Slashdot Mirror
Google Keyhole, Google Scholar
baegucb_18706 writes "The front page of Google has a link to Keyhole where you can download a free trial of satellite imagery. Is it worth the cost for a subscription, and is it the start of the real commercialism for Google? And a challenge to MS's imagery?" D H NG writes "According to CNET, Google introduced a new service for academics called Google Scholar on Wednesday. This service searches scholarly literature such as technical reports, theses and abstracts. This service will not carry ads." And finally, reader ian@FalsePositives.com links to some speculation about how a sufficiently competent search engine could write the news itself.
Sure its nice, and fun to browse, but I don't see a real good consistent profit motive for providing satelite imagery. Who needs it that can't get it already at a local courthouse, etc.
Unless someone can show me otherwise.
It's always nice to find a picture of your house on the Internet...
I think that in google we should trust, they will lead us in the right direction, they seem to be having better and better ideas all the time...
Is that what Google scholar is going for? I guess it would end up as a pay service before long.
-mkb
Is this not very similar to what NASA are doing? NASA's is free, but I think Google's has a much better resolution and can zoom in more detail. However, I remember a while back NASA saying they would probably support Open Source in the near future with their project?
Google isn't linking to Keyhole here. Maybe is it to random users, or selected geographical areas.
Would it be able to get a sufficient amount of meaningless technobable, managementspeak, sentence fragments and misspelled words?
I thought not.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
So I go to Download Free Registration, and it says compatible with Windows for PC's. So I guess I won't be able to use it :(
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
From the website:
I'm an author. Why would I want my articles in Google Scholar?
Your work likely has great value to a number of people who may not know it exists. By including your articles in Google Scholar, others will be more likely to find them, learn from them, cite them and build on the foundation you have laid.
Sounds like a good way to make yourself known in the writing world. For now, it sounds like a kickass idea. Go Google.
Will we get keyhole too someday?
So Google included Keyhole in its list of tools, which now takes another click (on more >> from the google homepage) to get to it. Heaven forbid that Google would do anything remotely business-like.
Quite frankly, Google is a corporation, and if they can help Keyhole get a few more customers (who need the service for whatever reason) while making a few dollars on the side, I think we should accept it as completely legitimate.
And no, I don't think this is the start of a slippery slope of Google into outrageous commercialism.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Thank you.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Excellent! As a postgrad CS student, I've been more or less relying on Citeseer and Google to search for literature online. Citeseer is really useful, but I find its search rather cumbersome. If Google can create a specialty search for academic papers...I'm more than thrilled! Go Google!
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
ummm.... worldwind from NASA is free and seems to be the same thing...
adding site:.edu and site:.gov to current Google searches?
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/keyhole.html Doesn't this make linking to Keyhole the same as linking to Picasa?
Rewriting English is similar to summarizing it. Using clever tricks, computers are about as good at writing a précis of a block of text as a dull 3rd grader -- every such summary lacks nuance, because the computer that generated it lacks understanding. All there is, is tricks. So the idea that an algorithm can be taught not only to understand the meaning of news stories that were written by humans, but then to rewrite them adaptively, is pure science fiction.
My favorite example of this is Cyc, a project to feed into a database all the propositions which some believe constitute "common sense." For example, Cyc knows that dogs and cats are mammals, and that they are common pets, so one could tell it "I have a mammal as a pet," and it could deduce that I have a dog or a cat or maybe something else. In the early 1990s, when the project was getting started, its researchers believed that in about five years, it would be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it well enough to assimilate into its database. At that point, of course, it would start absorbing all the knowledge in the world until it became the smartest encyclopedia there was.
And then in the last 1990s, its researchers were again interviewed, and again they said that it would soon be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it. When? In about five years. For any time T, strong AI is always about five years away.
So I'm amused that the strong AI postulated in that excellent Flash animation, the key which allows "big media" to die off because computers will do custom rewrites of amateur news dispatches and form newsfeeds of their own, comes to pass in... about five years. I don't think the New York Times has much to worry about.
The price is free when you have an Nvidia GPU, which I'm sure a lot of you do.
