Flying penguins

YouTube link.

The BBC will screen remarkable footage of penguins flying as part of its new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution.

The programme is being presented by ex-Monty Python star Terry Jones, who said: "We'd been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come.

"But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do."

BBC1 viewers will see the penguins not only take flight from the Antarctic wastes, but fly thousands of miles to the Amazonian rainforest to find winter sun.

 This related video describes the making of "flying penguins" -

YouTube link.

Reblogged from April 1 (note), 2008.

Bioluminescent firefly squid

Very cool photo, and a fitting final image for the top of the blog today.   There's a little information about these creatures in Wikipedia, and a post about them in Atlas Obscura.

Via Reddit.  I've tried without success to track back to the photographer for credit, but most "similar image" searches wind up in Japanese tumblrs that I can't decipher.

See also the incredible image of a shoreline in Australia glowing with bioluminescent algae.

A different view of the U.S. Postal Service

I don't know whether all these details are true, or to what extent they are relevant, but I thought the comments are interesting and worthy of consideration:

These gloomsayers claim the national mail agency is bogged down with too many overpaid workers and costly brick-and-mortar facilities, so it can't keep up with the instant messaging of Internet services and such nimble corporate competitors as FedEx. Thus, say these contrivers of their own conventional wisdom, the Postal Service is unprofitable and is costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year in losses. Wrong.

Since 1971, the postal service has not taken a dime from taxpayers. All of its operations — including the remarkable convenience of 32,000 local post offices — are paid for by peddling stamps and other products.

The privatizers squawk that USPS has gone some $13 billion in the hole during the past four years — a private corporation would go broke with that record! (Actually, private corporations tend to go to Washington rather than go broke, getting taxpayer bailouts to cover their losses.) The Postal Service is NOT broke. Indeed, in those four years of loudly deplored "losses," the service actually produced a $700 million operational profit (despite the worst economy since the Great Depression).

What's going on here? Right-wing sabotage of USPS financing, that's what.

In 2006, the Bush White House and Congress whacked the post office with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act — an incredible piece of ugliness requiring the agency to PRE-PAY the health care benefits not only of current employees, but also of all employees who'll retire during the next 75 years. Yes, that includes employees who're not yet born!

No other agency and no corporation has to do this. Worse, this ridiculous law demands that USPS fully fund this seven-decade burden by 2016. Imagine the shrieks of outrage if Congress tried to slap FedEx or other private firms with such an onerous requirement.

It's clearly a rant, posted at a liberal/progressive source (Common Dreams).  The implication is that politicians want the USPS to "fail" so that the services can be privatized and the resultant profits can be pocketed by the eventual owners.

Open for discussion.

The 1% at Play - Part II

Posted as a contrast to this.

Image from QuickMeme.  A video clip from a National Geographic program is available via The Telegraph.

Alice B. Toklas marijuana brownies recipe

Here's the story, from SubRosa:

First published in 1954, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is one of America's great works of recollection, culinary and otherwise. Toklas lived, cooked, and kept house in Paris and rural France with her companion, Gertrude Stein, from 1908 until Stein's death in 1947. During that time she cooked for and shared food with friends, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder, accumulating recipes for the simple and haute bourgeois dishes compiled in the book. She also saw and remembered all, from life in the high bohemian circle she and Stein occupied; to France during two world wars; to the United States, visited in the '30s; to summers passed in a paradisiacal country retreat at Biligin in France. These and more Toklas depicts vividly and acerbically, all viewed through the prism of food and good eating...

It all started when Alice signed a contract with Harper's to write a cookbook in 1952. She was a pretty fair cook, but what Harper really hoped to get (and what by and large it got) was not so much recipes but tales of her life with Gertrude Stein, who had died in 1946.

With the deadline only a few months away, Toklas, then in her mid-70s, found herself half a book shy. So she began soliciting recipes from her artsy friends. This recipe was contributed by wiseacre painter friend named Brion Gysin.

Alice, unfamiliar with "canibus" (at least as spelled by Gysin) and lacking the time to test the recipes, stuck her friend's contribution into her manuscript and sent it off to the publisher. The American editors at Harper's spotted the suspicious ingredient and held the recipe out, but the publisher of the British edition didn't. The press promptly went nuts. The rest is history. 

And here's the recipe for "haschigh fudge":

This is the food of Paradise – of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: It might provide entertaining refreshment for a Ladies Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by an ‘un évanouissment reveillé’.

Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of de-stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everyone in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.

Comments from lottery losers

"I know the odds are really not in my favor, but why not," she said.

"When it gets as big as it is now, you'd be nuts not to play," he said. "You have to take a chance on Lady Luck."

"My 401(k) is worth so little. My only chance to retire is Mega Millions," he says.

"They say the third time is the charm, so I'm bound to win, you know," she says.

And this promotional blurb: "Plenty of people don't win the lottery the first few thousand times they play."

A jumping robot (the "Sand Flea")

YouTube link. 

Pretty impressive.

Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings. Current development of Sand Flea is funded by the The US Army's Rapid Equipping Force.

Created by Boston Dynamics, who also made the "Big Dog" robot.  Presumably, the "Sand Flea" will later be equipped with reconnaissance equipment and perhaps some lethal weaponry.

Your tax money at work.

You Can't Go Home Again (Thomas Wolfe)

During my "feet in the air" post-bunionectomy blogcation, I pulled Thomas Wolfe's famous novel You Can't Go Home Again off the shelf for a reread.  When I was a young man in the 1960s, his writing fascinated me, and I think I must have read four or five of his novels.  Now that I'm older it's more difficult to find the time and energy to tackle a 700-page novel, and I'm frankly less interested in a thinly-disguised autobiography of a struggling young writer.

But at his best, Wolfe was capable of incisive commentary on the manners and mores of his contemporaries; I've pulled several excerpts relevant to the lifestyles of 1920s-1930s Americans and posted them in the last few days (see below in the blog).  He also can be masterful in his use of language, achieving a lyrical style that is almost poetic.  Here, for example is a passage from early in the book:

"Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.

"The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change.

 "The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbours, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same.

"All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts for ever. Only the earth endures, but it endures for ever.

"The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, for ever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April."

I have not added You Can't Go Home Again to my recommended books category, because the best parts of it are too thinly scattered through a rather prosaic storyline, but the excerpts were certainly worth finding and blogging.

Text credit for this post and the subsequent ones from Project Gutenberg Australia - with many thanks to them for saving me hours of transcribing.

Carte de visite of a bearded woman (~1860)

Found in Cornell University's online exhibition of "Dawn's Early Light" (the first 50 years of American photography), via Historical Indulgences.

Lots of interesting images at the link for those interested in photography (or for bloggers looking for material).

This is not a mohawk hairstyle

It's a distribution pattern for neural circuitry in the human brain, generated by diffusion spectrum imaging (discussed/explained at Reddit).

"Break It To Me Gently" (Brenda Lee, 1961)

YouTube link.

I heard this song last night in the background during the credits for an episode of Mad Men (second season) and thought it should be stored in the blog.

