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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.
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
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.