As with tracking calories and losing weight, people who track their energy use are the most likely to make changes in their lifestyle and reduce consumption—as we saw with digital wall meters, which helped homeowners dramatically cut their use.
Now you can watch your energy use anywhere you go: All you need to do is purchase the energy monitoring device, TED 5000 for $200 to $300, and then download Google’s PowerMeter for free to start monitoring your progress. Some of Google’s employees have already tested it out and have said good things.
Eweek Europe reports:
According to Energy Inc, the TED 5000 is specifically designed to provide energy information to consumers rather than being a tool for utility to improve their margins. “Smart meters are designed primarily for the electric utility industry so they can better manage the supply-and-demand of electricity. TED is designed specifically for the consumer, so that one can better manage the use and costs of electricity. TED puts you in charge,” the company states.
Users can view their energy use daily on their personal iGoogle homepage or directly on their cell phones, and some people have already reported a 15 percent use reduction. In addition to monitoring, the device offers advice on how to cut carbon use. And, if saving money on energy isn’t enough of a motivator, Google thinks social competition just might be: PowerMeter also allows you to compare your results with your friends’.
Unlike Apple’s relationship with AT&T, Google doesn’t intend to keep the partnership limited to TED. Other utilities may soon roll out energy devices soon.
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Image: Google
There’s no question technology is changing religious practices: You can Twitter prayers from home now, and even have them printed out and posted on Jerusalem’s Western Wall. And in the pre-computer era, it took years to decipher many ancient prayer texts. Leave it to Israeli researchers to create a computer algorithm that can read texts that were once illegible since the words have faded or been written over.
Just as forensic software deciphers fingerprints, this new algorithm pieces together written words—work usually reserved for historians and liturgists. The computer can read individual letters and identify handwriting styles in documents that have faded. Reuters reports:
The computer works with digital copies of the texts, assigning number values to each pixel of writing depending on how dark it is. It separates the writing from the background and then identifies individual lines, letters and words.
It also analyzes the handwriting and writing style, so it can “fill in the blanks” of smeared or faded characters that are otherwise indiscernible, Ben-Gurion of the University of the Negev said.
And the program only gets smarter as it begins to recognize the patterns in the writing and learns to guess what the missing words are.
Although ancient Hebrew texts are the only subjects tested so far, the researchers claim that the software is indeed multilingual.
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Image: flickr/ ramikey
When TMZ broke the news yesterday that Michael Jackson had been rushed to the hospital for cardiac arrest, rumors about the King of Pop’s fate flooded Twitter. Sure enough, the dreaded (and beloved) fail whale soon began to appear, when the 66,500 tweets about Michael crashed the micro-blogging site’s servers.
Millions of people also turned to Google, searching for “Michael Jackson” to find out the latest on the singer’s health. The BBC reported that Google initially thought it was under attack, because the Web slowed down so drastically when the news broke:
Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.
It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.
Other mainstream media sites including AOL, CBS, and CNN all needed additional time to load as well. As for us here at DISCOVER…well, we’re sworn to secrecy.
Image: flickr/ Jason Edmonds
Talk about sticking to your mantra. Google—overlord of the Internet, juggernaut of all data crunchers, right hand of the god of algorithms—is doing a little digging into human resources. Specifically, the company is worried about brain drain, particularly in the wake of several top executives announcing their departure. And given that the Web giant spends a pretty penny on hiring and training just the right group of geniuses to man its world-controlling desks, a mass exodus could dent its status as the Master of All Web Innovation.
So what did management do to determine which bright minds were most likely to give notice? They created an algorithm. Performance reviews, pay raises, promotion histories, and other data on its 20,000 employees were crunched into yet another mathematical formula, which reportedly spat out the names of who was most likely to quit.
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•Villagers in England chased away a Google car, saying that Google Street View is, yes, an invasion of privacy—and will also facilitate crime in their area.
•Good news for chocolate lovers: Eating it can help your math skills [ed. note: We refute this claim based on personal experience—we couldn't eat more chocolate, and couldn't be worse at math].
•Gals, take pride: sisters bring more happiness (and balance) to a family than do brothers.
•But any mothers out there, you might want to get your baby formula examined: It could contain rocket fuel.
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It may be reaching ubiquity, but Google has just scratched the surface of the Web. In fact, computer scientist Weiyi Meng at Binghamton University is already working on Google’s replacement: a search engine that can give you straightforward answers to questions like “Who is Einstein,” instead of simply listing relevant URLs.
The metasearch engine would tap into the million or so search engines around the world, and present a more complete and accurate list of search results by searching the “deep Internet.” While the surface Web—the part of the Web that is indexed by search engines—has about 60 billion pages, the deep Web has about 900 billion pages—and because Google has not been designed to dig deeper, many of those pages are out of reach.
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Sure, Google can map just about anything. But who knew it could actually influence geography from the ground up?
The French coastal town of Eu is getting no Internet love, and its mayor is about to do something about it. Marie-Françoise Gaouyer believes that the decline in tourism—down by as much as a third—is the result of the town’s poor standing in “Eu” Google searches. So, she’s advocating to change the name of the town on the belief that additional syllables will increase its Internet visibility. Her decision to act was triggered when even the French national railway’s computer system did not recognize Eu’s existence.
Instead of tourist accommodations, Google currently yields sites related to the European Union or, for French searches, to the past participle of the verb “avoir.” Gaouyer thinks that to increase awareness of Eu among potential tourists, she can either pay search engines like Google to place the town at the top of “Eu” searches, or simply change the town’s name.
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Is “Don’t Be Evil” Google in fact a sinister pollution-spewing machine? A Sunday Times article cited new research by Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, claiming that every Google search emits 7 grams of CO2, about half the amount released from boiling a kettle of water (15 grams). It portrays Google as “secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint” and refusing to “divulge” the locations of its power-sucking data centers.
There’s more:
When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.
It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.
The article also implicates other online activities, like Twittering or maintaining an avatar in Second Life (by one estimate, that avatar uses almost as much electricity as the average citizen of Brazil).
Google promptly put out a response on their blog challenging Wissner-Gross’ claims and touting the company’s green credentials. Each search emits a mere 0.2 grams of CO2, says Google. Besides, isn’t online searching greener than driving to the library?
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Musical acts have a similar epidemiology as the flu. Both start out as small, localized phenomena and then gain momentum with surprising speed, until everyone is hacking up the same virus and every radio station is blaring the same tune. Google caught on recently and created Flu Trends, which tracks the spread of the flu by charting user searches for flu-related words. And a team of Israeli researchers have come up with software that uses similar logic to predict the next big musical act.
This “music trends” software tracks searches for songs or bands on Gnutella, a giant peer-to-peer file sharing network, and locates where the searches are generated. Since new bands often develop popularity through local gigs (”American Idol” is an exception), the software works because it can tracks momentum of grassroots movements. Based on the local ranking of the searches and how fast these rankings change, the software can predict the next breakout band.
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While doctors may gripe about the increasing number of patients that arrive in their offices with WebMD printouts and search-engine-assisted self diagnoses, Google sees it as opportunity. Today, Google.org (the philanthropic arm of the Google monster) unveiled Google Flu Trends, a web tool that will track flu outbreaks based on user-generated search terms.
Flu Trends works because the Google search box is so often the first place people turn at the first sign of a sniffle. The company says Flu Trends could alert users to flu activity in their area up to two weeks ahead of traditional systems like emergency room reports.
The New York Times reports:
To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports.
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