A Google Perspective from the Other Side of the Age Gap
February 3, 2014
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Max Mosley: Google Is So Arrogant They Do Whatever They Like.” I am not sure about the accuracy of the story, but the tone and approach was interesting to me.
The focus of the article is Max Mosley, who “served as the long-time president of Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the governing body for Formula One and other international motor sports. My hunch is that the fellow is not a fan of Google’s self driving vehicles, but I am just speculating.
The gist of the Mosley Google mash up is that:
Google continued to list search results containing links to illegal photos of Mosley. He sued in both France and Germany to have the images automatically filtered out of search results. In November 2013, a Paris court ordered Google to filter out nine images. The California-based company says it has already started the appeals process against that ruling. On Friday, a Hamburg regional court issued a similar verdict. It ordered Google to block six images showing the racing boss in a compromising setting…
Tucked in the article were several comments I jotted down as quotes to note:
- “It is enormously expensive to sue in the US. Besides, to be honest, I have very little confidence in the US courts. If I had sued in England, it would have been seen as an entirely English thing. The truth is that it’s a European issue. And that’s why I took it to Germany and France — both countries have weight in Europe.”
- “If you ask Google to “take down these pictures,” then they do it, even though they aren’t very quick about it. At the same time, Google denies that it has the technological capacity to filter out images. But that’s nonsense. They are actually lying. And this despite their motto “Don’t Be Evil”. There’s something seriously wrong with Google. Technologically, they’re brilliant, sensational. But morally, its management is completely adolescent. The company is so big and so arrogant, they do whatever they like, they think they are above the law.”
- “But in the end it has to decide whether it wants to live in a democracy. Google behaves like an adolescent rebelling against the establishment.”
Mr. Mosley reveals that he uses Gmail, adding, “I am certain that Google reads all my emails.”
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2014
Stanford NLP Group Tackles Arabic Machine Translation
February 3, 2014
Machine translation can be a wonderful thing, but one key language has garnered less consideration than other widely-used languages. Though both Google and Babylon have made good progress [pdf] on Arabic translation, folks at The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group know there is plenty of room for improvement. These scientists are working close that gap with their Arabic Natural Language Processing project.
The page’s overview tells us:
“Arabic is the largest member of the Semitic language family and is spoken by nearly 500 million people worldwide. It is one of the six official UN languages. Despite its cultural, religious, and political significance, Arabic has received comparatively little attention by modern computational linguistics. We are remedying this oversight by developing tools and techniques that deliver state-of-the-art performance in a variety of language processing tasks. Machine translation is our most active area of research, but we have also worked on statistical parsing and part-of-speech tagging. This page provides links to our freely available software along with a list of relevant publications.”
The page holds a collection of useful links. There are software links, beginning with their statistical Stanford Arabic Parser. There are also links to eight papers, in pdf form, that either directly discuss Arabic or use it as an experimental subject. Anyone interested in machine translation may want to bookmark this helpful resource.
Cynthia Murrell, February 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
iOptik AR Contacts on the Way from Innovega
February 3, 2014
Never mind the glasses, augmented reality contacts are (almost) here! Can implants be far behind? The Daily Mail’s site Mail Online reports on “The Contact Lenses that Could Do Away with TV Screens: System that Projects Images onto the Eyeball to Be Unveiled Next Week.” Actually, there are glasses involved in the iOptik system, but they’re just the projection screens for the contacts (and look much more normal than Google Glass.) The article includes a two-and-a-half-minute video that shows us what it’s all about. I officially want one (though I know such HUD devices are not for everyone). Unfortunately the folks at Innovega, makers of iOptik, have yet to disclose how much their system will cost.
Reporter Ellie Zolfagharifard explains how the system works:
“The system can work with smartphones and portable game devices to deliver video – or switch to a translucent ‘augmented reality’ view, where computer information is layered over the world we know it.
‘Whatever runs on your smartphone would run on your eyewear,’ Innovega chief Stephen Willey said in an interview with CNET. ‘At full HD. Whether it’s a window or immersive.’ Crucially, the device can be worn while moving around in a similar way to Google Glass.
