loose wire blog

Google and History

I had gotten excited about Google’s timeline search before, but hadn’t seen this: Google is mining not just text for the dates of more recent stuff, but everything, stretching back into the mists of time, culled from Google Books:

The result is an odd but interesting automatically generated history of whatever you’re looking for.

In this case, I was looking for “cleft stick”. This is what appeared:

And the first few were all about how women found to be disrespectful, swearing, reveling or other forms of subversion had their tongues inserted into a cleft stick—a stick with the end split, and the tongue inserted:

The sources are varied, revealing a fascinating brutality and harrassment of women which went on for years:

In 1636, Elisabeth Aplegate was proclaimed guilty of the crime of swearing and reveling, and was required to stand in public with her tongue in a cleft stick.

1638 - The calmness with which even cultivated men then viewed the public whipping of women appears from the record by Governor Winthrop of the punishment of Mrs. Oliver in 1638. She was a woman of good character, but differed violently with the magistrates as to religious ...The calmness with which even cultivated men then viewed the public whipping of women appears from the record by Governor Winthrop of the punishment of Mrs. Oliver in 1638. She was a woman of good character, but differed violently with the magistrates as to religious matters, for which she was reproved, and finally sentenced to have her tongue put in a cleft stick, and then to be whipped.

This is clearly where the term “caught in a cleft stick” comes from. But not, probably, exactly what we mean when we say it.

Obese Texters, Back to the Future, and Scams

I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at about 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are.

Texting reduces obesity

If your kids are getting a little overweight, then treat them to a bit of texting. But it’s not quite how it sounds (I thought it might be something to do with the aerobic workout you get from the thumb twiddling.) No, a study by the University of North Carolina suggests that if obese kids are encouraged to keep a record of their eating habits via SMS, they are more likely to adhere to the health regimen—less TV, more exerices, less Coke—than those who just wrote down the same information. (Attrition rate was 28% against 61% for the paper diary kids and 50% for the control group.)

Part of this may be down to the fact that the kids get instant feedback via SMS on their results. So actually this is more about the interactivity of health regimes rather than the physical benefits of cellphones or texting. (Actually this whole SMS for health thing is quite a meme. Check out this conference here.)

The miracles of life in 2000—as seen from 1950

Popular Mechanics of February 1950 predicted a number of things, some of which have come true, some of which haven’t, and some of which should, if we got our act together.

What they got right

• Highways broad without any curves
• Doubledecked highways
• soup and milk come in frozen bricks (but thought that cooking would be a thing of the past)
• TV connected to the phone; but would buy stuff over the TV with store clerks holding the goods up obligingly for customers to inspect…
• robots in factories, but controlled by punch cards
• air travel would be frequent, but expensive because of jet fuel; rocket plane fare from Chicago to Paris would cost $5000

What they got wrong

• Heart of the town is the airport
• Clean as a whistle and quiet
• Crime to burn raw coal
• Illumnitated by electric suns on 200 ft high towers
• A house would cost only $5000 to build
• Houses don’t last more than 25 years
• Wash using chemicals that shave as well.
• Dishes dissolves in superheated water, so no washing machines
• Plastics derived from cottonseed hulls, Jerusalem artichocks and and fruit pips
• Clean the house by turning a hose on it; everything is synthetic fabric of waterproof plastic; drain in the middle of the floor
• worried by mass starvation, scientists came up with food from sawdust, table linen and rayon underwear converted into sweets
• ‘calculators’ would predict the weather
• storms diverted
• no one would have gone to the moon—yet…

What I wish they’d gotten right

• Used underwear recyled into candy

Scam lady

Janella Spears, nursing administrator in a place called Sweet Home, Oregon, who practices CPR and is a reverend, has given $400,000 to scammers. She got letters from President Bush, the president of Nigeria and FBI director Robert Mueller. Wiped out husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took out a lien on the family car. Everyone told her to stop but she didn’t.

This is the problem with scams; it’s very hard to accept you’ve been scammed, and so perversely it’s easier to continuing giving money in the belief that it will all come good.

Pocket Keys

A team at UCal San Diego have come up with software, called Sneakey, that can take a picture of a key and convert it to a bitting code, which is enough for a locksmith to make a new key:

1. The user provides point locations on the target key with a reference key as a guide.
2. The system warps the target image into the pose of the reference key and overlays markings of where the bite codes are to be found.
3. The user specifies where the cut falls along each line and the bit depths are decoded by the system into a bitting code.

