Google and Value: X Labs Explains Money to MBAs
February 17, 2015
I read “Astro Teller, Google’s ‘Captain of Moonshots,’ on Making Profits at Google X.” Interesting. The write up provides me with insight into what I call the “post mobile ad challenge logic” at Google.
The focus of the “article” which is really an interview is that Google is generating value from its moon shot projects. I think of these as Loon balloons and the remarkable un hip Google Glass. You may have your own X Labs’ highlight reel.
Here’s a statement I highlighted:
It would be fair to say Google Brain (now called the Neural Network Project) is producing in value for Google something that would be comparable to the total costs of Google X — just that that one thing we’ve spun out. We’re in commercial discussion with various commercial partners about integrating Loon into other networks. Without getting into specifics, I assure you we are looking at very substantial opportunities for Loon — Google-scale opportunities. I think generally Google feels the return on investment for Google X has been pretty good so far.
Take that you money centric MBAs. The idea of investing a dollar and generating a $1.10 is not germane. X Labs operates in the land of Loon and “pretty good” return on investment.
But where are the specifics? Er, you know, numbers.
There is a similar sentiment about the wildly hyped Google Glass project. But, alas, no reference to the management and interpersonal issues that project ignited.
What did that hack Willie Shakespeare include in Hamlet. Oh, yes, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Yep, methinks.
Stephen E Arnold, February 17, 2015
How to Date for a Job
February 17, 2015
Randy Newman would say this about the resume: “It’s dead! It’s dead!” and weave some story lyrics. While the resume is not entirely dead, it is slowly going down the wayside as job seekers ditch it in favor of online portfolios and social media Web sites. Inc. highlights a new way companies are finding employees in the article, “The Hiring Tool That Could Kill The Resume.” Tom Leung is the founder of a new startup called Poachable, an app that helps companies find job candidates.
Poachable uses a Tinder-style platform to find passive job candidates, people already employed and not currently seeking. The app asks the job candidate about the ideal job requirements, then it returns results based on the specifications. Leung created the startup to help people find their dream job. Leung also wants companies to move away from the archaic resume format.
Leung has shared that in his experience, companies are not asking for resumes. They want to know specifics that are not available on them. Leung cites that he is trying to make the hiring process simpler:
“For professionals, the quandary they find themselves in is this: They’re in a job and like it, but would be open to a great opportunity yet don’t want to go and publish their resume on Monster or write on LinkedIn that they are looking for a new job. So right now, they can come to us and say where they’re working and what opportunities they would consider. It’s kind of like in junior high that you wouldn’t ask a girl out directly, but your friend would ask on your behalf. In some ways, we do that online and go to the employer and say, ‘Here’s this guy, here’s his experience, he lives in the area and thinks your company is interesting, would you want to set up an informational call?’”
While Leung’s startup is admirable, it makes one wonder what about people who are not gainfully employed and are looking for a dream job. He is doing a disservice to recent college graduates; those laid off, or have a niche market. He should open the target audience to get more users. At least Tinder is open for everybody.
Whitney Grace, February 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Finding Elusive Image Libraries
February 17, 2015
In order to build a fantastic Web site these days, you need eye-catching graphics. While creating a logo can be completed with Fiverr, making daily images for your content feed is a little bit more difficult. It is not cost efficient to hire a graphic designer for every image (unless you have deep pockets), so it helps to have an image library to retrieve images. The problem with typing in image library into a search engine means you have to sift through results and assess each possible source.
Graphic designer Ash Stallard-Phillips collected “25 Awesome Sites With Stunning Free Stock Photos.” He rounded up the image libraries, because:
“As a web designer myself, I always find it handy to have an image library that I can use for dummy images and testing. I have compiled a list of the best sites offering free stock photos that you can use for your projects. “
Ash evaluates each resource, listing the pros and cons. Many of the image Web sites he lists are ones we have not used before and will be useful as we create content. There is an increase in the number of articles like Ash’s on the Internet and they are not just for photo libraries. They are lists that have tons of helpful information that you would usually have to sift through search results for. It saves time on searching and the evaluation process.
Whitney Grace, February 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Varying Predictions for SharePoint in 2015
February 17, 2015
With on-premise use rising over the years (despite a focus by Microsoft on cloud installations) it seems that SharePoint is promising on-premise updates in 2015. However, no one is really sure how or when the details will be final. CMS Wire helps with the speculation in their article, “4 Directions For SharePoint and Office 365 in 2015.”
The article begins:
“It’s going to be a big year for SharePoint, but details about what to expect are fuzzy. Microsoft has promised a new on-premise version will be released later this year. However, it has been less forthcoming about SharePoint Online in Office 365. Microsoft upgrades Office 365 on a regular basis and has given some indication as to where it would like to go with SharePoint Online. But a lot of questions remained unanswered.”
