NGrams are beautiful?
Was looking at the website “Information is Beautiful” (http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/) and found an entry about the Google labs NGrams product that shows occurances of pairs of words in the digitised libaries of Google books, some of which go back hundreds of years. There are some interesting ones – I liked the ‘age old debates’ such as chicken vs egg, region vs science, etc.
So I had a bit of a play myself. War and peace was interesting – some very clear peaks in the early 20th Century as you’d expect. Eventually I started on some more odd ball ones, including Google vs Microsoft. Well that yielded a surprise …
Don’t know if you can see that … but just what is that peak around 1900 for Microsoft?
Well, looks like it must just be a mishap in the Google scanning of books … top of the list of books returned from searching for Microsoft from 1880 to 1950 is the following:
The corporate software guide
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books.google.com 1938 – Snippet view
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So there. Writing about Xenix, Microsoft C and Pascal in 1938 … so that’s where Alan Turin got all those ideas from!
But on further investigation, it appears there are even earlier examples (obviously very hushed up, but presumably can be released now)
Principles of Food, Beverage, and Labor Cost Controls Using Microsoft Excel for Windows
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No cover image
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books.google.com Paul R. Dittmer – 1920 – 256 pages – No preview
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So now we all know.
Kevin.
Subtle Marketing …
Just in case it slipped anyones attention, GooglePlus is now open to all.
I do like the way Google are using very subtle marketing techniques just in case anyone hadn’t noticed. In fact it’s so subtle, you might not have noticed yourself, so I thought I should point it out to you …
Kevin
The Creative Internet
Been meaning to post about this for a while now. Google put together a presentation of loads of different Internet related projects that people have done. Next time you see some piece of media highlighting how bad the Internet is, pick one of these at random and redress the balance a little.
See:
Some personal favourites of mine include:
- In B Flat
- The YouTube Radio
- Sour’s Webcam fan-based video
- Stop-motion animation by PES
- Graffiti Animation
- Pixels
- User Generated Content version of Star Wars
- Mapping from geo-tagged photos
- We Feel Fine (naturally – I’ve mentioned this before!)
- Keiichi Matsuda (and the domestic robocop)
- Street View art reproductions
- Japanese Water Fountain (not really Internet, but .. wow!)
- Building Projections (again, and old favourite)
- The Google Pacman (blogged, here)
- Internet of Things
Fantastic stuff. Tech at its best.
Kevin.
What HAVE Google done to their image search?
I’ve regularly used the Google image search – simple, quick, find the pictures you want. But recently, they changed the interface, and boy is it annoying.
Now, you get expanding images when you move the mouse around the screen, constantly distracting your eye as you scan over the pictures for what you want. When you click on ‘more results’ it seems to jump to random page numbers. Once you reach the bottom of the page there isn’t an obvious ‘next page’ link. And it is so slow to load!
Thankfully there is a release – at the bottom there is a ‘switch to basic version’ link (read, switch to the working version). However, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make this the default choice.
The cynic in my wonders if this might be a new policy of Google: start releasing really irritating user interfaces that people will have just to login to iGoogle or their Google account to change to a usable version … I can’t think of any other reason why anyone would consider this an improvement. It is so anti-Google – their user interface is usually so slick and clean. This is just so clunky. An odd choice.
Kevin.
The best Google Logo yet?
The Google Doodles have been getting more and more elaborate recently, but I really think today’s logo is going to take some beating …
And whats more, if you click on ‘insert coin’ (where the ‘I feel lucky’ button is usually) you get to play it. A fully playable pac-man logo. Very neat indeed.
Kevin.
Virtual Revolution
I’ve just finished watching the BBC’s Virtual Revolution programmes. These were presented by Aleks Krotoski and shown on 4 consecutive Saturday evenings a month or so ago.
It follows the evolution of the Internet from its humble beginnings as the ARPANET and a collection of academic networks, through the non-commercial era, to the dot-com boom and bust. Finally, it talks about how people like Amazon and Google worked out how to make money from the Internet by exploiting out information in exchange for us using their services for free. We get the benefits of the services and haven’t really had any negative impact, yet, from giving up our personal information to them.
The final programme looks at the whole issue of online social networks such as Facebook and looks at some of the, as yet unknown, future effects on society.
One interesting conclusion, well discussion but looking like a conclusion, is that the web seems to be encouraging more associative brain functions than linear … people prefering short, associated chunks of information rather than large, linear books. This is one reason that many of ‘generation web’ don’t read books!
A very interesting series.
Kevin.
Painting via Google Street View
There have been several articles in the mainstream media (Telegraph and Daily Mail to mention a couple) just recently, about American artist Bill Guffey, who paints traditional scenes, but instead of painting from a visit to a landscape, or a photo, he uses the pictures provided by Google Street View. See his gallery here. In another gallery, he’s painted a picture from every state in the US (apart from Hawaii, that apparently doens’t yet have Street View).
Its a great application of modern technology to a more traditional pastime.
Kevin.
Notable dates in March
There are two notable dates just past that I managed to miss, but have recently come to my attention 
One was Earth Hour, where they were trying to get 1bn people to switch off their lights for 1 hour. This happened on the 28th March, and included cities all around the world, including the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building in the US. There was plenty going on in the UK too. It was even supported by the likes of Google.
Another major landmark date in March that I also missed, was PI Day, specifically 3/14 at 1:59 (in ‘US’ speak – i.e. 14th March).
Well I give you all advanced warning of Star Wars day – May the 4th (be with you).
Kevin.
RTFM … or use google!
You know those times when you’d really like to help someone online (in a forum, an email, or whatever), but you know that the first thing they should do is just type the thing into Google and see what comes up? Well, now you can drop a really big hint that that is what they should be doing, by using the website ‘Let me Google that for You’ (http://lmgtfy.com).
This is great. You type in your query, and it produces an animation of someone entering the query into Google and hitting ‘search’. A pretty big hint I would say! So, lets say someone is asking how to upload a blog post, well, here is the answer – http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+upload+a+blog+post (it will give your a tinyurl too if you’d rather have that).
Very clever and a lot more polite than RTFM!
Kevin.