4 ft 9 inch tall Brenda Mae Tarpley was born "in the charity ward of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia... She attended grade schools wherever her father found work, primarily in the corridor between Atlanta and Augusta. Her family was poor, living hand-to-mouth; she shared a bed with her two siblings in a series of three-room houses without running water... Her father died in 1953, and by the time she turned ten, she was the primary breadwinner of her family through singing at events and on local radio and television shows."

"Coregasm" (Exercise-induced orgasm)

A researcher claims that women can achieve orgasm during conventional physical exercise -

"The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting," Herbenick said. "These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women's experiences of orgasm."

The findings are published in a special issue of Sexual and Relationship Therapy, a leading peer-reviewed journal in the area of sex therapy and sexual health. Co-author is J. Dennis Fortenberry, M.D., professor at the IU School of Medicine and Center for Sexual Health Promotion affiliate.

The results are based on surveys administered online to 124 women who reported experiencing exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and 246 women who experienced exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP). The women ranged in age from 18 to 63. Most were in a relationship or married, and about 69 percent identified themselves as heterosexual. 

In an article in Psychology Today she reports that a companion study will include reports of men achieving orgasm during exercise.

Via The Dish.

Canada will no longer produce pennies

From the National Post:

The penny coin, loved by some but an annoyance to many, will be withdrawn from circulation this year because it costs too much to make and is a pecuniary pest....

Ottawa said the penny retained only one twentieth of its original purchasing power...

“Financial institutions face increasing costs for handling, storing and transporting pennies. Over time, the penny’s burden to the economy has grown relative to its value as a means of payment,” it said. Other nations that have either ceased to produce or have removed low denomination coins include Australia, Brazil, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain...

The Royal Canadian Mint will stop distributing penny coins to financial institutions later this year. As the coin slowly disappears, prices for cash transactions will be rounded up or down to the closest five cents. 

The rationale and details re the implementation are at the National Post link.  The U.S. has previously done away with two- and three-cent coins and twenty-cent coins and half cents.  I'm sure the penny will go soon.

Relevant video: Why the penny should be eliminated.  Completely.

ESIARN TOLCDU PMGHBY FVKWZX QJ

ESIARN TOLCDU PMGHBY FVKWZX QJ should be used in place of the more familiar ETAOIN SHRDLU CMFWYP VBGKQJ XZ when guessing letters during the playing of the word game "Hangman."

The new sequence is better because the old one represents the frequency of letters in the written/spoken language, which is dominated by common words, while the new sequence reflects letter frequency in the list of dictionary words.

Then you need to modify your choices according to the length of the word, and refine it again depending on whether the first letter you tried was present in the word or not.

Full details are at Data Genetics, via Neatorama.

Flying with bird-like wings

YouTube link. 

A 31-year-old Dutch man has successfully flown over a hundred meters from a ground-level start. According to UPI, "he controlled the 55-foot wings using two Nintendo Wii controllers, the accelerometers from an HTC Wildfire S smartphone and Turnigy motors..."

The embedded video is part 14 in a long YouTube documentary series -- all of which are apparently fake, according to readers of this blog (see the comments).  I'll leave it up because it's still cleverly done.

Addendum:  More re the fake video at Life's Little Mysteries, including a comment that "the experts point out that the animation cycle of Smeets flying through the air seems to be modeled on a clip of a flying monkey in the Wizard of Oz."

Before the crash of 1929

As described by Thomas Wolfe in You Can't Go Home Again:

But he spoke at length about the town itself, telling her all that he had seen of its speculative madness, and how it had impressed him. What did the future hold for that place and its people? They were always talking of the better life that lay ahead of them and of the greater city they would build, but to George it seemed that in all such talk there was evidence of a strange and savage hunger that drove them on, and that there was a desperate quality in it, as though what they really hungered for was ruin and death. It seemed to him that they were ruined, and that even when they laughed and shouted and smote each other on the back, the knowledge of their ruin was in them.

They had squandered fabulous sums in meaningless streets and bridges. They had torn down ancient buildings and erected new ones large enough to take care of a city of half a million people. They had levelled hills and bored through mountains, making magnificent tunnels paved with double roadways and glittering with shining tiles--tunnels which leaped out on the other side into Arcadian wilderness. They had flung away the earnings of a lifetime, and mortgaged those of a generation to come. They had ruined their city, and in doing so had ruined themselves, their children, and their children's children.


Already the town had passed from their possession. They no longer owned it. It was mortgaged under a debt of fifty million dollars, owned by bonding companies in the North. The very streets they walked on had been sold beneath their feet. They signed their names to papers calling for the payment of fabulous sums, and resold their land the next day to other madmen who signed away their lives with the same careless magnificence. On paper, their profits were enormous, but their "boom" was already over and they would not see it. They were staggering beneath obligations to pay which none of them could meet--and still they bought.

And when they had exhausted all their possibilities of ruin and extravagance that the town could offer, they had rushed out into the wilderness, into the lyrical immensities of wild earth where there was land enough for all men living, and they had staked off little plots and wedges in the hills as one might try to stake a picket fence out in the middle of the ocean. They had given fancy names to all these foolish enterprises--"Wild Boulders" --"Shady Acres" --"Eagle's Crest". They had set prices on these sites of forest, field, and tangled undergrowth that might have bought a mountain, and made charts and drawings showing populous communities of shops, houses, streets, roads, and clubs in regions where there was no road, no street, no house, and which could not be reached in any way save by a band of resolute pioneers armed with axes. These places were to be transformed into idyllic colonies for artists and writers and critics; and there were colonies as well for preachers, doctors, actors, dancers, golf players, and retired locomotive engineers. There were colonies for everyone, and, what is more, they sold the lots--to one another!

But under all this flash and play of great endeavour, the paucity of their designs and the starved meagreness of their lives were already apparent. The better life which they talked about resolved itself into a few sterile and baffled gestures. All they really did for themselves was to build uglier and more expensive homes, and buy new cars, and join a country club. And they did all this with a frenzied haste, because--it seemed to George--they were looking for food to feed their hunger and had not found it.

How many martinis is too many ?

In this "immortal quatrain," Dorothy Parker explained that her limit was two:

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
After four I'm under my host.” 

Intrigued by the quote, I checked the Wikipedia biography of a woman whose name I have heard, but about whom I knew nothing.  She was a widely quoted author, especially in the 1920s, known for her wit.  A collection of her work "was released in the United States in 1944 under the title The Portable Dorothy Parker. Parker's is one of only three of the Portable series (the other two being William Shakespeare and The Bible) to remain continuously in print."  Here are some of her famous quotes:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

“What fresh hell is this?”

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”

“This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”

“I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.”

“So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'" (Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead.”)

“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

“The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.”

For her epitaph, she suggested 'Excuse my dust.'  Ironically "her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years."  I've requested The Portable Dorothy Parker from the library.

Coloring Easter eggs using old silk ties

It's possible to bleed the colors from a silk tie onto an eggshell, as explained in this DIY article at Mommy Knows and in this older Martha Stewart column.

I have lots of silk ties from the 1940s that I inherited from my father and never wear; I think it's time to sacrifice a few for the sake of "art."