The article goes on to speculate at a few of SharePoint’s upcoming changes. Many experts will continue to speculate until the news becomes final. For those whom the changes will impact, it would be wise to keep an eye on the news coming out of Stephen E. Arnold’s SharePoint feed. As a longtime expert in the field, he uses his Web service, ArnoldIT.com, to share the latest tips, tricks, and news relating to all things search.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 17, 2015
Palantir Gets Some Publicity
February 16, 2015
Short honk: The New York Times publishes a weekly magazine. I have a tough time figuring out what the publication covers. I noted a long article on Sunday, February 15, 2015, “The Undergraduate and the Mentor.” The cover of the magazine carried the title “The Accusation.” I was confused, but the NYT magazine is a baffler I ignore when it arrives. You may be able to access the article at this link, but don’t complain to me if the NYT wants money from you. I just want to document that the mentor was a founder of Palantir. The company is described this way:
With early funding from the C.I.A., Lonsdale helped Thiel and others start Palantir. Named for the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings,” the company developed powerful data-mining software for surveillance and won contracts with hundreds of law-enforcement agencies, including the National Security Agency and the Defense Department. In 2009, Lonsdale went on to other ventures but retained a stake in Palantir, whose value would climb to more than $9 billion. In 2011, with a small group of partners, some of whom had close ties to Asia, Lonsdale started the venture-capital fund Formation 8, named for a lucky number in China. Along with starting and financing companies, he has continued to embrace libertarian causes and recently joined the finance team for Senator Rand Paul’s possible Republican presidential campaign. And he sometimes can’t resist showing off his newfound wealth: For a viewing party of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” last year, Lonsdale bought a $30,000 replica of the show’s iron throne, posing on it like the show’s line of blustering and sadistic kings.
I made a list of some of the loaded words used in the write up to bring the former Palantir founder into more vivid relief:
- “hard time making eye contact”. The Palantir person would not look at an interlocutor.
- “condescending.” Word used to describe the Palantir person’s attitude
- “broke the rules”. Phrase used to describe Palantir person’s behavior at a swimming pool
The author of the write up paints a word picture of the Palantir person which I did not find positive. If you are curious about alleged improper interpersonal behaviors, the NYT magazine may interest you.
For me, it is one more dreary Stanford University/Silicon Valley dust up. I assume the rules are different in the go go world of high tech. Innovating in content processing could, I suppose, husband more ambitious pursuits.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2015
Another Google Doubter
February 16, 2015
Is there a blossoming Venus Fly Trap in our Googley world. “Hoping Google’s Lab Is a Rainmaker” recycles grousing by US big media about investments without returns. I don’t want to peer into the Google Glass thing. I just see so so technology and mental health challenges.
This morning I read “Don’t Be Google.” The source was an outfit known to find good things to say about Googley things. Times seem to be changing. The write up has a clever graphic. The query “google where did it all go wrong” is entered into a search box. And like IBM Watson, no reasonable answer is forthcoming.
The article points out three actions in the forms of quotes from folks supposedly in the know. The first question concerns YouTube. I have wondered about YouTube for a long time. There is a reference to Google’s orphaning projects. Do you remember Web Accelerator? It was a crude antecedent to SPDY, which has been killed too. GTalk is a goner. Do these examples suggest more misses than hits.
But the killer point is that Google has morphed into Microsoft. The supporting fact for this remarkable idea is that Google has more former Microsoft employees than employees from any other company.
The paragraph I circled is illustrative of the more critical view of the online ad giant:
This may help to explain why Google is, I believe, slowly but steadily losing our trust. Nowadays, when you interact with Google, you don’t know if you’ll be talking to Awesome Google; Mammon Google; …or a former Microsoftian whose beliefs and values were birthed in Redmond, and who, as a result, identifies a whole lot more with Mammon — and with bureaucratic infighting — than with Awesome. Say what you like about Apple, and I can complain about them at length, you always know what to expect from them. (A gorgeous velvet glove enclosing an exquisitely sleek titanium fist.) But Google seems increasingly to have fragmented into a hydra with a hundred tone-deaf heads, each with its own distinct morality and personality. That wouldn’t matter so much if trust and awesomeness — “don’t be evil!” “moonshots!” — weren’t so intrinsic to the Google brand … which, to my mind, gets a little more tarnished every year.
I don’t agree. I think Google is just the superest information and content processing company I used to monitor closely. Google, as I recall, is the company that informed China it had to change its ways. How is that working out?
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2015
Statistics, Statistics. Disappointing Indeed
February 16, 2015
At dinner on Saturday evening, a medical researcher professional mentioned that reproducing results from tests conducted in the researcher’s lab was tough. I think the buzzword for this is “non reproducibility.” The question was asked, “Perhaps the research is essentially random?” There were some furrowed brows. My reaction was, “How does one know what’s what with experiments, data, or reproducibility tests?” The table talk shifted to a discussion of Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary. Safer ground.
Navigate to “Science’s Significant Stat Problem.” The article makes clear that 2013 thinking may have some relevance today. Here’s a passage I highlighted in pale blue:
Scientists use elaborate statistical significance tests to distinguish a fluke from real evidence. But the sad truth is that the standard methods for significance testing are often inadequate to the task.
There you go. And the supporting information for this statement?
