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Bruno Miguel snapped this photograph of Yoda, just moments before he became a Jedi Master. Now you know where he got his infinite wisdom. The best part is that the Yoda in the picture came from the NeatoShop! Link -Thanks, Bruno!
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Can you algorithmically optimize a company’s management team? Well, after building the web’s most dominant search engine and self-driving car, Google’s gonna try to tackle the next frontier: they’re going to build better bosses.
IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked
on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.
They wanted to build better bosses.
So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Adam Bryant of The New York Times has the full story: Link (Photo: Peter DaSilva/The New York Times)
Students between the ages of 13 and 18 are invited to take part in a global online science fair, sponsored by Google, CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic, and Scientific American.
You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world. You build and submit your project—either by yourself or in a team of up to three—entirely online. Students in India (or Israel or Ireland) will be able to compete with students in Canada (or Cambodia or Costa Rica) for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences (like a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer), scholarships and real-life work opportunities (like a five-day trip to CERN in Switzerland). And if you’re entering a science fair locally, please feel free to post that project online with Google Science Fair, too!
You can enter up until April 4th. Find links to the rules, prizes, and particulars at the Official Google Blog. Link -via Discoblog
Google has a new tool in which you can search the books that Google has digitized for a keyword and get statistics from as far back as the 16th century. The Google Book Ngram Viewer gives you data you can use to track the popularity of …just about anything. For example, Geeks Are Sexy looked as terms like “geek”, “computer geek”, and “computer hacker” to ascertain that geeks are indeed, gaining in popularity. Link
This promotional video for Google Docs shows how the utility’s presentation options can be used to create a fairly sophisticated animated short. It took 3 animators 3 days to complete the 413 slides. You can view the file at the link.
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Google has now released the Zeitgeist, a report on search patterns and trends, for 2010. New for this year is that they have added interactive HTML5 data visualizations for the top queries and events from around the world.
Link – via Official Google Blog
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What a neat idea! Type the name of each state in the US into the Google search field one at a time, and see what autocomplete suggestions come up. Then make a map of them. That’s what happened at Very Small Array, which resulted in this. I would have guessed Kentucky easily. See a larger version of this map at the site. Link -via The Daily What
One enterprising redditor named harrichr found that it is possible to make Google Translate’s audio function generate a beatbox sound. Here’s the process.
1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click “listen”
5) Be amazed
You can try it out yourself at the Google Translate link below.
Google Translate Link and reddit Link via Geekosystem
So, I’m sure you all have heard about Google’s latest product called Google Instant. If you’re tired of waiting for that fraction of a second for your search result, this is the search engine for you:
Using the new system, as a query is typed, the search box immediately jumps to the top of the search page, and a constantly changing list of suggested pages appears. If the user finds the right site, they don’t need to finish typing or hit "enter." (Source)
Basically, Google tries to predict what you want based on what other people search – and serve up the results faster than you can type out the full query.
The Official Google Blog notes:
The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!
That’s all fine and dandy – but I say let’s bring on the new bragging game: What’s Your Google Number? How many letters does it take for your blog to come up as the first result on the new Google Instant?
Neatorama is 4 (NEA brings out Neatorama in the search suggestions, but a full NEAT is required to bring out the blog in the search result). That’s pretty good, but not as cool as 4chan which comes out with just a "4."
The Taiwanese animators, who burst into the Web’s collective consciousness with their rendition of the Tiger Woods drama, are back. This time, their target is no other than Google (and its lost of mojo).
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Epicenter
Google, which is engaging in extensive book digitization projects, recently set out to determine the number of distinct print books currently in existence:
After some intensive analysis, we’ve come up with a number. Standing on the shoulders of giants—libraries and cataloging organizations—and based on our computational resources and experience of organizing millions of books through our Books Library Project and Books Partner Program since 2004, we’ve determined that number.
As of today, we estimate that there are 129,864,880 different books in the world. That’s a lot of knowledge captured in the written word! This calculation used an algorithm that combines books information from multiple sources including libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers. And the actual number of books is always increasing.
Link via Cool-O-Rama | Photo by Flickr user Nrbelex used under Creative Commons license
Mister Jalopy (a really nice guy, actually) got tired of people asking him for his business card, so he leveraged his Google ranking and printed this beauty:
If you Google my nom de bullshit, Mister Jalopy, all the top hits are for web pages that I control. And my e-mail address is right on the front page of all of them. For detractors, fans and spam scraping robots alike, I am super easy to find.
Despite my almost annoying ever presence, people are always asking for my business card. I understand. It is not so much about my contact information as a physical token of us having met. An artifact to record the moment. So, now I have a business card!