Deriving "the number of the Beast" from 123456789

I found this in a Martin Gardner column in a back issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

The "number of the Beast" (666) can be derived in eight different ways by placing + and - signs in the sequence 123456789.  Only plus and minus signs may be used, and the numbers have to stay in that order.

To me, the most remarkable solution is this one:

+123 +456 +78 +9 

There are five solutions that include the number 678, such as:

-1 +2 -3 +4 -5 +678 -9

And two solutions that use 567 as a component.

I'll defer posting those, to allow those of you who enjoy math puzzles to post your discoveries in the comments.  (btw, there are also five solutions using the descending order 987654321).

Update: Rob from Amersfoort has posted the other answers in the comments.

Earl Scruggs (1924-2012)

YouTube link. 

One of the advantages of having lived in Kentucky for ten years is that I gained an appreciation for bluegrass music. This week a lot of memorials are being posted to mark the passing of the legendary Earl Scruggs.  Instead of posting the usual "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," I've selected an earlier performance at the Grand Old Opry, in his classic pairing with Lester Flatt.

Here are a few biographical notes from AP, via the StarTribune:

"I just didn't know if or how well I'd be accepted because there'd never been anybody to play banjo like me here. There was Stringbean and Grandpa Jones. Most of them were comedians."

There was nothing jokey about the way Scruggs attacked his "fancy five-string banjo," as Opry announcer George D. Hayes called it. In a [1945] performance broadcast to much of the country but unfortunately lost to history, he scorched the earth and instantly changed country music. With Monroe on mandolin and Flatt on guitar, the pace was a real jolt to attendees and radio listeners far away, and in some ways the speed and volume he laid down predicted the power of electric music...

Scruggs' use of three fingers — in place of the limited clawhammer style once prevalent — elevated the banjo from a part of the rhythm section — or even a comedian's prop — to a lead instrument that was as versatile as the guitar and far more flashy...

"He invented a style that now probably 75 percent of the people that play the banjo in the world play Scruggs-style banjo. And that's a staggering thing to do, to play an instrument and change what everyone is doing."

World defense budgets

Data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, posted at Mother Jones.

Picnic table modification

Rain gutter used to replace the middle board; adaptation apparently developed at a vinyard somewhere.  One reader at Reddit suggested screwing it in with the brackets underneath, which might even allow the middle board to be repositioned.

Google App Engine Research Awards for scientific discovery

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations and Andrea Held, University Relations Program Manager

Since its launch four years ago, Google App Engine has been the platform for innovative and diverse applications. Today, Google’s University Relations team is inviting academic researchers to explore App Engine as a platform for their research activities through a new program: the Google App Engine Research Awards.

These research awards provide an opportunity for university faculty to experiment with App Engine, which provides services for building and hosting web applications on the same systems that power Google’s products and services. App Engine offers fast development and deployment, simple administration and built-in scalability -- it’s designed to adapt to large-scale data storage needs and sudden traffic spikes.

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to support cutting-edge scientific research across the board, this call for applications welcomes university faculty’s proposals in all fields. Projects may focus on activities such as social or economic experiments, development of academic aids, analysis of gene sequence data, or using App Engine MapReduce to crunch large datasets, just to name a few.

This new award program will support up to 15 projects by providing App Engine credits in the amount of $60,000 to each project for one year. In its first year, the program is launched in a limited number of countries. Please see the RFP for details.

If your research has the potential to advance scientific discovery, generates heavy data loads, or needs a reliable platform for running large-scale apps, we encourage you to submit your proposal. Information on how to apply is available on the Google Research website. Applications will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. PST, May 11, 2012.

I'm back

I've spent much of the past week with my feet propped up in the air, trying to relieve the congestion and edema that comes from undergoing bunion surgery - which basically involves cutting a metatarsal bone into several pieces and then scootching it over to a different position and then nailing it back together (but is not as bad as it sounds).

There are several aspects of the procedure (and some related aspects of health care financing) that are bloggable, but first I need to clear out over 60 links I saved while laid up.

Feet in the air is also a great position for reading, so I pulled Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again off a shelf and spent many hours reading it; I've collected the best excerpts and will scatter them in a half-dozen posts today and tomorrow.

I'll have to take another break soon to slog through the income tax paperwork, but first we'll post some of this new material.

Photo via Seleene's Sandbox.

Speculation and wealth in the 1920s

As described by Thomas Wolfe in You Can't Go Home Again (1940):

In all these ways Mr. Frederick Jack was not essentially different from ten thousand other men of his class and position. In that time and place he would have been peculiar if these things had not been true of him. For these men were all the victims of an occupational disease--a kind of mass hypnosis that denied to them the evidence of their senses. It was a monstrous and ironic fact that the very men who had created this world in which every value was false and theatrical saw themselves, not as creatures tranced by fatal illusions, but rather as the most knowing, practical, and hard-headed men alive. They did not think of themselves as gamblers, obsessed by their own fictions of speculation, but as brilliant executives of great affairs who at every moment of the day "had their fingers on the pulse of the nation." So when they looked about them and saw everywhere nothing but the myriad shapes of privilege, dishonesty, and self-interest, they were convinced that this was inevitably "the way things are."

It was generally assumed that every man had his price, just as every woman had hers... Such men could not realise that their own vision of human nature was distorted. They prided themselves on their "hardness" and fortitude and intelligence, which had enabled them to accept so black a picture of the earth with such easy tolerance. It was not until a little later that the real substance of their "hardness" and intelligence was demonstrated to them in terms which they could grasp. When the bubble of their unreal world suddenly exploded before their eyes, many of them were so little capable of facing harsh reality and truth that they blew their brains out or threw themselves from the high windows of their offices into the streets below...

All that, however, was still in the future. It was very imminent, but they did not know it, for they had trained themselves to deny the evidence of their senses. In that mid-October of 1929 nothing could exceed their satisfaction and assurance. They looked about them and, like an actor, saw with their eyes that all was false, but since they had schooled themselves to accept falseness as normal and natural, the discovery only enhanced their pleasure in life...
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The amount of simplicity that could be purchased even in, those times for a yearly rental of fifteen thousand dollars was quite considerable. As if this very thought had found an echo in her mind, she went on:

"I mean when you compare it with some of these places that you see nowadays--some of the God-awful places where all those rich people live. There's simply no comparison! I don't care how rich they are, there's--there's just something here that money cannot buy."

As her mind phrased the accusing words about "the God-awful places where all those rich people live," her nostrils twitched and her face took on an expression of sharp scorn. For Mrs. Jack had always been contemptuous of wealth. Though she was the wife of a rich man and had not known for years the economic necessity of work, yet it was one of her unshakable convictions that she and her family could not possibly be described as "rich". "Oh, not really," she would say. "Not the way people are who really are." And she would look for confirmation, not at the hundred and thirty million people there impossibly below her in the world's hard groove, but at the fabulous ten thousand who were above her on the moneyed heights, and who, by the comparison, were "really rich". 

The second excerpt has a certain resonance with statements made by some current politicians and their wives.

Black Beauty Stick Insect

Peruphasma schultei.

