Science Tech

Issue #6 for galo gimenez

3/9/2008 - 7/22/2008

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Technologies behind Google ranking By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/16/2008 10:53:00 AM

In my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. (See"Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview" for a quick overview of IR technology.) IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations. Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want. User expectations from search have rightly increased. We work hard to fulfill the expectations of each and every user, and to do that we need to better understand the pages, the queries, and our users. Over the last decade we have pushed the technologies for understanding these three components (of the search process) to completely new dimensions. When we talk about queries at Google, we use square brackets [ ] to mark the beginning and end of queries (see " How to write queries" by Matt Cutts), a notation I will use throughout this post. (Pages and search results change frequently, so in time, some examples used here may not behave as explained.) • Understanding pages: Over years we have invested heavily in our crawl and indexing system. As a result we have a very large and very fresh index. In addition to size and freshness, we have improved our index in other ways. One of the key technologies we have developed to understand pages is associating important concepts to a page even when they are not obvious on the page. We find the official homepage for Sprovieri Gallery in London for the Italian query [ galleria sprovieri londra], even though the official page does not have either London or Londra on it. In the U.S., a user searching for [cool tech pc vancouver, wa] finds the homepage www.cooltechpc.com even though the page does not mention anywhere that they are in Vancouver, WA. Other technologies we have developed include distinctions between important and less important words in the page and the freshness of the information on the page. • Understanding queries: It is critical that we understand what our users are looking for (beyond just the few words in their query). We have made several notable advances in this area including a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system. Most users have used our spelling suggestion system at one time or another. It knows that someone searching for [ kofee annan] is really searching for Mr. Kofi Annan, and is prompted: Did you mean: kofi annan; whereas someone searching for [ kofee beans] is actually looking for coffee beans. Doing this internationally with very high accuracy is hard, and we do it well. Synonyms are the foundation of our query

understanding work. This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. Though sometimes obvious to humans, it is an unsolved problem in automatic language processing. As a user, I don't want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. Often I don't even know what the right words are. This is where our synonyms system comes into action. Our synonyms system can do sophisticated query modifications, e.g., it knows that the word 'Dr' in the query [ Dr Zhivago] stands for Doctor whereas in [ Rodeo Dr] it means Drive. A user looking for [ back bumper repair] gets results about rear bumper repair. For [ Ramstein ab], we automatically look for Ramstein Air Base; for the query query [ b&b ab] we search for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta, Canada. We have developed this level of query understanding for almost one hundred different languages, which is what I am truly proud of. Another technology we use in our ranking system is concept identification. Identifying critical concepts in the query allows us to return much more relevant results. For example, our algorithms understand that in the query [ new york times square church] the user is looking for the wellknown church in Times Square and not for articles from the New York Times. We don't just stop at identifying concepts; we further enhance the query with the right concepts when, for instance, someone looking for [ PC and its impact on people] is in fact looking for impact of computers on society, or someone who searches for [ rainforest instructional activities for vocabulary] is really looking for rain forest lesson plans. Our query analysis algorithms have many such state-of-the-art techniques built into them, and once again, we do this internationally in almost every language we serve. • Understanding user s: Our work on interpreting user intent is aimed at returning results people really want, not just what they said in their query. This work starts with a world class localization system, and adds to it our advanced personalization technology, and several other great strides we have made in interpreting user intent, e.g. Universal Search. Our clear focus on "best locally relevant results served globally" is reflected in our work on localization. The same query typed in multiple countries may deserve completely different results. A user looking for [ bank] in the US should get American banks, whereas a user in the UK is either looking for the Bank Fashion line or for British financial institutions. The results for this query should return local financial institutions in other English speaking countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. The fun really starts when this query is typed in non-English-speaking countries like Egypt, Israel, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland. Likewise the query [football] refers to entirely different sports in Australia, the UK, and the US. These examples mostly show how we get the localized version of the same concept correctly (financial institution, sport, etc.). However, the same query can mean entirely different things in different countries. For example,

[Côte d'Or] is a geographic region in France- but it is a large chocolate manufacturer in neighboring French-speaking Belgium; and yes, we get that right too :-). Personalization is another strong feature in our search system which tailors search results to individual users. Users who are logged-in while searching and have signed up for Web History get results that are more relevant for them than the general Google results. For example, someone who does a lot football-related searches might get more football related results for [giants], while other users might get results related to the baseball team. Similarly, if you tend to prefer results from a particular shopping site, you will be more likely to get results from that site when you search for products. Our evaluation shows that users who get personalized results find them to be more relevant than non-personalized results. Another case of user intent can be observed for the query [ chevrolet magnum]. Magnum is actually made by Dodge and not Chevrolet. So we present the results for Dodge Magnum with the prompt See results for: dodge magnum in our result set. Our work on Universal Search is another example of how we interpret user intent to give them what they (sometimes) really want. Someone searching for [ bangalore] not only gets the important web pages, they also get a map, a video showing street life, traffic, etc. in Bangalore -watching this video I almost feel I am there :-) -and at the time of writing there is relevant news and relevant blogs about Bangalore. Finally let me briefly mention the latest advance we have made in search: Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). CLIR allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible. I call this advance: give me what I want in any language. A user looking for Tony Blair's biography in Russia who types the query in Russian [ ] is prompted at the bottom of our results to search the English web with: Similarly a user searching for Disney movie songs in Egypt with the query [ ] is prompted to search the English web. We are very excited about CLIR as it truly brings us closer to our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I could go on and on showing examples of stateof-the-art technology that we have developed to make our ranking system as good as it is, but the fact is that search is nowhere close to being a solved problem. Many queries still don't get satisfactory results from Google, and each such query is an opportunity to improve our ranking system. I am confident that with numerous techniques under development in our group, we will make large improvements to our ranking algorithms in the near future. I hope my two posts about Google ranking have made it clear that we live and breathe search, and we are more passionate than ever about it. Our fervor for serving all our users worldwide is unprecedented. We pride ourselves in running a very good ranking system, and are working incredibly hard every day to make it even better. Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Vote for FeedJournal's Future By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog) Submitted at 7/1/2008 12:20:00 PM

It is now dead-simple to request and vote for the

FeedJournal features you want to see added to future updates. The top requested features can be voted on from both the Reader and Member Services pages. Head over to FeedJournal's UserVoice page to add your own suggestions, cast

your vote for what to add next, or just browse around the submitted feature requests. I will make sure to use this input to decide which features get implemented next.

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Danny Schechter: Homeowners "March" Against Foreclosure (The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed) Submitted at 7/22/2008 9:34:54 AM

NACA's 5 Day DC Event Offers Help, And A Way Forward WASHINGTON JULY 20: Forty-five years ago this summer I spent a day Marching on Washington. Everyone remembers it as just four words of the many uttered by Dr. Martin Luther King: "I have a dream." After that march for justice (and jobs), the organizers led by Bayard Rustin returned to the Statler Hilton Hotel, now the Capital Hilton, which was the event's headquarters. Dr. King was there, and Malcolm X even dropped by for a press conference of his own to warn that non-violence was unlikely to lead to change. It was August 28, l963, a day which is still memorialized in the hotel's lobby. I was a civil rights worker then, and a small fry organizer of that historic mobilization. That night, I crashed in a hotel room rented for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Within five years, violence would claim the lives of both Malcolm and Martin, and today, Dr. King's children are, sadly, suing each other in part over how best to monetize his legacy. Today, I am back in that very same hotel, although the name Hilton is better known now for the antics of Baron Hilton's granddaughter Paris. Over this past weekend, the hotel, just a few blocks from the White House, was once again playing host to a human rights battle, this time the fight against foreclosures. America's largest and most militant homeownership organization, NACA, The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation hired out the grand hotel for five days, and brought 460 staffers from 38 offices to Washington for a five day event to demonstrate that their approach to stopping foreclosures is superior to everything that is being done elsewhere or proposed in Congress. They reference "the dream" too, 45 years ago activists wanted to claim it. Today they fight to save it. NACA believes that making mortgages affordable is the only way to stabilize at-risk homeowners. They call on banks to restructure mortgages, lower interest rates and replace adjustable mortgages and ARMS with low fixed rates for the long term. To make its point, and serve the community, NACA publicized an offer of free counseling and advice for homeowners that included creating modified and restructured loan proposals and aggressively persuading lenders to accept them. A solicitation was made in radio ads and through direct mail. People with mortgage problems were

