The Inside Story Of Siri’s Origins

How Apple’s voice-recognition software got its start—and how it lost some of its power along the way:

“This Siri — the Siri of the past — offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. The goal is a human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious tasks.

“Siri’s backers know Apple’s version of the assistant has not yet lived up to its potential. ‘The Siri team saw the future, defined the future and built the first working version of the future,’ says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri. ‘So it’s disappointing to those of us that were part of the original team to see how slowly that’s progressed out of the acquired company into the marketplace.'”

Source: HuffPost
Published: Jan 23, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,556 words)

Yesterday My Daughter Emigrated

A father in Spain laments the lack of a future for his daughter in their home country:

“Like many young people her age, my daughter was caught by surprise upon completion of her professional training. In the spring she returned to Spain with the intention of looking for a job here — it didn’t really matter what, as long as she could ‘do her thing.’ She got a few interviews, but the conditions that were offered to her always seemed to be abusive: a mere salary, 400 € a month, for a person with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, who speaks four languages, and who has worked abroad. Such salaries aren’t enough to eat or rent a room in the cities where they’re offered. She would have needed help from her parents — something we were willing to do. But our daughter didn’t want to keep being dependent on us — as this support would in fact subsidize the same employers that are taking advantage of our young people.

“This summer, many of her friends stopped by the house to say goodbye. Their conversations always came down to the same thing: the depression of the crisis, layoffs or fear of layoffs, companies that take advantage of the crisis to impose unfair conditions, laying off a good part of the workers so that ‘supervisors’ end up doing everyone’s part of the job, intimidated by the threat of being let go. It seems to me that they feel guilty, and maybe they are somewhat responsible — as we all are — but not for the excessive burden we’ve unloaded onto them.”

Source: HuffPost
Published: Oct 8, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,790 words)

‘I Have a Dream’ Speech (Martin Luther King Jr., 1963)

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”

Source: HuffPost
Published: Aug 28, 1963
Length: 6 minutes (1,728 words)

How We Got Here and How We Get Out of Here

A lot of what we’re seeing online today is actually a return, full circle, to the way things were when American newspapers began; a mixture of advocacy and investigative in-your-face journalism. There is a long and distinguished history of such newspapers—from the papers that were fiercely loyal to Jefferson or Hamilton, to the abolitionist broadsheets, to the activist newspapers at the turn of the century. As my partner Arianna Huffington says, the mission of journalism has always been “truth-seeking, not striking some fictitious balance between two sides.” And anyway, who can doubt that it’s always been important to give consumers what they want.

Source: HuffPost
Published: Apr 24, 2009
Length: 18 minutes (4,573 words)