Photo via Don't Panic and A London Salmagundi.  I found a source where you can purchase these at Virginia Cheeseman (an entomological supplier).  Does anyone know if they are hard to raise/take care of, because I'm rather tempted...

Addendum:  Those similarly interested should read Liesel Weppen's comment on this post.

Incentives for college basketball coaches

By winning the school's eighth consecutive Big 12 title during the regular season, [Kansas coach Bill] Self earned a $50,000 performance bonus. And when his team pulled away late to beat North Carolina in the Midwest Regional finals Sunday, Self guaranteed himself another $100,000. If the Jayhawks can get by Ohio State, a team they have beaten once already this season, and then win their second national championship in five years, Self will take another $200,000 to the bank.

The potential of $350,000 in incentives pales in comparison, though, to what could await Calipari... Calipari already has earned an extra* $50,000 for capturing the Southeastern Conference regular-season title, $100,000 each for making the regional semifinals and finals and $150,000 for beating Baylor and taking the Wildcats back to the Final Four. Winning the basketball-mad school's eighth NCAA tournament title would net another $350,000.

Incidentally, the bonus tied to Kentucky's academic progress rate? A mere $50,000.

* extras above base salary of $3.8 million 

p.s. - best wishes tonight to Tubby Smith and his Minnesota Golden Gophers as they take on the Stanford Cardinal in the championship game of the NIT tournament.

Earth's ocean surface currents

YouTube link. 

This visualization shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decmeber 2007. The visualization does not include a narration or annotations; the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.

This visualization was produced using NASA/JPL's computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2.. ECCO2 is high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization. The dark patterns under the ocean represent the undersea bathymetry. Topographic land exaggeration is 20x and bathymetric exaggeration is 40x. 

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, via Neatorama.

So you want to be a copy editor

It must be easier nowadays.  This is a hand-edited typewritten manuscript of Crash, by J.G. Ballard, written in the early 1970s.  Via Uncertain Times.

Addendum:  Reader MikeP points out that the ms above would not be the version submitted to the copy editor; this would have been an earlier draft, with revisions probably made in the author's handwriting, which would likely have been retyped before being professionally edited. 

"The desire for fame is rooted in the hearts of men"

An excerpt from Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again:

The desire for fame is rooted in the hearts of men. It is one of the most powerful of all human desires, and perhaps for that very reason, and because it is so deep and secret, it is the desire that men are most unwilling to admit, particularly those who feel most sharply its keen and piercing spur.

The politician, for example, would never have us think that it is love of office, the desire for the notorious elevation of public place, that drives him on. No, the thing that governs him is his pure devotion to the common weal, his selfless and high-minded statesmanship, his love of his fellow-man, and his burning idealism to turn out the rascal who usurps the office and betrays the public trust which he himself, as he assures us, would so gloriously and devotedly maintain.

So, too, the soldier. It is never love of glory that inspires him to his profession. It is never love of battle, love of war, love of all the resounding titles and the proud emoluments of the heroic conqueror. Oh, no. It is devotion to duty that makes him a soldier. There is no personal motive in it. He is inspired simply by the selfless ardour of his patriotic abnegation. He regrets that he has but one life to give for his country. So it goes through every walk of life. The lawyer assures us that he is the defender of the weak, the guardian of the oppressed, the champion of the rights of defrauded widows and beleaguered orphans, the upholder of justice, the unrelenting enemy, at no matter what cost to himself, of all forms of chicanery, fraud, theft, violence, and crime. Even the business man will not admit a selfish motive in his money-getting. On the contrary, he is the developer of the nation's resources. He is the benevolent employer of thousands of working men who would be lost and on the dole without the organising genius of his great intelligence. He is the defender of the American ideal of rugged individualism, the shining exemplar to youth of what a poor country boy may achieve in this nation through a devotion to the national virtues of thrift, industry, obedience to duty, and business integrity. He is, he assures us, the backbone of the country, the man who makes the wheels go round, the leading citizen, Public Friend No. 1.

All these people lie, of course. They know they lie, and everyone who hears them also knows they lie. The lie, however, has become a part of the convention of American life. People listen to it patiently, and if they smile at it, the smile is weary, touched with resignation and the indifferent dismissals of fatigue.

How African countries got their borders

In 1884 at the request of Portugal, German Chancellor Otto von Bismark called together the major western powers of the world to negotiate questions and end confusion over the control of Africa. Bismark appreciated the opportunity to expand Germany's sphere of influence over Africa and desired to force Germany's rivals to struggle with one another for territory.

The Berlin Conference was Africa's undoing in more ways than one. The colonial powers superimposed their domains on the African Continent. By the time Africa regained its independence after the late 1950s, the realm had acquired a legacy of political fragmentation that could neither be eliminated nor made to operate satisfactorily. The African politico-geographical map is thus a permanent liability that resulted from the three months of ignorant, greedy acquisitiveness during a period when Europe's search for minerals and markets had become insatiable.

At the time of the conference, 80% of Africa remained under Native Traditional and local control.

Fourteen countries were represented by a plethora of ambassadors when the conference opened in Berlin on November 15, 1884 by the imperial chancellor and architect of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck to settle the political partitioning of Africa. Bismarck wanted not only to expand German spheres of influence in Africa but also to play off Germany's colonial rivals against one another to the Germans' advantage. The countries represented at the time included Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway (unified from 1814-1905), Turkey, and the United States of America. Of these fourteen nations, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Portugal were the major players in the conference, controlling most of colonial Africa at the time...

Following the conference, the give and take continued. By 1914, the conference participants had fully divided Africa among themselves into fifty unnatural and artificial States. 

Here is a precolonial map:

Excerpted from an extensive discussion at Africa Federation, via fyeahblackhistory.

Camouflage

A Little Owl imitates a ceramic insulator on a telegraph pole. The bird was spotted by wildlife photographer Mircea Costina in Dobrogea, Romania...  Picture: Mircea Costina/Rex Features, via The Telegraph.

And for some reason, the juxtaposition makes the inverted insulator near the end humorous.

Cash can make a speeding ticket "disappear" (legally)

From the StarTribune in Minnesota, but it probably occurs in other states as well:

Motorists with no recent driving infractions are taking advantage of little-known court deals in which they pay a sometimes-hefty fee and keep their records clean as long as they don't get caught disobeying traffic laws too quickly again. In some cities in Hennepin County, for instance, the drivers can end up paying more than double the price of the ticket.

 "It's a loophole," said Jeff Hochstein, a 43-year-old self-described habitual speeder, who said he has sought and received the deal several times throughout his driving career in an attempt to keep his insurance rates lower. "There's ways to buy your way out of it."

Besides added revenue, the deals help keep court calendars from getting clogged with traffic cases, some prosecutors say. Still, some critics worry they give a pass to speeders -- one of the nation's deadliest road hazards -- even as legislators consider a bill to keep more speeding tickets off driving records. The deals, allowed in some cities but not others, raise questions of fairness and governmental policy.

"To me, that's bribery," said Sharon Gehrman-Driscoll, director of Minnesotans for Safe Driving. "What message are we sending our kids? Daddy's going to pay this ticket but he's gonna pay a little more so then no one knows about it? ... I think as a society we need to always be as fair as we possibly can."..