advised to make appointments on the NACA.com website and bring their mortgage documents with them. The event was a big and audacious gamble by NACA's feisty CEO Bruce Marks. Something amazing happened. Some homeowners started arriving at 6:30 AM. Soon lines stretched around the block. It was a march of the We Don't Want To Be Homeless, "wearing their troubles on their faces," as one NACA staffer later observed. A million families face foreclosure this year and many are trying to do something before their lives go on the auction block. The statistics are hard to wrap your head around; a parade of real people can't be ignored. By day's end, thousands of homeowners had trekked through the NACA process which included an orientation, the scanning of their documents into the organization's proprietary mortgage software and then one on one counseling in a ballroom which had been transformed into a vast arena of small tables, each with a HUD certified counselor and a computer. The counselors help the homeowners assess the affordability of their mortgages and the prospects of their losing their homes. They then draft sustainable budgets and a plan. With personal financial data in place, backed by bank statements, mortgage paper and pay stubs, they proposed affordable "solutions" to mortgage servicers and banks. These call for cutting interest rates and restructuring the mortgages at fixed rate for 30 years. NACA negotiators emailed the proposals to the finance companies and then advocated for their new members. Soon, emails started coming back from lenders with letters accepting some of the proposals. I spoke to some ectstatic homeowners who were leaving after a frustrating day of waiting for new deal that would allow them to save money and their homes. Officials from some banks and agencies dropped by and marveled over this well organized, business like and passionate first of a kind event. It clearly showed the enormity of the foreclosure crisis and the anger among so many homeowners who feel victimized by the subprime ponzi scheme. It also showed that there is a solution within reach if lenders are willing to compromise. NACA may take it on the road. These people--old and young, some with children, others in wheel chairs. came from as far away as Ohio, North Carolina and Florida. They were dignified and quiet, perhaps also frightened. Many told me they have had trouble sleeping because of worries about whether they could keep their families together.

The event did rate some press attention, but, as is often the case, drug related murders they night before were, predictably, of more interest to most local TV outlets. The CBS Evening News and Fox News showed up. (Afterwards, the Fox cameraman told me he was coming back with his own mortgage documents.) A Washington Post columnist had praised the event the day before it happened, writing, "The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America is doing something that should have been done a long time ago. Homeowners won't have to wait weeks for a callback from their loan servicers. They won't have to fret and fuss -- and in some cases cuss -- to get a mortgage servicing company to listen to their pleas to save their homes from foreclosure." But when the event unfolded, exceeding organizer's expectations, the Post did not bother to send a reporter. The newspaper is right next door to the hotel. Only z few of the media outlets contacted bothered to show up. Early next week, NACA will encourage its homeowners to descend on Congress to "encourage" their Senators and Representatives to press bankers to restructure constituent's loans. While congress debates bailouts, NACA saves homes. Early next week, NACA will encourage its homeowners to descend on Congress to "encourage" their Senators and They may be more successful with bankers who know that getting some payment is better than none, than with posturing members of Congress who seem paralyzed when it comes to helping people in need. Last week, Bill Moyers featured journalist William Greider who discussed, as Graig Gingold reports, "the abject failure of the politicians in DC to do what was called for to protect the public from the predatory lenders." He cites as evidence a headline from the Washington Post: "Figures in Both Campaigns Have Deep Ties to Mortgage Giants" The battle lines are being joined, NACA, a modern day David is taking on the mortgage Goliath---and, so far, making progress Hopefully the bloggers, gathered in their own convention in Austin Texas, and other activists, will take notice and realize there is more to politics than electoral contests. News Dissector Danny Schechter made the film In Debt We Trust and has just finished a new book investigating the crisis, Plunder to be published by C o s i m o . C o m m e n t s t o [email protected]

Neil Armstrong's Beautiful Mistake (Wired Science) Submitted at 7/21/2008 9:52:22 AM

On this very day 39 years ago, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. Watching on grainy television sets 240,000 miles away, millions of spellbound people heard Armstrong proclaim, "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." Famously, Armstrong was supposed to say"one small step for a man," but blew his line in the the excitement of the moment -- and thank goodness, because the mistaken utterance couldn't have been more perfect. I once heard that science fiction titan Ray Bradbury spent his night calling everyone who'd

laughed at his spacefaring dreams and told them exactly where they could put their skepticism, anatomically speaking. Bradbury himself, however, recalls events differently. "We're here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate. That's what I wanted to say and what I did say on the Cronkite show," he said during a 2000 speech at the National Book Awards ceremony. "I stayed up all night that night.... I was on nine different shows around the world. I said all these things. I cried all night I was so happy." What about you, Wired Science readers? Do you have any stories of your own (or your parents' own) from that night? Note: As some commenters have pointed out,

Armstrong didn't flub the line -- the vowel was lost in transmission. Score one for old-fashioned tech! Like hand-colored photographs and vinyl records, space communications are much improved by a few scratches and pops. See Also: • John Glenn At Unveil of New HD Space History Footage • Water Found on the Moon • The History of the Moon's Seas • Send Your Name to the Moon on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter • Americans Find Out NASA Is Going Back to the Moon WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter and Del.icio.us feeds; Wired Science on Facebook.

FeedJournal, Booklet Style By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog) Submitted at 3/9/2008 2:09:00 PM

It's great fun to monitor Technorati for blogs posts talking about FeedJournal. There are some

innovative usages out there and one of my favorites is from Nik Codes, who outlines how he uses FeedJournal in the restroom! Don't worry, the link is safe for work." I printed out Coding Horror and it really did feel like Jeff Atwood in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times."

Nik also mentions how he uses BookletCreator for folding FeedJournal into a nice booklet, a great suggestion which I'll be sure to add to the FAQ.

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Jeffrey Kluger: Cartoon Complexity (The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed) Submitted at 7/22/2008 9:25:31 AM

Never mind the nervous Nellies, I say kudos to the New Yorker for its recent cover illustration of Barack and Michelle Obama. The image of the potential first couple as a Muslim and a terrorist, fist-bumping in the Oval Office while an American flag burns in the fireplace was just a crackerjack bit of irony. The visual jujitsu the editors intended was immediately evident. (We don't think these things are true! We're just making fun of people who do!) And as for anxious Democrats and other worriers who suggest that maybe, just maybe, such a satiric bank-shot with comedic backspin won't be quite so clear to a broader audience--anyone outside the Conde Nast building, for example--well, just look at the record. If political history shows us anything, it's that subtlety and nuance always get through more powerfully than a single picture or resonant sound bite. To hear the fussbudgets tell it, you'd think that Obama's opponents were already making hay out of the fact that his middle name is Hussein or that he donned traditional Ethiopian clothing while on a state visit to Africa, even though Hussein is as common as "Bob" in the part of the world where Obama's father was born and politicians are forever donning local costumes to please local hosts. You'd think Democrats were already pounding John McCain for allegedly saying that he wants the Iraq war to continue for 100 more years, when all he really said was that he doesn't much mind if a longterm peacekeeping force remains in Iraq as long as the shooting has stopped. You'd even think some people still believe that Al Gore claims to have invented the Internet, when what he did say was that he took the legislative lead in creating the organized Web that exists today--which he did--a statement of fact no one would stoop to misrepresent because, well, it just wouldn't be sporting. If this through-the-looking-glass world--in which fair play and square dealing were the rules in politics--really did exist, then the folks at the New

