fffff.at slaps a GPS tracker on a Google streetview car so you can follow it: a first step in reverse-engineering that particular algorithm.
Tag Archives: google
gMeta
Google Sandbox redirects to the page "unavailable.html," which in turns gives a 404:
Invisible hand spotted
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 with horror of the guy who found a finger in his bowl of fast-food chili.
Patton asks: “So it is likely that the company will also ignore this question: If the process of creating Google Books is open and its motives good, why is there so much secrecy about the nuts and bolts?”
(rp)
Hypochondria by proxy
under digital, government, medicine, privacy, standards
“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 computerized and far easier and cheaper to download. But it is also prone to inaccuracies, partly because of the clunky diagnostic coding language used for medical billing, or because doctors sometimes label a test with the disease they hope to rule out, medical technology specialists say.
It doesn’t “turn out” at all—that’s what it is. Electronic health records (EHRs), personal health records (PHRs), personally controlled health records (PCHRs), and their ilk aren’t the detailed clinical notes kept by physicians or nurses; they’re the administrative records maintained by insurers. Confusing the two is on par with mistaking a charge from a restaurant on a credit-card bill for My Dinner with Andre.
Faced with questions about inaccuracies, Google plays the 24 card:
Google Health directed questions to Dr. Roni Zeiger, a product manager for the company; he said Google draws its information from a variety of sources sent by its partner hospitals, pharmacies, and laboratories, including claims data. He acknowledged that such billing information can sometimes be imprecise, but he argued that the overall benefit of having some information is better than no information and that accuracy will improve over time. For example, he said, a list of allergies, medications and recent lab reports can save a patient’s life, particularly in an emergency. “Test results from last week can make the difference between the right decision and the wrong decision,” he said.
And erroneous histories based on insurers’ billing codes can make the difference between a wrong decision and a wrong decision.
(risks)
Bad cover
Original:
“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
under digital, neighborhood, network, privacy, trend
“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 the Buckinghamshire village. He dashed outside, confronted the driver and told him that he was not allowed to continue, before alerting police. Mr Jacobs, 43, then knocked on his neighbours' doors and a crowd of angry residents surrounded the black Opel Astra, forcing it to make a U-turn and quickly leave. Mr Jacobs, who works for a global entertainment company, described Street View as a 'burglar's dream'. He said of the moment he spotted the car in London Road: 'My immediate reaction was anger—how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent?
‘I ran outside to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime. This is an affluent area.
‘If our houses are plastered all over Goodgle it’s an invitation for burglars to strike.’
‘I don’t mind estate agents taking pictures but this shows people how to get in and how to get out. I was determined to make a stand so I called the police.’
See also: “gEverything,” “If we showed you, we’d have to pixelate you,” “performance.google.com,” “You’re not allowed to take pictures here.”
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 in your photos: pix@nyt.com.” Since when does nyt.com redirect to nytimes.com?]
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]
under government, media
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 that.” Yours. The presidency is ours, Google is yours.]
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
under digital, media, neighborhood, security, urban
No Google street view for West 44th St (and sometimes 45th St too), between 7th and 8th Aves, in Manhattan:
Viacom?
Octopus’s garden
under digital, media, neighborhood, trend
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
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. [...] United had refuted a report by late morning in New York, but not before the stock lost more than 75 per cent of its value. The shares appeared to trade at 1 cent, the default price assigned following its halt.
Google won’t adopt the normal US solution to stupidity by stickering its front page with warnings that anticipate every possible basis for litigation; but, given the rate at which “information” is accumulating, this kind of snafu is likely to happen more and more often. So, if Google’s mission is indeed “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” then finding new ways to integrate time into search results will necessarily become an increasingly important aspect of fulfilling that mission.
Google now delegates timestamps for indexed pages to archive.org (through the “history” link in search results) and embedding them in the visible header of cached pages; but for a can-do company busy underwriting new spy satellites, laying submarine cables, providing satellite connectivity in equatorial regions, etc, etc, sidestepping the comparatively simple question of when a webpage was created smacks of avoidance. In any event, Google knows very well how rarely people actually click on the cache and history links in ways that would suggest they’re trying to establish the historical context of a page. So, while incredibly useful for a few, the presence of the cache and history links carries the familiar scent of a popular corporate risk-avoidance strategy: devolving risk to the consumer. But, as United and its investors have seen, the problem comes when that consumer is in a position—for example, through network effects—to cause major, distributed trouble. This is a shared problem, and the tacit appeal to the lowest common denominator that pervades talk about UI design is no refuge from it, particularly for a firm whose reach cuts across myriad demographic lines.
Two things Google could do to address the problem of outdated “information”: (1) include an explicit timestamp in the search results block, and (2) expand its advanced search criteria to include start and end time-delimiters, rather than just predefined options for how “recent” results are. These two things could go a long way toward minimizing the kind of error that led to the UA fiasco—and, more positively, advancing Google’s stated mission.
(FT, Baer, “United Airlines Shares Plunge 75% After Six-year-old Bankruptcy Story,” 9 Sep ’08)
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 must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
...could lead to some obvious services...
...which is pretty much what Google is up to anyway.
Google: ‘Privacy? Depends–where are you?’
under government, international, law, privacy
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” (NYT), or “Does Anyone Really Care Where Google Places Its Privacy Policy?” (Techdirt). Google relents, publishes self-congratulatory note on public policy weblog (hardly a surprise). Funny, that: Page didn’t seem to mind the complete redesign of Google‘s Japanese page back in March. (The new design now includes a link to a privacy page).
Lesson: in key respects, Google isn’t monolithic. In fact, a quick survey of “European” Google sites (adapted from some random list of country-code TLDs) turns up interesting data:
You’re not allowed to take pictures here
under law
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.”
gwikxcel
under network
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 click on the Share tab and enable “Anyone can edit this document WITHOUT LOGGING IN”, your spreadsheet becomes a wiki that can be edited by anyone.
A spreadsheet anyone can edit? Seems like the very idea of a “spreadsheet” is antithetical to all things wiki. But it’s hard to think these things through, because statements like that end up in a wilderness of tautologies and strawmen pretty quickly (what’s the authority for all things wiki—Wikipedia?). So, for the sake of argument, let’s stay on the “consensus” side of the fence.
I hacked together two versions of a command-line gizmo (see below) that grabs Google definitions and butchers the results into a wordlist (x≥5 characters, y≥2 occurrences) sorted by frequency. And, indeed, they speak of very different worlds:
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