bosisler's shared items in Google Reader

Post-earthquake imagery of Japan

A Googler — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:38:17 PST

(Cross-posted from the LatLong Blog)

In response to the devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan, we’ve worked with our satellite imagery providers to get the latest available data of the areas affected most.

To view this high-resolution imagery, courtesy of our partners at GeoEye, download this KML file and explore it in Google Earth. You can also explore the imagery with Google Maps, or have a look at this Picasa album of before-and-after shots. Here’s a sample:

Before and after the earthquake and tsunami. Above is Yuriage in Natori, below is Yagawahama; both are in Miyagi prefecture. High-resolution version of this photo.

We’re working to provide this data directly to response organizations on the ground to aid their efforts. We hope this new updated satellite imagery is valuable for them as well as everyone else following this situation to help illustrate the extent of the damage.

You can find more information regarding the disaster and resources for those in need at our Crisis Response page in English and Japanese. You can also follow @earthoutreach on Twitter to stay up to date with our mapping and imagery efforts.

Posted by Ryan Falor, Google Crisis Response team

Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

(author unknown) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:12:43 PST

Shared by bosisler
Vay kopyacilar vay...

By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.

I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.

This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries. Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing.

We couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google’s top search result appeared at the top of Bing’s ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google’s search results in Bing’s ranking.

We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:

To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above).

We saw this happen for multiple queries. For the query [delhipublicschool40 chdjob] we inserted a search result for a credit union:

The same credit union soon showed up on Bing for that query:

For the query [juegosdeben1ogrande] we inserted a page of hip hop bling jewelry:

And the same hip hop bling page showed up in Bing:

As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

A Googler — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:30:00 PST

One of the things I love about working at Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.

It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.

You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - U.S.)

Here are a few things you can do:

Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that's that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—with a view on Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project

Bir pantalon, bir gömlek...

Meltem Gürle — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:10:32 PST

BirGün
23 Ocak 2011

Çocukluktan ergenliğe geçtiğim dönemde, suyu bırakıp karaya çıkmaya çalışan bir kurbağa kadar şaşkın ve çirkindim. Bedenim irileşmiş, yüzümü sivilceler basmış, kollarım ve bacaklarım kontrol edilemez bir şekilde uzamıştı. Vücudum bana pek tanıdık gelmiyordu artık. Üstelik bir sakillik gelmişti üzerime, elimi kolumu nereye koyacağımı bilemiyordum.

Aksi gibi görüntümle her zamankinden daha fazla ilgilenir olmuştum. O vakte kadar pejmürde bir halde dolaşırken birden kılık kıyafeti ciddiye almaya başlamıştım. Saçıma başıma düzen vermeye çalışıyor, aynada sağıma soluma iyice bir bakmadan evden çıkmıyordum. Galiba ömrümün geri kalanında bana yetecek kadar aynaya baktım o dönemde.

Halbuki ondan evvel, evden çıkmak vakti geldiğinde kendimi kapının önüne atmaktan başka bir derdim olmazdı. Bizimkiler belki fikir değiştirir diye korktuğum için, izni kopardığım gibi bir nefeste sokağın başını bulmuş olurdum. Ama artık işler değişmişti işte. Hayvanlar Alemi kartlarım ya da kenarlarını uzun uzun yere sürterek düzleştirdiğim kaydırak taşı falan, hepsi gözden düşmüştü. Dürbünlü tüftüfümü bile kaldırıp bir kenara koymuştum. O günler geride kalmıştı şimdi.

Artık rengarenk Converse’ler, kot pantolonlar ve süet ceketler vardı. Bir de yanımızdaki apartmanda yaşayan Yalçın adlı çocuk. Ben onunki gibi güzel göz görmedim bir daha. Gözleri mora çalan bir lacivertti. Bir kere bakkalda karşılaşmıştık. Hayatımda hiç böyle bir renk görmediğim için bir süre aval aval bakmıştım. Yalçın da, ‘Pardon’ deyip yanımdan geçmişti. Çok kibar çocuktu. Almanya’da büyümüştü. ‘Pardon’ demesi ondandı. Aslında tam olarak aktarmak gerekirse, ‘Pağdon’ demişti – ‘r’leri söylemiyordu.

Mahallenin bütün kızları duvara dizilir onun basketbol antrenmanından dönüşünü beklerdi. Biraz cabbar olanların, o geçerken ‘Yalçın kayalıkların göklere yükseliyor…’ diye seslendiği bile olurdu. Ben aralarına karışmıyordum. Bakkalda yaşanan bu ‘Pağdon’ olayından beri, Yalçın’la özel bir ilişkimiz olduğuna karar vermiştim. Kendime ayrıcalıklı bir yer biçiyordum. Onun için bütün kızların oturduğu duvarda değil, başka bir köşede bir taşın üzerinde tüneyerek bekliyordum onun geçmesini. Hepimiz onüç yaşındaydık ve böyle detaylar bir nedenle çok önemliydi.

