Category Archives: Google

Google Doodle’s Little Nemo’s 107th Birthday.

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The Google Doodle folks are coming up with some amazing animated graphics these days and today may be the most spectacular of the Google Doodles, though I found it kind of annoying because you could not immediately go off to see what it was showcasing. Today’s doodle features Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo” comic strip, today celebrating a 107th birthday. This is certainly the *largest* Google Doodle ever, as the animated sequence takes up several screens as you scroll down to reveal more and more of Little Nemo’s dream. It’s a spectacular animation and another in the amazing series of graphics from Google.

Google Doodle Nemo

Google Doodle Nemo

Alan Turing Google Doodle honors Computing Pioneer

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Check out the most complicated Google Doodle of all time here, where the Google Doodle of the day  celebrates the birthday of computer science pioneer Alan Turing.   Turing is reasonably considered a founder of computer science even though he never lived to see anything like the current crop of machines we now find in our homes, businesses, and mobile devices.

The Google Doodle is representing a ‘codebreaker’ sequence.   Turing’s brilliancies in cracking encoded Nazi war memos led to major strategic breakthrough when he cracked the “enigma” code routine, giving the allies access to a treasure trove of strategic information about the Nazi war plans.

The “Turing Test” remains an intriguing part of the quest for general artificial intelligence.  Turing suggested that a major step in development of mechanical intelligence would be a human’s inability to distinguish the machine responses from those of another human.  Most current thinking suggests that a machine could pass the “Turing Test” and NOT be considered artificial intelligence, but Turing’s speculations remain some of the most important computing insights of all time.

Turing’s life was tragic in many ways.  He was gay in a time when the government prosecuted people for “indecency”, and his life was cut short by cyanide poisoning – most likely a suicide or accident – at the age of only 42.

Eadweard J. Muybridge Google Doodle

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Don’t miss today’s Google Doodle featuring an awesome animation inspired by the work of Eadweard J. Muybridge, a photographer whose innovative work was some of the earliest in the transition to modern day filmmaking.   Muybridge was hired by California industrialist Leland Stanford to settle a bet about whether all four of a horses hooves were off the ground when running.   As you can see from the Google Doodle animation they are off the ground, and many believe it was Muybridge’s innovative technique that provided others with the insights that led to modern day motion pictures.

Juan Gris Google Doodle

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Juan Gris was an amazing Spanish surrealist painter, Gris is dead now but he’s celebrated via a Google Doodle at Google.com.   Now, I can’t really say that I’m a huge Gris fan, or even that I knew who Gris was before today, but I CAN say that this will be an interesting experiment in terms of how Google ranks this blog post for the term “Juan Gris”, a fairly obscure reference in the blog literature.     At least until today, when a LOT of blogs will be talking Juan Gris, working the angle of discussing Google doodles.

Violin and Checkerboard, 1913

For more about this amazing painter you really need to go to one of these sites for more information:

Wikipedia:  Early life – Career – Death

Juan Gris – The complete works

Retirement, History, and Google Spreadsheets

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I’m working hard on our Retirement website and upcoming retirement blog project called “Retire USA” and wound up having a heck of a time with some data conversions, so I want to outline that process here in case others have the same troubles.

Process ONE – copying records from a Google Docs Spreadsheet to an Open Office “ODS” format spreadsheet:   This sure seemed non-trivial unless I missed something or had data glitches buried in the sheets.   I could NOT complete direct cut and pastes from Google docs to my Open Office “ODS” spreadsheet so….

What DID WORK was this:

1.  Save Google spreadsheet in CSV format within Google Docs

2.  Import that CSV sheet to Open Office and save in ODS format.

3.  Cut and paste between the two Open Office spreadsheets.   IMPORTANT:  When pasting, select ONLY the upper left cell as if you are going to paste everything into that single cell.

 Process TWO – Merge two cells into a new single cell containing contents of BOTH original cells.     In my case I wanted a new combined field name.

Update – review the “DATA/Text to Columns” and the related “Concatenate” functions within Open Office.

Again, I’m not an expert so there may be easy ways to do it, but this did not seem to work directly in Google Docs spreadsheet.    Merge cells is an option, but it only preserved ONE of the cells.    However in Open Office you can celect “Merge Cells” and it should immediately prompt you to include contents of BOTH cells.   Unfortunately I had to merge about 8000 cells and since there seemed to be no bulk process I created a keystroke macro and did them (pretty quickly) manually because I was not clever enough to get a macro that would run this process by itself.

FYI note that you may want to keep your old fields (cells) as well as have the new combined field.   In that case simply make copies of the columns so you have extra ones to combine.