Click here to get an Nvidia only free(beer) version. Their site seems to be down at the moment, which is odd for such a large company, but when it comes back up, you can get it from there. There are many other cool programs you can get for free if you have an Nvidia card while you are there.
sam-zen-pus?
And why in hell would anyone end their nym with pus
It looks like Keyhole is just using Citipix (http://www.citipix.com) imagery. So its essentially cheap access to the Citipix database without the uber-cool Citipix image viewer? Pah.
I think keyhole has more Sat. Imagery of Iraq and Afghanistan, than all of the U.S. put together. This is pretty much a good way to tell if you are on the US hit list, when more and more Imagery is available for your Counrty (At least in the Middle East, otherwise Italy and Greece need to watch their asses). Otherwise, I think this is a great step for Google to take if they are developing their own in-house MapQuest. Plus it is too much fun spinning the planet in circles.
"If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried"
I tried out Keyhole for a few days - it was interesting, but it seemed like most of the images I looked at that I could date were a couple of years out, at least. Also, the only hi-res images that exist are major population areas, which is slightly annoying if say, you want to examine Palo Duro Canyon or something like that.
12:50 - press return.
Not quite licenes plate reading, but getting there.
I think I'll put a brim on my tin-foil hat.
I downloaded and installed the 7-day free trial a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Google purchased the service and dropped the price of an annual subscription to a more reasonable level.
If they could have kept my DSL pipe full (or even occasionally full) when pulling down the image data I probably would have sprung for the subscription but the service was just unacceptably slow.
They do recommend that users have a broadband connection, so presumably the throughput will improve someday. However, if you're thinking about trying the service, do use enough of the free trial period to find out if it's fast enough for you.
Trusted by cats.
With Blackjack and Hookers!
I was giving Google Scholar a whirl, and found this scholarly paper from 1998 at the bottom of my search page:
.
Sonic hedgehog is essential to foregut development
These days, foregut development is more from playing Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, I suppose...
Sorry what was that you were saying? I just shit my pants, and not the good kind either.
I've seen news reports by ABC using keyspan.
How do I know they used it? There was a keyspan.com watermark on the top left!
Please remember that Google Scholar is BETA. You are not allowed to criticise it until 2015, at which time Google will change the name to "Google Scholar Release Candidate 1."
This has been a public service announcement from Google Advocacy Central BETA. If you have any feedback, please don't send it to us.
For more information, click here.
And don't get me started on the "funny" names us computer people like to give things...
The only thing I worry about with scholar, after giving it a whirl, is that some newer papers that have recently been published dont appear, since it seems it builds its index off of citations first. I worry that if Scholar does take hold, newer more obscure papers that may not get the publicity of more mainstream journals and venues of publication will never be seen again (This is all reliant on their indexing model not getting better). Perhaps i'll have to start submiting abstracts of my work to Google as well now...
I downloaded keyhole, but I can't install it becasue the crappy install won't let you select the install drive - or anything else. It does let you review your non-choices though...
I question their competence.
Also, isn't it time big companies ( and their subsidiaries ) used multi-platform tools so they can develop and release on multiple platforms easily *and simultaneously* ?
Groutch
Google Scholar basically seems to be an attempt to replace CiteSeer. It doesn't seem to have quite as many features in terms of displaying information as CiteSeer does, but it does have the important features, and it does lack a couple of the longstanding problems with CiteSeer (for example, that CiteSeer is absurdly slow)...
I am curious which produces better search results. Google seems to produce its results mainly from a handful of sources, but a couple of tests showed it giving more relevant results than CiteSeer, and Google Scholar also immediately returned a copy of this one specific article I was trying to find awhile back that I knew to exist but couldn't find either on CiteSeer or Google normal search... Hmm.
At any rate CiteSeer indexes 716797 articles and Google Scholar... interestingly, doesn't provide an index size number at all.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Search technologies are the future: I have just tried google scholar and in my field (optical model potenitals for nuclear physics) I was able to get most of the relevant references that I have been acumulating for years in a few seconds.
I am VERY impressed.
I think that search technologies like google desktop or spotlight are going to define the user interface of the 21st century: no files that you have to keep track of, only information that is a search query away from your fingertips.
