Parmesan cheese "pencils"

The cheese is pared by rolling the "pencil" in a pencil sharpener.  The scale on the "pencil" shows the calories shaved off.

Found at jazarah!, via Neatorama.

Department of Defense spending during my lifetime

This graph is better than most because the data used are expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars. 

Lacking in requisite political direction and without the internal tools (or will) to prioritize, DoD lumbers along, occasionally forced to defend its total spending against other discretionary outlays, but never really having to defend how it allocates what it spends internally.  Adding to the dysfunction is the sorry state of our political system, in which one party's adult leadership (the Democrats) is terrified to take on DoD for fear of looking weak, and the other party's adult leadership (the Republicans) is unable to apply its flinty aversion to government growth to national security apparatus of the country.

More at Information Dissemination, via The Dish.

What kids do when you're not watching

Via Reddit.

Married, no kids. The most common California family. And a new poll for TYWKIWDBI readers.

Excerpts from an article in the Los Angeles Times:

New census figures show that the percentage of Californians who live in "nuclear family" households — a married man and a woman raising their children — has dropped again over the last decade, to 23.4% of all households. That represents a 10% decline in 10 years, measured as a percentage of the state's households...

Those households, the Times analysis shows, are being supplanted by a striking spectrum of postmodern living arrangements: same-sex households, unmarried opposite-sex partners, married couples who have no children...

Indeed, interviews with numerous families in Southern California reveal a generation of parents and children who still view the family as the building block of society but no longer view the nuclear family as the ideal. By and large, those interviewed insisted that their non-nuclear lives do not reflect a weakening of society but a fluidity and complexity that echoes a modern world...

I'm not positive why the numbers in the figure above don't add to 100%.  Perhaps the other 32% of households are single persons living alone?

This seems like a good time for another TYWKIWDBI reader poll.  At the top of the right sidebar is a poll asking you to identify your living arrangements.  This will obviously sample people worldwide, rather than the U.S., and will have no scientific validity whatsoever.  It's just a way to satisfy one's curiosity about who else is reading this blog.

Addendum:  Oops.  I knew I would overlook some possible categories, some of which have already been pointed out within the first few minutes.  Unfortunately I can't add choices to the poll without losing the early votes, so I guess the nonlisted options will have to be grouped under "other."

Addendum:  The final data, based on 766 responses by TYWKIWDBI readers:

• 222 - Married with kids
• 220 - Single without kids
• 134 - Married without kids
• 103 - Unmarried, living with partner
• 28   - Single parent
• 26   - Same-sex partner
• 9     - Same-sex marriage
• 24   - other

Is this the world's first question mark:

Cambridge University manuscript specialist, Dr. Chip Coakley has identified what may be the world’s earliest example of a question mark. The symbol in question is two dots, one above the other, similar in appearance to a colon, rather than the familiar squiggle of the modern question mark. The double dot symbol appears in Syriac manuscripts of the Bible dating back to the fifth century...

The double dot mark, known to later grammarians as zawga elaya, is written above a word near the start of a sentence to tell the reader that it is a question. It doesn’t appear on all questions: ones with a wh- word don’t need it, just as in English ‘Who is it’ can only be a question (although we use a question mark anyway). But a question like ‘You’re going away?’ needs the question mark to be understood; and in Syriac, zawga elaya marks just these otherwise ambiguous expressions...

Question marks in Greek and Latin script emerged later than in Syriac, with the earliest examples dating from the eighth century. It is likely that these symbols developed independently from each other and from Syriac. Hebrew and Arabic, close neighbours of Syriac, have nothing comparable. Armenian, another neighbour, has a similar mark, but it seems to be later.

Via PhysOrg, where there are additional details.

Studies Show Search Ads Drive 89% Incremental Traffic

Posted by David Chan and Lizzy Van Alstine, Quantitative Management Team

Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. In other words, if search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase, and make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over 400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question.

In what we call “Search Ads Pause Studies”, our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads. Then they built a statistical model to predict the click volume for given levels of ad spend using spend and organic impression volume as predictors. These models generated estimates for the incremental clicks attributable to search ads (IAC), or in other words, the percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused.

The results were surprising. On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high across verticals. The full study can be found on here.

Faculty from across the Americas meet in New York for the Faculty Summit

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Last week, we held our seventh annual Computer Science Faculty Summit. For the first time, the event took place at our New York City office; nearly 100 faculty members from universities in the U.S., Canada and Latin America attended. The two-day Summit focused on systems, artificial intelligence and mobile computing. Alfred Spector, VP of research and special initiatives, hosted the conference and led lively discussions on privacy, security and Google’s approach to research.

Google’s Internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, opened the Summit with a talk on the challenges involved in securing the “Internet of things”—that is, uniquely identifiable objects (“things”) and their virtual representations. With almost 2 billion international Internet users and 5 billion mobile devices out there in the world, Vint expounded upon the idea that Internet security is not just about technology, but also about policy and global institutions. He stressed that our new digital ecosystem is complex and large in scale, and includes both hardware and software. It also has multiple stakeholders, diverse business models and a range of legal frameworks. Vint argued that making and keeping the Internet secure over the next few years will require technical innovation and global collaboration.

After Vint kicked things off, faculty spent the two days attending presentations by Google software engineers and research scientists, including John Wilkes on the management of Google's large hardware infrastructure, Andrew Chatham on the self-driving car, Johan Schalkwyk on mobile speech technology and Andrew Moore on the research challenges in commerce services. Craig Nevill-Manning, the engineering founder of Google’s NYC office, gave an update on Google.org, particularly its recent work in crisis response. Other talks covered the engineering work behind products like Ad Exchange and Google Docs, and the range of engineering projects taking place across 35 Google offices in 20 countries. For a complete list of the topics and sessions, visit the Faculty Summit site. Also, a few of our attendees heeded Alfred’s call to recap their breakout sessions in verse—download a PDF of one of our favorite poems, about the future of mobile computing, penned by NYU professor Ken Perlin.

A highlight of this year’s Summit was Bill Schilit’s presentation of the Library Wall, a Chrome OS experiment featuring an eight-foot tall full-color virtual display of ebooks that can be browsed and examined individually via touch screen. Faculty members were invited to play around with the digital-age “bookshelf,” which is one of the newest additions to our NYC office.

We’ve already posted deeper dives on a few of the talks—including cluster management, mobile search and commerce. We also collected some interesting faculty reflections. For more information on all of our programs, visit our University Relations website. The Faculty Summit is meant to connect forerunners across the computer science community—in business, research and academia—and we hope all our attendees returned home feeling informed and inspired.