Innovega customised the standard contact lens manufacturing process with a unique filter to make the contact lenses. ‘All the usual optics in the eyewear are taken away and there is a sub-millimeter lens right in the centre,’ Mr Willey told CNET. ‘The outside of the lens is shaped to your prescription if you need one and the very centre of the lens is a bump that allows you to see incredibly well half an inch from your eye.’ An optical filter also directs the light. ‘Light coming from outside the world is shunted to your normal prescription. Light from that very near display goes through the center of the lens, the optical filter,’ Mr Willey said.”
For a visual explanation, check out the diagram at Innovega’s site. The company may choose to license the tech to other vendors, who could add features like audio and motion control, or it might market the device itself. Founded in 2008, Innovega is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.
Zolfagharifard also notes that related developments are afoot elsewhere. For example, scientists in South Korea have created soft contacts fitted with LEDs that could be programmed to take pictures. Meanwhile, Microsoft and the University of Washington have been collaborating on a similar project; in 2012, they revealed a contact lens that can receive radio signals and transmit them to the brain through the optical nerves. I know, I know—there could be a lot of downsides with these developments. Right now, though, I’m just excited about the (positive) possibilities.
Cynthia Murrell, February 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ephemeral Messaging Now Available for Businesses
February 3, 2014
Temporary content is tough to search. Naturally, that is part of the point for the disappearing photos at Snapchat, and now some companies are applying the concept to messaging. BloombergBusinessweek introduces one such firm in, “Confide, a Snapchat for the Corner Office.” The idea behind these apps is to protect delicate legal and personal information in businesses, but it occurs to me that there may be some state officials who wish such a system had been in place for their messages in, say, last August.
Writer Sarah Frier notes a big problem with Confide, just released on January eighth, and other such apps: they are likely to run afoul of regulations that require the preservation of business records. And the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is not in the habit of letting violations slide; last December, that agency fined Barclays $3.75 million for failing to retain certain records, including emails and instant messages, over the past decade. The article reports:
“[Jon] Brod, Confide’s president, says it’s up to users to make sure they exercise proper caution and judgment. His app’s interface looks like an e-mail inbox, except that when you open a message, the text is covered by colored boxes that you have to run your fingers over to remove. Earlier words are quickly covered again, making the message more difficult to copy via screenshot than those on Snapchat. Confide’s additional security advantage, co-founder Lerman says, is end-to-end encryption, which means that the key needed to decrypt a message resides only on the recipient’s mobile device and is never transmitted over a company’s servers. That’s a step that would make government surveillance, or the Dec. 31 publication of millions of user phone numbers hacked from Snapchat, much more difficult to achieve. ‘We don’t have the technology to read your messages,’ says Lerman, who’s still running Yext. Because Confide doesn’t store any messages on its servers, it doesn’t have the ability to retrieve them if a company, or the National Security Agency, comes knocking.”
Interesting. Frier goes on to observe that Snapchat could make trouble for Confide if it decides to ramp up marketing to business users. We also don’t know whether businesses will embrace the tools at the risk of incurring fines down the road. I predict that some will steer clear, but others will find it worth the risk, especially if they have something to hide that would get them into more trouble than deleting records would. Ah, progress!
Cynthia Murrell, February 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Migration SharePoint Issues to Consider
February 3, 2014
There is a lot to consider when organizations weigh their options regarding enterprise content management. If an organization is just coming up, and has no current solution, SharePoint is definitely going to be a consideration. It is the largest player in the market. But other considerations take center stage when an organization has a SharePoint implementation, and needs to know what to do with it. All of these factors are considered in the Search Content Management story, “Migrating to SharePoint On-premises vs. SharePoint Online.”
The article says:
“Organizations that are considering deploying SharePoint must decide whether it makes sense to opt for SharePoint on-premises vs. SharePoint online, a cloud-based service in Microsoft Office 365. At first blush, this might seem like a relatively simple decision, especially given many companies’ skepticism about moving to the cloud, but there are some serious benefits to farming out the management of SharePoint, as well as several potential issues to consider.”