Google is clearly making an effort to consider ALL the different kinds of information available on the web. They've grown the idea of a search engine from simply something that indexes HTML pages to include PDFs, Office documents, images, news, products, etc...
This shows some initiative and creativity in trying to develop new ways for people to find all kinds of information, both on your desktop and on the Internet... just imagine when they get all this stuff integrated... you could search for a friend's address, and not only get a map of their house, but a satellite-guided view of the trip, as well as links to their website, public photo collection, slashdot and blog posts, e-mails you've written them, and scholarly articles they've written. Google wants to be a total information provider, and they're the only ones truly pulling all of this stuff together.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
After using keyhole I'll have to say that I was both impressed and disappointed. The things that impressed me the most about Keyhole were the fact that it had full color images of anywhere that I wanted to look(including my ranch in FL) and that it had a very elegant interface.
I was, however, disappointed with the speed at which these images were delivered to my desktop. The first 20 minutes that I used Keyhole I thought that it had a very limited high-res image base because everywhere that I tried to view came back very blurred. While browsing the software I had to take a call that lasted about 10 minutes, when I switched back to the keyhole application I was amazed to see a crisp clean image in front of me. I was on an OC-3, so it's not as if my connection would've caused a slowdown.
The Keyhole application definitely has a lot of potential, but if it continues to be so slow then I think I'll pass.
One of the more interesting features that was able to set Keyhole apart from other imaging services is that you can pan/tilt in "realtime" this was very cool because it enabled me to get a better view of what surrounded an area.
All in all it is a good product, but still needs to be polished a little. And the price per year is even fairly low.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
It happened over three weeks ago. The news is on Keyhole's front page.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Don't Google Keyhole and Google Scholar seem rather remarkably like beta versions of the Earth and Librarian programs from Hiro's study in Snow Crash?
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Probably most of the images created for this software come from government agencies for the public good. I think the government should also get involved with licensing and furthering this software even further so all citizens can take advantage of it. If every poor taxpayer chipped in few cents and weatlhier tax payers chipped in a few bucks, we'd have one universal service that everyone could have access to and make use of.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
So Google Scholar seems like it will be a pretty good resource, but for those of us in the humanities and social sciences, it doesn't look like it has a whole lot to offer just yet. Certainly, it doesn't compare to subscriber-only resources like JSTOR and Project MUSE. I like Google and I like the interface, so I hope that this changes in the near future, but I'm not really holding my breath. I don't know what it's like in the sciences, but part of the problem that I see is that University Presses who put out Humanities and Social Science journals are unlikely to allow them to be indexed on Google without some kind of monetary compensation. Smaller independent journals, maybe, but in the disciplines that I'm familiar with (Anthropology, Folklore, English etc.), those aren't the important journals anyway.
The software is nice but it is not worth the subscription IMHO. There is a lot more easily accessible data out there on the Intarweb that they need to put into their product. Still, it is a good start but the current version just isn't there yet.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Check it out. Either the White house had one BORING roof, or it's been balcked out.
Checkit, and see.
I don't know how many of you are actually bothering to download and try it out, but it is really awesome. I have no use for it, but the control is incredible and everything moves smoothly. Enter in an address and you'll zoom out and travel over to the new location and zoom in.
I really recommend trying this out, even if you're not interested in things like this or have a use for it. Seriously!
Unlike most online newspapers and magazines, almost all the scientific journals I know of require a paid subscription to access. The exception are the couple of new bioscience journals in the Public Library of Science and the physics pre-print server (not peer-reviewed). But even that the author must pay $1500 for the cost of review and webification.
I find this a bit ironic. Science is an epistomological enterprise of creating knowledge by the open publication of results. However, the greedy for-profit academic publishers and professional societies know this wall. They have the academic community by the b*lls with their high subscription and publication page charges.
Even the index services like Scientific Citations, GeoRef, Lexus-Nexus, etc. charge high fees. Hopefully Google Scholar will do an end-run around these and provide a more accessable search service.
Social Loathing
Note the search results. I'm especially fond of the second
Search for Yahoo on Google Scholar: 52,300 hits
Search for Google on Google Scholar: 520,000 hits
There are some things even an 18-year-old company can't buy... ;-)
Laugh.. it's a joke.