Yorker really would have made a perfectly defensible decision in running their cover. Nothing wrong with editors indulging their puckish selves if the 300 million of us sitting around the giant Algonquin round table that is our nation are all in on the joke. In the slightly more rough-and-tumble world that actually exists, however, an election is less an exchange of civilized badinage than of rabbit punches, kidney jabs, and slanders so shameless they'd make a Tammany hack blush. And that presents problems. There are few fields in which the increasingly sophisticated science of simplexity--the study of the way simple things can be improbably complex, and complex things can be brilliantly simple-applies more powerfully than in politics. The Twainian dictum that a lie can make it around the world before the truth even gets its boots on is nothing compared to the light-speed fleetness with which a simple idea takes hold in politics, compared to the mud-footed slowness of a complex one--something you'd think we'd have learned by now. In 1976, Gerald Ford sank his own presidential campaign when he declared that he didn't think the East bloc was under Soviet domination. Few rational people believed he had really forgotten the ongoing, 30-year lockdown Moscow had imposed on the Warsaw pact nations; rather he was merely making the more nuanced point that the democratic aspirations of those countries couldn't be smothered even if their political freedoms could be. Nonetheless, which impression do you think stuck? In a debate four years later, Jimmy Carter was asked the most important issue then facing the world and he answered nuclear proliferation, citing his 14-yearold daughter Amy as the source of that idea. Nobody truly thought that the President had huddled with his child for policy guidance before going out on stage, but rather that he was merely reminding voters that the world we create today will be left to our children tomorrow so we need to listen to their hopes and fears. Now try making these more subtle arguments when pundits are hooting that Ford thinks Poland is a thriving

democracy and Carter's got a teenager running the NSC. Ronald Reagan was the modern master of the clean, lethal sound bite--the maestro of "There you go again" and "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The Bushes raised the stakes --while lowering the game--with their toxic stew of Willie Hortons and Swift Boats and John McCain's nonexistent black child. But the sheer ability of the simple--even if phony--idea to steamroll the clumsy, complex one has been with us as long as there have been elections. It was into this environment that the New Yorker released its Barack and Michelle cover, almost certainly knowing that it would be used in innumerable slanderous ways by innumerable bloggers and other folks who wish Obama something other than succcess in November. That did both the candidate and the New Yorker itself a disservice. In 2001, many people argued that Time magazine ought to name Osama bin Laden as its Person of the Year, since that year bin Laden undeniably influenced world events for better or worse more than any other person, which is the historic criterion for the Person of the Year designation. I have been a writer and editor for Time since 1996, and though back then I was not part of the Person of the Year discussions, I was relieved when I learned we had chosen Rudolph Giuliani as 2001's cover boy instead. I for one didn't have the stomach to watch Time get villified in the U.S. and feted in the Arab world for what appeared to be an honor bestowed on a man who had killed 3,000 Americans--feeling pretty confident that our subtle for better or worse explanation would not get heard through the din. While the reaction to the New Yorker cover will hardly be as passionate as all that, the magazine's complex message will surely be simplified--and misused--the same way. I hope that'll be worth the laughs it got. Jeffrey Kluger is the author of Simplexity: Why Simple Things become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)

Rob Kall: McCain to New York Times: Dammit My Friend, Can't You See? I Am Right, Obama's Wrong. Let Me Repeat... (The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed) Submitted at 7/22/2008 9:20:49 AM

Senator McCain is beginning to show us what a McCain presidency will look like and it ain't pretty. It's creepy. Not surprisingly, the right wing echo chamber is demonstrating what it will act like, with its latest clueless demonstration, proving that Fox News and the Drudge Report are good at what they do -echoing talking points and delivering messages -but short on the goods when it comes to even getting what it means to function as a journalistic operation. Earlier this week, Obama sent the New York Times an op-ed ahead of a speech, one that contained new ideas and information. The New York Times opted to run it. McCain sent a print version of what we've been seeing on TV since Obama started on his massively successful, slam dunk overseas tour. The McCain piece was a poorly written, painfully repetitive recitation of his anti-Obama, "I was right on the surge and he was wrong and won't admit it" rant. I was going to say talking point but it's no longer just a talking point. McCain looks desperate and frustrated when he launches into his tirade how, and annoyed that "we" are not getting it, not lapping up his bromides and understanding how

right he is. The problem is, his message is now falling on ears that have been updated. It's an old, stale message that doesn't seem to be working. Right on Surge, Obama Wrong. Yadda yadda yadda. So what?! He's been right on how to get out and Maliki has repeatedly confirmed that this is what the Iraqis want. Oh? You say Maliki doesn't know what he wants or what the Iraqis need? Just imagine what a president this kind of inability to let go, this obtuse, stuck, inability to recognize the fact that the situation has changes, that the vectors in play have changed. McCain seems imprisoned within his brittle inflexibility, stuck with his limited range of ideas. Look familiar? It should. It's the G.W. Bush modus operandi sans a pitbull Dick Cheney type to drive it through. Even the right wing echo chamber players who are having fun thinking they are beating up on the New York Times don't get it that their attacks, while they may play to their usual Kool-Aid marinated base, are clearly seen as clueless by any and all of the players in the real media, in the real journalistic world -- both publishers and writers alike. I publish a medium sized website and routinely encounter rank amateurs who declare that their freedom of speech is violated if their poorly written

articles are rejected. Sorry. You have the right to speak or write hackneyed or badly written pieces. We don't have to publish them. Real media operations realize that. Faux media are so accustomed to accommodating the people and organizations they serve that they demonstrate their cluelessness with their smarmy remarks and indignation that McCain's repetitive hack writing was rejected. I give the New York Times extra credit for NOT publishing the McCain piece. It might have sold some extra papers, but it would have definitely NOT been up to the standards the New York Times holds for writing. You can read it, here, on the Drudge Report. Ironically, now that the piece of writing has become news as an object, it would be appropriate to publish it, but not as an op-ed, instead, as the document that was rejected. Of course, it is totally unrealistic to think that the right wing echo chamber organizations (I am loath to call them media) will ever actually report that this is actually another blunder by McCain and his handlers. It will be interesting to see if the more moderate media -- the big three networks and CNN will follow MSNBC in mocking the indignation that Fox News and the Drudge Report have demonstrated. Cross-posted from OpEdNews.com

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Pigeons: The Next Step in Local Eating (No, Really) (Wired Science) Submitted at 7/18/2008 3:53:58 PM

When you look at a pigeon, you might see a dirty, rat-like bird that fouls anything it touches with feathers or feces, but I see a waste-scavenging, protein-generating biomachine. At a time when rising demand for meat across the globe endangers the food system, and local eating has gained millions of ( T-shirt wearing) adherents, it's time to reconsider our assumptions about what protein sources are considered OK to eat. You see, city pigeons are the feral descendants of birds that were domesticated by humans thousands of years ago so that we could eat them and use their guano as fertilizer, we read in Der Spiegel. They're still doing their part, i.e. eating and breeding, but we humans have stopped doing ours, i.e. eating them. Numbering in the hundreds of millions, they could be a new source of guilt-free protein for locavores in urban centers. Instead, we're still trying to kill off our species' former pet birds, which (as any city-dweller can attest) doesn't work. "Killing makes no sense at all," Daniel HaagWackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel. "The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they'll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available." And in the developed world after World War II, there's always been plenty of food. "This explosion of the pigeon population is due to the large food supply, because after the war food became cheap in relation to income," HaagWackernagel argues on his website. "Since this increase in our welfare, society has produced pigeon food in abundance through our wasteful practices." It sure sounds like a bad situation, but put the two quotes together in the context of food production.

