A new online tool is expected to debut this week to answer questions like these: How far away from Earth is the planet Neptune at this point in its orbit? And how has the unemployment rate in Iowa’s Scott County changed over the past decade? WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines. “I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram [The New York Times].
Google’s mission, after all, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In contrast, WolframAlpha doesn’t present users with an organized list of information; it sorts through data sets, performs calculations, and presents an answer. Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser [Wired].
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Objections are increasing to Google Book Search, Google’s massive effort to scan millions of books and present their contents online. The company reached an agreement last year with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers to pursue the project. It is awaiting a judge’s approval…. The settlement is unusual is that it essentially structures the digitized book search market while that market is in its infancy, said Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute [Reuters]. But Google is facing new obstacles in winning that judicial approval, as concerns continue to mount over how much power will be concentrated in the company’s hands.
The settlement would establish a revenue-sharing system and would allow Google to present the partial contents of books in the public domain, books that that are still under copyright but are out of print, and current books whose publishers have negotiated agreements with Google. But critics worry that Google is building a new kind of monopoly based on access to information, and that the company could therefore set prices as high as it wanted. In a new legal filing by library groups, critics of the settlement wrote that “the cost of creating such a library and Google’s significant lead-time advantage suggest that no other entity will create a competing digital library for the foreseeable future” [CNET]. The Justice Department’s antitrust division is also reportedly investigating the deal.
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Playing true to form, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is launching an ambitious, expensive effort using unorthodox tactics, but this time he’s taking on Parkinson’s research. In cooperation with the personal genetics testing company 23andMe, which was cofounded by Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, Brin is hoping to get 10,000 Parkinson’s patients to fill out online questionnaires and get their genomes scanned. To encourage participation, 23andMe will provide the DNA scan for $25, a fraction of the normal $399 price. Brin, who says he has an elevated risk of Parkinson’s, will contribute the bulk of the money for the study, although he declined to disclose the total costs.
Wojcicki says that getting full genetic information for so many patients could reveal genetic patterns to the disease, which has already been linked to a handful of genes. “We want to try and find out if there are other genetic variations that are associated with Parkinson’s or with rapid progression or slow progression,” said Wojcicki, in a telephone interview yesterday. “Also, why some people respond well to therapy, some people don’t, and some develop resistance faster” [Bloomberg].
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A man browsing through Google Ocean, the new program that allows for virtual exploration of the ocean’s depths, briefly claimed to have found Atlantis, leading some to joke that a Google search really can find anything–even fabled cities that may never have existed. The man believed he had spotted the street grid of the ancient city that the philosopher Plato said sunk beneath the waves in 9000 BC. The network of criss-cross lines is 620 miles off the coast of north west Africa near the Canary Islands on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean…. The underwater image can be found at the co-ordinates 31 15′15.53N 24 15′30.53W [Telegraph].
But the exciting idea that a 11,000-year-old city could be located from a desktop computer was short-lived. Google quickly issued a statement explaining that the grid pattern was an artifact of the process used to collect data about the sea floor. “Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor…. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world’s oceans” [BBC News], the statement says.
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Google is testing a free web service that can turn average residents into all-seeing, all-knowing masters of their energy usage. The service, called PowerMeter, would allow people to track their household’s energy consumption online, and information about when electricity rates are high would allow them to adjust their habits and save money–say, by running a clothes dryer at night.
The service isn’t publicly available yet. Google will have to team up with electrical utility companies to get the usage information, and those utilities will have to first install “smart meters” that monitor usage in real-time. But with the current economic stimulus package providing money for the installation of 40 million smart meters, some say that the “smart grid” is inevitable. Basically, it appears that Google realizes that the smart grid is about to get a big boost from the government stimulus, and wants to make sure it has access to the inevitable mountain of data that results [Ars Technica].
A Google spokeswoman says she hopes the announcement will encourage other companies to work on smart grid technologies. “We can’t build this product all by ourselves,” said Kirsten Olsen Cahill, a program manager at Google.org, the company’s corporate philanthropy arm. “We depend on a whole ecosystem of utilities, device makers and policies that would allow consumers to have detailed access to their home energy use and make smarter energy decisions” [The New York Times]. Ultimately, experts say, home appliances like dishwashers could communicate wirelessly with Google’s PowerMeter or with utilities, which could tell the dishwasher when to turn on in order to save the most money.