Just Google me!
Links: Google Mister Jalopy | Or for you old-school web surfers: Mister Jalopy’s official website – via Dinosaurs and Robots
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Geeky Business Cards
On Google search today, if you enter “world cup”, the logo at the bottom of the page is quite different. Link -via The Daily What
Are you tired of people asking you questions that are easily answered by Google in the first place? If Let Me Google That For You isn’t enough of a hint for them, why not play a little harmless prank? Behold Google Gravity, a lil project by Mr.doob – via Gearfuse
The effect doesn’t work on Internet Explorer, which is undoubtedly the browser used by people who don’t know to use Google first, so it’s sadly kind of ironic.
Thanks to a partnership between Google and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a full, 3D, accurate model of the upcoming memorial is visible on Google Earth. Even though the memorial isn’t slated to be finished until at least next September, visitors to Google will be able to see what awaits them next year. The model includes the 1,776 ft tall Freedom Tower, the two reflecting pools that serve as “footprints” of the twin towers, and even the 400 white oak trees that will grace the 16-acre memorial.
So razor-sharp and up-close are the visual details that family members will be able to hone in on the nearly 3,000 bronze nameplates that will identify the innocents who were massacred in the 2001 attacks.
Link to story. Link to virtual tour. – via gothamist
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Google’s celebration of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary was fun, enabling people to play Pac-Man on their main search page, either as a one- or two-player game. And people certainly took advantage of the opportunity, spending approximately 4,819,352 hours on the game alone. The result is approximately $120 million in productivity lost, in one day.
Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low “perceived affordance” – they put an “insert coin” button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that. In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.
With $70 billion in advertisements placed on television each
year, Google can easily turn a profit from getting into the TV business. Google has been meeting with many electronic and retail CEO’s to work out their newest creation. Google TV shows great promise if it is as wondrous as some their other ideas. Link
– via informationweek
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sshuggi.
It may be long (nearly 50 minutes), but Conan’s recent appearance at Google was full of insight, hilarity, and general Conan-ness.
At one point (around 23:30) he leaves the stage to let an audience member touch his hair. This is shortly after his "impression of rapper Ludacris" after being asked about Jay Leno.
The program was hosted by Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, who allowed Conan to poke fun at him, Google, and anything else.
– via blogs
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.
I know from experience with this blog that redesigns are fraught with uncertainties - new things may break, people fear change and get attached to a particular style, and so on - so I'm watching the Google redesign with particular interest.
Google is rolling out a new look (you may or may not yet see the new design) that's sleeker and, well, different. It's actually their 8th iteration - though previous changes had been subtle that most users didn't even notice. Not this one, though. Marissa Mayer, VP of Search calls it "particularly large and particularly important."
Helen Walters of Bloomberg BusinessWeek has the inside scoop of the redesign process:
Google has long had advanced search capabilities, but they were difficult to find. The goal of redesign eight was to surface them and integrate them into the main results page. Users now get results with an extra column of tools to drill deeper into information. That means a query can be quickly refined to show only results from shopping sites, say, or just videos on a topic, or the latest news results. Add in a new logo and a splash of colorful icons on the left side of the page that guide users through the new options, and the look is noticeably different (right).
Given that the shift of a few pixels can affect Google's profits, why would the company ever mess with the most successful product in the history of the Internet? "The Web is always changing, evolving, and innovating," says Mayer. "It's important even for sites that people use every day and are very familiar with, like Google, to update their look."
Now, without going further into the functionalities of the new Google, let me ask you a simple question:
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Neat Facts About Google
In this purely scientific exploration of speed, we get to see who the real speed demon is in the browser wars. Google Chrome beats out the mighty potato canon like it was nothing. Lightning doesn’t even stand a chance.
– via gizmodo
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by calebkraft.
On its face, April Fools’ Day seems like a lighthearted opportunity to play practical jokes and pranks on your friends and coworkers, but it’s easy to see the problem with having such a wacky day filled with falsities and gags. Namely, what happens when something of real consequence actually takes place on April 1st, but people don’t believe it because they automatically think it’s a prank? Here’s a few true tales of actual events that occurred on April 1st that were anything but gags.
Google is known for announcing ridiculous news stories, such as telepathic search engines and job openings on the moon, on April Fools’ Day. The thing is, when you are known for this sort of tom foolery, it makes it difficult to be taken seriously when you have real news on April 1st.