In Hennepin County, most cities allow qualified drivers to get a deal, called a continuance for dismissal, simply by going to the courthouse and getting the OK from a hearing officer. The ticket's fines and fees are dismissed and replaced by "prosecution costs" which go entirely to the city, along with a state surcharge. The total bill can run as high as $325 in some cities, far above the $145 or so that the speeding ticket would have cost...

Tallen said he and other prosecutors are careful to make sure the benefit isn't just for the wealthy, though. He allows people the option to work off the tab through community service.

Tallen said he wasn't in favor of offering continuances at first, but judges urged him to cut down the number of cases going to trial. "We got tremendous pressure from the bench to get rid of cases," he said. "That's the only reason I did it."..

More on the details of the law and its ethical ramifications at the StarTribune.

A child's walker

Fashioned in the era before plastics, this clever walker (made of ?rattan) is a detail in a larger painting entitled "The Treat," by Giovanni Sandrucci -

- which I found posted at Miss Folly.  I've not been able to find out anything more about the artist, except that he was Italian (1829-1897), so I presume the walker was a construction of that country in that era.  I should think the history of children's walkers would be an interesting topic to research for a longer post.

Addendum:  I just found a nice collection of images of baby walkers (dating back as far as the 15th century!) at A Polar Bear's Tale.

Thomas Wolfe on "Hitlerism"

"Hitlerism" is a term we never hear today, having been replaced by "Nazism."  Wolfe wrote about it in You Can't Go Home Again, before the outbreak of the war:

Hitlerism, he saw, was a recrudescence of an old barbarism. Its racial nonsense and cruelty, its naked worship of brute force, its suppression of truth and resort to lies and myths, its ruthless contempt for the individual, its anti-intellectual and anti-moral dogma that to one man alone belongs the right of judgment and decision, and that for all others virtue lies in blind, unquestioning obedience--each of these fundamental elements of Hitlerism was a throwback to that fierce and ancient tribalism which had sent waves of hairy Teutons swooping down out of the north to destroy the vast edifice of Roman civilisation. That primitive spirit of greed and lust and force had always been the true enemy of mankind.

But this spirit was not confined to Germany. It belonged to no one race. It was a terrible part of the universal heritage of man. One saw traces of it everywhere. It took on many disguises, many labels. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin--each had his own name for it. And America had it, too, in various forms. For wherever ruthless men conspired together for their own ends, wherever the rule of dog-eat-dog was dominant, there it bred. And wherever one found it, one also found that its roots sank down into something primitive in man's ugly past. And these roots would somehow have to be eradicated, George felt, if man was to win his ultimate freedom and not be plunged back into savagery and perish utterly from the earth.

Matisse sculpting in his apartment (1951)

With what appear to be two black cats at his feet.*

Photo from LIFE (Dmitri Kessel), via Miss Folly.

* confirmed at The Cat Ladies.  One would think that he would have sculpted a cat, but a quick search doesn't show any photos of such.

Serrated teeth of the crabeater seal

This seal, Lobodon carcinophagus, is called a crab-eating seal, but its main diet consists of krill, which it filters out of the water through its complexly cusped teeth.

Via Evolution, where the teeth are compared to fossil whale teeth -

- which may offer some insight into the predecessors of modern filter-feeding baleen whales. Not quite.  See BJN's note in the comments.

One puzzler:  According to Wikipedia, crabs are not found in the Antarctic habitat of the crabeater seal.  So why are they called that?

Photo credit: Dr. Alistair Evans, Monash University, Australia.

The sublingua cleans the toothcomb

A toothcomb (tooth comb, dental comb) is a dental structure most commonly known in lemuriform primates (which includes lemurs and lorisoids). Similar dental structures can be found in other mammals, including colugos, treeshrews, and some African antelopes...

The toothcomb of lemuriform primates include incisors and canine teeth that tilt forward at the front of the lower jaw, followed by a canine-shaped first premolar... The comb is formed by fine spaces between the teeth, although in colugos the individual incisors are serrated, providing multiple tines per tooth.

The toothcomb is kept clean by either the tongue or, in the case of lemuriforms, the sublingua, a specialized "under-tongue."

The toothcomb is usually used for grooming. While licking the fur clean, the animal will run the toothcomb through the fur to comb it. Fine grooves or striations are usually cut into the teeth during grooming by the hair and may be seen on the sides of the teeth when viewed through a scanning electron microscope. The toothcomb can have other functions, such as food procurement and bark gouging...

You learn something every day.  More at Wikipedia.

"I believe that we are lost here in America..."

An excerpt from the concluding "Credo" chapter of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again:

I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me--and I think for all of us----not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us--the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created--was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.

I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfilment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished. I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope.

I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate--tried finally to take from us the crust.


I think the enemy comes to us with the face of innocence and says to us:

"I am your friend." 

I think the enemy deceives us with false words and lying phrases, saying:

"See, I am one of you--I am one of your children, your son, your brother, and your friend. Behold how sleek and fat I have become--and all because I am just one of you, and your friend. Behold how rich and powerful I am--and all because I am one of you--shaped in your way of life, of thinking, of accomplishment. What I am, I am because I am one of you, your humble brother and your friend. Behold," cries Enemy, "the man I am, the man I have become, the thing I have accomplished--and reflect. Will you destroy this thing? I assure you that it is the most precious thing you have. It is yourselves, the projection of each of you, the triumph of your individual lives, the thing that is rooted in your blood, and native to your stock, and inherent in the traditions of America. It is the thing that all of you may hope to be," says Enemy, "for"--humbly--"am I not just one of you? Am I not just your brother and your son? Am I not the living image of what each of you may hope to be, would wish to be, would desire for his own son? Would you destroy this glorious incarnation of your own heroic self? If you do, then," says Enemy, "you destroy yourselves--you kill the thing that is most gloriously American, and in so killing, kill yourselves."

He lies! And now we know he lies! He is not gloriously, or in any other way, ourselves. He is not our friend, our son, our brother. And he is not American! For, although he has a thousand familiar and convenient faces, his own true face is old as Hell...

"I'll take 'severed feet' for $800, Alex."

The Jeopardy! online test is tonight; it's the first step toward becoming a contestant.  It's too bad the readers of this blog can't sign up as a sort of "hive mind," but you can certainly try out on your own.  Details here.

I'll probably restart the blog tomorrow.  Today I'm cramming for the test.


Relevant:  A Jeopardy! episode from 1974.  And miscellaneous Jeopardy! trivia.

btw - “Watch Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek’s fun TV quiz game” is a pangram (it contains every letter of the alphabet).