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The future, according to author and technological soothsayer Ray Kurzweil, is going to be awesome. In his books, he maps out a future for humanity in which we live forever, supported by a fleet of cleverer-than-human artificial intelligences who solve such trivial problems as hunger and disease, while simultaneously creating ever more intelligent computer minds, racing technological progress forward according to his Law of Accelerated Returns [Telegraph]. Now, Kurzweil is opening a new school, Singularity University, that will gather smart people together and encourage them to bring that future to pass.
Kurzweil dreamed up the school with Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation, and got backing from Google and NASA; it will be housed on the NASA Ames base in California. The university takes its name from Kurzweil’s recent book, The Singularity Is Near, in which he argues that exponential advances in technology will shortly transform human life beyond all recognition…. This is Kurzweil’s own take on the widespread science-fiction use of the term “singularity” to refer to the day when artificial “intelligence” and/or processing power surpasses that of the human race’s collective brains. Sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge probably did most to hijack the word “singularity” from its use in physics to describe the breakdown of normal principles near a black hole [The Register].
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The blank spaces on the map of Google Earth are being filled in, as the company announced today that many of the flat blue oceans on its global replica have been replaced with detailed maps of the ocean floor. Now, users can soar from undersea mountains to the depths of the Marianas Trench, and can explore coral reefs and shipwrecks. Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer who was involved in the effort, says: “I cannot imagine a more effective way to inspire awareness and caring for the blue heart of the planet than the new Ocean in Google Earth. For the first time, everyone from curious kids to serious researchers can see the world, the whole world, with new eyes,” she added [BBC News].
Google’s usual satellite imaging can’t peer through deep water to map the seabed. Instead, sound is the tool of choice when mapping the ocean floor. Passing sonar arrays over every patch of ocean is beyond even Google’s means, so it has had to rely on the US navy for much of the information. As a result, some “sensitive” areas are blank. Other navies and research institutions around the world also provided data [New Scientist]. But the marine scientists who collaborated with Google note that only 5 percent of world’s sea floor is mapped in detail, and say they hope the Google Ocean will inspire the public to support further marine exploration.
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Trying to assess the importance of particular scientific papers has long been a tricky task. The current system relies on counting the number of times a paper is cited by others to determine how large an effect it has had on subsequent research, but this number can be misleading, a new study notes. Simply counting citations favors disciplines such as biology, where papers tend to be cited more, over fields such as mathematics, where citations are less frequent. In addition, a citation from a relatively marginal paper counts just the same as a citation from a leading researcher publishing in a marquee journal [Scientific American].
To try to get around these problems, a pair of researchers decided on a different tactic: They took the algorithm that Google uses to determine how to rank the Web pages turned up in a search result, and used it to rank the importance of scientific articles. The Google PageRank algorithm checks the number of times each Web page is linked to in order to determine its importance, which is equivalent to counting citations. But it has several other aspects that were very useful when applied to ranking scientific papers. The algorithm gives greater weight to citations from papers that list only a few references, and also to citations from papers that are themselves often cited. “Because of these attributes, PageRank readily identifies a large number of scientific ‘gems’–modestly cited articles that contain ground-breaking results” [arXiv], the researchers write. Among those gems turned up in the researchers first experiment were nine papers written by future Nobel Prize winners.
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NASA engineers have finally tested an “interplanetary Internet” that could be crucial for future communications with rovers and astronauts exploring the moon, Mars, or other planets. NASA says the system would rely on probes and orbiters to serve as relay stations, or routers, to send communications around the solar system. The space agency has been working for 10 years on the project with Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s key inventors and now chief Internet evangelist for Google [AP].
The protocols (the language computers use to speak to each other) used for our terrestrial Internet won’t work for deep space, because they assume that the network’s nodes will be connected continuously, and that messages will travel swiftly. But communication between objects in space are frequently disrupted by solar storms and obstructing planets, and sending a message from Earth to Mars can take up to 20 minutes. So engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked with Cerf to come up with a new protocol, called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN).
With the new communications design, each network node is designed to hold onto data packets, instead of discard them, until a destination path can be found. “The incentive to use Internet-like protocols over space links was to take advantage of automated routing,” [said NASA's Leigh Torgerson]. “With standard space-link communications, the ground sends commands to spacecraft to tell it what time and what data to send. It’s very hands-on-intensive” [Computerworld].
