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Slashback: Cradle, Indiscriminancy, Multiplicity
Power the hot tub with compost, remember the soy insulation. andyrossmeissl writes "William McDonough's book Cradle to Cradle was reviewed favorably back in 2002, and now its theories about making things sustainably will be put into practice in the C2C Home design competition. The judges (McDonough is on the panel) will present 9 awards and actually build four of the projects on sites in Roanoke, Virginia. Wanna try your hand? Students and professionals should register by November 15."
About that blind-date opportunity ... Alex Salkever, Tech Editor of BusinessWeek online, wrote with a response to the recent story about the dilemma Google faces in trying to make money from its Google News service:
"There is another side to this that I think is equally important, namely, that Google is undermining the news business with its algorithm-based story selection.It's clear to a journalist that this system was designed by someone who has no idea what's important in the news. While it may nail the top headlines, Google News can't do anything but that. There is no consideration of comprehensiveness of a story at one site over another. Often they cite bizarre news sources for stories way out of their specialty. Why else would we be seeing Al Jazeera as the top listing for a story on Kobe Bryant? The truth is, Web search in the Google model is a poor way to aggregate useful news. It's a great way to figure out what site posted news first but not much more than that.
All of which would be fine except that so many people go to Google for news that they have come to think its actually a really good source for news. It is, if you are searching for news. But if you are reading their home page it's wildly erratic. This ultimately hurts news outlets who work very hard to put together the best stories and draw traffic to their pages. Let me put it to you this way: Would you want the Google guys to set you up on a blind date? Guess what? They already did."
Fountain pens are still ineffective, at least. anomaly writes "I was quite displeased to see that the Kryptonite U locks were incredibly vulnerable to the venerable BIC pen.
I happened to be in the bike shop today and noticed that Kryptonite is sponsoring a lock replacement program. Now's the time to get that lock replaced with a more secure one - before the thieves make off with your bike. Kudos to Kryptonite for responding, and quickly."
Processor envy strikes hard. Adam writes "Orion Multisystems, the company which introduced two Linux-based multiprocessor supercomputers at the end of August, has begun selling the DT-12 Cluster Workstation online. The company claims that this 12-processor unit has a peak performance of 36 Gflops and is small enough to fit on a desk."
It would be better though if it filtered out duplicate articles
So would Slashdot.
- Would you want the Google guys to set you up on a blind date?
What a great idea! Too bad Lotus Domino is squatting at gdate.com, but Blind Dating would put the oogle in Google.-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
One of the things I have learned from reading Google News is just how few people are doing any acutal reporting. The vast majority of major new organizations are just repeating what they get off of the AP wire, which you might as well read directly. When Google really shines though, is when it finds those out of the way news sources that actually break a non-AP story. During the US military engagements in the middle east, Al-Jezera is often more intelligent than the regurgitated spin releases vomited from CBS/FOX/etc. Google also give you the opportunity to compare coverage on a wide range of sites, aggregating the gamut of viewpoints. I'm sorry, but Google is only "hurting" more established channels by providing more direct access to the fringe press. For the fringes, and those of us who enjoy the range of analysis, this is a huge boon.
But Google News is showing bias. And it's starting to become intentional.
John
I agree with this. I like the ability to have hundreds of views on one story instantly accessible. It seems to me that the "stories from outside their specialty" peeve is a small one. Usually you can tell relatively quickly from glancing at a site what kind of stories it usually does. And Google usually doesn't link to sites that are too far out there with tabloid style news.
I've gotten so sick of the mainstream media's useless regurgitation of political bias that I'll take anything over it. It's getting to the point where all the democrats watch CBS and all the Republicans watch Fox and because that's all they hear it just reinforces everyone's notion that all their own views are logical and correct and everyone else's are wrong. We need more news services that use a model like Google News.
I already get the Dallas Morning News, USA Today and the NYTimes, electronically, in my inbox every morning. I KNOW what "the journalists" give me as what THEY think is "important in the news."
What about those times when I DON'T want a journalist to decide for me what's "importantn"??
I think Google provides an excellent service.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
While it may nail the top headlines, Google News can't do anything but that. There is no consideration of comprehensiveness of a story at one site over another.
