I love it when analogue and digital have a fight. Google have been finding the spine of books the biggest problem when scanning titles for Book Search. They now, however, have a solution:
Book bindings cause pages to arch up either side of the spine – bending text and making it hard to interpret.
However, last week Google was granted a patent (US 7508978) on an answer to this problem. Its trick is to project an infrared pattern onto the open page spread. This lets a pair of infrared cameras map the three-dimensional shape of the pages by detecting distortion to the pattern. This in turn allows the distortion of the text to be determined – and therefore the degree of correction needed to read it accurately.
The patent in full can be found here.
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I cannot resist a combination of Charles Darwin and the OED so, despite the over-Darwinification of this site lately, I have to point you in the direction of a blog post by Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus, in which he points out that Darwin is the first cited author for 144 different words in that dictionary including (unsurprisingly) natural selection and (more surprisingly) rodeo.
As Zimmer concedes, this number is subject to revision: Darwin didn’t actually coin most of these words, but his is just the first recorded use currently in the dictionary. His status as first cited author for so many words is more of a result of the limited number of publications read for the original OED, rather than any unusual neological ability on his part. Most of these entries could probably easily be antedated with modern databases: for example, it only takes a few seconds on Google Book Search to find an English use of rodeo from 1820, easily beating Darwin’s 1834 quote.
Still, I won’t begrudge the man his 144 words: it is his 200th birthday, after all. Hence, today is either Darwin Day (if you like science) or Academic Freedom Day, (if you like nonsense). Google has decided to commemorate Darwin Day using a special logo:
At least, they have in the UK: the logo in the US is the standard one. Too controversial over there? Update: apparently it is being shown on the US Google as well. Just not for me. How strange.
Finally in Darwin(ish) news, the Open University has a fun but probably entirely inaccurate webapp in which you upload a photo and see how you might look if you devolved to 3.5 million years in the past. Hint: you’d look pretty ugly.
Google have published their Zeitgeist for 2008, in which the top and fastest rising search terms are listed for particular regions. In the UK:
Fastest Rising
- iplayer
- facebook
- iphone
- youtube
- yahoo mail
- large hadron collider
- obama
- friv
- cam4
- jogos
Most Popular
- facebook
- bbc
- youtube
- ebay
- games
- new
- hotmail
- bebo
- yahoo
- jobs
The only thing that this seems to reveal is that most people in the UK don’t know how to type a URL in an address bar. Oh well.
Google are using search trends relating to flu to predict the spread of the virus.
We’ve discovered that there is a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening, and are therefore good indicators of flu activity. Our estimates, based on up-to-date aggregated Google search data, may indicate flu activity up to two weeks ahead of traditional flu surveillance systems.
It’s kind of reminiscent of Kevin Kelly’s ideas of the future of science, based on finding patterns in the huge amounts of data generated every day (rather than the traditional experiment):
In large bodies of information with many variables, algorithmic discovery of patterns will become necessary and common. These exist in specialized niches of knowledge (such particle smashing) but more general rules and general-purpose pattern engines will enable pattern-seeking tools to become part of all data treatment.
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