MetaFilter posts tagged with google

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Horace Rumpole — Fri, 17 May 2013 06:49:31 -0800

I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses. “Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said.

Index cards inspire Google designs

cgc373 — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:50:59 -0800

A couple of discussions of recent Google design trends, one in The New Yorker (via Bruce Sterling), and one from Fast Company (via waxy).

37 years of Breakout

doctornemo — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:19:08 -0800

Not a Doodle, but an Easter egg Google has a fun way to celebrate Atari Breakout's 37th anniversary.

The Science of Optimizing Your Health

Foci for Analysis — Fri, 10 May 2013 23:31:59 -0800

An in-depth talk at Google that sums up the scientific research on living a healthy life with lots of practical advice.

Landsat Annual Timelapse 1984-2012

The Whelk — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:12:09 -0800

Explore different views into this global timelapse built from global, annual composites of Landsat satellite images. Watch change across the planet's surface beginning as early as 1984. See Vegas grow! Rainforests Shrink! Coastlines expand, and lakes vanish!

Just continue with the poker face, men

infini — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:41:55 -0800

Use These Secret NSA Google Search Tips to Become Your Own Spy Agency

Happy Birthday, Saul Bass

troika — Wed, 08 May 2013 08:07:28 -0800

Google is celebrating what would have been graphic designer Saul Bass' 93rd birthday with a Doodle celebrating some of his most famous title sequences. The doodle, set appropriately to Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance, " pays homage to Bass' visual work on Psycho, The Man With The Golden Arm, Spartacus, West Side Story, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Anatomy of a Murder, and Around the World in 80 Days.

Halfcat

Greg Nog — Tue, 07 May 2013 08:00:32 -0800

Halfcat. The magic of Google Street view is that it has shown us a new animal. A good animal. Thank you, science magic. Bonus: Top Ten Google Street View animals.

In a few cases, the start dates are well-informed guesses

mwhybark — Sat, 04 May 2013 09:25:05 -0800

Predicting Google Shutdowns. "In the following essay, I collect data on 350 Google products and look for predictive variables. I find some while modeling shutdown patterns, and make some predictions about future shutdowns. Hopefully the results are interesting, useful, or both." Gwern exhaustively analyzes Google products past and present with an eye to establishing what's not long for the bitverse. tl;dr? Results.

Free Speech on the Internet

homunculus — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:48:25 -0800

The Delete Squad: Google, Twitter, Facebook and the new global battle over the future of free speech.

I'm 85 and tired about worrying about my virginity

twoleftfeet — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 01:05:14 -0800

Life worries as expressed by Google Suggest.

"What is an innovation worth?"

the man of twists and turns — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:16:10 -0800

Google was worth 1,838,389 workers in 1998, maybe

Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt

palbo — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:38:54 -0800

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.

Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Susan Rice at the US State Department and current Communications Director of the International Crisis Group, and Lisa Shields, Vice President of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for "The New Digital World", their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.

Google Inactive Account Manager

jedicus — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:25:09 -0800

Google has announced a new feature called Inactive Account Manager "that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account."

Road Trip!

Casimir — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:22:44 -0800

Roll your own Google Street View Hyperlapse. via

The day the irony detectors died...

sodium lights the horizon — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 05:27:53 -0800

Fairsearch (a group led by Microsoft, Oracle and Expedia) has filed a complaint [PDF] with the EU claiming that Google has a monopoly in the mobile market and is using its mobile position to force its other products on users.

This is what happens when you take the blue pill and the red pill.

Room 641-A — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:15:17 -0800

Postcards From Google Earth: "I collect Google Earth images. I discovered them by accident, these particularly strange snapshots, where the illusion of a seamless and accurate representation of the Earth’s surface seems to break down. I was Google Earth-ing, when I noticed that a striking number of buildings looked like they were upside down." Clement Valla (previously) explains how Google's The Universal Texture system is changing the way we see the world:

"At first, I thought they were glitches, or errors in the algorithm, but looking closer I realized the situation was actually more interesting — these images are not glitches. They are the absolute logical result of the system. They are an edge condition—an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error. These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our attention on the software. They reveal a new model of representation: not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources constantly updated and endlessly combined to create a seamless illusion; Google Earth is a database disguised as a photographic representation. These uncanny images focus our attention on that process itself, and the network of algorithms, computers, storage systems, automated cameras, maps, pilots, engineers, photographers, surveyors and map-makers that generate them."

The Universal Texture WebGL Earth Documentation WebGL Earth 3D Digital Globe

Take a Left off WebKit onto Blink

juiceCake — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:23:43 -0800

Google is forking WebKit. WebKit was a fork of KHTML and now Google is creating a new fork called Blink. Opera will contribute to it and use it too. Vendor specific prefixes will no longer be supported.