Yalçın köşeyi döndüğünde, önce uzun bacakları görünürdü. Kot pantolonunun içinde lacivert olurdu bacakları. Gözlerinin rengine uygun gömlekler de giyerdi. Sırtına kayıtsızca attığı spor çantası ile çok afiliydi. Ama ben en çok kot pantolonunu beğenirdim. Her şeyiyle mükemmeldi. Rengi, duruşu, paçalarının lastik pabuçların üzerinde hafifçe katlanışı. Babası Almanya’dan getirmişti. Orjinaldi belli ki. Yalçın’ın kendisi gibi.

Bütün bir sene boyunca, diğer kızlar gibi ben de Yalçın’ın antrenmandan dönüşünü seyrettim. Onu sadece yürüyüşünden tanıyabilecek kadar ustalaşmıştım. Gelenin o olduğunu anlamak için bedeninin geri kalanını görmem gerekmiyordu artık. Gitgide renk değiştiren o kot pantolonun içinde hafifçe yaylanarak yürüyen bacakları gördüğüm zaman hemen biliyordum. O senenin yazında, pantolon ağarmaktan neredeyse beyaz olmaya yüz tuttuğunda, babası Yalçın’ı yanına almaya karar verdi. Bütün aile bir kaç günde toparlanıp gittiler.

Yalçın’ı seyredip belki bana bir kez daha ‘Pağdon’ der diye beklediğim o sene de böylece sona erdi. Bu konudaki umudum, Yalçın’ın pantalonu gibi yavaş yavaş ağarmış, ışıltısını kaybetmiş ve sonunda bir uçağa binip o zaman benim için akılalmaz derecede uzak bir yer olan Almanya’ya doğru yola çıkmıştı.

Bundan çok sonra ağartılarak satılan kotlar ortaya çıktığında, ilk büyük tutkumun temsili olan bu pantalonu defalarca hatırladım. O kotların hangi koşullarda beyazlatıldığını öğrendiğim zamansa, bunun acı bir şaka gibi olduğunu düşündüm. Anlaşılan artık hayatı kendimiz tecrübe etmek yerine, o tecrübenin izini satın alıyorduk. Hem de başkalarının canı pahasına. Bizimle beraber eskiyip ağaran kotları değil de, başkalarının hayatına mal olanları giyiyorduk.

Kot kumlama işçileri, daha ‘yaşanmış’ görünen pantalonlarımız olsun diye silikozis hastalığına yakalanıp birer birer öldüler. Hala ölüyorlar.

Bilerek ya da bilmeyerek onların ömrünü üstümüzde taşıdık. Ağır gelmiyor mu? Bana geliyor.

Not. Bu işçiler şimdi çocuklarının geleceğinin mücadelesini veriyorlar. Onlar için düzenlenen konsere katılarak destek verelim: Tarih: 25 Ocak 2011 Salı, Saat: 19.00, Yer: Beşiktaş Belediyesi Akatlar Mustafa Kemal Kültür Merkezi.

Comic for January 9, 2011

(author unknown) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:00:00 PST

Comic for November 17, 2010

(author unknown) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 08:40:23 PST

Shared by bosisler
Bazen böyle olabildigimi söylüyorlar...

Password Reuse

(author unknown) — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:00:00 PDT

milymiracles:bikinifetish:(via durian)

(author unknown) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:35:39 PDT

milymiracles:bikinifetish:(via durian)

Google Wants to Save Web Video With the New "WebM" Format [Google]

John Herrman — Wed, 19 May 2010 09:33:06 PDT

HTML5 video has a few hurdles to leap before it can fully replace Flash, but one looms larger than all others: Opposition to proprietary video formats, like h.264. Conveniently, Google has just open-sourced their own format, called WebM. More »

Display Myths Shattered: How Monitor Companies Cook Their Specs [Displays]

(author unknown) — Wed, 19 May 2010 05:14:18 PDT

Shared by bosisler
Ekran almadan önce okunmali...

Take everything you think you know about displays and throw it out the window. It's time for a clinic on what display specs really mean-brace yourself for the alarming truth More »

Dreaming in numbers

(author unknown) — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:38:22 PDT

Shared by armish
'Altın oran' fetişistlerine gelsin o zaman bu.

I don't dream in numbers, but if I did, I'm pretty sure it'd look a lot like this. In Nature by Numbers, a short movie by Cristobal Vila, inspired by, well, numbers and nature, Vila animates the natural existence of Fibonacci sequences, the golden ratio, and Delaunay triangulation. Watch it. Even if you don't know what those three things are, the video will rock your socks off.

