Ok...then how abut the IHT quoting Peugeot? [1991] A Peugeot spokesman said the withdrawal had been prompted by the failure of the company's 405 model sedan to gain a significant share of the U.S. market. Peugeot, which turns out both the Peugeot and the Citroën, joins such other European car companies as Renault and Ford's German operation in admitting defeat in the highly competitive midsize segment of the American market. Peugeot produced 1.4 million cars last year, and both the 405 and 605 have sold well in Europe. Last year [1990] Peugeot sold 4,261 cars in the United States.
Great for them if they can continue selling and doing very well without the US market. If they were selling in Europe alone they would have a larger population to sell to, so one would hope they could still sell cars there. I don't see how this supports any of your radical conclusions.
Not anti-anything except misinformation, so get over that to begin with. Follow the wikipedia link and read it yourself, no spinning necessary. I didn't post anything that wasn't there. In fact, so you don't even have to click the link:
As experienced by other European volume car makers, Peugot's U.S. sales faltered and finally became uneconomical, as the Peugeot 505 design aged. Several ideas to turn around sales in the United States, such as including the Peugeot 205 in its lineup, were considered but not pursued. In the early nineties, the newly introduced Peugeot 405 proved uncompetitive with domestic and import models in the same market segment, and sold less than 1,000 units. Total sales fell to 4,261 units in 1990 and 2,240 through July, 1991. This caused the company to cease U.S. operations after 33 years. There are currently no known plans to return to the American market.
It's great that they can do just fine without being in the US market - what does that mean? It doesn't mean what you want it to mean, that the US is useless and unnecessary. It simply means the obvious: a company can do well without being in the US market. So what? And yes, the EU GDP is larger than the US. Does that mean that #2 (a small margin from first but a larger margin from third; 200 million less people than the EU) doesn't matter anymore?
Being unable to compete (due to old designs) and swamped with financial difficulties (due to mismanagement and some questionable investment choices) leading to stopping production and sales in the US (after 30+ years of doing so) is different from choosing to remove themselves from the market because of some ethical or philisophical reason.
"Used to be called 'natural language question answering systems'"? NLP and Question Answering are still very very active fields of research with many conferences, workshops and evaluations going on - not only in the US but also internationally - encompassing multi-lingual QA and reasoning-based QA. Ask Jeeves was not real QA, it was based more on manual annotations than open-domain NLP.
Google already has huge competition with baidu.com & sohu.com. Baidu is very similar to google, and sohu is closer to a yahoo-ish portal with games, search, real estate, maps, media, etc.
FT(AOL)A: Civic terms, such as state, county, gov and Florida are surprisingly ubiquitous, although mostly popular during the workday. Is AOL's average user a retired Floridian?
I find it interesting that "county" appears so often in AOL searches, it seems like an odd civic term to be popular. Though, when looking at the Google trends for "county, city, town, state, gov", county is right up there with state in the US, but below city. Why would AOL users be more concerned with county rather than city?
Plus, you'd have to do some interesting things regarding localized precipitation. Would a 20% chance of rain for a metropolitan area be fulfilled if it rained *anywhere* in the covered area, not just where you are sitting taking down readings? If it rained a mile away from a person who checked the weather to find a percent chance of rain, but not in their exact location, it still rained for that forecast area. Would it make sense in that case to consider the chance of precipitation as the chance for any given location, i.e. 100% chance of scattered precipitation over the whole area with a smaller percent chance of it being in a precise location? This would take some thinking to really get right.
Yeah, there are some unexpected results here and there, such as the one you mention, or girls, where Pakistan (leading by far), India, Australia, NZ all come before the UK or US, and yet there is not a single Pakistani city in the top 10 list...
At the bottom, there is the disclaimer: Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.
The UK is the most confused, The Norwegians are lost, people from Mexico City are searching for the internet, Seattleites are wondering what Bill Gates is up to, people in Kansas City are cheating at Where's Waldo, Hungarians are hungry for warez, Iranians spell it Googel, the Polish seek the www, and the Japanese are the only ones searching for "/.".
In USA vs. UK, the UK wins out in search, but trails in news (though the news trend for the two follow each other, interestingly). Check out the regions graph.
While I agree that education in the US needs much improvement, it is still a huge destination for top students from foreign countries looking for university education, which they often take back with them to their home countries.
Looking at this particular article, I really hesitate to make such a direct connection between participation and overall education of the entire population and the entire education system, whether the participants performed well or poorly. There are many other factors involved that than simply "American schools are lame" (though many, not all, do need a lot of help).
