Tag Archives: google
Invisible hand spotted
Phil Patton: It showed the hand of whoever fed pages into the scanner — a hand with a latex sheath on its index finger, like a condom. The person’s nails were nothing to brag about. The condom and the nails, combined with the sudden, unexpected appearance, made the picture seem obscene and unhealthy. I thought [...]
Posted in digital, language, media, network, standards, trend Also tagged book, digitization Leave a comment
Hypochondria by proxy
“Electronic health records raise doubt,” Boston Globe (Wangness, 13 Apr ’09): It turns out that Google Health uses information from billing records, which can be inaccurate, undated, and was never intended to be used by doctors. Transferring existing paper records could take years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Insurance data, by contrast, is already [...]
Posted in digital, government, knowledge, medicine, privacy, standards Also tagged healthcare Leave a comment
Bad cover
Original: Cover: “You know—sort of a Carnaby Street meets direct-mail OCR look, but with a gratuitous use of crosshatching like in ’80s-era SAT-type forms and and a contemporarily artless use of long strings of solid caps…” (zimmer|bartow|someoneorother|etc)
yourpreciousfluids.google.com
“Watch out Broughton! Street View fans plan to descend on ‘privacy’ village for photo fest” (Dolan+Wrenn, MailOnline, 3 Apr ’09): The impromptu protest started on Wednesday when Resident Paul Jacobs spotted the Google car—which was unmarked but featured the tell-tale 360-degree rotating camera fixed on a pole on its roof—cruising slowly down his lane in [...]
gEverything
See also: “If we showed you, we’d have to pixelate you,” “performance.google.com,” “Proposed Google service,” “Google: ‘Privacy? Depends—where are you?’”
Those who hunt elves and can’t teach deserve neither
Who needs an accurate Santayana quotation when autocompletion ? The first time it’s a tragedy, the second time a madlib.
Sure sign of a responsive IT department [updated]
NYT covers breaking news within eyeshot of its new HQ: We would like to hear from witnesses who saw the plane go down. Call our Metro Desk editorial assistants at (212) 556-1533. Anyone with images of the crash and rescue is asked to e-mail them to cityroom.nyt@gmail.com. A Gmail address. [Update 18 Jan 00:35: “Send [...]
Priceless
Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products and User Experience, and Micheal Lopez, Web Design Lead, describe Google’s new favicon as “timeless.” See also: “Past not totally useless, streaming video at 11,” “Ideology 2.0,” “United Airlines crashes into event horizon.”
Fox on Pox [updox]
GHWB demonstrates onset of senility by pimping son Jeb for the WH before the Chimperor has vacated. Prominent weblogs will no doubt upload the hegemon-pr0n video; we’ll settle for eroticism. [Update: OK, the soft-core. “You can go back to your, your, your, what do you call it, your Google, and you can figure out all [...]
Ideology 2.0
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. See also: “Just-in-time macroeconomics.”
If we showed you, we’d have to pixelate you
No Google street view for West 44th St (and sometimes 45th St too), between 7th and 8th Aves, in Manhattan: Viacom?
performance.google.com
A new genre: Street with a view.
Octopus’s garden
NYT: Google Maps hasn’t quite heard of Mountain House: Ths sponsored link homegain.com links to findmeaforeclosure.com… …which has the same registrant as tracyrealestate.com: (Both sites’ “Community” links are blank.) Repeat ad nauseam nationwide.
Offhand economic indicator
Google layoffs. Contributing factors: advertising clients looking for lower expenditures and greater efficiencies; laid-off workers spending more time smurfing the net; broadband services cut off for nonpayment.
United Airlines crashes into event horizon
FT: United Airlines plunged yesterday after a false report that the carrier had returned to bankruptcy court surfaced on the internet. A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story on United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing, spotted on a Google search yesterday morning by an investment newsletter, triggered a massive sell-off of the carrier’s shares until trading was halted. [...] [...]
Proposed Google service
“Don’t be evil” is too passive and, above all, too simple. A minor mod like this… Google may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Google must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Google [...]
Google: ‘Privacy? Depends–where are you?’
A gaggle of campaigners (NAI, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Michael Zimmer, etc) push Google to add a link to its privacy policy on its home page, and Google’s refusal sparks snark: for example, “Larry Page, the company’s co-founder, didn’t want a privacy link ‘on that beautiful clean home page,’ said one executive at a Google competitor” [...]
You’re not allowed to take pictures here
Google Maps streetview driver pulled over by police. “But, Officer, I was helping to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” (Google sightseeing)
gwikxcel
Google Operating System writes: Google Spreadsheets added an option in the sharing dialog that allows anyone to view or edit the spreadsheet just by knowing the URL. Until now, you had to send an invitation URL that contained a secret code and the people you invited had to login using a Google account. If you [...]
Google’s new motto