Addendum:  A hat tip to Zak, who found a list of the questions online (the morning after the test).  Here are the first 25:


1. BYGONE KINGS
His title in French was "Le roi soleil"

2. MOVIE FACTS
Steven Spielberg wasn't yet 30 when he directed this 1975 scarefest that became one of the biggest hits ever

3. FICTION
Dan Brown introduced the character Robert Langdon in this novel that preceded "The DaVinci Code"

4. STATE CAPITALS
This city of about 175,000 people, also a state capital, was named by Roger Williams

5. WHAT'S FOR LUNCH
This Mexican dish is meat & veggies coated with masa dough & wrapped in a corn husk

6. FAMOUS AMERICANS
This man who died in CA in 1926 developed over 800 plant varieties, including a russet potato that bears his name

7. POETS
Her "Sonnets from the Portugese" was dedicated to her husband Robert

8. ALSO A BODY PART
This body part is also a term for certain baby mammals, like elephants

9. HISTORIC PLACES
It's a national monument in Charleston Harbor

10. PAINTINGS
This 1893 painting is perhaps the most famous artwork ever done in Norway

11. ANNUAL EVENTS
The UFO Encounter Festival takes place each July in this New Mexico city

12. CABLE TV
Since 2006 Tom Colicchio has been the head judge on this Bravo cooking show

13. MIDDLE EAST GEOGRAPHY
Riyadh is the capital of this country

14. TECHNOLOGY
Version 4 of this popular communications device includes Facetime, a system for video calling

15. SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES
This title character has Banquo killed & is later visited by Banquo's ghost

16. MEDICINE
Conjunctivitis, an inflammation of the membrane that lines the eye, is commonly known as this

17. CROSSWORD CLUES "H"
Emporium for men's clothes & hats (12)

18. BIBLICAL PEOPLE
She's the "she" in the verse "She caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head"

19. THAT'S COLD!
Temperatures can reacn -90 degrees in this area that makes up 75% of the world's biggest country

20. LITERARY TERMS
Type of novel that's often set in a gloomy castle designed in the arch. style of the same name

21. DISASTERS
Masses of pumice from this volcano landed in the ocean & halted ships around Indonesia in 1883

22. ROCK MUSICIANS
In U2 Bono sings lead; this man, born David Evans, plays lead guitar

23. MINERALS
Halite is also called rock this

24. CANADA
With 5.1 million in the metro area, it's Canada's most populous city

25. HOTELS
The Regal Maxwell House & the Sheraton Music City are found in this souther US city

The last 25 are at this link.   I think I only got 31 of the 50 right.

Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality

Posted by David Chan, Statistician and Lizzy Van Alstine, Research Evangelist

 In 2011, Google released a Search Ads Pause research study which showed that 89% of the clicks from search ads are incremental, i.e., 89% of the visits to the advertiser’s site from ad-clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when the search ads are paused. In a follow up to the original study, we address two main questions: (1) how often is an ad impression accompanied by an associated organic result (i.e., organic result for the same advertiser)? and (2) how does the incrementality of the ad clicks vary with the rank of advertiser’s organic results?

 A meta-analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies highlighted the limited opportunity for clicks from organic search results to substitute for ad clicks when search ads are turned off. We found that on average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic result on the first page of search results. In addition, we found that on average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental. The estimate for average incrementality of the ad clicks increases when the rank is lower; 82% of the ad clicks are incremental when the associated organic search result is between ranks 2 and 4, and 96% of the ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser’s organic result ranked lower than 4 (i.e., 5 and below).

 While these findings provide guidance on overall trends, results for individual advertisers may vary. It’s also important to note that the study focuses on clicks rather than conversions. We recommend that advertisers employ randomized experiments (e.g., geo-based experiments) to better quantify the incremental traffic and lift in conversions from the search ad campaigns and that they use the value-per-click calculations in the original search ads pause study to determine the level of investment on their search ads.

 For more information, find the full study here.

Excellent Papers for 2011

Posted by Corinna Cortes and Alfred Spector, Google Research

UPDATE: Added Theo Vassilakis as an author for "Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets"

Googlers across the company actively engage with the scientific community by publishing technical papers, contributing open-source packages, working on standards, introducing new APIs and tools, giving talks and presentations, participating in ongoing technical debates, and much more. Our publications offer technical and algorithmic advances, feature aspects we learn as we develop novel products and services, and shed light on some of the technical challenges we face at Google.

In an effort to highlight some of our work, we periodically select a number of publications to be featured on this blog. We first posted a set of papers on this blog in mid-2010 and subsequently discussed them in more detail in the following blog postings. In a second round, we highlighted new noteworthy papers from the later half of 2010. This time we honor the influential papers authored or co-authored by Googlers covering all of 2011 -- covering roughly 10% of our total publications.  It’s tough choosing, so we may have left out some important papers.  So, do see the publications list to review the complete group.

In the coming weeks we will be offering a more in-depth look at these publications, but here are some summaries:

Audio processing

“Cascades of two-pole–two-zero asymmetric resonators are good models of peripheral auditory function”, Richard F. Lyon, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 130 (2011), pp. 3893-3904.
Lyon's long title summarizes a result that he has been working toward over many years of modeling sound processing in the inner ear.  This nonlinear cochlear model is shown to be "good" with respect to psychophysical data on masking, physiological data on mechanical and neural response, and computational efficiency. These properties derive from the close connection between wave propagation and filter cascades. This filter-cascade model of the ear is used as an efficient sound processor for several machine hearing projects at Google.

Electronic Commerce and Algorithms

“Online Vertex-Weighted Bipartite Matching and Single-bid Budgeted Allocations”, Gagan Aggarwal, Gagan Goel, Chinmay Karande, Aranyak Mehta, SODA 2011.
The authors introduce an elegant and powerful algorithmic technique to the area of online ad allocation and matching: a hybrid of random perturbations and greedy choice to make decisions on the fly. Their technique sheds new light on classic matching algorithms, and can be used, for example, to pick one among a set of relevant ads, without knowing in advance the demand for ad slots on future web page views.

“Milgram-routing in social networks”, Silvio Lattanzi, Alessandro Panconesi, D. Sivakumar, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2011, pp. 725-734.
Milgram’s "six-degrees-of-separation experiment" and the fascinating small world hypothesis that follows from it, have generated a lot of interesting research in recent years. In this landmark experiment, Milgram showed that people unknown to each other are often connected by surprisingly short chains of acquaintances. In the paper we prove theoretically and experimentally how a recent model of social networks, "Affiliation Networks", offers an explanation to this phenomena and inspires interesting technique for local routing within social networks.

“Non-Price Equilibria in Markets of Discrete Goods”, Avinatan Hassidim, Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Noam Nisan, EC, 2011.
We present a correspondence between markets of indivisible items, and a family of auction based n player games. We show that a market has a price based (Walrasian) equilibrium if and only if the corresponding game has a pure Nash equilibrium. We then turn to markets which do not have a Walrasian equilibrium (which is the interesting case), and study properties of the mixed Nash equilibria of the corresponding games.

HCI

“From Basecamp to Summit: Scaling Field Research Across 9 Locations”, Jens Riegelsberger, Audrey Yang, Konstantin Samoylov, Elizabeth Nunge, Molly Stevens, Patrick Larvie, CHI 2011 Extended Abstracts.
The paper reports on our experience with a basecamp research hub to coordinate logistics and ongoing real-time analysis with research teams in the field. We also reflect on the implications for the meaning of research in a corporate context, where much of the value may be less in a final report, but more in the curated impressions and memories our colleagues take away from the the research trip.

