July 9, 2008

U-M will pay $2.5 million of Rodriguez’s $4-million buyout | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press

While Rodriguez claimed in his deposition this spring that he objected to the clause¸ he said he was pressured to sign by the WVU administration, seeking to get Garrison’s new presidency off on a positive public relations front. The school announced last month that Garrison will resign in September following an unrelated controversy.

Unrelated? BS! Rodriguez’s claim was that Garrison was dishonest. Garrison resigned because he was caught in a case of academic dishonesty, giving an unearned degree to a politician’s daughter.

WVU = Mickey Mouse U.

Google LatLong: See which campuses received an A+

We are happy to announce the winners for the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition! Congratulations to the talented students who took on such a challenging project. You can see their amazing models in Google Earth by turning on the 3D Buildings layer and navigating over to each campus, or you can see their individual collections in our 3D Warehouse. The winning schools are:

(snip)

including one of my daughter’s target schools:

• University of Wisconsin-Madison

what a great way to save money on those expensive college tours!

Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Ranking

Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

And they really mean #3!

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

It would be nice if a breath of candor were introduced here.

• Humans aren’t scalable.
• Humans aren’t subject to Moore’s law.
• Humans aren’t deniable.
• Humans Not Allowed is as much about $ as about search quality.
  

As Amit Singhal undoubtedly knows, many IR studies have found that a combination of humans with algorithms works better than either alone. Not that that’s a universal truth, but it has been a common pattern.

The good news is that as long as humans are out of the loop in Google, there will be an opportunity for human experts to add value using such old-fashioned technologies as the book.

Official Gmail Blog: Gmail blog turns 1: Looking back at our 10 most read tips

The more things change, the more they remain the same. A lot of these tips are pretty techie things that most users will never do.

(How many people will use the AND NOT operator, -foo, when searching gmail?)

gmail is rapidly becoming more feature-laden and complex–is this an inevitable product maturity trajectory that will make gmail 2012 = Microsoft Office 2012?

I suspect so–but there will still be one key difference which remains the primary reason why I permanently switched from Office in 2005. No more giant .pst files!

Yang accuses Microsoft of ‘trying to destabilize’ Yahoo

Yahoo founder and chief executive Jerry Yang accused Microsoft of trying to destabilize Yahoo with no genuine intent to buy the company, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Awww. That’s terrible. Those naughty boys!

Argentina’s military threat raises fears over Falklands - Telegraph

Argentina raised the prospect of posting military forces in the Antarctic region yesterday, with the announcement of plans to use troops to defend its interests.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner told defence chiefs that Argentina must be prepared to assert its sovereignty and protect its natural resources, as nations compete to claim areas of the region believed to be rich in oil.

Actually, the article is about military tensions over Antarctica.