Google Related Links

/ Media Technology

It took them longer than I expected, but it looks like Google has finally come out with a Related Links feature that people can add automatically-updated links to related searches, news or web pages on to their sites. Think Google Adwords only with search results instead of pay-for-placement advertisements. The text-box is simple to add to any webpage (it took me all of 30 seconds) and gets updated to whatever info is current when the page is viewed — essentially adding dynamic related content even if your page remains static.

I’m pleased to see this concept finally becoming mainstream, especially since the Margin Notes system I developed back in 1999 was a pioneer in the area. One issue that was tricky to figure out is what scope to use as the automatic search term. You can see the problem if you’re viewing this post in an aggregator like LiveJournal or even on my own main page — the search results are probably related at least in part to other posts on the page and not just this one. It’s a hard problem in the general case, but they should be able to get it to work most of the time. (I’ve not yet looked at their code to see what they’re actually doing — more after I check it out.) [Update 12:45pm: actually, LiveJournal strips out all Javascript so it won’t show up anyway… click here to see the actual post if you’re in LJ and have no clue what I’m talking about.]

One thing I didn’t have to worry about with Margin Notes was how to keep the system from being gamed by spammers and Google-juice stealers, though I did have to worry about relevance to individual readers. Something I’d like to see is a similar system that uses my own RSS subscriptions as the core source of info, plus perhaps one level of linkage out (e.g. take my blog-roll & RSS subscriptions plus the blog-roll and RSS subscriptions associated with each of those sites). That would give me some amount of personalization as well as make it harder to game the system.

(via Google Blogoscoped)

Update 12:30pm: I took a quick peek at the JavaScript, and as you probably could guess all it does is send a specially formatted request to http://www.googlesyndication.com/relcontent/content?… that includes the page’s URL. Sure enough, one second after I loaded the page in my browser I saw another retrieval from Google. Makes sense — you don’t want to have to deal with parsing the source document in the JavaScript itself — though it does mean the feature probably won’t work at all on pages that are behind a firewall. (That’s probably all for the best, as otherwise it’d be all too easy to slip up and start broadcasting supposedly-secure information out to Google.)

That said, I’m surprised at how lousy the results are. It looks like they’re relying on their cached copy when available, which for a blog post is, of course, almost guaranteed to not be related to the current post. As for the post-specific page, I’m getting lots of related links about blogs in general, which makes me suspect they’re doing a bad job of distinguishing actual page content from my page’s window dressing, Javascript and navigation bars. That really surprises me (if in fact it’s where the trouble lies) since that’s a problem they clearly know how to solve for their normal indexing.

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Statement of fair use in documentary films

/ Intellectual Property

My brother is working on a documentary called Reality Made Over, about Fox’s plastic-surgery reality TV show “The Swan”. Of course, since his subject matter television there’re lots of questions about what he needs permission to use and what counts as fair use under copyright law. Talking to him about it reminded me of the recent Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use that was put out by several associations of video and filmmakers, in consultation with the Center for Social Media at American University.

From their introduction:

This Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use makes clear what documentary filmmakers currently regard as reasonable application of the copyright “fair use” doctrine. Fair use expresses the core value of free expression within copyright law. The statement clarifies this crucial legal doctrine, to help filmmakers use it with confidence. Fair use is shaped, in part, by the practice of the professional communities that employ it. The statement is informed both by experience and ethical principles. It also draws on analogy: documentary filmmakers should have the same kind of access to copyrighted materials that is enjoyed by cultural and historical critics who work in print media and by news broadcasters.

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Stanisław Lem

/ Poetry

Stanisław Lem, in memoriam (1921 – 2006)

Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:

“Very well. Let’s have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.”

“Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?” Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi

— from The Cyberiad, 1967

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Two quotes by Justice Antonin Scalia

/ Politics

Comments by Justice Antonin Scalia on whether Guantánamo Bay detainees have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, as quoted by Newsweek (March 8, 2006):

“If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.”

Confirmation Testimony of Hon. Antonin Scalia, To Be U.S. Supreme Court Justice (August 5, 1986):

Senator Mathias: “…if a reasonable litigant actually believed that your judgment would be distorted because of some strong personal bias or belief, would that dissuade you from sitting on a case?”

Judge Scalia: I think the statute reads that way, Senator. I have the statute somewhere. I am quite sure that the way you put it is about the way the statute reads, requiring disqualification. If I may, title 28, United States Code, section 455: “Any justice, judge or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

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Wish-list: Google-Earth image search

/ Wish List

google-maps-ipod.jpg

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has posted a link to a Google Maps image that looks like an iPod.

The story that this is an abandoned mine that was won by Steve Jobs in a poker game sounds too good to be true, but the image got me thinking: I wonder how good the results would be for a “find the closest match to this image in Google Earth” app — something that picks the best location and zoom level for a given query image from all the locations on Earth. The feature’s no doubt already in place in some GIS systems (for things like “here’s an unannotated fly-by image of a missile silo; find the likely origin”) but I’m really just thinking for arty things like “create a font of letters made up entirely of satellite and fly-by images.”

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Flash Surfing

/ Media Technology

Long before flash mobs became the phonebooth-stuffing of the naughts, science fiction author Larry Niven speculated how the invention of teleportation would cause sudden flash crowds of gawkers to appear wherever a newsworthy event is taking place. Over at Searchblog, John Battelle suggests we’re bound to see something similar happen in couch-potato-land once channel surfers can automatically see what show or media event everyone else is watching…

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European Space Agency measures gravitomagnetism

/ Science

I don’t know enough physics to really grok how important or not this is, but man this sounds interesting:

Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.

…

Small acceleration sensors placed at different locations close to the spinning superconductor, which has to be accelerated for the effect to be noticeable, recorded an acceleration field outside the superconductor that appears to be produced by gravitomagnetism. “This experiment is the gravitational analogue of Faraday’s electromagnetic induction experiment in 1831.

It demonstrates that a superconductive gyroscope is capable of generating a powerful gravitomagnetic field, and is therefore the gravitational counterpart of the magnetic coil. Depending on further confirmation, this effect could form the basis for a new technological domain, which would have numerous applications in space and other high-tech sectors” says de Matos. Although just 100 millionths of the acceleration due to the Earth’s gravitational field, the measured field is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein’s General Relativity predicts. Initially, the researchers were reluctant to believe their own results.

(Via /. via Kurt.)

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Finally, Bush has a plan for victory…

/ Politics

After three years of bloody war in Iraq, President Bush has finally announced his hitherto super-secret plan for victory. Step 1: elect a more competent U.S. president…

President Bush said yesterday that future administrations will have to grapple with how and when to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, indicating that he doesn’t see an end to U.S. commitments until at least 2009.

“That’ll be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq,” Mr. Bush said at his second press conference of the year, during which he also said Iraq is not in the middle of a civil war and defended his continued commitment of U.S. troops.

Finally, Bush has a plan for victory… Read More »