At Google X, A Top-secret Lab Dreaming Up The Future

At Google X, a clandestine lab that many employees do not know exists, engineers and robotics experts are tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas that eventually might not seem so far-fetched.

At Google X, a Top-Secret Lab Dreaming Up the Future

Backlink: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=feb594def7951eb1b20902ba3e8bff30

Shareholder Sues Google On Drug Ads

A Pennsylvania shareholder has filed a federal lawsuit charging that Google and its directors knew or should have known that importing retail prescription drugs is illegal

Shareholder Sues Google on Drug Ads

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-08-30/google-sued-by-investor-over-illegal-imported-drug-ad-sales.html

Bits Blog: Google Said To Reach $500 Million Settlement With Government

Regulators will announce Wednesday that Google will pay $500 million to settle government charges that it has illegally shown ads for online pharmacies that operate outside the law, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

Bits Blog: Google Said to Reach $500 Million Settlement With Government

Backlink: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b37ac02753711bf603a388b8c4b483c5

“on Pseudonymity, Privacy And Responsibility On Google+” (excellent Nym Wars Rant)

Read Kee Hinkley's terrific essay on why pseudonymity matters. Inspired by the Google+ nymwars debate, but will be a valuable and viable set of observations long after this internet-storm has passed. Snip: "Using a pseudonym has been one of the … Continue reading →

“On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google+” (excellent Nym Wars rant)

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/-rn8UYoymAU/on-pseudonymity-privacy-and-responsibility-on-google-yet-another-eloquent-nymwars-rant.html

Google Person Finder: Pfif Database Helps Locate Friends & Family

When there's a major disaster, don't spend days or weeks waiting to hear news of loved ones. If you need to locate someone, Google's Person Finder can help.

Google Person Finder: PFIF Database Helps Locate Friends & Family

Backlink: http://www.suite101.com/content/google-person-finder-pfif-database-helps-locate-friends--family-a358374

Visualization Of Google Plus Graph

I took a sample of the Google Plus graph and loaded it up in to the excellent Gephi graph rendering package. Due to the simple manner in which I crawled the data, this doesn't represent a true breadth-first crawl of the graph (rather it captures the random set of in and out links that appear on a user's profile page). However, what is interesting is that there is a clear tightly connected component that is distinguished from a more dilute area. I suspect, without any real investigation, that this is the core area of Google employees and some of their immediate connections as well as alpha users. This is complete conjecture, though.

Visualization of Google Plus Graph

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DataMining/~3/h6hOLtEIylY/visualization-of-google-plus-graph.html

New Release Of Alice Aiml On Google Code

We have released an updated version of the free ALICE AIML set and made it available on Google Code.
The release is called AIML-en-us-foundation-ALICE (a free AIML set, in the English Language as spoken in the United States, authored by the AI Foundation, and the bot name is ALICE).  The AIML contains some significant changes and improvements:

- The AIML Safe Reductions have been included and released as open source free software.  This is a generic set of reductions that are useful for any English language bot.  

- The GAC-80K data collected by the late Chris McKinstry, translated into AIML, is now included.  The AIML consist of about 54,000 questions and statements with truth values varying from Yes ("Is violet a color"?) to No ("Are fish mammals?") with all sorts of gradations of Maybe in between ("Is the sky blue?  Sometimes.")

- Numerous duplicate categories have been removed (though some remain) or merged.   The AIML being available on Google Code makes it much easier for anyone in the community to clone and make modifications and correct errors themselves.  These can then be submitted back for inclusion in the main branch of ALICE AIML.  We are working on some documentation for this process.

This release deprecates the ALICE AAA Set and the test project to host free AIML on wikidot.com.  AIML-en-us-foundation is compatible with any AIML 1.0.1 compliant interpreter, and runs on Pandorabots
http://pandorabots.com.

New Release of ALICE AIML on Google Code

Backlink: http://alicebot.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-release-of-alice-aiml-on-google_27.html

A Google Mobile Payment Service?

"You'll be able to walk in a store and do commerce," says Google's Eric Schmidt. "You'd bump for everything and eventually replace credit cards"

A Google Mobile Payment Service?

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc20101231_087039.htm

In the Works: A Google Mobile Payment Service?

"You'll be able to walk in a store and do commerce," says Google's Eric Schmidt. "You'd bump for everything and eventually replace credit cards"

In the Works: A Google Mobile Payment Service?

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc20101231_087039.htm

Google Pushes Education Software Through App Store

Google is talking with makers of educational software to help build a marketplace for online learning programs, an industry whose value may approach $5 billion

Google Pushes Education Software Through App Store

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc20101227_227798.htm

Google Aims Twin Daggers at Microsoft’s Heart: Rich Jaroslovsky

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Forget about Google Inc.’s struggle with Facebook for eyeballs and programmers. Pay no attention to its fight with Apple Inc. over smartphones, or to any other tech rivalry.

