Insurance companies want us to be healthy. Really, they do. They have our interests at heart, and they defend those interests with an unusual zeal. This is why I am wondering which details might be missing from the tale of Natalie Blanchard.
According to the Associated Press, Blanchard, a 29-year-old IBM employee from Bromont, Quebec, was suffering from depression and took time away from work, relying on sick-leave benefits from her insurer, Manulife Financial.
The monthly payments were suddenly halted. When she called Manulife to ask why, she says she was told that it had espied photos on her Facebook page that showed her cheerful. Ergo, the argument allegedly went, she was able to work. Which led to the second ergo: no more payments.
The pictures, about which I am sure you are already wondering, were of her at a show featuring those tensing torsos, the Chippendales, as well as at a birthday party and on a beach holiday.
Depression is a nasty business. Cures are not exactly logical. And Blanchard says she went on three trips, each of a four-day duration, after consulting with her psychiatrist.
Manulife, while confirming (footage from Sky News embedded here) that it does use social-networking sites to, well, check up on its customers, also said, "We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on Web sites such as Facebook."
Perhaps you, too, have some questions. What sort of a life is it when you spend your days trawling social-networking sites to sniff around your customers' personal existence? How is it that Manulife observed Blanchard's photos? Did she leave her Facebook page entirely open, or could it be that she had her insurance agent as one of her Facebook friends? Was she, indeed, already under suspicion before the Facebook trawling began?
December 8, this case will be heard in the Quebec Superior Court. Surely, we will learn a little more about Natalie Blanchard and a little more about Manulife. Perhaps Facebook could provide a live feed from the proceedings?
Global company IBM seems to have found a way for its employees to get past language barriers and communicate.
IBM employees are currently using text translation software that can instantly convert documents, Web pages, and even instant messages between English and 11 other languages. The software, christened "n.Fluent," is being "crowdsourced" or tested among IBM's 400,000 employees across 170 countries.
As IBMers use n.Fluent, the software learns from its mistakes and improves itself. As the entire company potentially taps into n.Fluent, volunteers within IBM refine each translated word for greater accuracy. In just two weeks this past summer, volunteers tackled around 1.3 million words, averaging around 100,000 per day. Overall, n.Fluent has translated more than 400 million words for Big Blue staffers.
The software works as a plug-in or add-on to other applications, making it fairly seamless to use. Plug-ins translate instant messages on the fly. Text from a word processing document or other presentation is copied into one field of the software, with the immediate translation popping up in another field. IBMers can use n.Fluent on their desktops, laptops, and even smartphones.
This "universal translator" can currently tackle English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic.
"To become a smarter planet, the world needs a shared vocabulary for collaboration -- particularly the business community," said David Lubensky, an IBM researcher managing the n.Fluent project, in a statement. "We see n.Fluent as just such a tool, helping to expand commerce, cement relationships and make the world that much smaller, one word at a time."
Of course, free language translators, such as Google Translate, are already available. But IBM sees n.Fluent as a better alternative. The software is more secure as it runs behind a firewall. It's also adept at handling business jargon. Right now, n.Fluent is only being used internally. But like many of IBM's research projects, it's likely to find a home outside of Big Blue's walls.
IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind said there's no fixed date as to when it might be available externally. "It would be a reasonable assumption that there's a demand in the market for a translation tool that has very good security," he said. "And also this kind of tool is uniquely tuned for a business environment that has almost a language in itself."
Other language translation tools can convert individual words. Key to n.Fluent's success will be how it handles entire sentences and paragraphs as well as colloquialisms. But the company's field tests are geared toward those goals.
"The whole point is to continually refine the idioms and the syntax and the context by people who use the language every day," said Fishkind. "And that's part of this crowdsourcing idea where hopefully at the end of the day we're going to have a system that is not only intelligible but also fluent and fluid."
Harriet Pearson, chief privacy officer, IBM
(Credit: IBM)Harriet Pearson once joined a petition signed by Facebook users, urging the social-networking site to do more in terms of privacy.
But the privacy expert considers herself a moderate when it comes to protecting her personal information.
Pearson, IBM's chief privacy officer for the past nine years and also its security counsel since last year, says each person needs a mental model to assess the benefits or risks associated with providing personal data. In the same way, she said, governments ought to be thoughtful when drafting policies and laws on data protection.
In town recently for Singapore's annual GovernmentWare conference, Pearson sat down with ZDNet Asia to discuss data protection legislation, the need for a balanced view regarding data breach notification, and why Asian regulators should not "photocopy" European law books.
Read more of "Asia's lawmakers need not copy Europe" at ZDNet Asia.
Executives at the Authors Guild say the text-to-speech feature in Amazon's Kindle 2 could hurt sales of audio books. Not all of the experts agree, including the guild's.
Andy Aaron, an IBM text-to-speech expert, says synthetic voices don't know when to add emphasis or inflection when reading.