A food source that lives on our trash that is so reproductively prolific that we can't kill it off? That's green tech at its finest! Pigeons are direct waste-to-food converters, like edible protein weeds, that leave droppings that could be used as fertilizer as a bonus. And yet we expend energy trying to get rid of them. It wasn't always this way. In fact, eating pigeons is as American as eating pumpkin pie. Probably more so, on a net weight basis, actually. A 1917 report to the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture details the story of the American passenger pigeon, extinct kin to our current city birds. The birds provided our founding fathers with a bountiful feast in 1648 when, according to Massachusets Bay Colony luminary John Winthrop, "multitudes of them were killed daily." The report describes the many millions of birds that were killed all across the nation through the 19th century. A specialized itinerant profession even arose, the netters, who when pigeons were spotted "learned their whereabouts by telegraph, packed up their belongings, and moved to the new location." In one particularly fascinating section, the author describes the last great flock of New York pigeons on the lam from marauding bands of netters who sell their meat to market. Possibly the last great slaughter of pigeons in New York, of which we have record, was some time in the 70s. A flock had nested in Missouri in April, where they were followed by the same pigeoners, who again destroyed the squabs. The New York market alone would take 100 barrels a day for weeks without a break in price. Chicago, St. Louis, Boston and all the great and little cities of the North and East joined in the demand. Need we wonder why the pigeons have vanished? That's right: Passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction because they were a popular food in the great cities of Restoration-era America.

Of course, the obvious objection is that pigeons carry disease, but some evidence suggests that they aren't particularly susceptible to avian flu. As for the meat itself, I called up the FDA's food safety line to ask how pigeon compared, safety-wise, to your average factory-farmed pig or chicken, but after one-and-a-half hours on hold, the office closed down and I gave up. But as part of this 65 percent not-kidding thought experiment, let's assume that there's nothing horrifically bad about eating pigeon. Really, all pigeons need is a re-branding. Just as the spurned Patagonian toothfish became the majestic Chilean sea bass and the silly Chinese gooseberry became the beloved kiwifruit, pigeons can merely reclaim their previous sufficiently arugula-sounding name: squab. The term squab now refers to the meat of the baby pigeon, but it can also mean pigeons in general, so we can simply extend the brand back to its historical proportions. In fact, some companies like Bokhari Squab Farms are already doing good business selling the stuff: A dozen of Bokhari's live squab goes for $60. So, go buy sustainablesquab.com and encourage your urban friends to make omnivorism local. Just remind them: Pigeons are fowl. Disclaimer: How serious am I? 65 percent notkidding. Image: A composite image of scavenger pigeons on the left and squab on the right. Left: flickr/ ulterior epicure. Right: flickr/ vanberto. Thanks to urban agriculture supporter, TJ Sondermann, for his Twitter research help. Even though I'm pretty sure he's not going to be eating pigeon any time soon. WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Using FeedJournal #2: Google Reader Integration By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog) Submitted at 3/30/2008 10:30:00 PM

This is the second post in a series on how to best take advantage of FeedJournal Reader. Today's post describes how you can integrate FeedJournal with Google Reader, the most popular web based RSS reader . As I pointed out in the previous article, you'd rather keep feeds with shorter articles

in your old RSS reader. Still you will daily run into articles in Google Reader that you wished would show up in FeedJournal Reader. To do that, simply tag the article with "to FeedJournal" in GoogleReader. To set up articles with this tag to be automatically published in the next print issue of FeedJournal, you have to make the tag public. This setting is available in "Manage Subscriptions" below Google Reader's subscription list. Click on the Tag tab and

toggle the tag's state to public. This makes the "view public page" visible. At the bottom of the public page's right-hand column is a link to the RSS feed. That's the RSS feed you need to subscribe to in FeedJournal Reader. Once you've made the tag public and subscribed to it, you can keep tagging articles in Google Reader to make them appear in your next printedition of FeedJournal. Good Luck!

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Jonathan Schwarz: Looking Back: Rumsfeld Privately Criticized Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki As Inferior To Mass Murderers (The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed) Submitted at 7/22/2008 9:22:04 AM

There's no question Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri alMaliki has recently been giving the White House and John McCain heartburn. On Saturday in an interview with Der Spiegel he essentially endorsed Obama's plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. Then did it again today, right after speaking with Obama in Baghdad: After talks with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki reaffirmed that Iraq wants U.S. combat troops to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2010, a few months later than Obama had proposed. So it's worth looking back at the Bush administration's private views of Maliki, as stated by Donald Rumsfeld back in 2006. For the recent New York Time story on the close government ties of TV military analysts, the paper pried loose tons of internal Pentagon records never meant to see the light of day. Buried in the pile was a recording of Rumsfeld having lunch with many of the Pentagon's analysts in December, 2006 just before he was replaced by Robert Gates. (The large .wav file is available here.) One section of the recording goes like this: UNIDENTIFIED ANALYST #1: This is really off the record, but do you think that this government can survive -- the unity government -or they're eventually gonna have to go to an authoritarian one like came out of [South] Korea, Syngman Rhee, was really an authoritarian leader. The eleven years I was supporting commander in Korea, the president was an Army major general in civilian clothes and they had their highest growth rates and did the '88 Olympics and they finally handed it over. The real question is, and we all hope the unity government [inaudible], but it's very difficult. RUMSFELD: It is very difficult. You look at it and there isn't anyone smart enough to know the answer to your question. UNIDENTIFIED ANALYST #1: I think the answer's they can't, but how you do get that right person? RUMSFELD: I mean, Allawi had steel up his backside. UNIDENTIFIED ANALYST #2: Fallujah. RUMSFELD: And he wasn't well liked and wasn't perfect. He'd leave the country for long periods and stuff. He was not as attentive as he needed to be, it strikes me. But good lord, in terms of dealing with him, he was terrific. He could make a decision and he would kick some fanny to get it

implemented, and you felt good about it. The fellow who proceeded Maliki [Ibrahim al-Jaafari] was like a windsock. You know, he was the last guy he talked to, and we're still off the record. Q: We heard that windsock terminology over there from somebody else. RUMSFELD: Oh man, he was something. Yes, he's a hell of a -- a very pleasant guy, but good grief, the last guy he talked to. This fella [Maliki] is better than the one before, but he's not Syngman Rhee. For anyone familiar with Ayad Allawi and Syngman Rhee, the casual admiration Rumsfeld expresses for them is like a punch in the stomach. The hands of both Allawi and Rhee are covered with the blood of their countrymen. Allawi was a member of Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party during the sixties and seventies. Seymour Hersh quotes an American intelligence official as saying "Allawi helped Saddam get to power"; Hersh also reports that a high level Middle East diplomat told him that Allawi was part of a Baathist Party hit squad that murdered dissenters in Europe. (After a falling out with Saddam in the mid -seventies, Allawi lived in England and ended up channeling false information about Iraq's purported

WMD and Al-Qaeda ties to the media.) But that may merely have been the prelude. The Bush administration was able to briefly install Allawi as Iraq's Prime Minster in 2004. Soon afterward, Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker provided convincing evidence that, just before taking office, Allawi had personally shot seven Iraqi prisoners. Yet as bad as Allawi was, the South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee was far worse. According to recent reporting by AP, Rhee, who took power in 1948, supervised the slaughter of over 100,000 South Koreans in the space of a few weeks. Indeed, Allawi and Rhee seem almost indistinguishable from Saddam Hussein. But then, Rumsfeld never had any real problems with him either. [The secret dictator handshake] BONUS: Allawi's successor and Maliki's predecessor as prime minster was Ibrahim alJaafari. Jaafari is the one whom Rumsfeld refers to as a "windsock." In what must have come as quite a surprise to the Bush administration, Jaafari was a fervent admirer of Noam Chomsky. originally posted at the Tiny Revolution

Templates bring Docs to life By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/16/2008 5:37:00 PM

What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all examples of templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery that Sarah Beth Eisinger (Docs Templates engineer), Grant Dasher (intern), and I built and (happily!) released today. When researching how people use templates, we saw that lots of you create documents for all aspects of your lives. You need resumes and cover letters to look for jobs and fax cover letters and invoices to run your businesses. And of course you want to use documents in fun ways with family and friends, such as unique designs and layouts for invitation cards and calendars. Finally, everyone

wants to be able to have tools that "just work": print mailing labels, track portfolio values, and manage projects without having to painstakingly create documents from scratch.

