Francis's News Feeds

This combines together on one page various news websites and diaries which I like to read.
Also: BBC In Pictures | mySociety panopticon | mySociety Google reader | Francis is (my own blog)

November 22, 2008

The story of our times - time to abolish accounting as we know it | by Sigurd Rinde | 22 November 2008, 01:23 AM

(Image from idashboard.com)

Obviously the lag is bad for your driving prowess, but luckily you're allowed to roll down the window so you can stick your head out every now and then and get a fleeting glimpse of what's happening [5]. Coming back to the "dashboard" again you're often able to correlate that with what you saw. The best drivers are often the ones that stick their heads out frequently.

Obviously the speed of your vehicle is seriously hampered by this and an Elk jumping out of the woods would often hit your windscreen in full force, an occurrence often termed a "Black Swan" these days despite the fact that Elks do this all the time. 

But you have masters, the owners of the truck [6], and they pay you well for speed and volume of goods delivered. This will inevitably lead to you convincing the masters that they should give you funds to buy a bigger van [7], preferably with a bigger engine and more refined dashboards to give at least an illusion of control. And the masters often comply while your driving expertise increases over time.

With speed and size Elks are flattened and other little wild animal corpses simply get stuck in the grille. But the size and speed increase makes sudden bends in the road harder to handle, although as long as the road is straight and the maps are good, it works. 

Some drivers are in the business of fuel delivery [8], and their trucks used to be small and nimble driving at low speeds where the driver would have his head out the window all the time [9]. In those days the dashboard was not electronic, it was paper-based [10] and delivered by hand, so keeping the head in the wind was a must.

But with new dashboard technology [11] the fuel trucks grew in size to huge juggernauts, the speed increased to warp speed [12] - and for awhile the masters were happy while the driver's [13] bonus made them very rich men (mostly men I'm afraid, manly business such truck-driving).

The inspectors being soon overwhelmed, cozied up to the masters and the drivers crossing their fingers and hoping the maps where good. The traffic cops [14] and some traffic analysts [15] on the other hands saw a different world out there, almost blown off the road when the juggernauts passed at warp speed. Some started complaining, but as things stood, few legislators [16] were keen to do much as the speed and volume of fuel distributed was overwhelming and all were happy and able to live in big mansions and drive big trucks themselves. And BTW, the police chiefs and legislators saw even less of the reality than the drivers or the traffic cops.

Until some mid autumn day when the first truck hit a tree [17] and went up in flames, then another were saved in the nick of time [18], and another [19] and soon all the fuel trucks went into a crawl. The other trucks, delivering normal goods soon realised that they too had to slam on the brakes to avoid the suddenly obvious dangers out there, then move slowly forward to save fuel that instantly increased in price [20].

The traffic cops blew their whistles, and some entered some of the biggest trucks and took over the steering wheels as the drivers had been reduced from cocky one-hand-on-the-wheel road cowboys to shaking bundles of nerves. Even a new and unblemished police chief [21] was called in, increasing hopes for a solution. We have yet to see if he'll be radical enough, perhaps we'll only see more traffic cops?

 

And that's where we are today. And now we're trying to find out what went wrong and what to do.

Would lower speed and smaller trucks been better? Of course. Would more traffic cops out there been helpful? To a certain degree, but only very limited unless they took over the wheels which might have reduced the interest of the masters to put up money for the bigger trucks.

Nope, the answer then as today can be found in the driver's (and everybody else's) ability to see reality as it is. The dashboard reporting system that was developed for paper based technology worked adequately at low speed, with small trucks with drivers hanging out the windows. But not anymore if we want to grow the economy.

What we need is a transparent windscreen where the driver can see reality without a filter. And we need it now.

So forget the discussion about "more traffic cops" or more "traffic rules" or even smaller trucks at lower speeds. The discussion must focus on the way the drivers are given access to reality.

The indirect representation of reality by proxy, the transactions, in today's reporting and management systems has to go, it must be replaced with a representation of reality directly.

[1] Accounting rules, GAAP, IFRS

[2] Management systems, accounting

[3] Accounting departments

[4] CPA

[5] Visit customers, people at the front lines and in the plants

[6] Shareholders

[7] Capital increase, IPO

[8] Financial institutions

[9] Your local bank that knew all the townspeople

[10] Good old bound ledgers

[11] Enterprise software

[12] Derivatives and other creative financial instruments

[13] Wall Street workers

[14] SEC et al.

[15] Analysts (duh)

[16] Washington, Brussels, Westminster etc. workers

[17] Lehman Brothers

[18] AIG

[19] Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

[20] TED Spread

[21] Barack Obama

November 21, 2008

Copernicus: Still Dead | by Cosmic Variance | 21 November 2008, 11:27 PM

It seems that archeologists have definitively identified the remains of Copernicus, using a combination of forensic reconstruction and DNA matching. Historians were pretty sure that he was buried in a particular church, but weren’t quite sure where within it the grave actually was. They found a likely set of bones a few years back, and a reconstruction of the face from the skull sure looked an awful lot like Copernicus. (It also happened to look an awful lot like James Cromwell, the actor who played Farmer Hoggett in Babe, but he’s still alive).

While exercises like this are of historical interest, to me they’ve always raised the question as to when a set of remains becomes fair game for mucking about. If you were to dig up poor great aunt Edna, extract her skull, and sent it off to a lab in Sweden, you might be looked upon as being disrespectful or worse. But, digging about to find the remains of Copernicus is apparently completely OK, and was actually ordered by the local Catholic bishop. So when does this happen? Is there something like the copyright system where the right to be outraged by disturbance of a grave expires after a certain number of years? Is it more like radioactivity of the soul, where the connection to something sacred fades with an e-folding time?

It’s certainly a culturally loaded question as well. Locally, a set of 9000 year old remains found in the Pacific Northwest were the subject of dispute. Local tribes claimed Kennewick Man as one of their ancestors, and requested that the remains be given back to the Umatilla tribe for reburial. Scientists, on the other hand, wanted to continue to study the remains, and argued that testing showed that the skeleton was unlikely to have actually been a member of one of the tribes. There are on-going law suits to repatriate native american skeletons to their tribes. So obviously different cultures have different standards for when it’s acceptable to study their dead, and Copernicus lost out.

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India: Reason for a strike | by Global Voices (India) | 21 November 2008, 09:12 PM

Hartal, a blog against the culture of frequent strikes in India shows that even the shifting of a bus terminal to a new wider location in a municipality in Kerala can be a reason to stall an entire district with a day long strike.

Police spy on peaceful climate activist while dangerous warming goes unarrested | by Climate Progress | 21 November 2008, 08:31 PM

My very peaceful friend Mike Tidwell has a long post at Grist on how the Maryland State police shamefully spied on him. It updates the story I reported on earlier, “Maryland climate campaigners on terrorist list.”

Note to the police, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and anyone else watching and listening — the threat to the health and well-being — the security — of Americans isn’t from those peacefully protesting climate inaction. It’s from the climate inaction, as even our intelligence community understands (see “The moving Fingar writes: Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S“).

As our future Commander in Chief has said: “The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.“

Contributions from readers quadruple! (from 1% to 4%) | by Media Standards Trust | 21 November 2008, 08:00 PM

New research from Cardiff will show that 4% of news website readers contribute online - i.e. leave comments, keep blogs, send in photos etc. - according to an academic at Wednesday's journalism and democracy conference at the British Academy (whose name I did not catch - if the person who said it reads this please let me know). Though this was prefaced - by the Cardiff academic who made the

Cuba: Love and Marriage | by Global Voices (Cuba) | 21 November 2008, 07:58 PM

“With the love nest located in the parents’ house and with a salary that’s not enough to buy any durable or transferable goods, the signed paper and legal stamp that attest to the marriage are of little importance”: Generation Y says that Cubans are experiencing “a loss of the sense of the sanctity of marriage.”

Cuba: “Black Spring” Prisoners | by Global Voices (Cuba) | 21 November 2008, 07:31 PM

Cuban diaspora blogger Uncommon Sense focuses the spotlight on two of the “Black Spring” political prisoners, here and here.

Cascade Climate Network, Reenergize the Northwest summit | by It's Getting Hot in Here | 21 November 2008, 07:21 PM

Here’s a wonderful recount of the rockin’ Reenergize the Northwest summit last weekend in Seattle, by one of our… shall we say… “intergenerational allies,” Jeff Bissonnette of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board.  Jeff joined us at the summit and was an amazing resource on the ins and outs of the Oregon legislative arena. He was clearly impressed by the attendees of the summit, which was organized by the Cascade Climate Network and sponsored by the Sierra Student Coalition and the Sierra Club.  Jeff had this to say…

“Yo! What up?”

“Dude, I am so totally stoked about the smokin’ chance we have to make a mega-difference on GHG.”

“Yeah, we need to be completely rockin’ it by the time the Lege fires up in January.”

“No doubt.”

Translation:

“Hello there! How are you doing?”

“I must say, I am very excited about the excellent possibilities we have before us to have a major impact on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.”

“You are correct. We have a lot of work to do so that we’re ready to be involved when the 2009 session of the Legislature gets underway in January.”

“Of that you can be sure.”

Last weekend, CUB Organizing Director Jeff Bissonnette traveled to Seattle to take part in “Re-energizing the NW,” a climate change and clean energy organizing conference coordinated by the Sierra Student Coalition and the Cascade Climate Network. About 100 students, primarily from Oregon and Washington, gathered near the campus of the University of Washington to literally figure out how to save the planet by effectively addressing climate change.

Over the course of two days, enthusiasm and energy combined with in-depth political analysis, savvy strategizing and hard-core training. While the lingo may not have been the norm at an international climate conference in some world capitols, there was no mistaking the purpose and the drive these student activists bring to the issue of addressing climate change. From organizing on campus to figuring out the lay of the land in state legislatures to mapping out a national drive to impact Congress, there’s no question: these folks mean business. After all, it’s their generation that will begin to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change if we don’t do something about it now.

In workshops from the mundane but important (How to Plan a Campaign; How to Fundraise) to the visionary and progressive (Sustainable Food and Re-localization; Environmental Justice; How to Achieve a Fossil-Fuel Free Northwest), and with an eye to their immediate futures (How to Make a Career Out of Social Change), these climateers tackled issues that would intimidate activists twice their age. And as has been true with college students through the years, late-night conversations went on into the wee hours of the morning. Except these conversations were dominated by details of the physics of fuel cells and financing mechanisms to support large scale energy efficiency projects.

As a former student activist himself not all that long ago (OK, maybe longer ago than he cares to admit), Jeff recognized a lot of the nuts-and-bolts of the conference. However, new to the student organizing mix were laptops, wi-fi, text messages and Blackberries (overheard: “Oh no, I don’t have Flash on this computer to play the video for my presentation.” “No problem, download it straight from YouTube. There might be some buffering issues but it’ll be fine.”) It was a far cry from Jeff’s days as a student when high tech was an automatic Selectric typewriter with self-correction.

And these students know how to use the tools available to them. Websites, e-mails, meet-ups, mash-ups, MySpace and Facebook provide the backbone of the interactive connectivity that most of these student activists have grown up with. The technology and their mad skillz have developed in parallel so that they are now ready to utilize that technology to organize their peers to play a key role in solving the most challenging issue to confront society.

Some of the activists had just voted for the first time this month. Some just got out of school. But they are assuming leadership roles in their growing movement. No one “in charge” at the summit was older than their mid-20s. But make no mistake, they facilitated the workshops and discussions like pros. They intend to be taken seriously and rightly so. They’ve laid out an ambitious agenda and they’re working hard to increase their ranks. They’ve committed to support the Climate and Clean Energy Rally, sponsored by the Oregon Conservation Network at the start of the Oregon legislative session in support of the Priorities for a Healthy Oregon.

On a national level, they are promoting a National Teach-In on February 5 to urge the new administration and Congress to take decisive action on climate change. They are pushing to bring 10,000-15,000 students to Washington, DC for Powershift 2009 in late February/early March to advocate for effective greenhouse gas reductions. They are organizing town halls nationwide on April 18th through Focus the Nation to raise public awareness about climate change. And they’re not forgetting the details that will enable them to help pass effective climate policies, not just through Congress but through their state legislatures and campus administrations as well. Click on some of those links and see how you can plug in.

Jeff was honored to be asked to participate in the conference as an informational resource person. It was clear to him that the same energy that students brought to the table to sustain the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the early days of the environmental movement is alive and well and ready to take its place as a vital part of a larger coalition addressing climate change. “One thing we can be pretty sure of,” he said. “The future will be in good hands.”

Word.

Originally posted at the Citizens Utility Board of Oregon.

Posted in global warming      

Friday Free Fiction for 21st November | by Futurismic | 21 November 2008, 07:08 PM

Here’s a suggestion: don’t read the news. It’ll only make you miserable, and there’s no point wasting emotional energy worrying about stuff that’s way beyond your control.

So why not read some free science fiction instead, eh? That’ll keep you distracted at no cost whatsoever! Get clicking…

***

Manybooks has an old-school bit of satire in the form of “The Last American: A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy” by J A Mitchell

***

At Apex Online:

• “Under the Dryer” by Fran Friel
• “A Place of Snow Angels” by Matt Wallace
• “Captive Girl” by Jennifer Pelland
• “Something Wet” by James F Reilly

***

If you’re not yet experiencing a severe case of undead ennui, John Joseph Adams has unleashed some more free stories from his zombie anthology The Living Dead:

• “In Beauty, Like the Night” by Norman Partridge
• “Malthusian’s Zombie” by Jeffrey Ford
• “Sparks Fly Upward” by Lisa Morton
• “Followed” by Will McIntosh
• “Passion Play” by Nancy Holder

***

At Subterranean Online:

Noted Steampunk aviatrix Cherie Priest debuts what she calls The Clockwork Century (”Combat dirigibles skulk across the sky and armored vehicles crawl along the land. Military scientists twist the laws of man and nature, and barter their souls for weapons powered by light, fire, and steam.”) in the novelette, “Tanglefoot”, the story of a gentle, tragic mad scientist and his boy assistant.

***

Here’s a new free fiction start-up (downloadable PDF rather than in-browser HTML), Arkham Tales:

Presenting Issue #1 of Arkham Tales! 100 pages of the best weird fiction on the market right now, and all free for your reading pleasure!

This issue bears cover artwork by Ivan Green, and contains fiction by Mike W. Barr, Scott Bastedo, Steve Calvert, Robert Masterson, Benjamin W. Olson, Derek Rutherford, Jenny Schwartz, and Jeffery Scott Sims.

***

Via Gwyneth Jones:

And now, six weeks before publication, & to celebrate the first sighting of a copy of the printed ARC on ebay, here’s Part 1 of [Jones's forthcoming novel] Spirit set free again.

***

Via Gareth L Powell, and many others:

The November issue of Concept Sci-Fi is now available to download as a free pdf file.

***

Via John Jarrold:

Saxon Bullock has put the prologue and opening chapter of his wonderful SF novel, The Hypernova Gambit, up on his website.

Best. Author name. EVAR.

***

Via The Scalzi:

The fabulous Sarah Zettel writes to inform me of BookViewCafe.com, a collaborative site filled with lots of fiction and other cool stuff, from a whole bunch of famous/interesting writers including Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre and Anne Harris…

And Futurismic regular Nancy Jane Moore is involved on the organisational side as well, which is a fine thing. BVC has been added to the sidebar of justice, so go take a look.

***

Via Paul McAuley:

I recently blogged a six-part illustrated short story, “Edna Sharrow”, here. I’ve now archived the whole story on the web site, under a Creative Commons license… go straight to the first part. Enjoy!

***

Via Cheryl Morgan:

Kelley Eskridge has posted the full text of her novella, “Dangerous Space”, on her blog. This is one of her stories about Mars, a character whose gender is never specified. I am in awe of how Kelley manages this. It is also a really good story.

***

Here’s a couple of things we’d have missed, but for the ceaseless vigilance and generosity of the gang at SF Signal:

• The latest edition of Antipodean SF features fiction by Mark Farrugia, Kurt Kurchmeier, Jillian Moffatt, Richard Ridyard, Shaun A Saunders, Greg Wickenhofer, John Craig, PS Cottier, Adrian Gibb, and James C Clar.
• A now-complete serialised novella from Alan Baxter - A ‘Verse Full of Scum.

***

As mentioned earlier in the week, Filipino genre fiction mavens Charles Tan and Mia Tijam have co-edited an entire virtual anthology of speculative fiction written in English by Filipino writers - a great way to expose new writers to an otherwise hard-to-access market.

***

Finally, here’s a smattering of Friday Flash Fiction for you: Sarah Ellender displays her quintessential Britishness with “Tea and Vigilance“, while Gareth D Jones considers “The Blue Men”

***

That’s all, folks! Don’t forget to hit us up with your plugs, tip-offs and shout-outs. In the meantime, have the best weekend you can.

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

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Jesse Jenkins | by It's Getting Hot in Here | 21 November 2008, 06:54 PM

More on the EU ETS price and auction format later in the article:

“The price of emission allowances have plunged by nearly 30% since September to around €16.50, partly because there are fears that the auction will flood the market and partly because a recession will cut industrial output and reduce pollution worldwide.

The ETS scheme implements an overall cap on the amount of emissions countries can produce, allocates carbon allowances to companies and then allows them to buy or sell the permits to cover shortfalls or profit from cutting their emissions.

Phase II of the scheme, which covers energy generators and heavy industry and aims to cut emissions by encouraging the market to produce carbon reductions at least cost, allows for up to 10% of permits to be auctioned.

In the UK, 7%, or 85 million, permits are being auctioned over five years of the scheme to 2012. The main target of the auction is energy companies which have lost 30% of their free allowances.”

Sorting 1PB with MapReduce | by Official Google Blog | 21 November 2008, 04:57 PM

At Google we are fanatical about organizing the world's information. As a result, we spend a lot of time finding better ways to sort information using MapReduce, a key component of our software infrastructure that allows us to run multiple processes simultaneously. MapReduce is a perfect solution for many of the computations we run daily, due in large part to its simplicity, applicability to a wide range of real-world computing tasks, and natural translation to highly scalable distributed implementations that harness the power of thousands of computers.

In our sorting experiments we have followed the rules of a standard terabyte (TB) sort benchmark. Standardized experiments help us understand and compare the benefits of various technologies and also add a competitive spirit. You can think of it as an Olympic event for computations. By pushing the boundaries of these types of programs, we learn about the limitations of current technologies as well as the lessons useful in designing next generation computing platforms. This, in turn, should help everyone have faster access to higher-quality information.

We are excited to announce we were able to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record is 209 seconds on 910 computers.

Sometimes you need to sort more than a terabyte, so we were curious to find out what happens when you sort more and gave one petabyte (PB) a try. One petabyte is a thousand terabytes, or, to put this amount in perspective, it is 12 times the amount of archived web data in the U.S. Library of Congress as of May 2008. In comparison, consider that the aggregate size of data processed by all instances of MapReduce at Google was on average 20PB per day in January 2008.

It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers. We're not aware of any other sorting experiment at this scale and are obviously very excited to be able to process so much data so quickly.

An interesting question came up while running experiments at such a scale: Where do you put 1PB of sorted data? We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks). To make sure we kept our sorted petabyte safe, we asked the Google File System to write three copies of each file to three different disks.

Significantly improved handling of the so-called "stragglers" (parts of computation that run slower than expected) was a key software technique that helped sort 1PB. And of course, there are many other factors that contributed to the result. We'll be discussing all of this and more in an upcoming publication. And you can also check out the video from our recent Technology RoundTable Series.

Posted by Grzegorz Czajkowski, Systems Infrastructure Team

Barbican Update | by BLDGBLOD | 21 November 2008, 04:14 PM

[Image: From Code 46, courtesy of United Artists (via)].

Next week's event at the Barbican just got even better, with the addition of Mark Tildesley, production designer for Code 46, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, The Constant Gardener, 24 Hour Party People, Millions, and many others, including Richard Curtis's forthcoming film The Boat That Rocked.
I'll be interviewing director Michael Winterbottom and Mark Tildesley both after a screening of their film Code 46. The event has already sold-out, but if you've got your ticket I hope you're in for a great conversation! For those of you who can't make it, the event will be videotaped and I should be able to host that on BLDGBLOG within a few weeks.
Also, if you heard about the event here, come up and say hello – I'd love to see who's reading the site in London these days.

More information: Code 46.

Solar baseload outshines ‘clean coal’ — and it always will | by Climate Progress | 21 November 2008, 03:50 PM

Concentrated solar thermal power — aka solar baseload — remains hot. The Daily Climate has a nice update:

All told some 60 plants are either under construction or under contract worldwide — with most in either Spain or the United States — for a total capacity just north of 5,700 megawatts

Here is the world list of projects. Here is the U.S. list.

I remain as convinced as ever that solar baseload could well be “The technology that will save humanity,” in large part because it is highly scalable, eventually able to achieve 50 to 100 gigawatts a year growth or more.

Indeed, given the immense challenges that coal with CCS faces (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“), I’m still happy, indeed eager, to bet that concentrated solar thermal will continue delivering more power every year this century than so-called “clean coal” — and at a far lower cost per kilowatt-hour.

Solar baseload’s ultimate “trump card” is, of course, storage:

(more…)

Taxes to fall and then rise | by Robert Peston (BBC business editor) | 21 November 2008, 03:47 PM

On Monday, the chancellor will admit, by implication, that the government's industrial policy of the past decade has been something of a disaster.

Actually to call it an industrial policy is a bit misleading - but what I mean is the Treasury's celebration over many years of the UK's growing economic dependence on the City of London and financial services.

The City contributed around a third of our economic growth in the recent past and about 10% of total output.

It also generated a huge slug, directly and indirectly, of the tax revenues that flowed into the Exchequer.

So here's part of the horrible news we'll get on Monday in the pre-Budget report.

The slump in the City has knocked around £40bn - yes £40bn! - from annual tax revenues.

That's made up of lower corporation tax (our banks and other financial services provided about £10bn of this), lower income tax (those controversial fat City bonuses, now gone, yielded a fair chunk of tax), and lower stamp duty (on share trading and property deals).

And much of that tax revenue has probably gone forever, or at least for as long as the time horizon of most sensible forecasts (viz, up to five years).

How so?

Well, quite apart from the mess our banks are in, which has sent them tumbling into losses (no good for the tax man), the City in general is being forced by regulators to become a place where fewer risks are taken.

Such was the unambiguous message of last weekend's statement by the leaders of the G20 leading and most dynamic economies.

You may think it's a good thing that there'll be fewer risky deals by banks, hedge funds, private equity firms and so on.

But fewer risky deals, less risky lending, also means much smaller banks and City firms, much less employment, much smaller revenues, and much diminished tax payments.

So part of the hole in the government's revenues to be unveiled after the weekend should be seen as permanent.

Which is why the chancellor will have to announce that taxes are going to rise at a specified date in the future, to fill the structural hole in the public finances.

To be clear, I am not talking about immediate tax rises.

Quite the reverse.

I am certain that on Monday the chancellor will also announce a significant package of measures to stimulate the economy.

These will include tax cuts and spending increases funded by extra borrowing, equivalent perhaps to as much as 2% of GDP.

And the bulk of the tax cuts will be directed at those on lowest incomes, partly because they have the highest propensity to spend - for the good of the economy - and also for reasons of social justice.

Alistair Darling will describe such a giveaway as vital to lessen the sharp and painful economic contraction we're experiencing.

But he will also announce deferred tax rises and deferred cuts in public spending - to kick in when the economy has recovered a bit.

When would that be? Maybe 2010, maybe 2011.
If he fails to announce such debt-reduction measures, there could be very strong downward pressure on sterling and a corresponding damaging rise in the cost for the government of borrowing.

And, to be clear, the incremental sums he'll announce he has to borrow over the next couple of years will be colossal - equivalent to at least 8% of GDP, possibly more, or well over £110bn per annum.

You have to go back to at least the 1970's for a time when public borrowing was spiralling up at such an alarming rate.

Such a rise in public borrowing would be unsustainable.

Which is why, to repeat, there will have to be deferred tax rises and deferred public spending reductions inked into the public accounts and announced by the chancellor.

All of that is inevitable.

So which taxes will rise?

Well my prediction is VAT.

For the sake of transparency I should say that I don't know that there will be a VAT rise.

But a deferred increase from 17.5% to 22.5% in the VAT rate would raise around £20bn.

And it's one of the few future tax rises which might actually stimulate a bit of increased economic activity ahead of its implementation, rather than encouraging us to save

To use the economic cliche of the moment, it would give us all quite a "nudge" to spend now, before the swingeing increase in VAT would kick in.

Video Blog | by It's Getting Hot in Here | 21 November 2008, 03:28 PM

Please add comments and questions so we can better adjust the content/flow of the vlog.

Thanks

Posted in Act Locally, Campuses, Climate Justice, Dirty Energy, global warming, Government, Political Participation, Politics, United States, Youth Leaders      

The Worst Noel: Celebrating Recession | by Only In It For The Gold | 21 November 2008, 03:08 PM

One thing that's always disappointed me about the growth imperative is how the Christmas season is described based on gross sales. OK, that's sad enough in itself but consider that a season is described as "disappointing" if it grows less than the average growth rate. As far as I know, none of the recent "disappointing" Christmases has actually amounted to a decrease in economic activity over the previous year. As far as I know, there has been positive growth in US Christmastime sales for as long as the growth imperative has been in place.

Maybe I will be the first to say this publicly, but probably this Christmas will be different.

Because the growth imperative flies in the face of reality, the time will come when the "disappointing" Christmas will actually amount to a retreat. Likely we are entering that time at this very moment. It will be interesting to see badly we cope; how badly we are dependent on our growth addiction. Oil addiction is just a symptom; we have blundered into a situation where the unsustainable is a core of our social organization.

Maybe the stupidity of the financial sector has done us a service by hastening the day of reckoning. We need to cope with sustainability. This is not that big a deal for most individuals (I think we'll still have individual competition and individual wealth) but its a radical change for the society as a whole.

Will anybody be talking about this if the first "terrible" Christmas is upon us?

Advance warning of roadworks long past, 21st November | by FixMyStreet, new reports in Cambridge | 21 November 2008, 02:26 PM

Outside the Methodist Church on Castle Street, Cambridge, there's a sign giving "advance warning" of the closure of Thompsons Lane between October 2007 and February 2008. It should be removed.

Our international approach to search | by Official Google Blog | 21 November 2008, 02:15 PM

In previous posts in this series, you have read about the challenges of building a world-class search engine. Our goal is to make Google’s search be relevant to all people, regardless of their language or country. As my colleague Amit Singhal described, we use statistical data as the basis for making sweeping algorithmic changes. Many of these changes can be rolled out across all languages we support, but in some cases the unique characteristics of each language require some algorithmic considerations and tuning. And to make things really interesting, there are cases where the same language is different across countries. Obvious examples are "color" in the U.S. vs. "colour" in the U.K., or "camião" in Portugal vs. "caminhão" in Brazil.

My name is Daphne Dembo, and my focus is improving Google's international search. This is a tough challenge, since Google search is used in many countries and languages where our engineers have little personal knowledge. Initially, the international search improvements were done by Search Quality engineers who were passionate about their languages and countries: Lina from Sweden improved our parsing of compound words in German and Swedish; Dimitra from Greece introduced diacritical support; Ishai from Israel worked on transliteration corrections for Hebrew and Arabic; Trystan from Australia created methods for identifying local search results and ranking them together with foreign ones from the same language; Alex, a bilingual Ukrainian and Russian, introduced morphological understanding of these languages. As the importance of our international search grew, we solicited help from Googlers in all our offices. Finally, we are leveraging an international network of search specialists who help us understand search within the unique combination of their language and country.

Our first step in providing search support for a language is to train our language model on a large collection of documents in that language. This ensures that our language model is more precise and comprehensive — for example, it incorporates names, idioms, colloquial usage, and newly coined words not often found in static dictionaries. For instance, we recently started identifying Swahili, and used pages such as this one for the Parliament of Tanzania to train our system with the language's nuances. Having a trained language model helps to categorize documents during crawling and indexing of the web and to parse the user's query. Once this stage was complete, we launched Swahili search in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, enabling local searches for the "Dar es Salaam stock exchange" [Soko la hisa dar es salaam], and "cure for Malaria" [Tiba ya malaria]. (As always, we are using square brackets to denote a search query. For example, you can search for "soccer" in Hamburg, Germany by clicking on [fußball in hamburg]).

We learn some things from our users, so as people start using our search engine, we can improve the way we rank in that language. Here are few examples:

• Spell corrections: We recently launched spell corrections in Estonian. If your Estonian is rusty, and you don't remember how to spell "smoke detector," we can suggest a spell correction for [suitsuantur], leading to better search results.
• Diacritical marks: Many languages have diacritical marks, which alter pronunciation. Our algorithms are built to support them, and even help users who mis-type or completely ignore them. For example, if you're a resident of Quebec, Canada and would like to know the weather forecast in Quebec City, we'll serve good results whether you type with diacritical signs [Météo à Québec] or without [meteo quebec]. Czech users can read the same excellent results for a popular kids' cartoon by searching for [krtecek] and [krteček]. On the other hand, sometimes diacriticals change the meaning of the word and we have to use them correctly. For example, in Thai, [ข้าว] is "rice," with completely different results than [ข่าว], which is "news"; or in Slovakia, results for "child" [dieťa] are different than results for "diet" [diéta].
• Synonyms: A general case of diacritical support is the handling of synonyms in different languages. Korean searches showed that "samsung" can be viewed as a synonym of "삼성", so that when users search for [samsung], they find results which have the company's name in Korean.
• Compounding: Some languages allow compounding, which is the formation of new words by combining together existing words. You can see a nice example in Swedish, where we return documents about a Swedish credit card for both compounded [Visakort] and non-compounded [visa kort] queries.
• Stemming: Google has developed morphological models that can receive compound words as queries, and return pages which contain their stem, possibly as part of a different compound. For example, when searching for cars in Saudi Arabia, you can search for [سيارة] and [سيارات] because both are variants of the same stem, and both return many common results. A Polish user can search for "movie" [film], and get back results that contain other variants of the stem, such as "filmów," "filmu," "filmie," "filmy." A user from Belarus will find results for all word forms of the capital, Minsk [Мінск]: "Мінску," "Мінска," "Мінскага."

New Energy Economy: Part 3, The Next Transition Team | by Climate Progress | 21 November 2008, 02:04 PM

Barack Obama has created a top-notch team to guide his transition into the White House (see “Obama fills key posts on environment, energy teams“). Next, he should create a team to guide America’s transition to a new energy economy.

I’m not talking about the prestigious group of economic advisors Obama already has assembled to help him identify solutions to the economic meltdown. I’m talking about a team that includes experts in sustainable energy technologies, climate mitigation and adaptation, capital investment, state and local government, business, industry and labor.

Their job should be to fashion a deliberate, coherent and intelligent plan to move as rapidly and painlessly as possible from the old carbon-based economy to a brand new and long-overdue economic order powered by sustainable resources, dedicated to natural resource stewardship and striving to achieve a near-zero carbon society.

We have no such plan now. Instead, as I pointed out in Part 2 in this series, America’s de facto energy policy is a hodgepodge of self-defeating laws, programs and subsidies. Congress must make a critical decision: We either have to phase out fossil fuels or abandon any pretense that we care about climate change, despite its profound implications for public health, national security, peace and economic stability.

If we decide we really care, we need a transition plan for the economy — not just a stimulus package, but a program that focuses on long-term investment in a sustainable nation. What might such a program be like? Here’s one scenario:

(more…)

Blogging And Community IS ‘Real’ Work | by Social Networking Watch | 21 November 2008, 02:00 PM

Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, says blogging is the "realest" work he does.

He says: "Do You Ever Do Any Real Work? That's a question I used to get all of the time in the early days of this blog. I don't get it so much anymore. Because slowly but surely people are wising up to the fact that blogging is work and it's a very valuable use of my time… the time and energy I've put into this blog for the past five years has built a unique and very sophisticated audience. You are connectors and hubs of influence."

Then he adds: "But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference. And that's one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large."

I share Fred's sentiments. And as a marketer, I thank him and others for leading with progressive thinking on how businesses and individuals must interact and manage relationships in this age of open connections and online reputation. This is new territory, and he is pioneering by example.

And what about you? Similarly, you, too, are connectors and hubs of influence. Many of you also are my virtual and physical neighbors, friends, colleagues and, often, harsh critics. You share your ideas, build on mine and help shape context in our industry and beyond. You're an important presence in my professional and personal life, which, for better or worse, blurs more everyday. You are why I keep writing, commenting, discussing and participating — here in this column, on my personal blog, professional online communities and beyond.

For those gifts, I thank you. I hope my attempt to participate delivers similar value in return. And I'm honored by any feedback you have to help me improve.

(Disclosure: It also happened to be Fred's blogging that brought me together with him, and then brought me together with his early-stage portfolio company, Clickable.)

Open Everything Berlin, Saturday 6th December 2008 | by Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog | 21 November 2008, 01:29 PM

After the success of Open Everything London a few weeks ago, we’re now involved in putting on Open Everything Berlin, which will take place in early December. It will be a great opportunity to meet people interested in open knowledge, open source software, and so on. Details are as follows:

• When: Saturday 6th December 2008
• Where: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin-Mitte (map)
• Programme: http://openeverything.mixxt.de/networks/wiki/index.Programm
• Registration: Attendance is free! Sign up on the mixxt network!

The event will start with a handover from Open Everything Hong Kong and finish with a handover to Open Everything Madison - both of which will also take place on the 6th.

In addition to talks, presentations and discussions, the event will feature the launch of Ivo Gormley’s Us Now, a Creative Commons licensed documentary about new forms of collaboration produced in association with the RSA:

Everywhere you look, groups of people are using the internet to come together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action” Clay Shirky. For the first time in history, we have the tools that truly amplify group effort and can change politics, business and society. Us Now follows the stories of the people that are redefining what is an institution; it plots the fate of a football club owned and run by its fans, a bank in which everyone is the manager, a global network whose members share their homes with strangers and asks politicians and thinkers such as George Osbourne, Ed Milliband, Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky; what all this means for society.

There’s also a (relatively) new ok-berlin mailing list. If you’re around Berlin and you’d like to stay in touch with other people interested in open stuff - we hope you’ll join!

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The Dark: "The A's To Our Q's" | by Wooster Collective | 21 November 2008, 01:02 PM

Age: old enough to know better but still young enough to try it.
Hometown: Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada
Where do you now live?: Vancouver B.C. Canada
Where would you most like to live?: Paris, France
Who was your first "hero" in life?: This one is tricky. I'm finding myself debating the merits of the "hero" in North American culture, how the idea of a hero has become perverted and maligned, we no longer have a sense of the original intent or meaning of the word. Not unlike many initially positive and unbinding social constructs it seems to have become a method solely by which to propagate product; to create desire for that product unbeknownst to the consumer. More recently the product has been removed from tangibility, it now resides as ephemera, particularly useful when populations need to be convinced of or swayed towards certain ideologies. I am thinking specifically of the onslaught of comic book superhero movies that have been accosting every man woman and child in the last 6 or 7 years. The all rely on the same formula, the use of an underdog, a freak accident or occurrence beyond their control, the never ending countdown, the false humility..ect..ect. I suppose what concerns me the most is that these scenarios are played out with such frequent repetition and magnitude that the effect they must be having on the children and youth of today is incalculable. Anyway.....never really had any heroes, if I had to name one it would be Eric Blair. His work got me through some really hard times as a teen, and still amazes me with its almost prophetic accuracy.
What is your favorite thing to do on your day off from work?: I don't take days off.
What is your favorite color?: i know its not a colour..black.
Who (or what) do you love?: Kaia, animals, children who aren't afraid ( harder to come by these days...;{....) old folks who aren't angry, the forest, riding my bike really fast, making a good piece of art (rare), Europe, film cameras, making music, singing, playing piano, dreaming ( if they are good dreams) old blues, boy sopranos, being inspired, anything antique that is mechanical, hand tools.....ummm...lots of stuff..hahhaha!

Wooster: Who and/or what are some of your influences?:

The Renaissance, David Hockney, Caravaggio, Attila Richard Lukacs, Rick Owens, Chuck Close, Arvo Part, Eric Satie, David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, James Dean, Bernini, B/W film photography, Carl Jung, Carlos Castaneda, George Orwell, Shakespeare, Jimi Hendrix, William Blake.... there are so many. too many.

Wooster: What other artists do you most admire?

Currently ..Elbow Toe and Conor Harrington...sooo far ahead of the curve. These ones you might have to Google, but its worth it...Office Supplies Incorporated, Graeme Berglund, Jeff Petry, Todd Duym, Meghan Patterson, Ronan Boyle, Tom Anselmi.

Wooster: What other talent would most like to have?

I guess I'm pretty lucky in that department, I have pretty much all the ones I want. I do regret not taking ballet lessons when I was a kid, I think it's absolutely beautiful. I'd like to be able to dance like Baryshnikov. That would be really cool.

Wooster: What do you fear the most?

The power of my mind.

Wooster: What is your greatest ambition?

To be written into art history and be an inspiration for the generations to come.

You can see more work by The Dark here and here.

On the Street....Scarf Homme, Milan & Paris | by The Sartorialist | 21 November 2008, 01:02 PM

The Bold Shoulder, Paris | by The Sartorialist | 21 November 2008, 12:59 PM

Protecting your bits! | by electech | 21 November 2008, 12:46 PM

The Open Rights Group is 3.
This is a good thing.
You can read about what they've been up to here.

UK organisations keeps having problems protecting your data.
This is a bad thing*.
You can read about some of them here.

* Yes. Even when it's the BNP. Guilty schadenfreude aside, I can't pick when to apply my principles. If I say it's OK because it's the BNP and I don't like them, I lose the argument when someone who doesn't like me (or what I stand for) does the same. Bah.

Whippet Bus 114 | by Your Coleridge Conservative Councillor | 21 November 2008, 12:23 PM

I've been looking into the arrangements for Whippet bus service 114 - which always causes a large number of complaints when I speak to residents on Lichfield Rd. No-one can understand why such large, noisy buses are run down a small residential road - particularly as they don't appear to be very well used.

It appears the situation is complicated to say the least - Whippet run the basic service (hourly) on a commercial basis. The County Council contributes to run a tendered service hourly during the week, and the City Council contributes some funds to allow the route to operate half hourly on Saturdays. On the figures I've been told, the average subsidy per passenger on the tendered service is about £3 - although I don't know how this works out, as presumably if there was no tendered service at all, some of the passengers using the half hourly service would just use the hourly service that is run on a commercial basis.

The good news is that the County Council is retendering the service in April, and I have requested that they also ask for tender offers to operate the service in smaller, quieter buses that have low level access that would be better appreciated by some Lichfield Road residents - although these tender offers are expected to be higher. When the offers come in, we can see what the best solution is for taxpayers and Lichfield Road residents.

Constant scallop code rot | by Freesteel | 21 November 2008, 11:29 AM

The algorithm for doing the constant scallop stepover in HSMWorks is far more robust and speedier than the one I wrote in Depocam/Machining Strategist. Unfortunately this means it gets pushed much harder in the application.

For a start, bugs are a function of processor cycles, not time. Back in the old days when I was writing these algorithms on a 50 MHz Pentium, the users would have to run it for an hour, or all weekend, to produce the metres of toolpath they needed to run their machine tools. We called it High Speed Machining, because they were running their machine tools several times faster than they used to, which would require several times the length of toolpath. They would get this by halving or quartering the gap between each cutting pass of the tool on the surface, so the resulting surface had smaller ridges (scallops? cusps? the terminology has never been standardized! what’s this tell you about the degree of communication between practitioners in the industry?).

In the old days people would (I’ve never seen it) hire someone on low pay to polish these ridges down for hours to get a surface smooth enough to use for a plastic mold.

So anyway, what worked as a pretty reliable algorithm back in 1993 would begin to crumble quite badly in 1998 when the PCs being shipped with the application were 10 or 20 times faster, and the users adjusted to it by tightening the stepover, running it on bigger parts, and just generally executing 10 or 20 times the processor cycles per work day. While we, in the programming team, understood the problem of the software having too many users sending in too many bugs for us to deal with, this speed inflation was equivalent to the user base expanding at an exponential rate, even when the customer base and the size of the programming team remained constant.

There’s always been this mysterious phenomenon we called bit rot when the code you thought was fine suddenly starts breaking and having lots of problems, and you didn’t know why because you hadn’t touched it since last year when you thought you’d finally made it perfect.

If my conjecture is right, this will cease to be an issue as the speed of processors more or less stabilizes or exceeds a threshold where the code is being sufficiently tested in the way that it wasn’t when computers were much much slower.

It also means that there is going to be a difference between software that was designed early on in the processor speed inflationary process (in the 1990s), versus stuff that was put together in the later days.

This is the opposite of my original thinking: that older software would be better than what we write now when the computers are much more powerful, because back then the code had to be efficient and well-made to get the job done, and nowadays with so many more processor cycles to waste we can afford to become slap-dash and inefficient.

This intuition was consistently confirmed by Microsoft who made their products and operating systems more and more bloated and inefficient with each passing year so that a one-page plain text document you saved on a 386 machine in 1992 now required 200Mb on-board RAM minimum just read it. It was a joke. The hardware manufacturers were only just able to keep up with the rate of the software deterioration. What kind of sloppiness and memory leaks does it take to waste 199.99Mb of RAM to load a 10Kb document? How could it be getting this bad? We thought there must have been a conspiracy between Intel and Microsoft during those years driving the continual need for upgrades just to stay the same.

So the story is that later-designed software is going to be better than early software because it will be more in tune with the modern hardware and the way it is used. The old stuff is going to feel like you have changed your bike chain without changing the gears — it’ll skip all over the place.

It’s a pleasant diversion. I have decided I’m not going to fix the bug illustrated in the picture for now — along with the dozens of other ones in the same algorithm — because I am too annoyed after a week of hard work.

What’s happened here is he’s detected the shallow areas of the model using a 10mm diameter ball, and then offsetted all these areas outwards along the surface by 1.5mm so that the contours have wrapped down over the edges. The point is to smooth them in case your shallow area contours are fragmented at the threshold point and you’d them to merge. So here is a case I hadn’t thought about where three areas overlap in the same vertical axis and two of the contours are joining up incorrectly with a double vertical line. (There are four instances of it in the picture.)

It’s notable that I hadn’t thought of this case when I designed the local connecting algorithm (sort of like the patented marching cubes algorithm, only much harder, so no one’s interested), because now I’m thinking “How many other cases did I forget to think about?” Are there going to be thousands more, or is it just this one?

There are thousands more, because you could have a piece of a spiral staircase without the central pillar.

Paradox of bank bailout | by Robert Peston (BBC business editor) | 21 November 2008, 10:17 AM

In saying that there's a case for nationalising the entire British banking system, John McFall - the chairman of Commons Treasury select committee - has shone a light on the paradox of the recent global rescue of the world's biggest banks (listen to his interview on Today).

McFall and many others are exasperated that our banks remain deeply reluctant to lend to businesses and to individuals, even after so much taxpayers' money has been pumped into the banking system.

"What are the banks playing at?" many of you ask.

Well, funnily enough, part of the reason our banks are restricting the supply of credit actually stems from the official description of the bailout as "temporary".

Governments and central banks are saying that they want their (our) money back from banks within about five years.

That may seem a long time. But it's no time at all in the context of all the money that we've pumped into the banks.

The capital element of taxpayer support is only a small part of the problem.

Take the UK. Taxpayers are providing £37bn of capital to Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds TSB.

Redeeming that will be enough of a headache in the coming few years, given the parlous state of capital markets.

But it's the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Special, additional taxpayer loans and guarantees to British banks are a further £600bn in total, or just under half the UK's total annual economic output.

All of that has to be paid back too. And since it can't be refinanced on wholesale markets (which are closed till who-knows-when), paying it back automatically requires our banks to lend less to all of us.

There's nothing the banks or we can do about this - unless we tell them that we don't want our money back. And I'll return to what that would mean in a moment.

Nor is this simply a UK problem.

As I've pointed out in earlier notes (see "The £5000bn bailout"), taxpayer support for banks across the world - from South Korea, to Australia, Germany, the US and so on - is around £5000bn in total.

Which is equivalent to a sixth of the entire output of the global economy.

And, again, the imperative of paying this back is a massive drag on banks' ability to lend and is therefore also a ball-and-chain on economic growth.

This, of course, is just one of the deadening weights on banks' ability and desire to lend.

The other severe constraints are:

1) regulators' very belated stipulation that banks and other financial institutions should hold much more capital and cash in their balance sheets relative to the value of their loans - which in a world where capital and cash is scarce and expensive is a massive disincentive to lend;
2) the devastating effect on credit creation of falling asset prices;
3) the relative dependence of British banks on funding from overseas institutions which are progressively calling in their loans;
4) the considerably increased risks of lending to individuals and companies when the economy shrinks.

Against that backdrop, the question is whether it is remotely sensible to put a deadline - implicitly or explicitly - on the repayment of all that taxpayer funding for banks.

But if we don't demand our money back, we'd be formalising that there's been a semi-permanent nationalisation of the entire banking system.

And that would massively encroach on the ability of our banks to operate as independent commercial entities.

There would be massive political pressure on them to become quasi-social utilities, providing loans at the behest of ministers and officials rather than on the basis of commercial criteria.

So here's what may turn out to be the choice: less lending for years or public ownership of the banks for the foreseeable future. It's not an easy choice, is it?

Arcade Mania! Japanese Retro Gaming Galore! | by PingMag | 21 November 2008, 10:00 AM

Dearest readers, remember the time you spent in an arcade game centre? Now it’s time to declare your undying love for arcades since they are very much alive and kicking! For the new Arcade Mania! book published in English by Kodansha International, American Brian Ashcraft from Osaka — with the help of our dearest friend [...]

Tracking Flu Trends | by Official google.org Blog | 21 November 2008, 09:59 AM

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Like many Googlers, we're fascinated by trends in online search queries. Whether you're interested in U.S. elections, today's hot trends, or each year's Zeitgeist, patterns in Google search queries can be very informative. Last year, a small team of software engineers began to explore if we could go beyond simple trends and accurately model real-world phenomena using patterns in search queries. After meeting with the public health gurus on Google.org's Predict and Prevent team, we decided to focus on outbreaks of infectious disease, which are responsible for millions of deaths around the world each year. You've probably heard of one such disease: influenza, commonly known as "the flu," which is responsible for up to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year. If you or your kids have ever caught the flu, you know just how awful it can be.

Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. Based on this discovery, we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S.

The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.

For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics.

We shared our preliminary results with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC throughout the 2007-2008 flu season, and together we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data. Our system is still very experimental, so anything is possible, but we're hoping to see similar correlations in the coming year.

We couldn't have created such good models without aggregating hundreds of billions of individual searches going back to 2003. Of course, we're keenly aware of the trust that users place in us and of our responsibility to protect their privacy. Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week. The patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.

Flu season is here, so avoid becoming part of our statistics and get a flu shot! And keep an eye on those graphs if you're curious to see how the flu season unfolds...

Update on 11/21: The team just published an academic paper in Nature, the international journal of science, explaining the science and methodology behind Flu Trends. Check it out for more information.

Posted by Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Software Engineers

Tracking flu trends | by Official Google Blog | 21 November 2008, 09:56 AM

Like many Googlers, we're fascinated by trends in online search queries. Whether you're interested in U.S. elections, today's hot trends, or each year's Zeitgeist, patterns in Google search queries can be very informative. Last year, a small team of software engineers began to explore if we could go beyond simple trends and accurately model real-world phenomena using patterns in search queries. After meeting with the public health gurus on Google.org's Predict and Prevent team, we decided to focus on outbreaks of infectious disease, which are responsible for millions of deaths around the world each year. You've probably heard of one such disease: influenza, commonly known as "the flu," which is responsible for up to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year. If you or your kids have ever caught the flu, you know just how awful it can be.

Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. Based on this discovery, we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S.

The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.

For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics.

We shared our preliminary results with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC throughout the 2007-2008 flu season, and together we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data. Our system is still very experimental, so anything is possible, but we're hoping to see similar correlations in the coming year.

We couldn't have created such good models without aggregating hundreds of billions of individual searches going back to 2003. Of course, we're keenly aware of the trust that users place in us and of our responsibility to protect their privacy. Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week. The patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.

Flu season is here, so avoid becoming part of our statistics and get a flu shot! And keep an eye on those graphs if you're curious to see how the flu season unfolds...

Update on 11/21: The team just published an academic paper in Nature, the international journal of science, explaining the science and methodology behind Flu Trends. Check it out for more information.

Posted by Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Software Engineers

Matter is actually just fluctuations in the quantum vacuum | by Futurismic | 21 November 2008, 09:39 AM

Another classic case of the headline saying it all: physicists have confirmed that matter is no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. Everything is arguably illusory, including ourselves. All of a sudden I have a vision of Terence McKenna muttering Beatles lyrics to the hyperspace elves in between fits of gently manic laughter…

And while we’re in brain-bending existential scientific headf*ck territory, why don’t we all get behind conceptual artist Jonathon Keats and his plan to turn the contents of a nuclear waste dump into a massive machine for generating new universes?

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

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