Meet Watson, IBM’s new supercomputer:

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

Fascinating article.

Postbox is a different way to do email.

There’s a lot to love about this application, and they just launched a free version, called Postbox Express, along with a new website designed by Tim Van Damme. It’s beautiful.

Keith Hennessey nicely summarizes the administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill:

The President risks overreaching by trying to use a crisis in one subset of domestic oil drilling to enact a policy agenda that applies to all types of oil drilling and imports, and to coal, and to natural gas. Were he to focus just on solving the deepwater drilling problem, he’d have a slam dunk. Instead he’s trying not to let this crisis go to waste, and to use it as an opportunity to enact indirectly related policies that are much more hotly disputed.

Hennessey provides some of the best analysis and commentary on Washington minutia.

Matt Ridley on why invention and innovation seem to be inexhaustable:

Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Henry Ford once candidly admitted that he had invented nothing new: He had “simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.”

Since innovation is the application of an existing technology or the pairing of existing technologies together toward a new use, innovation requires broad interests and understanding of the world. Putting your head down and diving into one specific field is important, but pursuing seemingly disparate interests is just as important.

After two individuals (who identify themselves as students) ask Congressman Etheridge (D, NC) if he “fully supports the Obama agenda,” he pushes their camera away and grabs one of them first by the hand, and then his neck and waist.

Etheridge, while refusing to let go, demands to know who they are.

David Weigel of the Washington Post wrote about it, but rather than focus on what the Congressman did, chose to focus on who the individuals are (He titled his article “Who TMZ’d Rep. Bob Etheridge?”), and characterizes Etheridge’s actions as a “hug.”

Two things: one, Etheridge was completely out of line. Who these individuals are is wholly irrelevant. Second, Weigel’s article is an attempt to shift the story from something absolutely unacceptable–Etheridge’s actions–to something merely of interest, who the individuals are.

Let’s see how the media portrays this (if at all). It should be instructive.

Interesting study by UX Magazine of the iPad Square application in day-to-day use:

And as a shared device, the iPad invites social interaction.

This actually proves to be somewhat of a pain point in the user experience of Square on the iPad, as customers are drawn to interacting with (or at least observing) their payment transactions. Yet iPad users today are now largely removed from the transaction, apart from providing their credit card as a form of payment.

It sounds like the Square application should be used in these circumstances primarily by the customer themselves, rather than the employee.

This raises an interesting idea: iPads, if they get a front-facing camera in the future, could allow customers to scan their product and complete the order process all on their own (like the self-check out at grocery stores).

The New York Times interviewed several North Koreans living in China, and the picture they show is disturbing:

Others were more skeptical of the government’s propaganda, but still cast war as an inevitability. “We always wait for the invasion,” said one former primary school teacher. “My son says he wishes the war would come because life is too hard, and we will probably die anyway from starvation.”

They struggle to even survive, are brainwashed, and are forced into a state of deep depression as a mode of everyday life, where each new day is another day of suffering. This is how people in North Korea live in 2010.

David Barnard:

Apple is taking back control so that it can decide what is appropriate. And I trust Apple in that regard a hell of a lot more than I trust Google, Facebook, etc. The thing is, Apple is a hardware company, that’s where they have and will continue to make their money. Google, Facebook, and others trade in information. The more detailed and specific, the more valuable that information.

That’s a really nice summation of the AdMob situation.

Steve Jobs nicely explains Picasso’s famous “great artists steal” line:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

That’s from a 1996 interview Wired did with Jobs, and it is well worth your time. There’s an especially good section on why Jobs thinks our education system is broken.

The Obama administration will try to force BP to pay for the salaries of workers who lose their jobs as a result of the administration’s deepwater exploratory drilling ban:

Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a Senate hearing he would ask BP to repay the salaries of any workers laid off because of the six-month moratorium on deepwater exploratory drilling imposed by the U.S. government after the spill.

BP is responsible for the environmental and economic damage caused by their negligence (and, from what I can tell, absolute stupidity), and should pay for it. But the deepwater exploration ban is this administration’s choice, and has nothing to do with BP.

The Obama administration is attempting to use (justified) public anger against BP to force them to cover the effects of their own policy. This is so monumentally immoral I’m not sure what to say. How they manage to continually top themselves is beyond me. It’s a talent, really.

Khoi Vinh comments on Apple’s back-patting for what the iPhone 4′s screen does for text:

Forstall is quite literally claiming perfection while a hand model holds up this terrible example of everything that’s wrong with Apple’s commitment to typography. While the letterforms on that virtual page may look gorgeous, it’s apparent to any designer that the text is far from perfectly typeset.

Tony Hsieh didn’t want to sell Zappos to Amazon, but had little choice because of Sequoia Capital’s investment:

By early 2009, we were at a stalemate. Because of a complicated legal structure, I effectively controlled the majority of the common shares, so that the board couldn’t force a sale of the company. But on the five-person board, only two of us — Alfred Lin, our CFO and COO, and myself — were completely committed to Zappos’s culture. This made it likely that if the economy didn’t improve, the board would fire me and hire a new CEO who was concerned only with maximizing profits.

That is Sequoia’s choice of course (it is their investment), but it does not mean trying to squeeze every last dollar out of one of the best companies in the last decade is the right thing to do.

After the New York Times complained, Apple pulled the Pulse News Reader from the App Store.

The New York Times claims the application violates its RSS feed terms of use because the application, by default, comes with the Times’ RSS feed installed and must be purchased.

Absolutely ridiculous. The New York Times is, in essence, forcing an application to be removed for sending them too many readers. Good move, guys.

Update: Looks like it’s back up on the App Store. I wonder if the Times received a little phone call.

Columbia professor Ang Yuen Yuen thinks China’s cheap labor advantage is slipping away:

Apparel production is a prime example of China’s declining competiveness in markets dependent on low-cost labor. According to a study by the US consulting firm Jassin O’Rourke, labor costs in China are higher than in seven other Asian countries. The average cost for a worker is $1.08 per hour in China’s coastal provinces and $0.55-0.80 in the inland provinces. India was in seventh place, at $0.51 per hour. Bangladesh offers the lowest cost, only one-fifth the price of locations like Shanghai and Suzhou.

That’s how developing markets work: an economy based on cheap labor leads to rising standards of living and wages, and that advantage erodes over time. The economy must then shift to different economic advantages, or higher up the supply chain, as Ang says.

Netflix released a slideshow on their business strategy.

It’s a fascinating look at what they’re thinking. Not surprisingly, of course, they are shifting to online video streaming, but their strategy for what to focus on is much more interesting. They will focus on movie and TV show streaming, but not new releases. They are giving up new releases to their competitors. This means Netflix must be an additional service for their customers if they want access to new tv show episodes, news, sports and new release movies.