Google Aims Twin Daggers at Microsoft’s Heart: Rich Jaroslovsky

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-22/google-aims-twin-daggers-at-microsoft-s-heart-rich-jaroslovsky.html

Data Diligence: More Thoughts on Google Books' Ngrams

Since my earlier post on the new trending tool provided by Google Books, I've been thinking more about the service. While I've found plenty of interesting trends (more of which later), I've also been considering the underlying data and interface.Many of these considerations are common to any trending or other data probing interface (such as BlogPulse).

Data Diligence: More Thoughts on Google Books' Ngrams

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DataMining/~3/xENnqMr3NW4/more-thoughts-on-google-books-ngrams.html

European Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Is Broadened

The European Commission is taking over two German cases in which publishers and a mapping company are accusing Google of posing unfair competition.

European Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Is Broadened

Backlink: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=099b934bced29cdc6c717d1ccb1a7f9a

Data mining the intellectual history of the human race with Google Book Search

Harvard's Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden and colleagues have been analyzing the huge corpus of literature that Google digitized in its Book Search program, and they're uncovering absolutely fascinating information about our cultural lives, the evolution of language, the secret history of the world, censorship and even public health. It's all written up in a (regwalled) paper in Science, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books":

When the team looked at the frequency of individual years, they found a consistent pattern. In their own words: "'1951' was rarely discussed until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its frequency soared in 1951, remained high for three years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next fifteen years." But the shape of these graphs is changing. The peak gets higher with every year and we are forgetting our past with greater speed. The half-life of '1880' was 32 years, but that of '1973' was a mere 10 years.

The future, however, is becoming ever more easily ingrained. The team found that new technology permeates through our culture with growing speed. By scanning the corpus for 154 inventions created between 1800-1960, from microwave ovens to electroencephalographs, they found that more recent ones took far less time to become widely discussed.

The cultural genome: Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages (via Beyond the Beyond)

 

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Data mining the intellectual history of the human race with Google Book Search

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/TZdhjPX72A0/data-mining-the-inte.html

DealBook: Is Google Too Big to Shop?

The search giant defends its mergers and acquisitions strategy. The lawyer who led the antitrust crusade against Microsoft disagrees.

DealBook: Is Google Too Big to Shop?

Backlink: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f8b9e74acbcfc68c108ada5e10016561

Work with EFF's international team as a Google Policy Fellow

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now accepting applications for its Google Policy Fellowship, which runs next summer. This year's Fellow will be working with EFF's international team on global treaties, censorship and other issues:

Google Policy Fellows work to advance debate on key policy issues affecting the public for a minimum of 10 weeks in June - August 2011. Google kindly offers a $7500 stipend to the selected fellows. Google is now accepting applications at its GPF application page before January 17, 2011. Applicants will then be reviewed by host organizations and the successful applicant for each organization will be informed by Google by February 28, 2011. EFF is looking for a fellow with a global perspective, who has substantial knowledge about the international issues in which we are involved. More information about the focus of the work our Google Policy Fellow will take on are available here. More information about the GPF program is available in the FAQ.

Law students: there's also a program for legal interns.

Work with EFF's international team as a Google Policy Fellow

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/r1UbRDZsD4A/work-with-effs-inter.html

Advertising: France Says Google May Have Misused Its Search Advantage

But regulators proposed “targeted responses,” rather than new rules, as a remedy.

Advertising: France Says Google May Have Misused Its Search Advantage

Backlink: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=44a1dde1e671a77c439ba10762baabda

DealBook: Groupon Said to Reject $6 Billion Google Offer

9:13 p.m. | Updated In an unexpected move, Groupon has walked away from Google’s $6 billion takeover offer, according to a person close to the company, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

DealBook: Groupon Said to Reject $6 Billion Google Offer

Backlink: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b4ff699828a080bb4b52ac3dcf72c8c5

Google Bid to Buy Groupon Daily-Deal Site Is Said to Be Rejected

Google Inc.’s offer to buy daily- deal site Groupon Inc. has been rejected by the Chicago-based startup, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Google Bid to Buy Groupon Daily-Deal Site Is Said to Be Rejected

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-03/google-bid-to-buy-groupon-daily-deal-site-is-said-to-be-rejected.html

Google Gains Market Share in U.S. Mobile Ads

A new IDC report expects other winners this year to include Apple and Millennial Media. Among the losers: Yahoo and Microsoft

Google Gains Market Share in U.S. Mobile Ads

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc2010123_780712.htm