Tired of the same boring URL’s? Need a little excitement? Well thanks to ShadyURL.com you can turn those boring URL’s into brand new suspicious and frightening URL’s. All you do is type it in and they do the rest. For example:

Pixelatedgeek.com is now...

Now how cool is that? Scare your friends! Scare your enemies! It’s fun for the whole family. And if this is too much excitement for you, they have an option to shorten the URL and make it less shady. Thanks Wonder-Tonic!

Well here you go. Poor guy, I think he needs a hug.

Comes to show you that even professionals mess up. And look! It seems like the news media has it all wrong from the beginning. According to @swineflew’s bio:

“Swine flu? You’ve got it all wrong. They said swine flew in Mexico. We do it all the time. Get over it.”

“It will try to understand a user’s question and intent and understand it at a rudimentary level and provide and accurate and confident answer.”

Of course buzzing in with a wrong answer in Jeopardy is costly and so Watson must be absolutely sure before answering. This kind of open ended question answering is something that hasn’t been tackled successfully in the past. Playing chess means calculating millions of chess moves to find the best solution to a fixed problem. Answering questions on a game show like Jeopary requires a very different skill set, something computers are not naturally good at requiring broad general knowledge, quick prompt analysis of meaning, irony, riddles and other natural language subtleties that are at a pinch out of the remit of a computer. Matching words to words is something a computer excels at but matching meaning to meaning is still something that although we take it for granted in our own lives, computationally is exceptionally hard.

Hit the read link for more on what could become your computer overlords in the near future.

Watson will be given the questions as electronic text while the human contestants will both see the text and hear it spoken by the show’s host Alex Trebek. Watson will also be disconnected from the internet allowing only the use of previously parsed information stored in it’s memory. Watson will answer the questions in a synthesised voice and be able to choose follow-up questions. IBM and the show’s producers aim to involve Ken Jennings, the legendary grand master of Jeopardy with 74 consecutive wins and collected a prise fund of $2.52m in 2004.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM does have a constructive business plan behind this high-profile stunt. The aim is to provide accurate and fast answers by having the computer look at all the information associated with a search regardless of how remote that might impinge on an answer that you might be building towards. Traditional search returns lots of information, but unless you have an infinite amount of time to search through every resource for even the smallest pieces of information you’re at risk of missing something and creating an ill informed decision. Dr. Ferrucci aims to have Watson “…able to be applied to all sorts of applications in the world and essentially cut the time to find answers to very difficult problems… [by]…getting the computer to work in human terms”.

IBM's Watson laboratory

Once Watson has taken on and beaten Ken Jennings (it’s not a case of if but when one supposes) what’s next for the mightly computing machine? Building better humans? Understanding the meaning of emotions and finding the hatred that drives the human race? How about taking on humans in the ultimate battle, Quake Live? Yeah ok, the computer already kicks my ass at that one too.

What would you, our dear readers, have Watson do for you? The answer is 42 remember.

[Via BBC]

In 4chan we lul

Beating out President Barack Obama’s “hope” fans, beating out Oprah Winfrey’s followers, and beating up Pop Singer, Rain, moot was officially named Time’s more influential person of 2009.  Even after the 4chan founder’s votes were criticized and found to be fake, moot is still #1.

“Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100).”

Congratulations /b/tards.  Once again, you have proven that the internet is your playground and you are able to leap out of computer screens and make real world differences.

[via Time via Mashable]

Congrats to that lucky boy. He will be receiving a HUGE present from Apple that I think most of us will be jealous about. A $10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule and (the cherry-on-top) a MacBook Pro.

Special Guests from Night Zero will be on the show to talk about their photographic novel and the super viral Left 5 Dead photoshoot.

Tonight’s topics:

• San Diego Comic Con’s Friday single-day passes sold out
• Jamie’s Street Fighter 4 National Tournament experience
• Carousel video and the 21:9 phillips screen
• Ashton Kutcher and his 1 million Twitter followers
• and more

Go to PixelatedLive.com at 7:30pm (pacific) to join us.

The viral marketing doesn’t seem to stop for the Burger King.  I just found the full two minute music video of the Spongebob Squarepants, Sir Mix-a-lot, and the Burger King.  Great job to Burger King and the agency they hired for this campaign.  IF you want to take a look at past viral campaigns they have done, read this post.