The 36 best stories, pictures and opinions of August 2012

Every link I shared in August 2012 that earned at least 50 clicks on Twitter:

1. Wikipedia Redefined (1001)
2. An independent rating system for online Terms of Service (545)
3. Your startup is not a startup, it’s just a website. (536) 
4. Public humiliation done right. (479)
5. The best place on the web to learn anything, free. (410) 
6. Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger (356)
7. Advice I Wish I Could Have Given Myself 5 Years Ago (324)
8. Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy (255)
9. Friend just posted a pic of Atlanta Marriott mega-lobby, AKA Dragon*Con ground zero. I remember that feeling (247)
10. Programmer Time Translation Cheatsheet -or- Why Programmers Are Bad at Estimating Times (241)
11. A rookie goes to Dragon*Con: Here's what he learned (240) 
12. The best interface is no interface (218)
13. How The Poor, The Middle Class And The Rich Spend Their Money (157)
14. You can't make this stuff up… (153) 
15. "Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies" - Fox News (142)
16. Productivity vs. Guilt and Self-Loathing (142)
17. Fear of Money (138)
18. The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win (136)
19. The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy (131)
20. Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa (129)
21. When Freemium Fails (129)
22. 13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious (114)
23. An Unexpected Ass Kicking (105)
24. If Content Is King, Multiscreen Is The Queen, Says New Google Study (90)
25. 25 Ways To Survive As A Creative Person (89)
26. 30 Indispensable Writing Tips From Famous Authors (87)
27. Move your feet (86)
28. The poison pill hidden in Twitter's social graph (85)
29. Why You Can’t Be Anything You Want to Be (81)
30. Wolfram|Alpha's Personal Analytics for Facebook (80)
31. Peter Thiel's College Dropouts: One-Year Checkup (73)
32. ‘The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe’ – The Top 10 TED talks for startups (66)
33. The top ten differences between white terrorists and others (61)
34. What My Son's Disabilities Taught Me About 'Having It All' (58)
35. The coming civil war over general purpose computing (57)
36. How to Be a Better Procrastinator (55)

Stats compiled with Buffer.

Nerd Word of the Day: Mechanical Turk

Image by Bernt Rostad via Flickr

Mechanical Turk (n.) - A geek term for any "fake" artificial intelligence, as in an intellect that is presented as artificial but is in fact operated by a human being, or other conventional intelligence. Anyone or anything that cheats on the Turing Test is a Mechnical Turk. The term is a reference for "The Turk," a chess-playing robot that was exhibited in Europe for over 80 years starting in the 1770s--defeating both Ben Franklin and Napolean--until it was revealed to be operated by a human chessmaster hiding inside. In some tech circles, the term Mechanical Turk refers specifically to a service offered by Amazon.com, which quickly answers user information requests by routing them to human researchers.

I bring it up because: Terminator: Salvation opens today, and that's always a good excuse to discuss artificial intelligence, especially those that are clearly fake. More appropriately, a prototype artificial intelligence that precedes SkyNet in The Sarah Connor Chronicles was called The Turk, referencing the same 18th-century hoax chess-bot. Above all, concepts like the Mechanical Turk are abuzz in AI circles and tech message boards thanks to Wolfram Alpha, a so-called "computational engine" that seeks to analyze text questions and research its own answers to them, effectively automating the human process that is at the heart of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. So far, the Amazon fleshlings are much more effective than the Wolfram proto-AI--which means the deathbot rebellion isn't likely this week, no matter how much McG's new Terminator flick may scare you into thinking so.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Metadata in a Crowd: Shared Knowledge Production (slideshare.net)
• Machine Learning to AI (hunch.net)
• What does the Turing test really mean? (marginalrevolution.com)
• The Coming Superbrain (innovationtoronto.com)
• Twittercism: Twitter Will Be The Birthplace Of Skynet (boxofmeat.net)