In one experiment, the Sneakey team installed a camera on their four story department building (77 feet above the ground) at an acute angle to a key sitting on a café table 195 feet away. The image captured (below) was correctly decoded.

They’ve not released the software but say it would be pretty easy to put together.

Bookmarks Are Dead. Long Live Bookmarks

Interesting post by Mathew Ingram over at the Globe and Mail on the new-look del.icio.us. His conclusion: great, but who bookmarks anymore?

I got all shirty at first, but actually he’s right. It’s not that people don’t bookmark, it’s that the purpose of bookmarking is less obvious now than it used to be.

The point of bookmarking stuff is, presumably, to

1. save stuff you want to go back to
2. save stuff you want to share
3. save stuff you don’t want to forget exists
4. save stuff in a place alongside similar stuff
5. save stuff as a regular port of call

These have all changed in recent years.

RSS killed the bookmark

5. has largely been taken over by RSS. Why visit a website when it will come to you?

Sharing killed the bookmark

2. can be better shared via Google Reader—sort of—but now increasingly in things like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. And of course StumbleUpon, digg.com etc. We are more interested in just pushing stuff out there in a timely fashion—no use in sharing something if everyone else already knows about it. These links are as likely to be fat cat videos or news stories as much as services, products and more ‘permanent’ links.

Which leaves what?

1. and 3. are slightly similar. But saving something you won’t forget and something you will are slightly different—the difference between putting car keys somewhere you wont’ forget them, as opposed to putting car keys somewhere so you remember you have a car.

An online equivalent is your bank account website, say: You’re unlikely to forget you have a bank account, but you might forget the address—or hate typing in the address again. Whereas a cool new tool for collecting the email addresses of people who share your middle name might sound like something worth visiting again, but chances are you’ll forget it exists unless you save it somewhere.

So, saving something you go back to regularly makes sense as an in-house bookmark. I use the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox for these links (removing the name to save space):

and then I use the Google Browser Sync to make sure these look the same over different browsers. (Although I just noticed that it’s no longer available for download. What happened there?)

So that’s 1. dealt with. But this doesn’t really make sense more infrequent bookmarks, or bookmarks you’d just like to check out at some future date. The screen real-estate is finite, after all.

This is where I think bookmarking becomes more of a useful service. And tagging. But it still doesn’t work that well. Tagging is a great tool—and del.icio.us has made it much easier by suggesting tags for things—but I still find navigating my own tags too time-consuming a task. And adding them into clouds etc just seems like something someone else should be doing for me. 

This is where we also get onto 4.—saving stuff so that it ends up alongside similar stuff. What I mean by this is that we may not be able to remember all the social tools we’ve come across that allow us to, say converse with other people who share the same middle name, but we know we saved it somewhere. So when we add another bookmark we want to be able to be sure that it somehow connects to those other bookmarks we’ve saved, but quickly and without too much pain.

An option here is PersonalBrain, which is another way to save bookmarks in a way that makes not only finding them easier, but also guarantees, through the web-like links, that you’d find connections with other bookmarks (or bits of information) that you’ve saved:

But it’s not perfect. Like del.icio.us, it requires pruning and management, and while it’s easier enough to add links—just drag ‘em in—it’s not as fast as one would like.

Indeed, I suspect that what we’re really talking about is speed. We want to be able to save stuff in a way that makes search and retrieval fast and painless. We want to be able to find what we’re looking for, and also be reminded that something is there for us to find.

Hence the Google solution, or the ask-my-buddies-on-twitter solution that a lot of Mathew’s commenters have talked about.

Perhaps the real change we’re talking about is the one that twitter has wrought. On the one hand it’s forced us to be more concise. It’s also enabled us to quickly communicate with a select crowd—the people we commune with on twitter—who are, at least for now, as cooperative and helpful as the early denizens of the net. So why bother rooting through your del.icio.us tags when you can tap into the wisdom of the twitter crowd?

That is what these services—and products like PersonalBrain—have to compete with. I’m guessing that what will evolve is a combined service where a request that is sent via twitter—anyone remember the name of that service that lets you talk to people with the same middle name?—would simultaneously search your own databases of links and saved data: your Google Reader shared items, your del.icio.us tags, your browsing history, your friends’ browsing history and tags. The answers—automated, human--would merge together and the results would organize themselves into a list.