Humorously enough, the company has decided to take advantage of the viral marketing people give to the news they announce that day, so they have actually made announcements for real products and services at the same time. In 2004 (the same year they created job listings for the moon), they announced the release of Gmail. While this may not seem all that funny, many people still thought it was a prank because the idea of a mail service with one full gigabyte of storage seemed preposterous –at the time, Hotmail only offered 2 megabytes. They followed the success of this announcement by announcing the increase of the mail service’s storage to two gigabytes the next year, also on April Fools’ Day.
In a company that plays such major pranks on the nation every year, it seems likely that the employees must play some really great jokes on each other come April 1st. As such, when an employee’s pet ball python escaped its enclosure on the holiday, the news was met with some disbelief. Unfortunately, this time the news was real. An email was sent out to the entire staff that started out, “The timing of this email could not be more awkward.” It then moved on to say:
“Tempting as it might be, this is not an April Fool’s joke! We are sending this message to alert you to the situation and to let you know what to do in the event you see the snake. “
At least the sender recognized the humor of the situation. In case you were worried about the critter, he was eventually found and returned to his owner’s house a few days later.
Image via Char1iej [Flickr]
Whereas Google has mastered the art of cleverly announcing real news on April Fools’ Day in order to play with the minds of the public, CBS obviously has a lot to learn about making serious announcements on April 1st. Last year, they infuriated a number of loyal viewers by announcing the cancellation of the seventy-two year old daytime soap Guiding Light on April Fools’ Day. As one angry commenter wrote on TV Squad:
“If it’s true, you’re jerks for announcing it today. And if it’s not true, then everyone who believes you was a jerk for believing such a story on April Fools’ Day.”
Unfortunately, not all real news on April Fools’ Day is as minor as a lost python or canceled TV show. There are many situations where people do not believe a person has died, simply because of the date. Unfortunately, the three best examples of this are all so strange that it’s not surprising that people believed the news to be a hoax.
In 1984, one day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was murdered by his own father after intervening in an argument between his parents. Many fans refused to believe the news because it seemed so odd that his dad would have been the murderer. It wasn’t until the news was confirmed officially that many people stopped believing the murder was more than a cruel April Fools’ Day joke.
Surprisingly, Marvin Senior was only found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to five years imprisonment because his son beat him before the shooting.
If you heard a NASCAR champion nicknamed “The Polish Prince” died in a Hooters corporate plane on April Fools’ Day, would you believe it? A lot of fans thought they were hearing a bad joke in 1993 when racing star Alan Kulwicki was announced to be dead in exactly those circumstances.
Image via jbspec7 [Flickr]
Is there a more fitting day for a comedian to die than April Fools’ Day? While Mitch Hedberg actually died on March 30, 2005, the news wasn’t spread to the media until very late on March 31st. Not surprisingly, many people thought the death was merely a prank or a bad publicity stunt put on by Mitch himself.
Perhaps the only situation that is worse than one person dying on April Fools’ Day is the so-called April Fools’ Tsunami of 1946, when over 100 people died, largely because they believed storm warnings were a joke. The incident occurred after an massive earthquake on the Aleutian Islands near Alaska, which caused a series of massive tidal waves that spread all the way to South America. Most of the damage hit Hawaii though, where the tsunami reached up to 45 feet tall. Unfortunately, because so many people doubted the news of the impending tidal wave and refused to evacuate, over 165 people died -159 of them in Hawaii.
Interestingly, perhaps this was a bit of a sick prank on the part of Mother Nature, because scientists are still unable to find any reason the 7.8 magnitude earthquake was able to launch such a massive tsunami. It was originally thought that the waves were intensified by a major underwater landslide in the area, but scientists have still found no evidence of this hypothetical landslide. One of the researchers who recently mapped the ocean floor looking for a landslide in the area summed up the matter by noting, “almost 60 years after the event, the 1946 tsunami is still making fools of all of us.”
What about you, readers? Have you ever thought something that happened on April 1st was actually a joke, only to find out later that it was actually 100% true?
This is a guest post from D. Salmons over at TestFreaks - website for real geeks, where you can find everything from dvd players to wii games
One of the ways of getting your business (or yourself) out there to the
masses is with business cards. Whether you're passing them out at conventions,
conferences or business lunches, your business card can make a great first
impression.
Some of the most innovative, creative business cards just so happen to
be the geekiest. So check out these 10 geeky business cards that are sure
to leave a lasting impression:
Pop Up Geeky
Saving my favorite for last. Bringing out the child in all of us are
the Lego employee's business cards. A little miniature Lego of yourself
- how awesome is that?!?!
If these business cards don't inspire you to create a
unique and, well... geeky business card, I'm not sure what will. Just
have fun with it. No one will soon forget you, I'm sure.
