To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at others.

This riddle of digital deduction has been centre stage recently.

Late last month, for instance, the internet search giant Google announced that it was making a major overhaul of its formula for ranking websites. The company said it was demoting “low quality” websites, designed mainly to lure traffic from Google's search engine and attract advertising revenue. It was a move to improve the quality of search, but also an admission that Google, the trusted curator of the web, was being outwitted.

The week before, IBM's question-answering computer Watson drubbed two of the best human players in the history ofJeopardy! Yet on the way to victory, Watson occasionally gave answers so seemingly absurd that audience members were left laughing and shaking their heads.

Computers are only as smart as their algorithms – man-made software recipes for calculation, the basic building blocks of computerised thought. When running on powerful computers, a clever algorithm can perform amazing feats. Google's algorithm handles 1 billion search queries a day. But algorithms are often brittle and simple-minded, doggedly following their step-by-step formulas as if with blinders. They can be amazingly good at set tasks – playing chess, scanning the web, simulating weather patterns. But they are typically unable to process what humans effortlessly understand – nuance, background knowledge, common sense about things in the physical world.

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How to use Facebook Places while protecting your private information

From RelaxNews

Social networking site Facebook introduced a new service called Facebook Places on August 20 that lets users share their location with others.

Facebook Places is similar to rival location-based services BrightKite, Dopplr, Foursquare, Google Latitude, Gowalla, and Loopt. It enables people to tag themselves at specific locations in much the same way you might tag yourself or friends in a photo you upload to the social networking site.

To use Facebook Places service you will have to download Facebook's latest iPhone application on your iPhone or head to touch.facebook.com on a HTML 5-enabled mobile browser.

Get the tips HERE

Are Your Facebook And Twitter Friends Using Other Languages? Try XIHA

by Robin Wauters | TechCrunch

If your social graph on Facebook and/or Twitter happens to consist of people who speak many different languages, it’s not always easy to make sense of their status updates.

I know it can be a pain when people I follow constantly switch back and forth from English to Russian, Italian, Hebrew and so forth – because I don’t speak any of their native tongues nearly well enough to get what they’re saying, even though at times I wish I did.

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100 iPhone Apps to Learn Anything & Everything

The App Store has become an outstanding source of education spanning every topic you can imagine. Whether you’re interested in wine tasting, medieval weaponry, or U.S. presidents, you can learn all about it using your iPhone.

For learning objectives involving, but not limited to Art & Design, Basic Education, Business &Finance, Games, Language, Magic, Medical, Music & Dance, Photography, Sports & Fitness, and the United States.

See all the 100 apps HERE.

Google Improves Google Docs Experience on iOS and Android

By Tony Bradley, PC World

Google has expanded the functionality of Google Docs viewer on the iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile devices to include the ability to view PDFs, *.doc, *.docx (the Office 2007 and Office 2010 file format that replaces *.doc), and even Microsoft PowerPoint (although there is no mention of the newer *.pptx format for PowerPoint) natively within Google Docs Viewer. So far, though, Google is taking a "look, but don't touch" approach--providing the ability to view multiple file formats, but still lacking the functionality to create or edit documents, even in Google Docs.

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