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One of the teams competing for the $20 million top prize in the Google Lunar X Prize has announced its plans for an ambitious series of moon missions, beginning with a proposed trip to the historic Apollo 11 landing site. The team, Astrobotic Technology Inc., wants to send a rover to Tranquility Base in May 2010 to see how the relics left behind by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have weathered over the 40 years.
The proposal has sparked a debate over whether new rovers can be trusted to not disturb the hallowed ground. Astrobotic Tech says its rover will land far from the Apollo 11 site and will be able to recognize and circumvent footprints and artifacts on the lunar surface, but not everyone shares this optimism. [Space policy expert] John Logsdon … believes the team should first perform trial runs on Earth. “I’d like to see them demonstrate their ability to do a precision landing someplace else before they try it next to the Apollo 11 site,” Logsdon says. “You wouldn’t have to be very far off to come down on top of the flag or something dramatic like that” [Seed].
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Google and General Electric have announced a partnership aimed at upgrading the United States electric power grid and pushing forward the development of renewable energy. The companies plan to conduct a joint lobbying effort in Washington to encourage the government to invest in developing a “smart grid,” and will also work together on projects like geothermal energy systems and integrating plug-in electric cars into the grid. The deal combines each company’s strengths: GE will make the hardware — from wind turbines to metering switches, and Google will make the software — applying network technologies to the grid [Portfolio].
The announcement follows a speech given two weeks ago by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which he laid out a blueprint for how the United States could switch over to generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030, while also eliminating half of the gasoline-powered cars from the roads. While Google hasn’t offered to follow through on that comprehensive proposal, which carried the hefty price tag of $2.7 billion, the partnership with GE seems to indicate that Google wants to put many of its suggestions into practice.
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Google has backed a venture to use satellites to bring high-speed Internet to three billion people in Africa and other developing markets around the equator. Today Google announced a partnership with cable operator Liberty Global and bank HSBC. Their partnership is called O3b Networks—O3b stands for “other 3 billion,” a reference to the world’s population that still can’t access the Internet [The New York Times].
The group announced an order for 16 satellites as the first stage in the $750 million project, which will provide cheap, fast Internet access to companies that sell internet service via mobile phones or wireless networks. The move is being greeted as a clever technological solution, a boon for the developing world, and a smart business move. “Google has an interest in boosting the Internet all over the world to reach new masses,” said [business analyst] Wim Zwanenburg…. “The growth market for Internet and mobile phones is in emerging countries” [Bloomberg].
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Cattle and deer grazing in fields tend to align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field, suggesting that the animals may have a built-in magnetic compass. A new study shows that animals in these herds tend to face towards either magnetic north or south, which has come as a surprise even to those who spend their days with bovines. Asked whether he had ever observed such behavior in cows, dairy farmer Rob Fletcher of Tulare, Calif., said, “Absolutely not.” But, he added, “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about stuff like that” [Los Angeles Times].
Researchers used satellite imagery from Google Earth to look for patterns in more than 300 cow-filled pastures from every continent except Antarctica, and in more than 250 herds of deer in the Czech Republic. While every individual animal didn’t face the same direction, the herds, on average, pointed towards either magnetic north or south. That orientation didn’t consistently line up with any aspect of the terrain on which they were grazing, the direction from which the wind was blowing or the direction from which the sun was shining, [co-author Hynek] Burda says. In fact, many of these field observations were made at night, he notes [Science News].
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Google.org, the philanthropic wing of Google, has announced a $10 million investment in a renewable energy technology that’s powered by hot rocks several miles beneath the earth’s surface. The technology, called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), differs from traditional geothermal energy that relies on finding natural pockets of hot water and steam. Instead, EGS fractures the hot rock, circulates water in its system, and uses the steam created from the process to create electricity in a turbine [Cleantechnica].
The system could augment less reliable renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, which don’t generate steady amounts of energy. Google executive Dan Reicher says EGS would be very dependable, and could be revolutionary. “It’s 24-7, it’s potentially developable all over the country, all over the world, and for all that we really do think it could be the ‘killer app’ of the energy world” [New Scientist].
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