What a silly point. Google News doesn't try to tell you what to read. It gathers the most commonly reported events into headlines and intends the user to sort through them. As a way of organizing news reports, it's unparalleled. Just like traditional Google Search, it doesn't make the choice of resource for you (that's what our discernment is for), it merely organizes your choices so they are accessible. Perhaps from the perspective of a traditional journalist, the idea of a broad range of news sources at the fingertips of the reader rather blind dependency on a few well-known outlets is worrying because it threatens the old way of doing things. Personally, I think more accessibility and more choice for the reader will only make online news more competitive and allow quality articles outside of the conventional vendors to show themselves more easily.
They already know how to do it. Linguistic anomalies and other factors can skew Google News results. When you're talking about human events, there's no way to remove bias.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This ultimately hurts news outlets who work very hard to put together the best stories and draw traffic to their pages.
If Google News is that much worse than traditional news outlets "working very hard", then those traditional news outlets won't have anything to fear, will they? If Google News is so "erratic", then obviously readers will flock to the traditional news outlets, won't they? It's funny how these comments were made by somebody from the traditional news outlets, isn't it?
Let me put it to you this way: Would you want the Google guys to set you up on a blind date? Guess what? They already did.
>Looks around< err... no, I'm pretty sure they didn't. What a stupid thing to say.
Often they cite bizarre news sources for stories way out of their specialty. Why else would we be seeing Al Jazeera as the top listing for a story on Kobe Bryant?
So? I am smart enough to click on the part that says, for example, "..and 650 more.." and look for sources that make more sense. I like having the option to read five or six or 50 different write-up's of the same story. I can tell when the first source or two are inappropriate and I can move on. I suspect the person who wrote in prefers the CNN or FOX, etc. format of deciding what should be the news for the day. Google dumps it all out there and in quantity. For a news junky, I think Google is great! I do read the CNN online news as well but sometimes I am astounded at the difference between CNN's version (which can lean left just as the Fox version can lean right) versus the BBC version or one of the India newspapers.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Does he have any idea how insulting that is? Why do so many journalists not only want to decide what the news is, they also want you to get it from certain sources only and they don't want you think critically about the news or the source. Well, that's how I feel, anyway. Bastards.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Take the Al-Jeezera on Kobe Bryant story example. There you have a perspective that nobody in the U.S. will otherwise be exposed to. Sure, they probably didn't do much in-depth reporting, but who needs in-depth stories on sports figure rape cases, anyway? That's the kind of thing that U.S. media has too much of as it is. I would rather learn what some nameless Al-Jeezera reporter thinks of Kobe Bryant's case than that of the whole cast and crew of Denver TV newsrooms put together.
Anyway, Google News Search and Alerts are indeed superb. Much better than the MSN and Yahoo alternatives, and I've been reading side-by-side alerts on a variety of topics for several months now.
I think his point is somewhat valid - I really don't feel that Google News does a very good job of picking the best articles on a subject to make the front page. Quite often, I will want to read about a story, and the couple of sources listed on the front page will all be two paragraph summaries that provide absolutely no detail. I often have to search through the list of sources to find a decent story.
I really don't know why this is. Maybe it is just really hard to properly organize news. Considering how good of a job Google did with web search, I would expect more out of them. Maybe we just need some startup with brand new ideas to revolutionize the news aggregration business.
All that said, the article submitter (Salkever) did sound like a whiny jerk. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with computer aggregrated search results - Google has just been doing a pretty poor job of it so far.
Kudos to Kryptonite for responding, and quickly
Considering that the U lock pen opening technique was discovered circa 1992, I wouldn't call Kryptonite's response quick, exactly.
Nice of them, yes, but quick, no.
Without studying locksmithing, how can we know Kyptonite has changed lock core vendors? How do you know that they have solved the root problem? A $50 lock should be good against far more specialized tools than a Bic pen - how can you be sure that they have done a real security audit, when they didn't find this themselves? How can you believe that they even have the capability?
You are waiting for a patch from Microsoft for a buffer overflow in an obvious location. You can wait for a patch, and hope that the next flaw is sufficiently less obvious, or you can install OpenBSD. That is, buy a big sold steel padlock from a vendor which at least tries for real security. Something that you'll actually see on the streets of NYC - Medico, Multilock, etc.