One recent paper found an appallingly low chance that certain neuroscience studies could correctly identify an effect from statistical data. Reviews of genetics research show that the statistics linking diseases to genes are wrong far more often than they’re right. Pharmaceutical companies find that test results favoring new drugs typically disappear when the tests are repeated.
For the math inclined the write up offers:
It’s like flipping coins. Sometimes you’ll flip a penny and get several heads in a row, but that doesn’t mean the penny is rigged. Suppose, for instance, that you toss a penny 10 times. A perfectly fair coin (heads or tails equally likely) will often produce more or fewer than five heads. In fact, you’ll get exactly five heads only about a fourth of the time. Sometimes you’ll get six heads, or four. Or seven, or eight. In fact, even with a fair coin, you might get 10 heads out of 10 flips (but only about once for every thousand 10-flip trials). So how many heads should make you suspicious? Suppose you get eight heads out of 10 tosses. For a fair coin, the chances of eight or more heads are only about 5.5 percent. That’s a P value of 0.055, close to the standard statistical significance threshold. Perhaps suspicion is warranted.
Now the kicker:
And there’s one other type of paper that attracts journalists while illustrating the wider point: research about smart animals. One such study involved a fish—an Atlantic salmon—placed in a brain scanner and shown various pictures of human activity. One particular spot in the fish’s brain showed a statistically significant increase in activity when the pictures depicted emotional scenes, like the exasperation on the face of a waiter who had just dropped his dishes. The scientists didn’t rush to publish their finding about how empathetic salmon are, though. They were just doing the test to reveal the quirks of statistical significance. The fish in the scanner was dead.
How are those Big Data analyses working out, folks?
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2015
Peripatetic Big Data: Hit the Road, Jack
February 16, 2015
I read “Patterns in Large Data Show How Information Travels.” Yep, it seems obvious that info moves around. Communication involves passing information from A to B. Isn’t that “moving around”? How naive.
The write up explains:
The results show that people care about local and regional information related to sports, media, celebrities or local places. Moreover, people from countries with similar language or historic backgrounds care about similar information.
Be still my heart. A quick flip through CyberOSINT makes clear that examining information in graph form has been around at least 15 years in the form of commercial software that performs these analyses. Yes, it is a good idea to be able to know when a person of interest communicates, what, to whom, when, and where. Ah, PhDs. Love ‘em.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2015
Early English Texts Now Available Online
February 16, 2015
The phrase “early English literature” encompasses texts written from the mid-fifteenth century to 1700. Now, the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries tells us about its exciting project to make such works available to anyone with Internet access in, “Thousands of Early English Books Released Online to Public by Bodleian Libraries and Partners.” The University of Michigan Library is also involved in the project, which will release some 25,000 texts. The fully searchable files can be downloaded in different formats or read online.
The works were compiled some time ago by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), which spent 15 years manually entering and XML-encoding the texts. The results were made available to users of academic libraries at the time, but were released into the public domain at the turn of the new year. The post informs us:
“Members of the public, teachers and researchers around the world can now have access to thousands of transcriptions of English texts published during the first two centuries of printing in England. The corpus includes important works by literary giants like Chaucer and Bacon, but also contains many rare and little-known materials that were previously only available to those with access to special collections at academic libraries.
“The text-only files are a unique resource for members of the public to browse for curious and interesting topics and titles ranging from witchcraft and homeopathy to poetry and recipes. In addition to browsing and reading text-only versions of these early English books, users of EEBO-TCP can also search the entire corpus, which contains more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. The text has been encoded with Extensible Markup Language (XML), allowing individuals to search for keywords and themes across the entire collection of works, in individual books or even within specific sections of text such as stage directions or tables of contents.”
Michael Popham, head of the Bodleian Libraries’ digital collections, is excited about the full-search functionality. He expects the tool will allow users to make connections, cross-references, and discoveries unlike ever before.
Cynthia Murrell, February 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
USDA Research Now Easily Searchable by Public
February 16, 2015
In order to give citizens more access to research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Agricultural Library (NAL) has launched a new, public-facing search engine called PubAg. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service tells us about the tool in, “NAL Unveils New Search Engine for Published USDA Research.” It looks a lot like a Lucene/Solr system to us; that choice would not be at all surprising. The post tells us:
“PubAg, which can be found at PubAg.nal.usda.gov, is a new portal for literature searches and full-text access of more than 40,000 scientific journal articles by USDA researchers, mostly from 1997 to 2014. New articles by USDA researchers will be added almost daily, and older articles may be added if possible. There is no access fee for PubAg.
“Phase I of PubAg provides access for searches of 340,000 peer-reviewed agriculturally related scientific literature, mostly from 2002 to 2012, each entry offering a citation, abstract and a link to the article if available from the publisher. This initial group of highly relevant, high-quality literature was taken from the 4 million bibliographic citations in NAL’s database.”
The agency has worked to make the system easy to use for folks from farmers to academicians. So easy, in fact, that there’s no registration — no user name or password is needed. We’re told that NAL maintains “one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive compilations of agricultural information.” Now they’ve made that wealth of knowledge available to us all.
Cynthia Murrell, February 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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