Is there a list anywhere with the sources Google Scholar indexes? It's going to be tough to compete with PubMed (for biosciences anyway) which is free, and other things like Web Of Knowledge which isn't free but available at pretty much every academic institution here in the UK.
:-(o me&t=f aqHome#seeMyHouse
Neither Germany nor Switzerland is on the map:
http://www.keyhole.com/body.php?c=popup&h=h
(Or should I be happy about this?)
These damn sims keep ignoring my commands. And the refresh rate is abominable. I sure hope they have a patch for this pronto!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I agree it's pretty damn cool, but is it worth the $30? I say i'm going to order, but I know I never will:(
Speaking of Google commercializing, looks like they've still got a bit of it to do:
Google Shares Fall on Fourth Quarter Revenue Warning
-----------------------
www.email-cop.com
"the start of real commercialism for Google" Ummm I guess those Google ads don't count? Do you maybe me the start of chargeing for services? I do not see a huge problem with this. If you want keyhole why not buy it. Frankly it looks almost as much fun as Everquest. And the price is low. i am looking forward to paying with it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I cannot see to authenticate, it says "try back in 15 minutes". Cannot figure out if it is /.'ed or something is up with the firewall here at work...
Anyone?
From the Keyhole page:
"... Access 12+ Terrabytes of aerial and satellite imagery, including international cities (Beijing, Taipei, Havana, Paris, London, Rome, Montreal, Athens, Mexico City, Toronto and more)...."
Today I got en e-mail from SCIRUS and they state that they are better than Google in the search of science related information.
The e-mail has an online version.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
If we can monitor things so closely, can anyone explain to me why we can't watch iraq, or afganastan for movement by terrorists?
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
I likely won't use WOS again, especially since they won't let me export references as BibTeX format anymore.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
How is this a new unit?? I've had a couple TBs on a file server of mine for a couple years now.
Keep Austin Weird!
i have been a keyhole user for almost a year now, and i think keyhole rocks! Its the perfect compliment to all my GPS maps.
San Deigo, Cambridge and Las Vegas has 3 inch resolution! That's amazing - I could clearly see my bald spot represented as a pixel while in my driveway!
Wow, thats a neat idea. I think I'll write stuff and put it up. Can't be all bad, Right? How many of us have google ads on our websites?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I think Google's motives are obvious on this one... Think a better mapquest.
Soon it will be free; I'm guessing it's only subscription based until they integrate into search.
I am a biologist, namely a geneticist, and no, shh was not named for anything to do with protein appearance. There is a mutant in Drosophila (fruit flies) which was lethal in early development and the pattern of denticles (like a row of hairs on each segment of the larvae) was disrupted in a way that they named it hedgehog. As researchers found homologs (the same) gane in mammalian genomes and more copies of the gene they named them in the hedgehog family things like sonic hedgehog, indian hedgehog and desert hedgehog. Hedgehog proteins have since been found to be very important developmental signal proteins for things like limb and eye development.
Try the philosophical quote "To be or not to be" and it complained:
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be. [details]
Lowercase "or" was ignored. Try "OR" to search for either of two terms. [details]
Well, not very helpful, is it?
Stealth Falcon
I've found Google Scholar disappointing. It shows articles headers disregarding if they are available for free or not. Free articles are lost among payed content like portal.acm.org. If I have time and money to pay for article I don't need google. For free articles available on the web common Google is of more use then Google Scholar.
they don't even have my state (Iowa), oops?
The Government (actually the USGS) provides the aerial photography for places like http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
CrossRef Free DOI lookup to retrieve a link to a citation.
They already provide linking technology to libraries and publishers.
Alternatively, you can Google their content using restrict=crossref in the URL.
The areas that I've heard described as locations for "secret caves" where OBL has been hiding can't get a lot of traffic. My point being, why send troops to random locations in remote areas with difficult terrain when we can monitor those areas and look for movement - sending our troops via parachute to those locations to investigate?
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
I'm a moron. That will be all. :-)
Keep Austin Weird!
"is this the start of real commercialism for google?"
Last time I checked they were a public for profit company. And very profitable. Also closed-source. Like Microsoft. The idea that they are motived by anything other than the profit motive is hopelessly naive. Not that that makes them any different, better or worse than Apple, Sun or Coca-Cola.