For a language as far from any Latin-based language as Japanese is (English-borrowed words aside), the best way to learn Japanese is to take a class, an immersion class if you can find one. I did this and in a short period of time, I was able to have small, mostly toy conversations and write a few things. Any language class is best taught as immersion, I believe, because it forces you to really start trying it out. After learning a few languages myself, I can honestly say that you progress much faster if you're just trying the language out as much as possible. Don't be afraid to make mistakes - laugh at them, really.
The Japanese immersion class I took was English on the first day, but beginning on the second day for the next 2 semesters, there was no English during class - all questions had to be asked in Japanese, all tests were written in Japanese (Hirigana/Kanji only after we learned some) and so on. It's really a great way to learn a language.
Also from the article: Schmidt said he saw Writely and other server-based tools as another way to collect and organize the world's data. "All the world's information includes personal information," he noted.
I was a little surprised to not see anything else in there really about privacy concerns, except that users "need to trust that the information won't be abused by Google or by governments".
The FTC has a good list of where to go to opt-out of pre-approved credit offers as well as direct marketers. The 888 number you gave is still valid, as is optoutprescreen, mentioned elsewhere in the comments here.
Maybe I'll consider checking it out then, thanks. I saw a long list of aquaduct graphics errors, with them leading off here and there all over and that really didn't look good. I am intrigued by new gameplay aspects, but wasn't sure it was really worth it.
True. I love the civ series, played civ2 for a very long time until switching to civ3. After looking at civ4 with the horrible graphics bugs and the unnecessary usage of 3D, I'm not in any hurry to pick it up, I'll stick with civ3.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok...then how abut the IHT quoting Peugeot? [1991] A Peugeot spokesman said the withdrawal had been prompted by the failure of the company's 405 model sedan to gain a significant share of the U.S. market. Peugeot, which turns out both the Peugeot and the Citroën, joins such other European car companies as Renault and Ford's German operation in admitting defeat in the highly competitive midsize segment of the American market. Peugeot produced 1.4 million cars last year, and both the 405 and 605 have sold well in Europe. Last year [1990] Peugeot sold 4,261 cars in the United States.
Great for them if they can continue selling and doing very well without the US market. If they were selling in Europe alone they would have a larger population to sell to, so one would hope they could still sell cars there. I don't see how this supports any of your radical conclusions.
Not anti-anything except misinformation, so get over that to begin with. Follow the wikipedia link and read it yourself, no spinning necessary. I didn't post anything that wasn't there. In fact, so you don't even have to click the link:
As experienced by other European volume car makers, Peugot's U.S. sales faltered and finally became uneconomical, as the Peugeot 505 design aged. Several ideas to turn around sales in the United States, such as including the Peugeot 205 in its lineup, were considered but not pursued. In the early nineties, the newly introduced Peugeot 405 proved uncompetitive with domestic and import models in the same market segment, and sold less than 1,000 units. Total sales fell to 4,261 units in 1990 and 2,240 through July, 1991. This caused the company to cease U.S. operations after 33 years. There are currently no known plans to return to the American market.
It's great that they can do just fine without being in the US market - what does that mean? It doesn't mean what you want it to mean, that the US is useless and unnecessary. It simply means the obvious: a company can do well without being in the US market. So what? And yes, the EU GDP is larger than the US. Does that mean that #2 (a small margin from first but a larger margin from third; 200 million less people than the EU) doesn't matter anymore?
Being unable to compete (due to old designs) and swamped with financial difficulties (due to mismanagement and some questionable investment choices) leading to stopping production and sales in the US (after 30+ years of doing so) is different from choosing to remove themselves from the market because of some ethical or philisophical reason.
For Natural Language Processing and Question Answering research activities, search for "AQUAINT (DTO OR ARDA OR IARPA)" and also the NIST TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) workshops and research competitions.
There is a lot of interesting work out there and some answers as to why more precise information finding through natural language input is useful.
"Used to be called 'natural language question answering systems'"? NLP and Question Answering are still very very active fields of research with many conferences, workshops and evaluations going on - not only in the US but also internationally - encompassing multi-lingual QA and reasoning-based QA. Ask Jeeves was not real QA, it was based more on manual annotations than open-domain NLP.
Google already has huge competition with baidu.com & sohu.com. Baidu is very similar to google, and sohu is closer to a yahoo-ish portal with games, search, real estate, maps, media, etc.