Nothing is ungoogleable in Sweden

Etrigan — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:47:31 -0800

The Language Council of Sweden has been the semi-official arbiter of the Swedish language since World War II. It monitors "the development of spoken and written Swedish" and publishes a list of new words each year to ensure consistency of spelling and make sure that Swedish is a "complete language, i.e. [is] possible to use in all areas of society." This year, for the first time, the Council has taken a word off the list: ogooglebar, which literally meant "ungoogleable" but was defined as "a thing or person that does not produce relevant results when typed into a search engine." Google objected to the word's official definition, saying that it would rather the word mean anything that couldn't be found on Google specifically (possibly trying not to open itself up to the threat of genericization). The Council decided not to bother with the word instead, striking ogooglebar from the list.

You Are What You See

BillW — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:38:43 -0800

Google Glasses are being tested by tech writers as we speak. But are they a good thing? The long awaited Project Glass is nearly here. There are articles about them here, here, and here among many others. But is it a good thing? Questions are being asked both about safety and about privacy. Everything good, bad and ugly about the online world is about to get more intense. Are you ready?

The Dreams Of Big Data

the man of twists and turns — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:12:19 -0800

Does Big Data Mean The Demise Of The Expert - And Intuition? - "Data-driven decisions are poised to augment or overrule human judgment." What Is Big Data? Are Smart Gadgets Making Us Dumb?

First, thanks to the proliferation of cheap, powerful sensors, the most commonplace objects can finally understand what we do with them—from umbrellas that know it's going to rain to shoes that know they're wearing out—and alert us to potential problems and programmed priorities. These objects are no longer just dumb, passive matter. With some help from crowdsourcing or artificial intelligence, they can be taught to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible behavior (between recycling and throwing stuff away, for example) and then punish or reward us accordingly—in real time.

A Stunning Vision Of Our Interoperable Future

At the heart of "Trillions" is the power of the microprocessor. To date, it's been mostly put at the service of personal computing, using individualized tools that only interact with each other when we tell them to. For the authors, we've gone about as far as we can go in this direction - and that's why we've been so frustrated of late with the seemingly unmanageable firehose of data coming out of the global economy. If, as the authors put it, we want to tame the complexity of our world, we need to walk back down the mountain of personal computing and begin climbing Trillions Mountain, which is based on pervasive computing.

When Public Data Is Too Public Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You

Federal law protects the confidentiality of your medical records and your conversations with your doctor. There are also strict rules regarding the sale of information used to determine your credit-worthiness, or your eligibility for employment, insurance, and housing. For instance, consumers have the right to view and correct their own credit reports, and potential employers have to ask for your consent before they buy a credit report about you. Other than certain kinds of protected data—including medical records and data used for credit reports—consumers have no legal right to control or even monitor how information about them is bought and sold. As the FTC notes, “There are no current laws requiring data brokers to maintain the privacy of consumer data unless they use that data for credit, employment, insurance, housing, or other similar purposes.”

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

In The Information, Gleick neatly captures today’s reality. “We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground,” he writes. “But it has always been there.”

CIA's CTO Gus Hunt: "We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever." Big Data Is Neutral: A Tool For Both Good And Evil David Brooks concludes in "What Data Can't Do": "This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others. As the Yale professor Edward Tufte has said, “The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.” " reinventing Society In The Wake Of Big Data

What those breadcrumbs tell is the story of your life. It tells what you've chosen to do. That's very different than what you put on Facebook. What you put on Facebook is what you would like to tell people, edited according to the standards of the day. Who you actually are is determined by where you spend time, and which things you buy. Big data is increasingly about real behavior, and by analyzing this sort of data, scientists can tell an enormous amount about you. They can tell whether you are the sort of person who will pay back loans. They can tell you if you're likely to get diabetes. They can do this because the sort of person you are is largely determined by your social context, so if I can see some of your behaviors, I can infer the rest, just by comparing you to the people in your crowd. You can tell all sorts of things about a person, even though it's not explicitly in the data, because people are so enmeshed in the surrounding social fabric that it determines the sorts of things that they think are normal, and what behaviors they will learn from each other.

"Big Data" is not without its critics. Evgeny Morzov: The Curse Of 'You May Also Like'

But when it comes to discovery of new talent and the subsequent production of their work, things look much gloomier. After all, recommendation matters only if there's great art to recommend. If that art is selected based on how likely it is to match the success of previous selections and if it's produced based on immediate feedback from the audience, sales might increase, but will anything truly radical emerge out of all this salesmanship?

Toward A Complex, Realistic, and Moral Tech Criticism

Morozov's second book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, is the most wide-ranging and generative critique of digital technology I've ever read. There's so much substance to argue about between its covers. At the center of it all, there's a brilliant, idiosyncratic mind at work. Describing and destroying two concepts -- "Internet-centrism" and "solutionism" -- form the core of his book, and both are fascinating frames for the discourse surrounding our network technologies.

