Farewell, Dean Dome. You had a rough night, but I won’t soon forget you. (Taken with instagram)
“PageRank, however, has always been just one of the factors determining how Google’s search results are ordered. In 2007, Google told the New York Times that it was now using more than 200 signals in its ranking algorithm, and the number must now be higher. What every one of those signals is and how they are weighted is Google’s most precious trade secret, but the most useful signal of all is the least predictable: the behaviour of the person who types their query into the search box. A click on the third result counts as a vote that it ought to come higher. A ‘long click’ – when you select one of the results and don’t come back – is a stronger vote. To test a new version of its algorithm, Google releases it to a small subset of its users and measures its effectiveness through the pattern of their clicks: more happy surfers and it’s just got cleverer. We teach it while we think it’s teaching us. Levy tells the story of a new recruit with a long managerial background who asked Google’s senior vice-president of engineering, Alan Eustace, what systems Google had in place to improve its products. ‘He expected to hear about quality assurance teams and focus groups’ – the sort of set-up he was used to. ‘Instead Eustace explained that Google’s brain was like a baby’s, an omnivorous sponge that was always getting smarter from the information it soaked up.’ Like a baby, Google uses what it hears to learn about the workings of human language. The large number of people who search for ‘pictures of dogs’ and also ‘pictures of puppies’ tells Google that ‘puppy’ and ‘dog’ mean similar things, yet it also knows that people searching for ‘hot dogs’ get cross if they’re given instructions for ‘boiling puppies’. If Google misunderstands you, and delivers the wrong results, the fact that you’ll go back and rephrase your query, explaining what you mean, will help it get it right next time. Every search for information is itself a piece of information Google can learn from.” —
Daniel Soar, London Review of Books
I learned of this review via Gmail. I read it — and posted this excerpt and link — via Chrome.
Hi, Google.
Taken with instagram
(Source: what-about-the-beatles, via fuckyeahthebeatles)
“It is Alito’s quarrel with Scalia’s originalist approach that is most interesting today, echoing and even amplifying his jab at oral argument in a case about violent video games last year, that “what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games.” At argument in that case, Alito went further, observing that such games represent a “new medium that cannot possibly have been envisioned when the First Amendment was ratified” and that it was “entirely artificial” to analogize the Framers’ attitudes to violent books for children to violent games. Today Alito again invokes the artifice of the Scalia approach, poking fun at his obsession with what the Framers would have done with satellites and lasers by suggesting, “It is almost impossible to think of late-18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case. (Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach’s owner?)” Then to ratchet up the absurdity, Alito answers his own question in a footnote: The teensy constable scenario “would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both—not to mention a constable with incredible fortitude and patience.” —
U.S. v. Jones: Supreme Court Justices Alito and Scalia brawl over technology and privacy. - Slate
Sam Alito is hilarious! Who knew?
… your dad calls you to tell you he saw you in your mailbag video and you can hear the concern in his voice immediately as he says: “Jeez, son, are you OK? You look like you haven’t slept in a week. Get some sleep. Can you take a nap during the day here and there, maybe? At least go have a steak. You need protein.”
To be fair to the pops, he ain’t wrong. Especially about the steak. I could definitely go for a steak.
“Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.” — Hunter S. Thompson’s 1958 cover letter for a newspaper job - Boing Boing
The Cover Of The New Penn Stater Magazine Is Dark, Demented, And Perfect — Deadspin