These needs inspired our new templates and gallery. We developed these in conjunction with Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business. Many templates leverage the collaborative aspect of Google Docs so that several people can work on a single document online without having to email attachments back and forth. To hear the story behind two templates, watch these videos: To get started, go directly to the template gallery or access it from the "New" menu in your document list. Templates are currently available only in English, but other languages are coming soon. They're also available to Google Apps users. Posted by Valerie Blechar, Templates Engineer, Google Docs (Cross-posted on the Google Docs Blog.)

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Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/15/2008 5:48:00 PM

Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will "secure the single biggest factor for competitive advantage." We and other forwardlooking companies put a lot of effort into hiring such people. What are we looking for? At the highest level, we are looking for nonroutine problem-solving skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a matter of course. After all, that's what most education is concerned with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative thought and tenacity. Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process. How do we find these non-routine savants? There are many factors, of course, but we primarily look for ... ... analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know. ... communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn't useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions. ... a willingness to experiment. Non-routine

problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a willingness to accept the evidence even if you don't like it. ... team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team's expectations. ... passion and leadership. This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do. These characteristics are not just important in our business, but in every business, as well as in government, philanthropy, and academia. The challenge for the up-and-coming generation is how to acquire them. It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities. And then keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn't end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major. Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP, Product Management

Video: 'Match on a Stick to Hydrogen. Big Bang Coming.' (Wired Science) Submitted at 7/19/2008 12:35:15 AM

Where can you find explosions, deadly poisons, and spy stories? The periodic table. Brady Haran, a journalist, teamed up with chemists at the University of Nottingham to create the best educational tool since chemistry sets -- a series of exciting YouTube videos about each element -- jam packed with information and fun. In a clip about hydrogen, Haran and his colleagues fill a balloon with the gas and prepare to ignite it with a match, but the explosion comes after a quick lecture by Martyn Poliakoff, a softspoken professor with remarkable hair. When speaking of Polonium, Poliakoff mentions the recent assassination of a Russian spy with the radioactive substance, and its earlier role as a trigger in atomic bombs. Students should react well to the films. Each of them contains the elements of a good lesson: brevity, excitement, quick starts, closeup shots, serious information, and likeable characters. Hopefully, they will be an inspiration for many similar projects.

Students surf their way to success By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/16/2008 12:02:00 AM

Early on in my career at Google I was approached by a former professor of mine, Jamie Murphy, who was eager to give his students hands-on exposure to online marketing. Apart from delivering a great learning experience, Jamie wanted to make sure that his students would leave university with skills they could take directly into the workforce. Together, Jamie and I recruited a panel of professors from all over the globe and came up with the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Student teams had to identify a local business with a website, but no experience of online marketing, and then were given free Google AdWords vouchers worth the equivalent of US$200. The student teams worked with the local business to set up an AdWords account and structure an online marketing campaign which would increase web traffic and sales for the local business. The teams had three weeks to run the campaign and had to submit their campaign report to a panel of international academic judges. Today we're announcing the winners: an innovative team from the University of Western Australia who worked with an indoor rockclimbing school that scaled the heights and scooped the global prize. The winners will be whisked off to Mountain View, California for a tour of the Googleplex and meet with the creators of AdWords and other executives. To help them in their ongoing studies, each team member will also receive an Apple MacBook Pro.

L to R: Dr. Fang Liu, Glen Linthorne (from the partner business), Victor Tsen (hanging), Amy Smith, Aaron Balm, and Lauren Bobridge. Absent: Anna Usikov. There were also three regional winners, including students from Pennsylvania State University, who won in the fierce Americas field, while a team from the Universität Bern in Switzerland beat some impressive competition to win for Europe, the

Middle East and Africa. The Asia Pacific winners came from the Australian Graduate School of Management with a skillful campaign for a small specialty cake business (actually based in California). These four teams were clearly deserving winners, but the enthusiasm all the students and professors showed for the challenge was inspiring. We initially expected slightly more than 1,000 students to take part, and were thrilled when c. 8,500 students from 47+ countries put their marketing skills to the test. The success of the challenge and the positive feedback we've had from both professors and students was more than we had hoped for. As Dr. Fang Liu, who taught the winning team, notes: “The Online Marketing Challenge offers a great opportunity for students to develop their skills and experience in online marketing. Local businesses also benefit as the AdWords campaigns have helped promote their business to a wider community. I feel absolutely thrilled that one of my student teams is the global winner." We're delighted to have worked with professors to find a fun and innovative way to introduce online marketing into the university curriculum. And we're happy to say the Challenge will carry on next year, and we hope it will go from strength to strength. Here are more details on the Challenge and our winners. Posted by Lee Hunter, Product Marketing Manager

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Using FeedJournal Barely Alive, Seafloor Microbes Might Resemble Exo- #3: How to Publish Anything Organisms By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog)

(Wired Science)

Submitted at 4/22/2008 2:32:00 PM

Submitted at 7/21/2008 4:54:31 PM

Deep below the sea floor live massive colonies of primitive microbes. Almost like one-celled zombies, these microbes use so little energy that it might be more accurate to call them undead rather than alive. Yet scientists think that the species might provide a model for life on other planets. Even on this planet, such microbes might account for a whopping 10 percent of the Earth's biomass. "In essence, these microbes are almost, practically dead by our normal standards," said Christopher House, a geosciences professor at Penn State University, and the lead author of the paper, in a release. "They metabolize a little, but not much." The cold, lightless and energy-poor conditions under the seafloor provide a promising research analog for the harsh conditions in subsurface Martian soil or near hydrothermal vents on Europa, Jupiter's second moon. "We do not expect the microbes in other places to be these microbes exactly," said House. "But, they could be living at a similar slow rate." Subseafloor microbes, according to a metagenomic analysis to be published Thursday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are genetically distinct from life on Earth's surface and oceans. The Archaea the Penn State researchers found might look like bacteria, but they don't eat or work like them. While E. coli might double its numbers in 30 minutes, Archaea could take hundreds or even thousands of years to accomplish the same amount of growth. The researchers conducted their work off the coast of South America in a region known as the Peru Margin. They sampled genetic material from the biomes at varying depths. Below 160 feet, the researcher said Archaea account for 90 percent of the life present, and represent the most unique environment thus far revealed by metagenomic analysis. The Archaea represent a thus-far untapped genetic repository for scientists looking for novel genes for changing metabolism, withstanding cold or synthesizing chemicals. UCLA molecular biologist Jim Lake called the results "very exciting." He also noted that more research into populations of isolated Archaea communities like the one described in the paper could do more than reveal the attributes of the

microbial life. "Our whole concept of microbial evolution is up for grabs," Lake said. "People are realizing there is lots of exchange and gene transfers between organisms, and I think the whole area is about to explode." Lake noted that while many, like House and Biddle, think the Archaea are an ancient species, they could just be evolving very quickly because of their isolation, a bit like animals on the Galapagos islands. The debate about how Archaea got so very different from other prokaryotes like bacteria highlights how little is known about them. House's co-author, astrobiologist Jennifer Biddle, said that even the most basic questions about this kind of life remain unanswered. "For example, how do they die?" asked Biddle. Image: Close-up photographs from the drilling site, 1229. Courtesy of the Ocean Drilling Program. WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook

Publisher Gets Images in Free Service By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog) Submitted at 5/18/2008 1:21:00 PM

Images are now freely available in FeedJournal Publisher, allowing any blogger or content provider to generate a great-looking PDF out of their latest writings. This feature was previously reserved for paying Gold members, but is now free for all to use! At the same time, the FeedJournal subscription model got simplified, only one paid subscription option is now available: Gold. I found that the Silver option only served to confuse potential customers. The new model is more in line with FeedJournal's focus on simplicity. The Publisher page has also been improved to better showcase the newspaper layout. Today, PDF publishers have the luxury of choosing between at least two brilliant solutions for embedding PDF content on their web site: Scribd and Issuu. As they both offer very competitive packages for the same

unbeatable price (free), the choice is tough. Issuu offers a slightly sexier experience, but Scribd on the other hand have a good programming interface for automating the upload process. I chose to use Scribd for embedding my blog's newspaper as an example.

This is the third post in a series on how to best take advantage of FeedJournal Reader. Today, I describe how you can select any text to be published in the next issue of your personalized newspaper. If you are like me, you are probably receiving links to interesting online articles from a multitude of sources: e-mail, newsletters, ads, feeds, etc. I find that more and more relevant and interesting information is becoming available online, but I usually don't have opportunity to read it at the time of discovery. I would like to file it away and read it later. The simplest strategy would be to bookmark the web page and browse my bookmarks once I have some time available. I could use my web browser's bookmark feature, an online boomarking service like Furl or del.icio.us, or use Instapaper. Provided I am online, these solutions allow me to access the relevant articles, but they don't allow me to read the article uninterrupted. As I often touch upon in my blog, there is a fundamental problem with reading long texts on a computer. I suggest printing the articles on paper so you can concentrate fully on the reading task at hand and thereby use your reading time more effectively. A more bulky, but interesting, alternative to paper is of course the e-reader devices, which are doing an excellent job of emulating the experience of reading printed material. If you decide to go the route of printing your reading list, you might find FeedJournal Reader a very attractive solution. It's a service, which allows you to subscribe to news feeds and periodically publish them in a personalized paper. To make your paper even more valuable, you can mark any text not in your subscription list to be published in the upcoming issue. Below is my preferred recipe: Ingredients(all free): One Google Notebook account with the browser extension (optional) and one FeedJournal Reader account. Scenario: You have browsed to an interesting article but have no time to read it right now. Instructions: Select the text with the mouse, rightclick on the selection and choose "Note this (Google Notebook)". The text have now been saved to your Google Notebook account. Make sure it is added to a section marked as shared, as it enables RSS feeds from the notebook. Grab the feed URL from the public page of your Google Notebook and subscribe to it in FeedJournal Reader. Once you subscribed to that section's RSS feed, any additional entries you add to Google Notebook will be automatically published in FeedJournal Reader. Another solution I have been successful with is Evernote 2.0 which replaces Google Notebook's functionality in the scenario above. Evernote is still in invitation-only beta mode, but looks very promising since it offers client applications for both web, Windows, Mac and mobile platforms. I have invites to share for accessing Evernote beta, so just let me know if you would like one. UPDATE (Apr 24, 2008): As Ken Lawrence correctly pointed out to me, the Evernote solution does not work for FeedJournal, because it cuts off the notes if they are too long. This correction only invalidates the last paragraph of my blog post. Using the suggested Google Notebook service works as advertised. Thanks, Ken!

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Hitting 40 languages By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/18/2008 7:01:00 AM

One of our goals is to give everyone using Google the information they want, wherever they are, in whatever language they speak, and through whatever device they're using. A huge part of that goal is making our services available in as many languages as possible. And as I’m sure you can imagine, that isn't as easy as simply as translating a few lines of text. Take Hebrew or Arabic, which are written from right to left. An Arabic speaker may search for [world cup football 2008] [ 2008 ]. Part of the query will be written from right to left in Arabic, while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail. Or take Russian, where words change depending on their placement and role in a sentence. In Russian, for example [pizza in Moscow] is [ ] but [pizza near Moscow] is [ ]. Then there's the whole challenge of ensuring that queries are locally relevant. While many Australians searching for [freedom] are looking for the Australian furniture chain, UK and US users are often looking for the definition of the word itself. Our search results, then, have to take into account these local differences. Our efforts to make Google products available in as many languages as possible dates to 2001, when we started Google in Your Language, which lets volunteers translate and edit translations of Google products in their native languages. As more and more users, advertisers, and partners interact with Google across the world, the need for local products has become even more obvious. In 2007, we undertook a company-wide initiative to increase the availability of our products in multiple languages. We picked the 40 languages read by over 98% of Internet users and got going, relying heavily on open source libraries such as ICU and other internationalization technologies to design products. Do you need web search in Chinese or AdWords online support in Spanish? Perhaps Google News in Hindi or Google Scholar in Korean? Not a problem.

Sony said to be prepping PSP-3000 with built-in mic (Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 9:07:00 AM

Here's a taste of how far we've come. Growth in local language versions. • 30 in 30: Today we have more than 30 products in more than 30 languages, up from 5 products in 30 languages just a year ago. • In 2004, we had 150 local-language versions of various products (e.g. a product local to the UK, not just the English-speaking world); today we're at more than 1500. • From January to March of 2008, we launched 256 local-language versions of various products, compared to 55 in the same period of 2007. • We've upgraded to Unicode 5.1 to make sure that we can handle any characters people read or write in. The web is only useful - or utile, , poyteczny, or nyttig, depending on what language you speak - to the degree it can be accessible in your language. That's why we're so excited about how far we've come - and why we know there's still a lot of work to be done. Posted by Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America

Filed under: Gaming There may not have been any word of a new PSP out of E3 as some had suspected, but it looks Sony may have a bit of a late surprise for us, at least if these tantalizing pics from PSPChina are to be believed. Apparently, this new PSP-3000 model remains mostly unchanged from the current PSP2000, with the notable addition of a built-in microphone and a somewhat less notable PlayStation button in place of the usual Home button. As you can see in the picture after the break, the signature steel ring on the back of the PSP also appears to have been trimmed a bit (there's a pic of the inside of the case as well, for the curious). Not exactly the DS Lite sort of upgrade that'd make everyone ditch their old PSPs to be sure but, as we've seen with the PSP-2000, it would be about par for the course for Sony. [Via Joystiq, Khattab] Continue reading Sony said to be prepping PSP3000 with built-in mic Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Introducing our European 2008 Anita Borg Scholars By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/17/2008 10:25:00 AM

Posted by Beate List, University Programme, Zurich A few months ago we had the great pleasure of announcing the fifth class of Anita Borg Scholars in the U.S. and our first class of Scholars in Canada. Now it's the Europeans' turn. This scholarship program, originally established in the U.S. to honor the work of Anita Borg and to recognize outstanding young women scholars in computer science and related fields, expanded to Europe most recently. Nearly 300 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 31 countries applied for the award. Sixty-three finalists were selected; 20 women received a €5,000 scholarship for the 2008-2009 academic year. The remaining 43 finalists received a €1,000 award. Each of the finalists visited our Engineering Centre in Zurich for our annual Scholars' Retreat, which included tech talks, career panels and social fun. All of it was a way for the young women to share experiences and come together as leaders in the computer science field. Visit the Google Europe Anita Borg Scholarship page for more on the program. Hearty

congratulations to these winners! The 2008 Europe Anita Borg Scholars • Cynthia Liem, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands • Despina Michael - University of Cyprus, Cyprus • Dina Petri - University of Reading, UK; Aristotle University, Greece; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain • Inbal Talgam - Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel • Katy Howland - University of Sussex, UK • Kerstin Wendt - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain • Ksenia Rogova - Petrozavodsk State University,