Is this a scene from Finding Nemo? Or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds? No, this bird was caught absconding with a piece of lunch on Google Street View, specifically on John Street in Brighton, England. Link -via reddit
If you just finished looking at the Google Street View of Stonehenge, it might be time to take a trip to the World Famous San Diego Zoo. All from your computer, of course. The paths can be a little difficult to navigate and some of the animals are hard to see from the street map distance, but it’s definitely awesome to be able to check out one of the best zoos in the world from your home. When you first load the site, it drops you right in the heart of the zoo’s newest exhibit, the Elephant Odyssey.
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NORAD has been tracking Santa every year since 1958. In 2007, Google Maps and Google Earth got involved with following Santa’s progress on Christmas Eve. As often happens with new projects, something went awry in 2008. Jeff Martin, a senior marketing manager at Google Geo, found himself in hot water quickly.
Inexplicably, as Santa made his way through Toronto that night last year, the mapping software began identifying the city as being in the United States. Instantly, NORAD Santa’s dedicated Gmail account “just lit up” with messages from irate Canadians, Martin said, and quickly, the Google team fixed the problem.
But not before Martin’s run-in with Canadian Lt. Gen. Marcel Duval. “He said, ‘I understand that you have a new American city,’” Martin recalled. “It was a slightly tense moment for me, standing in front of a three-star general explaining to him why one of his cities had been designated as a United States city.”
Read more about how the NORAD Santa Tracker came about and the technology used in the program today. Link -Thanks, Vince d’Eon!
Nate Heagy, a musician from Saskatoon, Canada, decided that the best way to promote his career was to get pictured on Google Street View. So he followed a Street View picture-taking car around his town until he could predict its path and get his image captured. CBC News quotes Heagy:
“Promoting a band is hard. And all the while I’ve been working on the album I’ve been trying to think of how I can promote it — how I can get noticed.
“When Google announced that Street View was coming to Saskatoon, a light bulb went on,” he said. “I just thought Street View would allow anyone on any corner to be seen by any number of people anywhere.”
Hatching the plan was one thing, execution was another.
“I figured Saskatoon’s not that big, I could probably find the Google car if I really wanted to,” he said. “So I built a sign, and kept it in the trunk of my car.”
Heagy said he enlisted friends to keep an eye out for the vehicle and to call him if they spotted something with a large camera mounted on a tripod on the roof.
As it turned out, Heagy was having lunch one day and saw the Google car himself. He rushed to his own car to catch up to it and figure out where it would be going.
Link via Gizmodo | Musician’s Website | Image: CBC
I just discovered this, and it should prove a handy and effective tool for answering questions in the future. From Lifehacker:
If you’re a power searcher, or other people think you are, and you’re getting tired of constant requests for answers to questions that a quick Google search would provide, try Let me google that for you. Enter a search term, click the Google Search button, and a link appears that you can copy, paste and send to your friend. When they click the link, an animation displays the complicated process of searching Google for information, and then directs the user to the actual search results page from Google.
Here’s a dry run I easily did that took almost no time. Say someone asked me where I could find the neat side of the web. Here’s my reply – http://lmgtfy.com/?q=where+is+the+neat+side+of+the+web%3F (tinyURL also available).
Wanna send someone a postcard these holidays, but don’t want to spend the 44 cents to actually send them something via snail mail? Google’s got you covered. Right now, you can send anyone in the U.S. a free postcard courtesy of Gmail. There are six designs to choose from.
The World Wide Web is big. Really big. As of July of 2008, Google found 1 trillion (that’s 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once. The search engine has only indexed a fraction of those web pages (the last count I found was 25 billion in 2006).
But that’s nothing compared to the "Deep Web" – a part of the Internet that is not easily accessible by search engines (for example, dynamically generated content that exists only momentarily). People have estimated that the Deep Web is several orders of magnitude larger than the "surface Web". There is, however, another part of the Deep Web that is more sinister: the dark side of the Internet used by criminals.
Andy Beckett of The Guardian wrote:
The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it’s a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don’t know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."
"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working. [...]
Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, ‘It’s probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"’ he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."
In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available."
At The Business Insider, Alyson Shontell wrote about her unsuccessful job interview with Google, which has gained a reputation for asking hard and bizarre questions that test a candidate’s creativity, priorities, and critical thinking skills. She provided 15 examples from other people who’ve interviewed with Google:
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?Why are manhole covers round?
Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
You have eight balls all of the same size 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
You can read more questions and the preferred answers at the link.
Link via Gizmodo | Image: US Department of State
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