But how often are people searching for information about their county? How much of a need is there for AOL users to do that?
FT(AOL)A: Civic terms, such as state, county, gov and Florida are surprisingly ubiquitous, although mostly popular during the workday. Is AOL's average user a retired Floridian?
I find it interesting that "county" appears so often in AOL searches, it seems like an odd civic term to be popular. Though, when looking at the Google trends for "county, city, town, state, gov", county is right up there with state in the US, but below city. Why would AOL users be more concerned with county rather than city?
Plus, you'd have to do some interesting things regarding localized precipitation. Would a 20% chance of rain for a metropolitan area be fulfilled if it rained *anywhere* in the covered area, not just where you are sitting taking down readings? If it rained a mile away from a person who checked the weather to find a percent chance of rain, but not in their exact location, it still rained for that forecast area. Would it make sense in that case to consider the chance of precipitation as the chance for any given location, i.e. 100% chance of scattered precipitation over the whole area with a smaller percent chance of it being in a precise location? This would take some thinking to really get right.
Anything that comes through (an IP network), we can record
How long until the RIAA comes knocking at this guy's door?
He who controls the mail, controls ... Information! - Newman
The analysis of the poll, stating that simply "A majority of Americans initially support" the program is a little misleading.
Yeah, there are some unexpected results here and there, such as the one you mention, or girls, where Pakistan (leading by far), India, Australia, NZ all come before the UK or US, and yet there is not a single Pakistani city in the top 10 list...
At the bottom, there is the disclaimer: Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.
The UK is the most confused, The Norwegians are lost, people from Mexico City are searching for the internet, Seattleites are wondering what Bill Gates is up to, people in Kansas City are cheating at Where's Waldo, Hungarians are hungry for warez, Iranians spell it Googel, the Polish seek the www, and the Japanese are the only ones searching for "/.".
In USA vs. UK, the UK wins out in search, but trails in news (though the news trend for the two follow each other, interestingly). Check out the regions graph.
While I agree that education in the US needs much improvement, it is still a huge destination for top students from foreign countries looking for university education, which they often take back with them to their home countries.
Looking at this particular article, I really hesitate to make such a direct connection between participation and overall education of the entire population and the entire education system, whether the participants performed well or poorly. There are many other factors involved that than simply "American schools are lame" (though many, not all, do need a lot of help).
How many Doctor Octopus wannabes are jumping on couches about this?
This algae is in contrast to the eye fungus going around that can cause blindness.
For a language as far from any Latin-based language as Japanese is (English-borrowed words aside), the best way to learn Japanese is to take a class, an immersion class if you can find one. I did this and in a short period of time, I was able to have small, mostly toy conversations and write a few things. Any language class is best taught as immersion, I believe, because it forces you to really start trying it out. After learning a few languages myself, I can honestly say that you progress much faster if you're just trying the language out as much as possible. Don't be afraid to make mistakes - laugh at them, really.
The Japanese immersion class I took was English on the first day, but beginning on the second day for the next 2 semesters, there was no English during class - all questions had to be asked in Japanese, all tests were written in Japanese (Hirigana/Kanji only after we learned some) and so on. It's really a great way to learn a language.
Also from the article: Schmidt said he saw Writely and other server-based tools as another way to collect and organize the world's data. "All the world's information includes personal information," he noted.
I was a little surprised to not see anything else in there really about privacy concerns, except that users "need to trust that the information won't be abused by Google or by governments".
The FTC has a good list of where to go to opt-out of pre-approved credit offers as well as direct marketers. The 888 number you gave is still valid, as is optoutprescreen, mentioned elsewhere in the comments here.
Maybe I'll consider checking it out then, thanks. I saw a long list of aquaduct graphics errors, with them leading off here and there all over and that really didn't look good. I am intrigued by new gameplay aspects, but wasn't sure it was really worth it.
True. I love the civ series, played civ2 for a very long time until switching to civ3. After looking at civ4 with the horrible graphics bugs and the unnecessary usage of 3D, I'm not in any hurry to pick it up, I'll stick with civ3.
So that's what the AI researchers have been missing all along: some big virus to generate the Big AI?
So how long until we start seeing "IT Company Employee" trading cards? It sounds like these guys are being moved around like baseball players.
"Hey, I got Kai-Fu Lee's Bachelor's card!" "Cool, but you know after he got traded to Google, his publication stats tanked."