So no, this is not the start of "real commercialism". They started that when they took VC money.
Did everyone miss the announcement here on /. 2-3 weeks ago?
Google Acquires Keyhole Corp
Aside from the announcement of Google Scholar, the rest shouldn't of been in the story.
AFAIK parallel lines should appear parallel when seen from far, far away (where satellites normally are).
Pay attention to corners of skyscrapers at the crossing of Copper ave and 3rd Street. Building corners are normally vertical, which also means they are parallel, but the angle between the upper right skyscraper and lover left building is just too BIG.
This makes me believe that this image was not taken from a sattelite (not even low-orbiting one), but from a much lower altitude, and Keyhole may be decieving people with such advertising.
Back when Google was testing their new homepage I was the only one at my company who could see it, everyone else got the old homepage. I had everyone reset their cookies and after that about half of them got the new page.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Keyhole is cool. I downloaded it and installed it. Great! I'm running Windblows XP and my system cratered. REBOOT on it's own. I haven't had that happen in a long time. Be careful.
http://www.space.com/
They had free software for a while, but I can not find the exe now.
-Steve
I also noticed that Google Scholar lists how many times a paper is cited by other works. This seems like an excellent use of PageRank technology.
Actually, it's more like PageRank is an excellent application to the web of citation analysis, a long-established area of research that looks at documents and references between them.
Here is the Keyhole link.
I saw the press release a few weeks ago announcing that Google had purchased Keyhole, and downloaded a copy. It's absolutely amazing.
The program still has a few rough edges, but even at this stage it's the most fun I've ever had for $30 - at least 10 times more entertaining than the $50 that I blew on Doom 3 ("every black pixel carefully rendered by hand").
Keyhole combined aerial photography with topographic data. It uses the topo data to construct a 3-D surface that maps to the actual terrain. It then lays the aerial photography down on the 3-D surface to provide a 3-D model of the terrain. You can fly through the 3-D space just like you were in a helicopter.
For mountainous areas the 3-D representation is eerily realistic. The skyline as viewed from my house looks PRECISELY like the view out my window.
You can also lay down custom images on top of the terrain. I took a trail map of the park by my house and easily laid it down on top of the park itself. By controlling the opacity of the map, I could easily use the map to help identify buildings and trails that I could see on the photos. There are lots of custom overlays on their bbs - so you can, for example, lay the nighttime light map of the world on top of the real world, and fade back-n-forth from the daytime view via keyhole and the nighttime view. Fun for answering the question, "so what city is THAT bright spot?"
Cities look a bit silly in 3D, since the topo data doesn't know about building heights. Manhattan is pretty flat, with lots of tall buildings painted on the ground. But mountains look unbelievably realistic.
I've shown it to about a dozen people since I got it, and at least 4 have purchased their own copy.
In short, it's an infinite timesink. Lots of fun.
I came, I saw, I played with it. In most cases the 2 feet resolution (in a few cases as low as 3 inches, sometimes 1 feet and many times a meter or two) was blurry and at best a toy I tired of after 15 minutes. Even the places that were 3 inch resolution (think of it as a 3 inch wide pixel) were not that impressive unless you were just looking for the overall layout (which you can pretty much get from a map). On the other hand if you like looking out the window on a plan flight at the ground, this is a safe home experience of something quite similar.
In just 5 minutes of using Google Scholar, I've found more papers on language revitalization and cultural identity that actually pertain to the topic than I've been able to find through hours of digging through the hundreds of databases that our university library subscribes to.
To say that it rocks is nothing short of a massive understatement.
Finally, the web might be available in a form which we can actually do research on again. That'll be nice.
Google should make a "Hobbyist" portal which only has data on various hobbyist sites, such as RC cars/planes/etc., electronics, home automation, linux, anachronism, etc. That would tweak my noodle.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hey Google... students all over the world rely on you. Why do you assume that they only use a Microsoft Product. First google bar, now this. Impress us next time... spend the extra time and money to launch something cross-platform. IE... Linux, Mac, and PC.... Look, I'm to expert, but take a hint from Firefox.
