hold true now. Even better, Apple should get out of the PC manufacturing market completely and license it – get some real innovation rather than hiring packaging designers to make laptops.

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