Which might itself become a new form of content.

So, in short, bookmarks are dead, long live bookmarks. They are still the best signposts we have for getting around the web, but we have moved beyond the idea of needing to save them in some order. What we want know is to be able to find them quickly—and to be able to have what we find put in a broader context.

Does something like this exist already?

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us,tagging,search,bookmarks,yahoo,personalbrain,folksonomy

Books. The New Google Juice?

Increasingly I find that if I enter a search on Google for something that I need explaining to me, the first result is a book. Of course, the book is in Google’s Book Search, but chances are the search is in a page that has been scanned and is available without having to buy the book. What I’m not clear about are the implications of this.

(The above example is from me finding myself watching a UK quiz show from 2001 on the BBC’s Entertainment Channel, which I noticed is free this month on our local cable network. As a long-term expat I find these programs compelling viewing, because they offer a window on a culture I’ve lost access to huge chunks of. So when they ask about something old, I’m good, but if it’s a reference to EastEnders since 1987, I’m stumped. Hence the search for what ‘bank’ means on The Weakest Link.)

So back to the implications. Well, Google may be gaming the system. But it looks like a legit result to me:

I don’t really understand how this works—I always thought links to a page affected its prominence in the rankings, but I’m not complaining. I found what I was looking for. But what does this mean for books? For publishing? Do authors and publishers try to SEO their books? Or will it eat into sales? Is it worth book-ising a website so that it scores higher on Google? Is it worth putting ads into books so when they appear in the scanned form on Google Book Search, readers see the ads? Just some thoughts.

Google Killer? A Clip Around the Ears, Maybe

There's a new search engine out there, according to the Guardian, and it sort of tries to figure out what you're looking for. Which is good. Google searches are great so long as they're simple. But is Powerset up to snuff?

Here are some searches I did (betraying my interests):

Pretty good stuff. And how about me?

Even less obvious matches seem to work:

Also right on the money. Nixon got second place when I asked who was the first u.s. president to resign? which is good enough:

Other searches tho -- how many copies of Office 2007 has Microsoft sold? and how far is it from London to Sydney -- weren't any good at all.

Of course, Powerset is so far only parsing Wikipedia articles (only -- there are 2.3 million of those in the English language). And ask Google the same questions and you're also likely to get the answers high up (1st in the case of Nixon, Taser inventer, Suharto resignation, though nowhere on my own alleged career (fittingly). Sydney/London throws up a WikiAnswers page, and I've given up hope trying to find out how many copies of Office 2007 have been sold.)

Still, it's early days for something like this. There's no question that a better search engine will one day come along, perhaps belonging to Google, perhaps not. Will it need to parse every sentence for meaning? Who knows?

Technorati Tags: google,search,powerset

How Reliable Is Google Maps?

Was looking for a Singapore hotel this morning on Google Maps, which would seem to be a good place to start, and was perturbed to find it flagged in five different places, most of them several streets apart (above). These are all links from companies advertising rooms. So you'd think they would try to get it right. (Amusingly, the sponsored link at the top is for a hotel of the same name in Vancouver, which is slightly further down the road and across several oceans):

So, some ways to go, I suspect, before the era of ubiquitous searchability and and mobile findability, or whatever it's called.

Technorati Tags: findability, ubiquitous computing, search, google, google maps, singapore

Investigation Step #1: Google Suspect

Every journalist (and police officer, for that matter) should start their investigative work with a Google search. They may find it's all they need.

You've probably read by now of the disappearance, reappearance and arrest of the former British prison officer John Darwin, who turned up at a police station this month saying he'd lost his memory after a kayak incident in 2002. Everyone was relieved, including his wife, who had apparently reconciled herself to his passing and moved to Panama a week earlier. But one person was skeptical: an unnamed woman who turned to Google, as this Guardian story by Matthew Weaver reports:

A single mother put police and journalists to shame in their attempts to unravel the mysterious reappearance of the canoeist John Darwin by using a simple Google search, it emerged yesterday.

The woman found the picture that apparently shows Darwin with his wife, Anne, in Panama City in July last year.

When confronted with the picture, which was published in the Daily Mirror yesterday, Anne Darwin is reported to have admitted: "Yes, that's him. My sons will never forgive me."