Russia • Mirela Ben-Chen - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel • Nadezhda Baldina - Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology, Russia • Olga Boronenko - University of Reading, UK; Aristotle University, Greece; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain • Patricia Moore- Dublin City University, Ireland • Rebecca Stewart - Queen Mary, University of London, UK • Sara Elisabeth Adams - University of Oxford, UK • Seda Gürses - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium • Silvia Breu - University of Cambridge, UK • Siska Fitrianie - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands • Stefanie Jegelka - Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany • Svetlana Obraztsova - Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Russia • Sylvia Rueda - University of Nottingham, UK • Ulyana Tikhonova - Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University, Russia Update: Added photo.

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A Cheap, Natural Way of Cutting Greenhouse Gas (Wired Science) Submitted at 7/21/2008 4:21:09 PM

Keeping tropical forests from being cut down isn't cheap, but it's affordable -- and it might be humanity's best short-term climate change solution. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of economists and ecologists calculated a price of keeping CO2-gobbling tropical forests intact. That's only the first step in conserving them, but it's an important one. "Nobody knew how expensive or cheap it would be," said study co-author Brent Sohngen, an agricultural economics professor at Ohio State University. "Our results say it's a relatively cheap option compared to storage in deep geological wells, or trying to transform the energy economy. That's a good option in the long run, but expensive in the short term. This is a good option in the near future." Sohngen's team calculated the costs of paying landowners to say their chainsaws using three different estimates of tropical forest area and carbon sequestration potential. Slowing deforestation by 10% over the next twenty years would cost between $0.4 billion and $1.7 billion annually, and save about half a gigaton of CO2 yearly. A 50% deforestation drop would cost between $17 and $30 billion, and save more than two gigatons of CO2 each year -- about onethird of total United States greenhouse gas emissions. The money would go to landowners, who would

charge rent on leaving their forests untouched. But where would the money come from? Sohngen says a carbon market based on internationally accepted pollution constraints would be the best source. Lacking that, however, members of international climate treaties could fund the projects directly. Sohngen does warn that his estimates don't account for the potentially considerable costs of enforcing deals, monitoring forests and paying middlemen. "We need to figure out what those are going to be," he said. But there are also benefits unaccounted for by his estimations. "You preserve biodiversity and help enhance water quality. we haven't even calculated what those benefits are, but they're probably big, and you don't get them with new nuclear power plants or carbon sequestration," he said. Global cost estimates of reducing carbon emissions through avoided deforestation[PNAS] [not yet online] Image: Brandon Keim See Also: • Making Deforestation Unprofitable is Key to Bali Success • Biofuel Solution at Sea, not on Land • Can't See the Forest for the Biofuels • Beetles Turn Western Forests From Carbon Sink to Carbon Source • China's 2030 CO2 Emissions Could Equal the Entire World's Today WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter and Del.icio.us feeds; Wired Science on Facebook.

TiVo lets users buy stuff from Amazon on their TV, all three QVC fans go wild (Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 8:23:00 AM

Filed under: Home Entertainment Back in May, TiVo's VP of product marketing got all of our hopes up that the next announcement involving it and Amazon would include HD Unbox content. As you can very clearly see, this is most certainly not the case. Instead, we have the immense pleasure of informing internet-connected Series2, Series3 and TiVo HD owners that they can now buy wares from Amazon without leaving their couch. If browsing through Amazon's extraordinarily huge store with just a remote sounds appealing to you, you're in luck (and mildly insane). Also of note, the new Product Purchase feature will enable advertisers to "market products sold through Amazon on any broadcast or cable network, any TV show, or via any of TiVo's extensive interactive advertising features." In other words, next time you see Dwight using that iconic shredder, you can buy that bad boy right then and there. Take that, Staples. [Via Zatz Not Funny] Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

'Tongue Drive System' Controls Wheelchair, Computer (Wired Science) Submitted at 7/21/2008 9:36:18 AM

Quadriplegics may gain a new degree of freedom via their tongues, if a new control system becomes widely available. The new system uses that famously strong, agile and sensitive muscle, the tongue, to provide computer accessibility and wheelchair control to severely disabled people. Designed by researchers for people with debilitating spinal cord injuries and diseases, the tongue-drive tech takes advantage of the nearly direct connection between the tongue and the brain via cranial nerves, which makes it particularly likely to remain functional, even after severe accidents. The system has two parts: a small magnet, attached to the tip of the tongue via adhesive, piercing or implantation, and a headset with two

three-dimensional magnetic sensors mounted on it. The headset picks up the location of the tongue via the magnet and transmits that information to a smartphone. Maysam Ghovanloo, the lead Georgia Tech researcher, designed software that converts the

position of the tongue into joystick or mouse movements, allowing the severely disabled to control a wheelchair or computer. The setup could provide an unprecedentedly simple and powerful means of locomotion for the disabled. "This device could revolutionize the field of assistive technologies," Ghovanloo said in a release. See also: • Wired 15.04: Mixed Feelings(using the tongue to "see") • A Sixth Sense for a Wired World(sensing electric fields with a fingertip-embedded magnet) Image and Video: Courtesy of Georgia Tech. Credit: Gary Meek. WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

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"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-totext technology By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/14/2008 4:32:00 PM

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product Managers In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms? Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections. Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look: In addition to providing voters with election information, we also hope to find out more about how people use speech technology to search and consume videos, and to learn what works and what doesn't, to help us improve our products. The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians. It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the

Transistors on paper become a reality (Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 9:51:00 AM

index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, we hope that you'll find the product useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but we're constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results. To try it out, just visit our iGoogle gadget page. We welcome your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment while you're there.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets Check it, nerds. A team over at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa has reportedly figured out a way to use paper (yes, paper) as an interstrate component of a Field Effect Transistor (FET). In testing, the group "fabricated the devices on both sides of the paper sheet," thus causing the paper to act as the "electric insulator and as the substrate" simultaneously. Remarkably, results showed that performance actually rivaled that of best-in-class oxide thin film transistors, giving revived hope for the realm of disposable devices like paper displays, labels, intelligent packaging, tracking tags, etc. The findings are scheduled to be published this September, after which we're sure any firms interested in taking this stuff commercial will be putting their best foot forward. [Via Scientific Blogging] Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Malfunctioning Bladder Could Alter Your Brain (Wired Science) Submitted at 7/22/2008 8:56:13 AM

Bladder problems are all in your head, in a manner of speaking. Researchers report that rats suffering from overactive bladders experienced a neurological rewiring, with parts of their brains devoted to peeing shutting down as urination control shifted elsewhere. At the same time, their brains became more aroused, exhibiting low-frequency electrical activity and higher levels of brain patterns called theta waves, which can also be observed during meditation and dreaming.

The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that organ malfunctions also affect the brain -- and not just directly-implicated regions, but other mental processes as well. As with any rodent study, it remains to be seen whether the same thing happens in people. But given the marvelously overlapping complexity of the brain, it seems plausible. Note: One of my pet peeves is reductionistic, lifeon-the-savannah evolutionary explanations for complex behaviors. But of course I'm prone to them, too. To wit: If our savannah-dwelling ancestors were going to the bathroom too often, they'd want to be on a constant lookout for safe

places to pee. Impact of overactive bladder on the brain: Central sequelae of a visceral pathology[PNAS] Image: PNAS See Also: • Climate Change Means More Kidney Stones • New Anti-Obesity Drugs Could Stunt Kids' Brains • Scientists Link Brain Symmetry, Sexual Orientation • New Type of Painkiller Could Stunt Memory, Learning WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter and Del.icio.us feeds; Wired Science on Facebook.