A review of Evgeny Morozov’s “To Save Everything, Click Here”

From here it is just one more short step to the buying and selling of our personal data: to insurers in return for lower premiums, to advertisers in return for better deals. Our personal data becomes a new “asset class” and executives respond by “trying to shift the focus [of debate] from purely privacy to what we call property rights” (235). New social pressures emerge as the digitizers follow their path of bits, algorithms and markets (career counsellors now routinely recommend that building a strong presence on LinkedIn is a route to a better job), and we can replace debates about privacy with reassurances about personal choice. “Privacy is mostly an illusion, but you’ll have as much of it as you want to pay for” says Kevin Kelly (236). New companies emerge to optimize our self-presentation on the web (reputation.com), new norms emerge as “If you’re going out with someone, and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious” (Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, quoted on p. 239). Why would you not share your real-time blood alcohol levels with your employer if you don’t have anything to hide? (240).

Douglas Rushkoff: Unlike - Why I'm Leaving Facebook

I can no longer justify this arrangement. Today I am surrendering my Facebook account, because my participation on the site is simply too inconsistent with the values I espouse in my work. In my upcoming book Present Shock, I chronicle some of what happens when we can no longer manage our many online presences. I argue - as I always have - for engaging with technology as conscious human beings, and dispensing with technologies that take that agency away.

Adaptation from Present Shock:

Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, we attempt to match the speed of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business not less, we work at all hours on demand, and spend our free time answering email or tending to our social networks. Staring into screens, we are less attuned to light of day and the physiological rhythms of our housemates and co-workers. We are more likely to accept the digital clock's illusion that all time is equivalent and interchangeable. But it isn't.

NY Times review of Present Shock: Out of Time: The Sins of Immediacy

Among the intuitive ideas turned tangible by “Present Shock” is “filter failure,” the writer and teacher Clay Shirky’s improved term for what used to be called “information overload.” Mr. Rushkoff’s translation: “Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.”

Nassim Taleb: Beware The Big Errors of 'Big Data' and referenced here: Spurious Correlations Everywhere: The Tragedy Of Big Data Bruce Schneier (via): Government, Big Data Pose Bigger 'Net Threat Than Criminals

Schneier said the threat is often obfuscated by the tremendous technical advances the big data players have offered. Google mail is a safer alternative for average users because there's almost no chance they'll ever lose a message. Apple's iPhone is wildly popular because it's easy to use and to date has proved largely impervious to real-world malware attacks. But behind the security and reliability, there are threats many don't consider. "I can't find a program that will erase the data on this thing to a reasonable assurance without jailbreaking it," he said, holding up his iPhone. "For me that's bad."

see also: Battle Of The Internet Giants Michael Lind: Stop Pretending Cyberspace Exists - "Treating The Internet As A Mythical Country Makes Us Dumber"

It is not a parallel universe, coexisting with our world but in a different dimension. It is just a bad metaphor that has outlived its usefulness. Using the imagery of a fictitious country makes it harder to have rational arguments about government regulation or commercial exploitation of modern information and communications technologies.

Some via. Previously

We used to have these things called books, and some told you where to go

gottabefunky — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:16:29 -0800

Does BBC Worldwide's sale of Lonely Planet at an £80 million loss (after writing down its value by £67 million over 6 years), on top of Google's purchase of Frommer's last year, herald the end of travel guidebooks? Of course, some have been wondering this for years already.

"Ouga Chaka Ouga!"

Fizz — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 08:04:05 -0800

OMGif! [Wired] "On Tuesday, Google announced via Google+ that Image Search now has an “Animated” filter. That means that if you’re only searching for animated magic, you need never be bothered with a still image again. Finally that search for Jennifer Lawrence GIFs from the Academy Awards just got a whole lot easier."

The Canon Drone

mwhybark — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:01:04 -0800

We've all seen it. The off-white UAV is seen side on, nose tilted slightly down, a stubby missile caught at the moment of launch beneath it, a blue and grey landscape of treeless mountains behind it. There's no motion blur and none of the markings on the aircraft have been obfuscated. It's a perfect shot. Except for one or two details. The image is Google's #1 image search result for "drone." Artist James Bridle posts on the topic of drones at his Tumblr, One Visible Future, and his familiarity with the subject led him to analyze the markings on the craft. His conclusion? As the drone pictured is marked as though it were an aircraft that entered service in 1985 and displays the insignia of a New York State National Air Guard unit, it's a fake. He posted a link on Twitter this morning, and in a half-hour posted that the original artist had been found. via, and h/t to, MeFi's own @brownpau

Go home, Fyodor, you're drunk.

Snarl Furillo — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:29:36 -0800

Are your favorite writers using Google Docs? Probably. They're also bossy and irritable.