The photograph was available on a website of the firm Move to Panama. It was found by the anonymous woman after she tapped in the words "John, Anne and Panama" into Google. She forwarded the picture to Cleveland police and the Mirror. She said that when she sent the picture to detectives, she was told: "You're joking."

I believe she actually did a Google image search, which, at the time of writing, still throws up the same image as the number one result, although the actual image has been removed from the site.

Police and journalists should share the shame and blame for not doing some basic Google sleuthing.

Caught in the web | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Technorati Tags: police, journalism, google, incompetence, sleuthing, investigation, john darwin, panama, guardian

Brain Withdrawal

I'm really getting into using PersonalBrain, the newly launched version of a decade-old program that should have swept the world by now. But there's a downside to relying on one piece of software so much: When it goes wrong, you're adrift.

Luckily the guys at PersonalBrain are looking into it, but I had to stop using mine about 24 hours ago when I noticed weird things happening. My brain is now on their operating table and I'm praying I'll get it back soon because I just have no appetite to do anything meaningful without it.

PersonalBrain fills that hole I've often felt existed between having ideas, finding snippets of information or encountering websites, companies, people and books I encounter in my day. Before I would not know quite where to put them so I could find them when I needed them, and invented dozens of systems to try to solve the problem. None worked very well, because they all relied on me remembering what I'd added and where.

As you may have found, most of what we know doesn't fit neatly into a structure -- that PR guy we met last night? Should we put him under PR, or the companies he handles, or the fact that actually he was much more interesting on credit card fraud, and he could definitely be lured out on a date with one of the legions of single females we seem to know?

And what about that idea you had in the bath this morning, where you wondered aloud whether the plethora of news stories on global warming was evidence of a) a sudden increase in global warming, b) a sudden increase in journalists' interest in global warming, c) a sudden increase in editorial commitment to educate the public about global warming d) a pathetic hope on the part of editors that global warming stories may sell more papers or e) a sort of new tacit agreement between media and public that now we all agree that climate change is happening, we need to be reminded of how clever we are? If you're not sure, where are you going to put that in your database? Future media? Future of newspapers? Cynical ploys? Global warming? Great ideas you have in the bath that don't sound so great when you're not?

The answer: with PersonalBrain you can put it anywhere, and, more importantly, have a higher chance of finding it again. Quickly PB envelopes your processes and shifts them into a different gear. Which is why it's sooooo hard to function when your file gets corrupted and needs to go in for surgery. (Yes, it's worrying that software can do this, but we should have gotten used to it by now. I'd much rather there was software that wasn't perfect but which reached for the stars than some more basic mush that always worked but never transformed how I worked.)

So. I'm brainless, gormless, mindless, whatever you want to call it until the doctors call. Next time I'm going to back up my brain every hour and hope this doesn't happen again. But I'm excited, too, that I care enough about a piece of software and how it can help me that I feel so bereft. I haven't felt like this since Enfish Tracker Pro.

Update: An all nighter by the PersonalBrain people and my brain is back, fixed and missing half a dozen thoughts (out of 7,000). I've been assured the problem is being investigated and future versions of the software will include an automatic backup option each time the program is closed.

Technorati Tags: personalbrain, search, mindmaps, organizers, outliners

The Holy Grail of Software

I was chatting with someone in the comments section of one of my blog posts and we realised tha we're both looking for the same kind of software we haven't found yet. One that, in my words at least, fulfil the following: to be able to store stuff in a way that is
- easy to input
- easy to organise
- easy to access
- easy to retrieve
- easy to search
- easy to view
- easy to order in different ways
- easy to visualize
- easy to export

There are outliners, mind mappers, search programs and database programs, but none of them quite does all this the way we'd like. So we thought we'd start a Google Group and try to see if we could either

a) hone the requirement. What is it, exactly, we're looking for, and are other people looking for it too?

b) find the perfect software that does all this?

c) define what we're looking for so well that maybe someone else comes along and develops it for us?

Anyway, if any of you are interested, please do join us at personalknowldgebase. The discussion could be an interesting one. I'd particularly love to hear from people who are developing software that they feel already does this. As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of stuff like PersonalBrain, Topicscape, MindManager, outliners like MyInfo and more Wiki-based stuff like TiddlyWiki and ConnectedText, but without wanting to offend any of you, I don't think that any so far represent the holy grail of a program that captures what you want it to capture and gives it back to you in the way, and ways, you want it. But maybe that could form the start of the discussion.