Worldwind is great if you don't want to get high-res data, and if you don't need to polish of keyhole viewer.
.NET.
Landsat 7 servers are almost never reachable, so you end up downloading 5gb of cache data to your drive and they you still don't have the high-res data you want when you zoom in.
But... if you want to view different maps on the world to visualize different data, it's a good framework.
Personally, I wish worldwind would roll their support and development behind celestia (which runs on all platforms) and stop using
That said, there's nothing available for $30/year that even comes close to Keyhole
I have free access to ISI through work, but I haven't used it in years because of the awful interface. It is slow and kludgy, I can invariably find things faster using google + citeseer.
I downloaded the 7-day trial version, and I have to say, I've had most of my office stopping by my room to check out the absolute coolness of Keyhole.
This product seems extremely useful to me. I'm a geocacher. (if you're a member, my username is "virosa") I have purchased several maps from Garmin, but their maps are fairly expensive (typically $100 or more), and don't have every little dirt trail clearly marked, which are usually what I wind up on eventually. The Keyhole maps may not have every road labelled, but you can visually SEE the dirt trails that are there. This is great for reconning a geocaching location for good ways to approach, and large hazards. After all, that thin line that says "creek" on my GPS may be an unfordable river, or it could be a dry bed. I don't have to guess with Keyhole.
I also like to travel to places that aren't your typical tourist fare. I try to pick one country a year and wander around backpacking for 2 or more weeks. This year was Turkey (OK, it isn't tourist fare for us in the U.S.). Last year was Romania. Garmin GPS maps SUCK for these locations, and for any location that isn't really metropolitan. While the Keyhole software doesn't have any resolution for Turkey (haven't checked Romania yet), the resolution for other backwoods places like Iraq and Afghanistan is remarkable! Places like these would maybe have one airport listed on them with Garmin maps, and here I get tons of detail, including topography!
Which leads me to another cool tie-in. I like first person shooter games. I also like watching current war events in the news. I went to Kumawar's website and learned to combine these two likes. Kumawar offers you missions that are based on recent world events, such as battles in Najaf, Sadr, and the assassination of Sadam's two sons. Kumawar has recreated these locals with real attention to the actual architecture of where these battles took place -- keyhole adds one more level of understanding to what was happening, since I can actually look at Sadr or Najaf and see how all the buildings are positioned. History always kinda bored me. With these two tools, it really cements current events into my mind.
If I'm going somewhere new by car, and I have the address, I used to use a free service like this one so that I could just GPS my way there. Keyhole gives me some more detail.
Did I mention the fact that most of these satellite shots are 6+ years more recent than Microsoft's terraserver images?
Now having said all that, there are a few things that Keyhole really has to work out.
1) No way to enter Lat/Lon coordinates. It will display them, sure, but if I really want to zoom in on 38N 77W, I have to do some tricky stuff with my mouse.
2) Puting in addresses is touchy. I have to say that Puerto Rico is the U.S. It will find "Kirby St", but not "Kirby Street". Little things like that.
3) Many countries have absolutely no resolution. I wanted to show some buddies of mine one of the most amazing sites in Turkey, but the entire country is a blur. Even a huge city like Istanbul has no imagery.
4) Right now, there's no support for any coordinate types other than Decimal degrees and Degrees/minutes/seconds. UTM and MGRS support would R0xx0r.
5) A way to export points of interest onto my GPS would double-r0xx0r.
I still think this is a winner. I'll definately be giving them my $30.
I almost forgot to mention -- some way to download permanent information about a certain site would make this a competition killer. (seeing how I don't typically have a highspeed connection when I'm climbing through the back country)
It looks like the rooftops of the White House and the buildings next to it have had things drawn over them. Too bad... I wanted to check out the rumor I've always heard that there are anti-aircraft guns on the roof of 1600.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
---Unlike most online newspapers and magazines, almost all the scientific journals I know of require a paid subscription to access.---
Actually, many journals these days allow open access for all articles after a certain amount of time, 12 months in some cases, 6 months in others.
---The exception are the couple of new bioscience journals in the Public Library of Science and the physics pre-print server (not peer-reviewed). But even that the author must pay $1500 for the cost of review and webification. ---
Note that the PLOS journals are all being financed by heavy endowments, and the author pays method of publishing a journal has so far not been proven to be economically viable.