Don't forget to catch shots from the process too:

[via infosthetics]

Kaya Oğuz: İstediğin Kadar Öde

(author unknown) — Mon, 10 May 2010 22:23:26 PDT

Az önce RSS’lerde çıkan habere tıkladığımda olayı tam kavrayamamıştım, ama durum şöyle: http://www.wolfire.com/humble adresine gidiyorsunuz: The Humble Indie Bundle sayfası. Orada beş tane indie oyun var; World of Goo herhalde en ünlüsü ama, askere gitmeden önce Penumbra Overture’ün demosunu oynamıştım ve çok güzel duruyordu. Geçenlerde bir yerlerde oyunu 5 liraya satıyorlardı, acaba ID’nin Quake/Doom serisi gibi, Linux çalıştırılabilir dosyasını, oyunun Windows sürümü olursa indirmeye izin verirler mi diye merak ederek aldım. Ne yazık ki öyle bir şansım yokmuş. Ama iki hafta sonra karşıma bu şans çıktı. Diğer üç oyun, Aquaria, Lugaru HD ve Gish, daha önce duymadığım oyunlar. Ama World of Goo ve Penumbra merak ettiğim oyunlar olduğu için okumaya devam ettim.

Olay basit, istediğiniz kadar bir bağış yapıyorsunuz, bütün bu beş oyunun Windows, Mac ve Linux sürümlerini indirebileceğiniz bağlantılar e-postanıza geliyor. Ortalamalara bakarsanız, genelde ödenen miktar 8,83$ civarındayken, Linux kullanıcıları ortalama 14$ ödemişler. Toplanan para 848.164$. Bu para hayır kurumları ve geliştiriciler arasında eşit olarak bölüştürülüyor. Aracı bir kurum yok, para doğrudan onlara gidiyor.

Bağışınızdan sonra bir oyun daha geliyor: Samorost 2. Aralarında bir de Machinarium olsaydı keşke demedim değil, bakalım belki o da katılır.

İyi oyunlar, iyi eğlenceler!

Found Footage: Flight of the Bumblebee in concert on an iPad

David Winograd — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:00:00 PDT

Filed under: Found Footage

Chinese pianist Lang Lang headlined a concert at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall on April 19th. For the first of three encores, he played The Flight of the Bumblebee on an iPad. To accomplish this, he used the Magic Piano iPad app. This is just one example of how amazing apps can allow people to do amazing things, and the party has just started.

[To clarify, the Magic Piano app does do a lot of the work in playing a piece like that; it drops down indicators for the correct notes, so the pianist has to get 'pretty close' and have the rhythm correct. Still impressive. -Ed.]

[via 9to5Mac]

TUAW Found Footage: Flight of the Bumblebee in concert on an iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lonely Planet giving away free iPhone guides in honor of Eyjafjallajökull messing with Europe

Michael Grothaus — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:00:00 PDT

Filed under: App Store

Did Eyjafjallajökull mess your week up? The answer is probably "no" if you're asking who Eyjafjallajökull is. For those of us who did have our week interrupted by that big exploding volcano in Iceland, Lonely Planet is offering thirteen of its City Guides for free in the App Store (and okay, they're free to all, no proof of volcano-interruption required).

The aptly-named "Volcano Relief Sale" is being held in hopes of helping travelers stuck in unfamiliar places find "access to practical information as well as suggestions on what to do whilst stranded," according to Tom Hall, Lonely Planet Travel Editor. "That's why we're giving away iPhone city guides to major affected destinations."

Those destinations include: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Istanbul, London, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna.

I've been to all but two of those destinations, and if you're stuck in any of them, you really should be thanking Eyjafjallajökull (and now, Lonely Planet). The thirteen City Guides are normally priced between $10 and $15, so this is quite a bargain. But act fast, the City Guides will only be available for free until April 22 -- hopefully a date which will also see many more planes back in the air.

[via Macworld]
[Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video]

TUAW Lonely Planet giving away free iPhone guides in honor of Eyjafjallajökull messing with Europe originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today's two-second laugh: iPad printing, solved

Michael Grothaus — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:30:00 PDT

Filed under: iPad

Take one iPad with any application running (and a clear-as-day multitouch screen), add one multi-function printer with an optical scanner, and boom, you've solved the problem of printing from iPad. Who needs a firmware update when you've got a little ingenuity?

Points to the clever folk at Form for coming up with this.

[via Engadget]

TUAW Today's two-second laugh: iPad printing, solved originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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03/15/10 PHD comic: 'Contes de la route: Equal Opportunity'

(author unknown) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:51:02 PDT

Shared by bosisler
Son Kareye Dikkat...

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Contes de la route: Equal Opportunity" - originally published 3/15/2010 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

03/15/10 PHD comic: 'Contes de la route: Equal Opportunity'

(author unknown) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:00:15 PDT

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Contes de la route: Equal Opportunity" - originally published 3/15/2010 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Collatz Conjecture

(author unknown) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:00:00 PST

Devotion to Duty

(author unknown) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:00:00 PST

Spirit

(author unknown) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:00:00 PST