“User-Defined Motion Gestures for Mobile Interaction”, Jaime Ruiz, Yang Li, Edward Lank, CHI 2011: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 197-206.
Modern smartphones contain sophisticated sensors that can detect rich motion gestures — deliberate movements of the device by end-users to invoke commands. However, little is known about best-practices in motion gesture design for the mobile computing paradigm. We systematically studied the design space of motion gestures via a guessability study that elicits end-user motion gestures to invoke commands on a smartphone device. The study revealed consensus among our participants on parameters of movement and on mappings of motion gestures onto commands, by which we developed a taxonomy for motion gestures and compiled an end-user inspired motion gesture set. The work lays the foundation of motion gesture design—a new dimension for mobile interaction.

Information Retrieval

“Reputation Systems for Open Collaboration”, B.T. Adler, L. de Alfaro, A. Kulshreshtha , I. Pye, Communications of the ACM, vol. 54 No. 8 (2011), pp. 81-87.
This paper describes content based reputation algorithms, that rely on automated content analysis to derive user and content reputation, and their applications for Wikipedia and google Maps. The Wikipedia reputation system WikiTrust relies on a chronological analysis of user contributions to articles, metering positive or negative increments of reputation whenever new contributions are made. The Google Maps system Crowdsensus compares the information provided by users on map business listings and computes both a likely reconstruction of the correct listing and a reputation value for each user. Algorithmic-based user incentives ensure the trustworthiness of evaluations of Wikipedia entries and Google Maps business information.

Machine Learning and Data Mining

“Domain adaptation in regression”, Corinna Cortes, Mehryar Mohri, Proceedings of The 22nd International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, ALT 2011.
Domain adaptation is one of the most important and challenging problems in machine learning.  This paper presents a series of theoretical guarantees for domain adaptation in regression, gives an adaptation algorithm based on that theory that can be cast as a semi-definite programming problem, derives an efficient solution for that problem by using results from smooth optimization, shows that the solution can scale to relatively large data sets, and reports extensive empirical results demonstrating the benefits of this new adaptation algorithm.

“On the necessity of irrelevant variables”, David P. Helmbold, Philip M. Long, ICML, 2011
Relevant variables sometimes do much more good than irrelevant variables do harm, so that it is possible to learn a very accurate classifier using predominantly irrelevant variables.  We show that this holds given an assumption that formalizes the intuitive idea that the variables are non-redundant.  For problems like this it can be advantageous to add many additional variables, even if only a small fraction of them are relevant.

“Online Learning in the Manifold of Low-Rank Matrices”, Gal Chechik, Daphna Weinshall, Uri Shalit, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 23), 2011, pp. 2128-2136.
Learning measures of similarity from examples of similar and dissimilar pairs is a problem that is hard to scale. LORETA uses retractions, an operator from matrix optimization, to learn low-rank similarity matrices efficiently. This allows to learn similarities between objects like images or texts when represented using many more features than possible before.

Machine Translation

“Training a Parser for Machine Translation Reordering”, Jason Katz-Brown, Slav Petrov, Ryan McDonald, Franz Och, David Talbot, Hiroshi Ichikawa, Masakazu Seno, Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '11).
Machine translation systems often need to understand the syntactic structure of a sentence to translate it correctly. Traditionally, syntactic parsers are evaluated as standalone systems against reference data created by linguists. Instead, we show how to train a parser to optimize reordering accuracy in a machine translation system, resulting in measurable improvements in translation quality over a more traditionally trained parser.

“Watermarking the Outputs of Structured Prediction with an application in Statistical Machine Translation”, Ashish Venugopal, Jakob Uszkoreit, David Talbot, Franz Och, Juri Ganitkevitch, Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
We propose a general method to watermark and probabilistically identify the structured results of machine learning algorithms with an application in statistical machine translation. Our approach does not rely on controlling or even knowing the inputs to the algorithm and provides probabilistic guarantees on the ability to identify collections of results from one’s own algorithm, while being robust to limited editing operations.

“Inducing Sentence Structure from Parallel Corpora for Reordering”, John DeNero, Jakob Uszkoreit, Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
Automatically discovering the full range of linguistic rules that govern the correct use of language is an appealing goal, but extremely challenging.  Our paper describes a targeted method for discovering only those aspects of linguistic syntax necessary to explain how two different languages differ in their word ordering.  By focusing on word order, we demonstrate an effective and practical application of unsupervised grammar induction that improves a Japanese to English machine translation system.

Multimedia and Computer Vision

“Kernelized Structural SVM Learning for Supervised Object Segmentation”, Luca Bertelli, Tianli Yu, Diem Vu, Burak Gokturk,Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2011.
The paper proposes a principled way for computers to learn how to segment the foreground from the background of an image given a set of training examples. The technology is build upon a specially designed nonlinear segmentation kernel under the recently proposed structured SVM learning framework.

“Auto-Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths”, Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, Irfan Essa, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2011).
Casually shot videos captured by handheld or mobile cameras suffer from significant amount of shake. Existing in-camera stabilization methods dampen high-frequency jitter but do not suppress low-frequency movements and bounces, such as those observed in videos captured by a walking person. On the other hand, most professionally shot videos usually consist of carefully designed camera configurations, using specialized equipment such as tripods or camera dollies, and employ ease-in and ease-out for transitions. Our stabilization technique automatically converts casual shaky footage into more pleasant and professional looking videos by mimicking these cinematographic principles. The original, shaky camera path is divided into a set of segments, each approximated by either constant, linear or parabolic motion, using an algorithm based on robust L1 optimization. The stabilizer has been part of the YouTube Editor (youtube.com/editor) since March 2011.

“The Power of Comparative Reasoning”, Jay Yagnik, Dennis Strelow, David Ross, Ruei-Sung Lin, International Conference on Computer Vision (2011).
The paper describes a theory derived vector space transform that converts vectors into sparse binary vectors such that Euclidean space operations on the sparse binary vectors imply rank space operations in the original vector space. The transform a) does not need any data-driven supervised/unsupervised learning b) can be computed from polynomial expansions of the input space in linear time (in the degree of the polynomial) and c) can be implemented in 10-lines of code. We show competitive results on similarity search and sparse coding (for classification) tasks.

NLP

“Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based Projections”, Dipanjan Das, Slav Petrov, Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL '11), 2011, Best Paper Award.
We would like to have natural language processing systems for all languages, but obtaining labeled data for all languages and tasks is unrealistic and expensive. We present an approach which leverages existing resources in one language (for example English) to induce part-of-speech taggers for languages without any labeled training data. We use graph-based label propagation for cross-lingual knowledge transfer and use the projected labels as features in a hidden Markov model trained with the Expectation Maximization algorithm.

Networks

“TCP Fast Open”, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Yuchung Cheng, Jerry Chu, Arvind Jain, Barath Raghavan, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), 2011.
TCP Fast Open enables data exchange during TCP’s initial handshake. It decreases application network latency by one full round-trip time, a significant speedup for today's short Web transfers. Our experiments on popular websites show that Fast Open reduces the whole-page load time over 10% on average, and in some cases up to 40%.

“Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP”, Nandita Dukkipati, Matt Mathis, Yuchung Cheng, Monia Ghobadi, Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement 2011, Berlin, Germany - November 2-4, 2011.
Packet losses increase latency of Web transfers and negatively impact user experience. Proportional rate reduction (PRR) is designed to recover from losses quickly, smoothly and accurately by pacing out retransmissions across received ACKs during TCP’s fast recovery. Experiments on Google Web and YouTube servers in U.S. and India demonstrate that PRR reduces the TCP latency of connections experiencing losses by 3-10% depending on response size.

Security and Privacy

“Automated Analysis of Security-Critical JavaScript APIs”, Ankur Taly, Úlfar Erlingsson, John C. Mitchell, Mark S. Miller, Jasvir Nagra, IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (SP), 2011.
As software is increasingly written in high-level, type-safe languages, attackers have fewer means to subvert system fundamentals, and attacks are more likely to exploit errors and vulnerabilities in application-level logic.  This paper describes a generic, practical defense against such attacks, which can protect critical application resources even when those resources are partially exposed to attackers via software interfaces.  In the context of carefully-crafted fragments of JavaScript, the paper applies formal methods and semantics to prove that these defenses can provide complete, non-circumventable mediation of resource access; the paper also shows how an implementation of the techniques can establish the properties of widely-used software, and find previously-unknown bugs.

“App Isolation: Get the Security of Multiple Browsers with Just One”, Eric Y. Chen, Jason Bau, Charles Reis, Adam Barth, Collin Jackson, 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2011.
We find that anecdotal advice to use a separate web browser for sites like your bank is indeed effective at defeating most cross-origin web attacks.  We also prove that a single web browser can provide the same key properties, for sites that fit within the compatibility constraints.

Speech

“Improving the speed of neural networks on CPUs”, Vincent Vanhoucke, Andrew Senior, Mark Z. Mao, Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning Workshop, NIPS 2011.
As deep neural networks become state-of-the-art in real-time machine learning applications such as speech recognition, computational complexity is fast becoming a limiting factor in their adoption. We show how to best leverage modern CPU architectures to significantly speed-up their inference.

“Bayesian Language Model Interpolation for Mobile Speech Input”, Cyril Allauzen, Michael Riley, Interspeech 2011.
Voice recognition on the Android platform must contend with many possible target domains - e.g. search, maps, SMS. For each of these, a domain-specific language model was built by linearly interpolating several n-gram LMs from a common set of Google corpora. The current work has found a way to efficiently compute a single n-gram language model with accuracy very close to the domain-specific LMs but with considerably less complexity at recognition time.

Statistics

“Large-Scale Parallel Statistical Forecasting Computations in R”, Murray Stokely, Farzan Rohani, Eric Tassone, JSM Proceedings, Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences, 2011.
This paper describes the implementation of a framework for utilizing distributed computational infrastructure from within the R interactive statistical computing environment, with applications to timeseries forecasting. This system is widely used by the statistical analyst community at Google for data analysis on very large data sets.

Structured Data

“Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets”, Sergey Melnik, Andrey Gubarev, Jing Jing Long, Geoffrey Romer, Shiva Shivakumar, Matt Tolton, Theo Vassilakis, Communications of the ACM, vol. 54 (2011), pp. 114-123.
Dremel is a scalable, interactive ad-hoc query system. By combining multi-level execution trees and columnar data layout, it is capable of running aggregation queries over trillion-row tables in seconds. Besides continued growth internally to Google, Dremel now also backs an increasing number of external customers including BigQuery and UIs such as AdExchange front-end.

“Representative Skylines using Threshold-based Preference Distributions”, Atish Das Sarma, Ashwin Lall, Danupon Nanongkai, Richard J. Lipton, Jim Xu, International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2011.
The paper adopts principled approach towards representative skylines and formalizes the problem of displaying k tuples such that the probability that a random user clicks on one of them is maximized. This requires mathematically modeling (a) the likelihood with which a user is interested in a tuple, as well as (b) how one negotiates the lack of knowledge of an explicit set of users. This work presents theoretical and experimental results showing that the suggested algorithm significantly outperforms previously suggested approaches.

“Hyper-local, directions-based ranking of places”, Petros Venetis, Hector Gonzalez, Alon Y. Halevy, Christian S. Jensen, PVLDB, vol. 4(5) (2011), pp. 290-30.
Click through information is one of the strongest signals we have for ranking web pages. We propose an equivalent signal for raking real world places: The number of times that people ask for precise directions to the address of the place. We show that this signal is competitive in quality with human reviews while being much cheaper to collect, we also show that the signal can be incorporated efficiently into a location search system.

Systems

“Power Management of Online Data-Intensive Services”, David Meisner, Christopher M. Sadler, Luiz André Barroso, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Thomas F. Wenisch, Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 2011.
Compute and data intensive Web services (such as Search) are a notoriously hard target for energy savings techniques. This article characterizes the statistical hardware activity behavior of servers running Web search and discusses the potential opportunities of existing and proposed energy savings techniques.

“The Impact of Memory Subsystem Resource Sharing on Datacenter Applications”, Lingjia Tang, Jason Mars, Neil Vachharajani, Robert Hundt, Mary-Lou Soffa, ISCA, 2011.
In this work, the authors expose key characteristics of an emerging class of Google-style workloads and show how to enhance system software to take advantage of these characteristics to improve efficiency in data centers. The authors find that across datacenter applications, there is both a sizable benefit and a potential degradation from improperly sharing micro-architectural resources on a single machine (such as on-chip caches and bandwidth to memory). The impact of co-locating threads from multiple applications with diverse memory behavior changes the optimal mapping of thread to cores for each application. By employing an adaptive thread-to-core mapper, the authors improved the performance of the datacenter applications by up to 22% over status quo thread-to-core mapping, achieving performance within 3% of optimal.

“Language-Independent Sandboxing of Just-In-Time Compilation and Self-Modifying Code”, Jason Ansel, Petr Marchenko, Úlfar Erlingsson, Elijah Taylor, Brad Chen, Derek Schuff, David Sehr, Cliff L. Biffle, Bennet S. Yee, ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2011.
Since its introduction in the early 90's, Software Fault Isolation, or SFI, has been a static code technique, commonly perceived as incompatible with dynamic libraries, runtime code generation, and other dynamic code.  This paper describes how to address this limitation and explains how the SFI techniques in Google Native Client were extended to support modern language implementations based on just-in-time code generation and runtime instrumentation. This work is already deployed in Google Chrome, benefitting millions of users, and was developed over a summer collaboration with three Ph.D. interns; it exemplifies how Research at Google is focused on rapidly bringing significant benefits to our users through groundbreaking technology and real-world products.

“Thialfi: A Client Notification Service for Internet-Scale Applications”, Atul Adya, Gregory Cooper, Daniel Myers, Michael Piatek,Proc. 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2011, pp. 129-142.
This paper describes a notification service that scales to hundreds of millions of users, provides sub-second latency in the common case, and guarantees delivery even in the presence of a wide variety of failures.  The service has been deployed in several popular Google applications including Chrome, Google Plus, and Contacts.