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Late, Great Watson Explored Supernatural, Kept Pet Tapeworm (Wired Science) Submitted at 7/21/2008 8:17:26 AM

In our hyperspecialized, citation index-happy era, scientists like the late Lyall Watson-- biologist, geologist, anthropologist and adventurer -- are a vanishing breed. Sure, his theories weren't always accurate. But they were lots of fun, as was his life, a record of which overlows the boundaries of his obituary in today's New York Times. Among other things, the South African-born Watson earned degrees in eight scientific disciplines; filmed nature documentaries for the BBC; ran a safari company; created a whale sanctuary; promoted championship sumo wrestling; led expeditions into Antarctica, Madagascar and the Kalahari desert; wrote a best-selling history of supernatural science; lived for 12 years on a boat in the Amazon; and named his tapeworm Fred. Where were the seeds of his polymathic brilliance sown? In a telling anecdote, the Times recounts how In an effort to tame him and his rambunctious friends, Mo’s grandmother drove the lot of them to a beach shack made of driftwood and left them with a month’s provisions and instructions to fend for themselves. The tribe prospered, and the exercise was repeated every summer thereafter. You probably won't find that sort of advice in the parenting section of your nearest Borders, and it's a

shame. Images: Watson, right, with new age artist Penny Slinger; the cover of Lifetide: The Biology of the Unconscious, which science fiction titan Stanislaw Lem called a "concentrated package of misinformation" that would "require several years of work by a whole team of authors" to correct. See Also: • The Next Step in Space Exploration: Billionaire Scientists WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter and Del.icio.us feeds; Wired Science on Facebook.

Garmin introduces waterproof nuvi 500 / 550 for the argonauts (Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 8:42:00 AM

Filed under: GPS Sure, Garmin's new nüvi 500 series can get you from point A to point G on paved and well-lit highways, but that's not the (whole) point here. Instead, these rugged (and waterproof) navigators are geared up to take to the trails, waterways and sidewalks with one-touch transitions between driving, bicycling, boating and walking modes. The 500 includes road maps and topographic maps for the lower 48 US states, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, while the 550 touts comprehensive street map coverage of the US and Canada. Both devices boast a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a removable, rechargeable battery, Garmin's "Where Am I?" feature and geocaching support to boot. As for USers, you'll

find the 500 and 550 on sale in Q3 for $499.99, while those across the pond will see the nüvi 550 land this September for £299. [Via GPSTracklog, thanks Rich] Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

(Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 8:02:00 AM

Filed under: Peripherals, Portable Audio You can't put velvet in these earcups and call 'em nice headphones! As Mr. Chappelle would likely attest, there are no better headphones in which to drop the beat into than Dr. Dre's "highly anticipated" Beats. The master of chronic himself has slapped his all-but-forgotten name onto a set of cans (which we spotted originally at CES), and is now ready to introduce 'em to the world. Starting on July 25th, the crunk-inducing headphones will be available exclusively at Apple and Best Buy (both online and in-store), though the buying experience would likely be way more gangsta if checking out at BeatsByDre.com. Still, for $349.95, we'd recommend looking at more respected names in sound, but if your street cred is sitting at rock bottom, you may have no other choice. Thug life, fool. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Bug Squashed In Generate Newspaper By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog)

Celebrating young computer scientists By Eric Case (The Official Google Blog) Submitted at 7/17/2008 1:30:00 PM

Last week, the ten grand prize winners for the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our initiative to get pre-university students involved in open source development. We were very excited to welcome these burgeoning computer scientists and their families to Silicon Valley in a celebration of their many accomplishments. Our grand prize winners and the Open Source team Chosen from more than 350 students worldwide, our winners created software, documentation and marketing materials for ten different open source projects, getting all this work accomplished in just

Dr. Dre's Beats headphones keep they heads ringin' for $350

Submitted at 3/12/2008 11:38:00 PM

Today's update to FeedJournal Reader includes a fix for an annoying bug which occurred sporadically. Error messages about trying again after you hit the "Generate Newspaper" button should now have been rooted out. The update also includes some site optimizations to Reader. I am currently probing the market for a more reliable web host; so if you have positive experiences from an ASP.NET + SQL Server hosting company I'll gratefully lend you an ear.

over two months. For more details, including interviews with the winners and their mentors, check out the Google Open Source Blog. Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager Open Source

FeedJournal Adds Multilingual Support By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog) Submitted at 4/16/2008 1:45:00 PM

Experimental support for additional languages is

now available in FeedJournal Reader! You set your language in "Edit Profile". This update adds support for the following encodings: Eastern Europe (Latin 2), Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Windows Baltic and Vietnamese.

The right-to-left languages have not been tested yet so there are probably still some issues with them. Please let me know how it works in your language!

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Panasonic pushes out 14.7MP DMC-FX150 pocket shooter (Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 7:42:00 AM

WowWee's Alive White Tiger Cub gets unboxed, showcased on video (Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 7:21:00 AM

Filed under: Robots It has been a hot minute since WowWee let the Alive animals out of the zoo, but this particular White Tiger Cub has just recently been loosed from its cage. Although it's just dying for an I Can Has Cheezburger? caption (feel free to drop your best in comments below), this cute cat looks to be the perfect play toy for small children or adults hoping

to rekindle some of that youthful innocence. We're also told that the eyebrow and mouth movements are "quite realistic," but its the individual personality that really makes it worth coming back to. Check out the unboxing and a brief review in the read link, and peek a video of the feline in action after the cut. Continue reading WowWee's Alive White Tiger Cub gets unboxed, showcased on video Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

popSiren Gets Her Hands on FeedJournal By Jonas Martinsson (Jonas Martinsson Blog) Submitted at 6/18/2008 2:20:00 PM

Electric MINI hitting US streets in summer 2009 (Engadget) Submitted at 7/22/2008 9:29:00 AM

Filed under: Transportation Not that electric MINIs are anything new, but unless you were willing to pay for all the mods yourself, procuring one wasn't exactly simple. Now, however, we're hearing that MINI itself will be bringing scads of these buggers to American streets in the summer of 2009. Yeah, like, one year from right now. MINI USA VP Jim McDowell was the source of said statement, though he didn't mention whether all of them would be reserved for California or if they would be available sold out nationwide. Hey MINI, we'd say you've got a hit on your hands. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Sarah Lane over at popSiren had the good taste of recording a video review of my FeedJournal Reader service earlier this week. She had solely positive things to say about the RSS newspaper and I certainly appreciate the exposure! I'll keep the video embedded on FeedJournal's front page for a while - I think it can be a good way of presenting the service to new visitors who prefer to watch a video instead of reading about it.

Filed under: Digital Cameras Taking the wraps off of three cameras at once just isn't good enough for Panasonic, so how's about a fourth? The pocket-friendly LUMIX DMCFX150 arrives in a trio of stylish hues (black, gold and silver) and features an admittedly absurd 14.7megapixel sensor, 28-millimeter wide-angle LEICA DC VARIO-ELMARIT lens, a 3.6x optical zoom and a host of manual controls to boot. This shooter can also capture shots in RAW format, and the usual suspects -- you know, red-eye correction, optical image stabilizer, face detection, intelligent ISO, etc. -- are all there. If this one fits the bill, expect to receive one of your own for $399.95 when picking it up next month. [Via Impress] Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments