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There was a widespread claim a few years back that there was a half-million shortage of Software Engineers that would reach one million by 2020. I cry bullshit on that, as it is quite difficult for many coders to find work - guys with grey hair such as myself, women, latinos, African Americans and those who specialize in coding other than web or mobile apps.

I only got back to work when I totally gave up on getting into mobile or web then hung out my shingle as a driver and embedded coder. That's worked out well but what I _really_ like a about coding?

"Check this out Mom. See what happens when I click _this_ button?" "Yes... ."

"I wrote that!" "OH MIKEY!"

Mikey Likes To Make His Momma Proud.

I have traced that million-coder shortage claim to the Obama Administration's Official Whitehouse Blog from 2013, which reported that there would be openings for 1.4 Million coders in 2020, but that there would only be 400,000 new CS graduates.

But consider that my own degree is in Physics yet I do just fine. That blog cited the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics for both figures but I have been unable to find the original publication - if there even is one. I emailed a specific individual at the BLS who was in that general line of statisticsifying but got no response. Later this week I'll send a few dead trees to them.

My own take is that hiring managers and recruiters are completely unable to judiciously select the right candidates to interview due to - as I've read repeatledy, no citation but RSN I'll have one - that job board posts for coders result in on the average one thousand applications.

Surely that would make your own eyeballs bleed.

The Balkanizations of languages, applications - web back end, front end, mobile, embedded, systems, MIS even nuclear weapons design - results in it being very very difficult for the right coders to connect to the right companies. That and the fact that Google Trends convinced me that the single most-consistently searched-for keyword is "jobs" resulted in my building what - by 2020 I hope - will be a comprehensive list of links directly to the Jobs or Careers Portals of every Computer Industry that hires through its own website. BEHOLD:

• The Global Computer Industry Index
• Telecommuting and Remote Work

(The exceedingly basic web design is intended to enable my site to work well for the ancient boxes and browsers found in the developing world, most rural public libraries as well as those owned by low-income people.)

About a month from now I'll form a Non-Profit Corporation to take over the operation of Soggy Jobs. The IRS takes about a year to approve 501(c)(3) Tax-Deductible Status, at which point I'll apply for charitable grants from Google.org, employment- and economic development-oriented philanthropists, and government employment and economic development agencies.

That will enable me to hire - just at first - an Entry-Level SQA Engineer, a Journey-Level Back End Developer and a Senior Front End Developer; I've got lots of plans for modern boxes and browsers that I shan't divulge until they... wait for it... Beta.

After the IRS approves my deductible status I'll form subsidiaries in most industrialized nations then apply for their non deductible statuses. That's going to be really complicated and will require some cash as I'll have to retain a bunch of non-profit corp formation attorneys.

San Francisco consistently gets the most hits. My most-loved page is that for

Or do you insist they start a new department called Google Charity?

Technically they already did.

"Well, if it wasn't so cold. :) "

Is your area under yet another "heat warning"?

http://www.google.org/publical...

They're claiming this enough to power 10 households, which would be 15 kW per house... Someone clearly dropped a decimal or doesn't understand units. 15.0kW or 150kWh/d is plausible. Math or GTFO:

Google used ((862 heliostats) * (6 m**2 / heliostat)) to generate 890 kWe. Source

890kWe / 5172 m**2 =~ 172 watts per square meter.

Helio100 is using ((100 heliostats) * (2.2 m**2 / heliostat)) == 220 m**2. Assuming it's really 15.0 kWe, that comes out to 68 watts per square meter. The difference can easily be because Google optimized more for large-scale and efficiency instead of installation cost, whereas Helio100 optimized for smaller scale and minimum labor.

If only there were some amazing internet search technology where you could cut and paste Google's RE and get an accurate answer.

Yeah...maybe Google could even offer it. Oh, wait.

And now the penny drops: it's a broken reference to Google's RE<C.

Thanks for the improvement.

Google has been working on that, it's called Flu Trends. But it hasn't really proven itself out yet. See my post below.

Google tried (is still trying?) to track the spread of influenza, by watching the trends in searches for information about the disease. It's a very interesting bit of work, but as I recall, failed to be meaningfully predictive. The trouble is, there are lots of prosaic reasons why someone might search out information about the flu (or any other disease) other than actually having it. Separating that noise (general interest in the flu) from the genuine signal (particular interest from people who are infected). Doesn't mean it can't work, just that it hasn't been made to work yet.

The quake was in Napa, which most people don't consider to be the Bay Area. Yes, it's nearby, but it's not really the Bay Area.
When the headlines read "Massive Quake Hits Bay Area!", most people will think of places like San Francisco and Oakland. According to Google Maps, Oakland to Napa County Airport (near the epicenter) is 37 miles and my guess is 30 miles in a straight line.

See that map here: http://www.google.org/publical...

In my part of Oakland, it was big enough to wake me up, but nothing rattled or hit the floor.

Napa got hammered, but the Bay Area just got its dishes rattled.

I saw a bunch of panic on social media this morning, from people out of the area. All they saw was "Bay Area Earthquake" in the media.

One thing I know about the Googlites is that when they make a public statement like this, it's usually pretty conservative. Self-driving cars seemed like a pipe dream, but they're just about here, and it's for real.

In fact, Google has been working for years to use their information for predicting disease breakouts in a more general sense. If he says 100,000 lives, they've probably already done the math to support that statement.

get the magnitude wrong.

7.7
8.2
8.0

http://www.google.org/publical...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/c...

http://www.latimes.com/world/w...

I'd like to see more Geothermal like the Geysers setup in California.

With new low temp Geothermal setups its viable in most US states.

http://www.google.org/egs/

It has worked well for Iceland too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Evidently not that vulnerable
since a backup system kicked in to prevent any critical consequences.

Exactly! We need to keep in mind that nothing can possibly go wrong - why, it'd probably take an earthquake to interfere with a nuke plant, and eathquakes and tsunamis are purely mythical.

It's perfectly OK for TEPCO's operators to make mistakes - since nothing can go wrong, and backup systems always work, as proven conclusively by this incident.

If you're looking for someone, or have information about someone who's lost, post it here: http://google.org/personfinder/2013-boston-explosions

This one is the US. Of course we're talking about Japan which has ample geothermal resources.

As a few others have noted, there are a few sites out there (e.g., Google's crisis response and Sahana) that seek to match people in need with responders.

If this were any other application, I would argue that competition is good, but I fear that the fragmentation of services for disaster relief ultimately puts more lives at risk. Why doesn't Microsoft through its support & resources behind a well-established, widely-adopted system for collective disaster management? To provide yet another service that is disconnected from all others seems to invite confusion and reduce the power of the network effect.

The only answer I can think of is that Microsoft (lacking the same philanthropic reputation as its competitor, Google) wants to take all the credit. How noble.

Pardon my lack of login. Have you tried looking at more dimensional data? If flu propagation is graphed not just over time, but over area via a heat map, perhaps some correlation can be ascertained. As a simple example, if the spread was a slow wave from area to area and it hits where the populace are less likely to seek medical treatment (lower income/lower rate of insurance), there may be no additional observed cases despite the disease continuing to spread. Once the wave of propagation leaves this region (which in the heat map will be a blind spot in the data at best) the observed cases will return to normal levels.

I have not found any granular data that could help. Some people are trying to do this with twitter. Though I would hope you could get general demographic information of the area served by the hospitals you get the observation data from and map it out on a much more detailed level than Google flu trends or flu.gov powered by Healthmap. Just go ahead and look at that last one of global indications. It is clear that flu could be spreading through areas without adequate healthcare and no one would know it.

Available free from Google: http://www.google.org/flutrends/

don't worry maine, sandy will visit you friday after touring montreal:

http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy

Google has launched a crisis map showing rainfall, active emergency shelters and quite a bit of other info. http://google.org/crisismap/sandy-2012

but retaining the link to the link to IBTimes.

Worthless.

http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/

The actual Google Crisis site is:

http://google.org/crisismap/2012-tropical-system-isaac

Geothermal - great if you live near steaming hot springs and are basically sitting on an inactive volcano, not so great if you aren't

This is not true in general and not in Japan specifically because the entire region is geothermally active. New enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) can extract electrical energy from temperature deltas far lower than traditional dry steam plants. They don't even have to be on land: offshore subsea geothermal plants would work quite well especially with a cool flow of ocean water to supply the cold side of the delta. There is very little of the US that could not generate power with EGS. Google mapped them for us. Quote: "Potential for the continental U.S. exceeds 2,980,295 megawatts using Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) and other advanced geothermal technologies such as Low Temperature Hydrothermal. " This is 3/4ths of domestic consumption in 2011. We don't even have to look for them - typically EGS thermal sources are found incidental to other mineral exploration, and ignored even though most of the work is already done at that point.

Since these resources are completely safe, nontoxic, natural, carbon-free electrical energy resources that cost even less than nuclear energy it would be irresponsible to engage in any increase in risk or carbon generation whatsoever before all of these resources were fully exploited.

As both baseload power and on-demand power EGS also offers the potential to mitigate the variability of other clean resources in a way that even nuclear can't. The persistent thermal resource in a given area is limited, but over a long time base so on surges in need can over-extract thermal energy for many years before diminishing returns diminish the resource locally for a while. This makes them the perfect complement to PV solar and others.

There are other things we could do to improve the situation without the toxins of carbon or the risk of nuclear, like encouraging shallow geothermal heatpumps for home heating and cooling, and extracting electricity from the thermal deltas of manufacturing, but EGS is a really big bucket to serve our energy needs in a realistic way and your dismissal of it in this way is offensive so now I'm going to reciprocate.

One chief objection to nuclear is that we have many hundred reactors worldwide of the Fukushima disaster designs. And every one has 40 years worth of spent fuel stored in an elevated pool on top of the building that could be destroyed in some way - many times the design load of fission byproducts for these pools now, and dozens of times the fuel in the reactor vessel. After cooling for a time this fuel is supposed to be moved to safer dry cask storage. But casks cost money and the operators are skinflints and it's cheaper to have the pools recertified for more and more spent fuel packed tighter and tighter and not ever move any to the casks. But density is the bugaboo of nuclear fission: the tighter you pack these rods the more they encourage each other to fission. So now our national production capacity for these casks is 3% of the need, and one brick of C4 on the bottom of one of these pools could lead to a meltdown outside of the containment leading to a vast wasteland of hundreds of square miles of American Exclusion Zone that can't be occupied for 100 years - among other things - for each of these reactors. Certainly there is evidence that this occurred at Fukushima to some degree. On that very day the dumb bastards trusted to operate our nuclear plants should have been cutting P.O.s for casks - and that

http://www.manufacturing.net/blogs/2012/07/google-made-in-the-usa

http://www.google.org/

http://www.google.com/landing/givesback/2011/

but the point requires an adult mind to bring adult judgement to a real world situation which is not black and white- something you're just not cut for apparently. Comcast and Verizon and ATT have REPEATEDLY shown themselves to be rapacious ,exploitative and dishonest. If Google wants to protect NN by laying down fiber and bypassing that group of assholes then I say bully for them and more power to them. You have to be a bigger cynic than I am to just make blanket statements based on one or two selected data points. Sometimes in a war both sides do very bad things, but that doesn't make both sides morally equivalent. Sometimes when you fight a war you have to give a go at engaging Communist China, or save big money the way your competitors are doing , or do something else unsavory That's life in war time. But the real question is not answered by those bad actions unless like ATT and Comcast and Verizon they become so persistent and pervasive that they have, in fact, turned evil. The real question we're trying to get at is "what's in their heads? Where are they trying to get to by doing this?" That is effectively the state in a hidden Markov model and we can only approximate and build more or less good models to try to get at it . My HMM tells me that Google is acting in accordance with their value system in seeking to lay down fiber and establish NN once and for all.

Sorry, but you can't separate me from my well honed capacity to form accurate judgments about the world and people in it by flinging some sophomoric "et tu" feces at me like an angry little monkey.

http://blog.google.org/2011/10/new-geothermal-map-of-united-states.html

or maybe even:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/10/03/bc-fusion-energy-project.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion

Google has not really done any innovation after their search engine and advertising platform.

I (and my business) found this incredibly useful during recent earthquakes and floods http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/. Who did they buy it from?

Surely you are trolling: http://www.google.org/

I do know how expensive it is to drill. And a lot more things about your questions. You're way off. You're thinking about this on a "what you might expect" level. It turns out what it is is very much different than you might expect.

Geothermal is baseload power. It can reliably generate up to 98% of its capacity 100 percent of the time - day or night, maintenance or no maintenance. This is even better than nuclear, which has reactors that must be periodically shut down for maintenance. Better than that, since an EGS plant can overextract the heat available it can moderate its consumption of this resource to compensate for variability of other energy resources like wind and solar in a way that nuclear plants can't.

Nuclear takes 10x as much water, and coal needs as much. The geothermal resource must not be at the surface - in fact, a dry well from oil drilling will often do for a start and to prove the resource. Frequently oil and gas exploration terminates with "too hot to drill" conditions that indicate the explorer has found a different kind of energy. The US Department of Energy places the new enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) at about $0.05/KWh, which compares favorably to nuclear. Plant investment is less than nuclear too, but not less than coal. Sometimes geothermal drilling accidentally finds oil, gas or coal resources incidentally, as was recently the case in Britain with a well that found all four. All the major energy drilling companies probably have huge data on geothermal resources they've categorized as "unfit to drill because the rock is too hot" and dry holes to start at. For 50 years or more they call these dry holes and cap them and walk away. There's maybe drillers in receivership you could get with this data for under a million dollars. It's lost data come useful.

The new EGS systems are a closed loop: water is injected into deep dry hot rock, typically after opening up a large surface area for thermal transfer with fracking. When the water comes back up hot the heat is transferred to a second closed loop system that uses another fluid with a low boiling point, much like your refrigerator. This allows conversion of the energy retrieved from water that's not necessarily above 100c when it reaches the surface. The cooler (but still warm) water is then reinjected back into the well, resulting in a closed subterranean loop, and incidentally injecting this warmer water increases the efficiency and lifespan of the well, meaning there are no emissions whatever, ever, except for the precipitates of dissolved minerals that rain out during cooling.

Google, which has been doing some research into minimal footprint power because they use so much of it, funded a study you can find here that allows you to explore geothermal resources with a Google Earth interface. To put it simply, the US has vast amounts of subsurface energy available to be tapped. It costs less than nuclear, has no carbon emissions like coal does, requires no fuel that might fluctuate in cost or availability, is clean available baseload power, but it can be moderated to counteract the variations of wind and solar dynamically on a moment's notice, so it can help integrated those sources into the grid removing the risk.

Over-exploitation can overcool the hot rock to the point where it's not useful, but it doesn't halt the energy flow. Ultimately a level is found that delivers an average use that can be varied in the short term.

Best of all there's no mountain of toxic fly ash to be rid of, no spent fuel you can't find a home for. There is no waste - at all. There's no fuel cost commodity spikes, shortages, embargoes, import levies or restrictions because there is no fuel and this reduces the risks associated with building a plant that must generate power for 50 years or more, and the cost of insurance against such risks. Men don't need to toil miles beneath the ground to

Here is what confuses me. Both http://www.weather.com/outlook/health/coldandflu/nationalreports/ and http://www.google.org/flutrends/us/#10139621013962 seem to show different results. What's up with that? Which one is accurate?

Google also has a flu trends mapping: http://www.google.org/flutrends/us/

Look, everyone agrees this is legal. Many are just saying it's not right -- not for people who claim to do no evil at least.

No, that's not at all what people are saying. Read the replies in this thread.

People are actually suggesting google should pay taxes it is not required to pay, just because they are google. They should just make up some huge number and mail in a check, and never mind what the tax codes in these countries actually require.

What google did is both LEGAL and RIGHT. If it weren't Ireland would be all over google's case. If google just decided to dump huge piles of cash on Ireland their share holders would have been defrauded.

The law is what we as a society AGREE is RIGHT. The law defines what society AGREES is JUST.

When Ireland no longer feels its JUST or RIGHT they will change their laws.

Google gives back to the community great deal. Far more in total than any company I know of. In addition to free services to everyone in the world, financed out of advertising revenue, they have their own Philanthropy.

So Google is bad for being transparent and releasing data which is aggregated and highly anonymous? It is a good thing I don't run Google because after enough articles like this I'd be tempted to say "you know, we get so much crap even when we're being helpful. Let's see what happens if we just try to act really, really evil for a few months." Seriously, this criticism comes down to Google releasing interesting data which in the long run could be actually useful to sociologists and other academics. It already has been used to help accurately get an idea of where the common flu is and how bad it is at any given time http://www.google.org/flutrends/. And the complaint in TFA is that unethical people can abuse this data at the margins. The obvious question is whether that minor abuse outweighs the positive good created by having this data. At least for me, the answer seems to be know, but that's partially because I have a strong ideological commitment to transparency and openness. When in doubt, give people access to data when it can be done easily.

Large corporations are profit generating machines. That's it. They don't try to do good (for its own sake). They don't try to do evil (for its own sake). Everything they do is based on the (perceived) impact on the bottom line

Okay, if that's always the case, how do you explain things like this? Is that the exception that proves the rule? Or is it really just a very sneaky and roundabout way of (eventually) generating more profit by generating good will? And if it is the latter, does it make any difference? After all, one could argue (and some do) that even individual acts of altruism are nothing more than disguised self-interest... but in all cases, either some good is done, or not, and any secret underlying intentions are irrelevant to the result.

I think if Google would look at all health-related search terms they'd have a good base for that even now... and maybe they already do.

There's no "maybe" about it. Google tracked flu-related searches this year.

Oops forgot this link: this one specifically talks about clean energy as related to article above in Google approved format. http://www.google.org/rec.html

Has nobody noticed Google Power Meter?

http://www.google.org/powermeter/

While we pay a fixed price for electricity regardless of when we use it the actual spot price varies hugely. The electricity company that trades most efficiently and buys their power furthest ahead of demand "wins" in the sense that they can either make more profit, or charge less than their competitors.

By data mining power meters in every home it seems that Google are well placed to be a very effective electricity company.

You've forgotten the Google Powermeter project - http://www.google.org/powermeter. It's not a stretch to think that if it gains traction and they put a solid analytics engine underneath all that data, Google would be well positioned to speculate in the power markets. I was puzzling over Google's business case for Powermeter a month or so back - long before the FERC application came to light. It certainly seems like it could be more ambitious than Microsoft Hohm's somewhat modest ad-based model. Enron's actions were somewhat localized. Google's reach could be much larger. I guess we'll see if they truly adhere to their credo...

\As far as I'm concerned toolbar == spy-ware. Google jumped the shark and joined the ranks of Yahoo, MSN and Happy-smiley-spy-ware-toolbar the day they created one and started shoving it down people's throat.

No techie I know installs any toolbar in IE or Firefox.

Programmer, admin, etc. of 20+ years. I've used Google Toolbar for 2 years. It's a nice tool. I like the highlighting features and the page-rank display. Translate integration is nice. I could get everything that Google's toolbar gives me in a suite of other addons, but I don't need to. I never use the various funky buttons, but i do like the gmail mailto: integration.

The only poor souls that seems to be stuck with them are non-techies, who usually have at least 3-4 toolbars and they "don't know how it happened".

I explicitly download and install it. I don't know who these people you know are, but their browser fail is not my problem.

It's also amazing to watch them browse the web, they almost never use the address bar, it's either the Google or Yahoo toolbar's search box

I almost never use the toolbar's search, and I don't turn on the integrated search feature (where it replaces the basic search widget) because I use many other forms of search (corporate intranet search, amazon, Wikipedia, etc.)

I would be surprised if this was actually a "bug" and not a feature, sounds like a great bug to have for a data mining company.

Why on Earth would they want to do such a thing. They practically drown in data. Pissing off customers in order to get a dribble more (from what I understand the bug showed up in IE8 when you turned off the feedback but had not yet restarted the browser... which is an awfully narrow segment of their user-base).

My love for Google is diminishing faster than the DOW in 2008.

Yes, I can understand. A company that puts out a toolbar cannot possibly restore your faith in them by continuing to be the largest backer of open source development as well as a massive contributor, backing large humanitarian and charitable efforts and speaking out against government violations of privacy that go far beyond giving you the choice of installing a toolbar.

How could you have been blinded to their abuses.

...about Google's "Smart Meter" for your home.

Never forget Google's main money maker is not search, it is not ads and it is not applications. It is data and the statistics that are derived from that data. On top of those statistics they build the best search, the best targeted advertising and decent applications (because although they are good applications Google Docs doesn't really benefit from these statistics). There are people looking around for horizontal integration for data and statistics in all forms of our lives because that's largely an untapped natural resource in Google's eyes. The vertical integration we are talking about in this article is run of the mill business. The "Smart Meter" is slightly more innovative horizontal search. There might not even be obvious applications for this data and statistics but the engineers don't care, that's another arm of the company's job. Personally I could see that being very very lucrative if you incentivize people to adopt the Smart Meter. Nielson would look like amateurs if Google got that thing out.

...about Google's "Smart Meter" for your home. It seems like Google wants to know everything about everybody. The only difference between them and other entities that what this much information is that Google's gradually arriving to that goal.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporter Maria Bartiromo

'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.'

For those who missed it, Schmidt's statement is very likely an indirect reference to Climategate. Google is heavily invested in climate-change mitigation initiatives such as RE<C through its non-profit arm Google.org. The Climategate scandal would be on his radar and the description of people "who have something that you don't anyone to know" and who "shouldn't be doing it in the first place" fits the perpetrators of Climategate to a tee.

Exactly. It's ok to worry about privacy, but if Google wants to use what random unimportant things I search for to be read by software (never people) to give me ads that are a) relevant, b) entertaining, c) (and most likely) never seen by me due to AdBlock, they're free to do as they please. Especially if mining my (again, trivial) data contributes to the open source/philanthropic efforts put forth by them.

It might very well be a local peak (temporally speaking). For instance, see the shape of the flu progression in France, which was characterized by a peak in September. Now, it is rising again.

Interestingly, Google Flu Trends shows similar signs, although there the peak already occured in October.

Here in Canada, my doctor said yesterday that he is seeing a drop in people coming in with flu symptoms. It used to be more in the past few weeks.

Also, Google Flu Trends shows a marked drop. In the USA, there is a drop too.

I have also observed less absence at my little kid's school as well.

Here in Canada, my doctor said yesterday that he is seeing a drop in people coming in with flu symptoms. It used to be more in the past few weeks.

Also, Google Flu Trends shows a marked drop. In the USA, there is a drop too.

I have also observed less absence at my little kid's school as well.

Google Powermeter ought to be interesting once supported widely. You'll be able to see how much is really collected.

but my roads will probably either be properly paved or be replaced with a more efficient road technology

And we'd all be using plug-in priuses.

So google's flu results will be validated a few days faster. People start feeling crappy, do some self diagnosis via google, then see a doctor who then files a report when then is summarized and reported by the CDC.

I've been checking Google Flu Trends every couple weeks, and at least some metric is now much higher than it has been in years past.

I've been following the public health debate over this, and having known people with the swine flu, I have to say it is mostly hype. Mostly.

Google Flu Trends. The season is just starting. Have a look at how it matches to the last several years at their peaks.

The true efficacy of the vaccine is not known, because they will not do placebo-controlled trials.

It's an influenza vaccine. The only difference between it and any seasonal one is the virus it's made with; all the rest are the same process (grown in eggs, filtered, yada yada yada.) If we waited for full-up trials every season, by the time the vaccine was available we'd be in the next season and the strains in circulation would be different anyway.

HOWEVER! We have done clinical tests with the vaccine, the only way that we can in such short time frame: we injected it into volunteers and measured the antibody response, then compared that to the response from previous seasons where we have after-the-fact data to go by. We've been building that data collection for decades now, and it's pretty flipping good.

As with anything in real time, if you wait for perfect data you might as well not bother.