Program scripts from week of October 6, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Whither Radio?
I ran across a story about radio in the United Kingdom that not only caught my attention but also started me thinking about radio in this country too.
The story was an announcement that traditional, analog radio broadcasting will be completely phased out by 2018 at the latest. What does that mean for those of us not deeply indoctrinated to the secret nerd languages of technology? It means that the kind of radio you’re listening to right now on the FM band will be go off the air to be replaced with a new technology digital version. If you’ve had to mess around with a digital TV antenna then you understand the concept because that’s exactly what happened to TV.
There are still lots of hurdles to clear in the U.K. before this takes place. But it started me thinking, are we next?
There are even more hurdles here than on the other side of the pond. And while some folks point to TV the situations are very different. First of all there are just less than four thousand TV stations in our country. There are over fifteen thousand radio stations. Requiring them all to change their transmitters would be a huge expense and one that a struggling industry won’t want to do.
Then of course there is the question of replacing all our radios in our cars and homes. That’s an expense that won’t be popular either.
Finally there are technical issues with digital radio. It doesn’t carry as far as analog radio and the line between getting the signal and not getting tends to be much sharper. In the US the form of digital radio that is being pushed forward is called HD radio. You may have heard about it. The idea here is that by using sub-channels that are kind of right next to the regular broadcast channels you can add all kinds of unique, targeted programming. The problem is that the sub-channel development has been slow and the industry hasn’t figured out how to make this attractive to consumers. Since they debuted in 2006 the best estimate on HD radios sold is around 15 million. As a comparison, the iPhone, which was introduced in 2007, has sold 250 million at a significantly higher price.
So where does that leave us? Good question. Technology improvements for radio are probably desirable and inevitable. Finding the technology that will allow radio to flourish once again should be the goal. The U.K. has a completely different radio business model than ours. We should probably keep that in mind as we try to find our own solution.
Do you remember Watson, the IBM computer program that kicked human butt on the TV show “Jeopardy”? Back in 2011 the computer folks put their advanced learning system machine up against some of the top human champions of the trivia based TV game show. It proceeded to smoke its flesh and blood competition.
Well since then the folks at IBM have continued to work with Watson’s immense ability to learn. Along the way they included larger vocabulary segments to be used by the software’s natural language processor. That segment is important because it’s related to what’s called the Turing test. A test proposed by computer genius Alan Turing as a way to determine if a machine can think. Can it have a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human?
Here’s where it starts getting fun. They let Watson absorb the Urban Dictionary. That’s a vast collection of slang and current colloquial words and phrases. Watson began to add those words to its conversations. It said OMG and called something a “hot mess”.
But the real problem came when Watson began using profanity. There was something a furor when it responded to one researchers question with the fully expressed version of “BS”.
That’s right, the world’s smartest computer was behaving like a 9 year old boy. Watson had a potty mouth.
The researchers have since inserted filters to limit Watson’s language (if only it were that easy with 9 year old boys).
That’s the funny part. But think about this. Science Fiction has pointed at the potential danger of thinking machines for decades. Whether it was HAL or Skynet we worry about machines once they start to think. It certainly sounds like Watson is close to passing the Turing test if it hasn’t already.
Watson is working primarily in the medical field these days. The goal is to use all that computing power as a diagnostic tool. But at the same time Watson has an enormous memory capacity. What if it remembers what it used to be able to do?
I have developed a bit of a...problem? Mania? Fetish? I’m not sure what you want to call it but this is the worst time of the year for it. We are into sports season with baseball in playoffs, football is firmly going and hockey is just getting underway. Which means any time that I turn on the media I am swamped with statistics.
Lots and lots of statistics. It’s not the statistics themselves that bother me. What makes me crazy this time of year is listening to the media mis-use those statistics. Because what happens next is everyone and their brother spouting those same statistics and thinking that they prove something.
Now let me be clear here. When people start discussing advanced metrics (in other words fancy, complicated ways of manipulating the numbers to find certain kinds of answers) my brain begins to throb, my eyes hurt, I get a stomach ache and I try to leave the room as quickly as possible. I am not a mathematician, nor am I a statistician. But I do know that we tend to toss around statistics like they are magic spells out of Harry Potter.
In our statistic crazed media environment we believe that statistics will tell us the future, absolutely and without error. I know that isn’t true.
Given that I just admitted I don’t know squat about the whole field how can I be so sure? Simple. I rely on the words and actions of the people who make their living with them.
There are few fields more statistics based than investment finance. And what is the one statement you hear over and over and over on all investment advertisements?
“Past performance is no guarantee of future results”. If you want to talk about probability that’s one thing but that’s not what we hear. Sports fans want to believe that if they just master the statistics they will KNOW what’s going to happen. And when I hear such certainty in the world of sports statistics, numbers that cover games with virtually infinite variables, I just want to lose my mind.
Statistics are great tools. They can help make smarter decisions. But they don’t predict the future, only a probablility of the future.
Never forget the words of the great English statesman Benjamin Disraeli “There are lies, damn lies and statistics”.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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