Stephen E. Arnold has made a career out of covering search. His current Web service, ArnoldIT.com, devotes a good deal of attention to SharePoint. As the most popular platform on the market, SharePoint is not waning anytime soon, but users have concerns with customization and implementation. And now that Office 365 has complicated things, users are excited about the potential of the cloud, while still skeptical about security and functionality.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 3, 2014
Ads Gone Wrong
February 2, 2014
I came across an outfit called Tribune Online. The company offers a news aggregation service. You can examine the different content slices at http://www.frenchtribune.com. There are several interesting characteristics of the site.
First, the company offers country specific “Tribunes online.” One example is http://austriantribune.com/klasse/legen/united-states. Try to navigate to this country specific listing of articles from a range of sources. The information is in English and provides a country-specific “brand” for content available from the main Web page. The company lists some of the country-specific “brands”, but I could not locate a comprehensive list.
Second, the advertisements are flagged. What is intriguing about the paid articles is that they are scattered across different business sectors. I am not sure how many people will related to technology for indexing spun out of SAIC, a new diet for chubbies, and a listicle of metal detectors. I am finding less and less relevance in the online ads displayed to me. I thought technology like Bing’s, Google’s, and other ad services was to deliver relevant advertising.
Third, the name of the company is listed as Tribune Online. The principal office appears to be in France. I could not determine if the US news and information company using the word “Tribune” in its name was involved. Running a query on a public Web index company is interesting. Confusion between US Tribune publications’ online presence and “Tribune Online” was interesting.
If you are a Euro news maven and want to get non-European Commission sponsored aggregation of articles, check out some of the Tribune Online’s services. I liked this one: http://frenchtribune.com/categorie/emplacements/spain.
I did not spot a search function. Have we entered the post-search era?
Stephen E Arnold, February 2, 2014
Google Books Ruling Appealed
February 2, 2014
It’s not over until it’s over. The long process of determining whether Google’s giant Books project counts as “fair use” continues, we learn from “Authors Guild Appeals Ruling in Google Books Case” at Phys.org. The Authors Guild would like to see limits on the herculean digitization project, which has scanned more than 20 million books to date.
The brief write-up reveals:
“The Authors Guild is appealing a US judge’s decision in a long-running case that cleared legal obstacles for Google’s massive book-scanning project, court documents showed Monday. The group filed a notice of appeal in the case following a November 14 ruling by Federal Judge Denny Chin. Arguments are to be filed at a later date with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. The guild vowed to appeal the case after Chin ruled that Google’s project is ‘fair use’ under copyright law because it provides vital educational and other public benefits. The case, which dates back to 2005, centers on a Google program started in 2004 to create an electronic database of books that could be searchable by keywords.”
Works in Google’s database that do not hold current copyrights are available online for free (Chaucer, anyone?) The problem, of course, involves copyrighted books. Those are not available for free in their entirety, but Google does maintain a searchable database, complete with snippets of text from each book. Google maintains that this practice, which the company considers akin to a virtual card catalog, complies with copyright law. Judge Chin, for one, seems to agree. Will the Authors Guild’s appeal get any traction?
Cynthia Murrell, February 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data and Human Culture
February 1, 2014
A couple of big data pros have written the book on how data analysis can connect us with our culture’s evolution. At least one critic, though, is lukewarm about the project, for which the authors plumbed the depths of Google’s huge digitized book database for patterns in word usage. Nick Romeo at the Daily Beast describes “Why Big Data Doesn’t Live up to the Hype.”
He writes:
“Sometimes it seems the only thing larger than big data is the hype that surrounds it. Within the first 30 pages of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel manage to compare themselves to Galileo and Darwin and suggest that they, too, are revolutionizing the world. The authors were instrumental in creating the Google Ngram viewer, which allows researchers or anyone else so inclined to explore the changing frequencies of words across time. Likening their creation to a cultural telescope, they proceed to share some of their ostensibly dazzling findings.”
Romeo begins his piece with an account of similar, pre-big-data-era investigations into language that is worth checking out in itself. He admits that it can be interesting to observe the patterns that turn up in such explorations, both analog and digital. He even shares a few examples from the book that he found intriguing. For example, writers shifted from treating “the United States” as plural to singular in 1880. However, Romeo maintains that Aiden and Michel are overstating the significance of their finds, which he calls mere trivia. Is he right, or could such efforts provide key insights into the human condition?
Cynthia Murrell, February 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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