(Credit: Andy Aaron)Andy Aaron, an expert on text-to-speech technology, recently commented in an interview about how much such systems have advanced. In an op-ed piece published Tuesday in the The New York Times titled "The Kindle Swindle?" Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, used Aaron's quotes to support his argument that the Kindle's voice feature could threaten the future of audio books.
But when asked to elaborate, Aaron told CNET News on Wednesday that the audio-book market has little to fear from "synthetic voices."
"I'm a big believer in (text-to-speech) and a booster of it," said Aaron, who is with IBM's Watson Research Center. "But I don't think at this point, or for the foreseeable future, it's going to compete meaningfully with a professional book reader...Am I going to sit down and put my feet up and listen to text-to-speech read 'War And Peace' or Harry Potter for six to eight hours? For someone who has the choice, I think they would rather get an audio book."
Amazon appears headed towards a showdown with the Authors Guild over text-to-speech technology. This enables computers to read text in a lifelike voice. Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, a trade group representing 9,000 authors, argues that Amazon isn't compensating authors for Kindle's text-to-speech feature. He claims authors' copyrights are being violated.
Amazon representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Aiken generated a lot of attention when he first raised concerns about the Kindle following the debut earlier this month of the e-book reader. On Wednesday, Aiken said Amazon never informed the guild--or book publishers for that matter--of the retailer's plan to include the feature.
In the weeks since the Kindle debut, the guild has had discussions with Amazon and the online retailer is taking a "hard-line position," Aiken said. All this doesn't bode well for finding an amicable resolution.
Aiken wouldn't say what the guild's plans are but confirmed that guild administrators won't rule out filing a lawsuit.
"Anytime you have a new means of accessing content," said Aiken, "there's always some sort of aggregator that wants to control it and keep the value for themselves."
As for Aaron's assertions that text-to-speech systems won't threaten audio books for a long time, Aiken says nobody knows the future.
"Things move quickly," Aiken said. "I think the technology has made a generational leap in just the last few years."
To prove the point, the guild has posted demonstrations of text-to-speech technologies offered by Apple four years ago (the video posted above). The voice is monotone and unintelligible in places. It sounds like it was lifted from a bad sci-fi film.
The next clip is a recording of Kindle's text-to-speech offering. (At right, I've included a humorous demonstration of Kindle text-to-speech function posted to YouTube by a user called Kindlejunkie). The differences are sharp. The Kindle's voice pronounces words clearly and sounds far more lifelike. There is however, no inflection or emphasis. The thing drones on.
It's not that the technology can't create dramatic effects. Aaron says the technology has advanced to a point where synthetic voices can be made to sound happy or apologetic. The major roadblock for these systems, however, is that they don't know when to insert these effects or choose the effect that is most appropriate.
What's missing in computers is the ability to understand what they're reading, said Aaron.
"Even a mediocre human reader is interacting with the text and understands every word that he or she is reading," Aaron said. "Text-to-speech doesn't. It can be really good. It can be really smooth. It can sound very lifelike. But it doesn't understand what it's reading. Do you want to listen to a reader that doesn't understand what they're reading?"
The obvious question here is if text-to-speech systems can read something with a specific emotional tone, couldn't a publisher go into a digital book and mark where they want to insert a specific effect?
They could, says Aaron, but that would take an enormous of amount of time and expense. At that point it's easier to hire a human reader and create an audio book.
Here's a little bit about how they create a voice for text-to-speech. First, a professional reader is hired to read text created for its "phonemic diversity." The sentences are designed to cover a wide range of word sounds. The process takes more than 60 hours to complete, Aaron said.
Algorithms are used to help figure out how to manipulate the sounds correctly.
Aiken concedes that text-to-speech systems can't provide many of the dramatic effects that a human can. But he does think they're good enough to erode sales of audio books.
One thing to remember is that the potential to compete with audio books is only one part of the guild's complaint. Aiken argues that Kindle's voice feature should be considered a separate derivative and authors should share in its revenues.
What's for certain is guild managers don't believe Amazon should give text-to-speech away for free just to help market Kindles.
"This should be considered a legitimate new market for publishers and authors," Aiken said. "It's a technology that should be used for incremental revenue. With all the squeezing that's going on in publishing, you just can't let this one go."
Google's brand name value jumped from 20th place last year to 10th in 2008, according to the latest version of an annual study that ranks the best brands, with only four technology companies ahead of it on the list.
Microsoft slipped from second to third place, edged down a peg by IBM, according to the study by BusinessWeek and Interbrand, which base their results on the value of the brand as judged by how much revenue it will likely earn for the company.
Coca-Cola is king, but technology companies are common in the top 25 brands.
(Credit: BusinessWeek/Interbrand)Google showed the strongest gain, with a value that increased 43 percent to $25.6 billion, the study said. Next in line was 24th-place Apple, whose brand value rose 24 percent to $13.7 billion.
Coca-Cola remains the top, with a $66.7 billion in brand value, but technology companies are well represented on the list. No. 5 is Nokia, Intel No. 7, Hewlett-Packard No. 12, Cisco No. 17, Samsung No. 21, Oracle No. 23, and Sony No. 25.
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