The reason I needed this was to create a CityCategory field name that will work well with our Retirement website.   One painful alternative to this little merge routine would have been to type the extra word into five thousand records!

World Record for Largest Observed Snowflake … on a Google Doodle?

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The World record for the largest observed snowflake …

according to the Guinness Book of World Records, was attained this day of January 28th in 1887.  The city was Fort Keogh, Montana and the observer was a farmer.

Google’s doodle of today celebrates his discovery, though it appears he may have been the only witness to this frozen snowflake miracle of nature.

From Wikipedia we learn that Guinness’ recognized the world’s largest snowflakes as those of January 1887 at Fort Keogh, Montana; allegedly one measured 38 cm (15 inches) wide.

Google Chromebook Computer

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Google just announced a new computing platform called “Chromebook” that looks very promising.    Working with partners Samsung and Acer, the new computers will optimize the computing experience for the web, taking advantage of Google’s Android operating system, the Google Chrome browser, gmail, Google documents, Google maps, and the many other great web-centric products Google has cooked up since they began their amazing online journey from obscure search engine to online advertising juggernaut.

More about Google Chromebook at Technology Report

Official Google Blog: A new kind of computer: Chromebook

Intro to Chromebook

Google’s 10 to the 10th project winners – spawning innovative solutions.

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Google’s  Project 10 to the 10th gathered 150,000 ideas and filtered them to five great ideas listed below.  Each will receive huge funding from Google:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Enhance science and engineering education

FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST

Make government more transparent

Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Drive innovation in public transport

Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting

Provide quality education to African students

Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to Masters and PhD study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

http://www.project10tothe100.com/

THANKS GOOGLE!

————    Joe rambles on —————-

I love the innovative spirit in contests and project like these, and also believe funding from deep pockets like Google is critical because I think in general innovations …. fail…. even in the for profit sector.     However in that sector we reward success hugely, so we get a fair number of entrepreneurial “players” who are looking to win the innovation lottery, and these players tend to spin out a few good ideas among mostly bad ones.

The current USA system tends to dramatically reward success and ruthlessly kill commercial failure, which is probably a good approach to optimize business success.  A common mistake by those who argue that “innovation is golden” is to only look at the few innovative projects that have had huge success  (Apple Computer, Google, etc) and ignore the *thousands* of failed innovations, most of which most of us never hear about.      One of the big lessons that should have been learned from the internet and real estate bubbles is that innovation does NOT foster success – it simply fosters new ideas.     Most internet companies that were spawned during the bubble have failed where a few like Google have become global economic powerhouses.

But as usual I digress.   THANKS Google for helping to spawn new ideas to do good.   That’s cool.

Google Adwords: All Your Advertising Base are Belong to GOOGLE!

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I’m firing up an Adwords campaign to support our  CES 2010 Coverage over at Technology Report and … ummm… I am NOT enjoying revisiting the frustration of working with the world’s most sophisticated advertising monopoly.

I really would NOT complain that much if Google’s silly “ad diagnosis tool” said something like this:

“Dear Joe, we noticed you wanted to run some advertising on our blank results pages.    Although we realize your content is very relevant to users and there is low competition for the space we are going to gouge you on pricing … why Joe?  BECAUSE WE CAN YOU SUCKER!”

I really would chuckle and appreciate the honesty.    In my view Google does not have an obligation to me with respect to pricing ads.   They can do as they please and let the market decide.

BUT … they do have an obligation to be more honest than they are with Adwords comments and as usual the recommendations take the ridiculous forms as they do wth organic search problems where Google is often vague or non-responsive.     Why am I saying they aren’t being honest?    Although it’s true that there appear to be ways to increase your chances of appearing without paying more, the notion that the quality of the keywords and what you pay are unrelated is preposterous.  In fact it clearly defies the claim of “user centric” so often heard from Google.

What can I do?
There are several ways to improve the quality of your keywords, thus decreasing your advertising costs. Learn how to build a more effective keyword list, and take advantage of our campaign optimization tips. You can also raise your bid. See the ‘Quality Score’ tab for recommendations.

So yes Google I will pay more to show up, but it would be nice if you’d at least make it clear that the reason irrelevant ads are trumping others is that they *make more for Google*, not because they are better for users.

What, you wanted an example of pay to play clear irrelevancy?    Here’s ONE among what I’d estimate are millions of inferior ads running at Google at higher rates than more relevant ads:

Consumer Electronics Show
Consumer Electronics Show Online.

Free Shipping on 100,000+ Products!
http://www.Target.com

Disclaimer:   Hey, on other websites I make money from Google Adwords via Adsense.  I am thus one of the *beneficiaries of this process.  So, why am I biting the hand that feeds me?    Because ya gotta calls ’em like ya sees ’em.