Anyway, hope you'll join us in this discussion. And, if this discussion already exists outside a very program-specific forum, I'd love to hear of that too.

 

Technorati tags: software, organizing, productivity, mindmapping, mindmaps, mindmanager, personalbrain, thebrain, visualization, outliners, database, search

A Directory of Tagging Software

I've long felt that tagging is the unsung story for Web 2.0. Sure it's abused, but it's one of the best ways to "move beyond Google" as a way of finding stuff. If everyone tagged what they found on the net, we could all find stuff so much more easily. Actually, come to think of it, that would be a nightmare, since then we'd need a search engine to sift through all the tags. But in general, the idea is a good one: if you've ever looked for a range of sites on Google and been confronted by a mess, checking your keyword on out something like del.icio.us gives you some idea of the power of tags.

But the question I have been trying to ask myself then is: what software lets you use tagging in a non-social environment -- an anti-social environment, if you will? Tagging, it seems to me, is just as powerful for sorting and accessing one's personal information. Why hasn't more standalone software got tags built in? (And to be simple, I've excluded anything that is more like a category, in that it's either a fiddle to add or else only allows assigning one category.)

So here's the beginnings of a list. As usual, I'd love to hear more. And this is very Windows biased. Sorry about that.

• Taglocity allows you to tag your content from within Microsoft Outlook. Tagging helps you find things more easily, organize a lot of information and to communicate more clearly to others - all without complex rules or a new way of working. Tagclouds? Yup.
• MyInfo a personal-reference information manager. MyInfo is a complete solution for collecting, organizing, editing, storing, and retrieving personal-reference information. You can search and list entries in the usual tree form, or via tags. Tagclouds? Yup.
• TiddlyWiki like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole.
• Email: ThunderBird 2.0 supports tagging, although it's a bit basic. TheBat! does a more comprehensive job, turning tags into virtual folders, a bit like GMail's labels.
• Photos: Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Album both support tagging. But be warned. Photoshop Album is, er, no longer available. Instead you're nudged towards the $90 Photoshop Elements.
• EverNote: still one step too many for me, but version 2.0 makes it easier to assign categories to items. And they've changed the icon from a stamp to a tag, so I'm guessing they're getting it.

Some notes

Windows XP tagging

You can add tags to files in Windows XP by the following, according to the company:

Right now in Windows XP, the best way to tag and annotate files is to right-click on the file, select “Properties,” select the “Summary” tab and then insert the metadata (tags) you want to associate with that file. The basic categories are Title, Subject, Author, Category, Keywords and Comments. An additional click on the “Advanced” button in the Summary section provides a few additional categories. For photos though, Digital Image Pro today enables users to add meaningful keywords to your pictures so that you can view them in lots of different ways. Those keywords are applied directly to your photos and so when you put them on a Windows Vista PC in the future, you can immediately take advantage of the built in organization capabilities of the system.

Windows Vista tagging

we have made dramatic changes and improvements to the ways in which the operating system uses that metadata. For instance, all Windows Vista Explorers will include a Preview Pane that displays the metadata associated with the file the user has selected. With the Preview pane, you no longer have to right-click a file to open the Properties dialog box. Instead, a rich set of file properties (metadata) are always visible in the preview pane. You can also add or edit properties easily, for one or many files by selecting the “edit properties” option also found in the pane. Each Explorer also includes an Instant Search field, which immediately searches file names, file properties -- including any metadata added by the user -- and text within each file, and returns results instantly. Users can also save their customized searches as “Search Folders;” a Search Folder re-runs a created search anytime you click on it showing you the latest results. That way you no longer have to worry about where you put your documents and email as your Search Folder instantly looks across your PC and automatically finds them for you.
Users also have the option of following essentially the same steps as in Windows XP to add metadata to their files. The “Summary” tab is called “Details,” and one change that has been made is that all of a file’s properties (metadata) are included in this view in a scrolling menu, so the extra click to get to advanced properties is no longer necessary. However, with Windows Vista, users can select multiple files, right click, follow the same steps, and the metadata is added to all of the files selected. This makes it much easier for users to add metadata and saves them time.

Technorati tags: tagging, tags, search, labels, categories