---However, the greedy for-profit academic publishers and professional societies know this wall. They have the academic community by the b*lls with their high subscription and publication page charges----
Do you really think that most scientific societies are out to make a profit? Most that I've been involved with do a great deal for their communities. Most are almost entirely funded through proceeds from the journals they publish. Take these away, and you lose all of the good deeds that societies do for scientists. Remove their ability to publish, and societies vanish, and then all of the journals are in the hands of the greedy for-profit publishers. Is this what you want?
---Hopefully Google Scholar will do an end-run around these and provide a more accessable search service.---
Nope. You can search all you like on Google, but unless you subscribe to the journal, or the paper is open access, you can't read the full text.
This all may change with the proposed new NIH guidelines.
even though google scholar now searches through technical documents (without bringing up junk hits), if you aren't a member of some university which actually has unfettered access to the sites holding the journals and articles, you won't be able to get access. for example:
& oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=test&ie=UTF-8
click the first link and you'll see what i mean.
Spurred on by your additional info, I poked around to find out more about shh. I took a look at a Sonic Hedgehog page at Davidson College. I was surprised to find out that shh gets its name from the video game character. "The first two homologues of hedgehog were named after species of hedgehog and the third was named after the video game character (Gilbert, 2000)."
A press release over at the University of Chicago Hospitals site elaborated: "Researchers found three different versions of the "hedgehog" gene but only two kinds of real hedgehogs, so they named the third gene after the cartoon character."
I know you said they named them after things in the hedgehog family, so I assumed there must be an actual "sonic hedgehog" to go along with the Indian and desert hedgehog. No less likely that the animal would have a crazy name than the protein, I figured. My ignorance shows once again...
And Halo-, looks like you had a point about biologists, physicists, and computer geeks assigning crazy names to things.
Google Scholar seems like it's just a much better interface to the same idea
I agree. Some quick results of a vanity search. I found all of my papers and more through Google. Citeseer found none of them. I'm still hunting. Google even found papers where I was listed as an author which I did not know existed.
It is interesting that Google (bombing|spamming) in the world of article references predates Google. Want a promotion in the academy? Cite yourself hundreds of times in your own articles, and your citation count goes through the roof, like this. Promotions and disgust from colleagues usually follow.
Back when one of the free mapping programs had aerial photos (for a much smaller set of locations), I was able to see my car parked on my street (I think the resolution was between 0.25-1 meter per pixel), and I was able to see that a street had a divider down the middle (so I could tell that the driving directions didn't support a left turn there...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"...speculation about how a sufficiently competent search engine could write the news itself.":
John Brunner covered this (and much more) in his 1970 sci-fi classic "Stand on Zanzibar".
I loved the flyover feature of the old Microsoft software atlases of the 90's. Better than the wireframe of Flight Simulator, but still only granular to a mile square, if I remember correctly. I look forward to flying over Paris, London, my old home town, my ancestors' villages, and who knows where else. And....Retail and chain restaurant real estate people (the folks who decide where to put the stores) will certainly use these systems, and not just for fun. I worked in the trade area group at a "big box" retailer, and two of our staff would fly out to whatever city where a new store was proposed, drive around, drink a lot of coffee, take a lot of pictures, and mark up maps with competitors' locations, apparent traffic flows, and whatever else they could see that seemed relevant. Back at the office, the maps were pinned with population demographics, planned highway or other development info, etc. Companies with smaller stores do the same thing without the travel, and frequently miss some salient characteristics. I see these folks using such mapping, with geo-coded data laid over the photos, to plan locations better. And whenever you get the urge to say some technology has no use beyond amusement, remember that the head of Western Union said the same thing about the telephone (unless he didn't).
"Quantum Mechanics Do It Differently If You Watch"
There's actually an interesting web site which keeps a database of interesting gene names. There's genes like ken and barbie (for drosophila lacking genitalia), maggie (for where development seems to stop, like in certain simpsons characters), tribbles (dividing uncontrollably), and tigger (constant jumping).
Are there any Iran maps in the new map tool?
Thanks. - Hal I. Burton