Google SearchRank?

I just realized that I've read Google literature on storing and
searching web pages, but not on storing and searching (or otherwise
analyzing) searches (user search phrases)?

What do they do here? Do they use the same technologies as for pages?
Store it in BigTable? Analyze it using MapReduce? Do they compute a
"SearchRank", i.e. the rank of a page based on how often it is clicked
when presented as part of a search result set? Do they take combine
this with the page's PageRank before displaying the TopK results?

What other analytics do they perform on search results? User-visible
"analytics" examples include Google Trends and Zeitgeist but those
are just pure aggregation and ordering.

getattr on a script

I wanted to dispatch calls to other functions within my script, but couldn't figure out what object to pass as argument to getattr. Turns out __name__ is the name of my module, and I can look up a reference in sys.modules.

Handy!

REF: getattr on a function - comp.lang.python | Google Groups

Nvidia Nabs a Top Scientist From Stanford - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Nvidia Nabs a Top Scientist From Stanford - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com:

"Since 2005, Mr. Dally has served as the chairman of Stanford’s vaunted computer science department. More crucially for Nvidia’s immediate aims, Mr. Dally has done extensive research into “stream processing,” which is a form of computing gaining momentum with both scientists and businesses.

The stream processing model helps spread complex tasks across processors with many cores — like Nvidia’s graphics chips, which can contain hundreds of small processing engines versus just a handful of more powerful engines found on standard processors from companies like Intel. Certain types of software jobs run much faster on the many-core chips, making them desirable for organizations taking on some of the toughest tasks."

This sounds promising. Hopefully we'll see more of this innovation in the market from Nvidia after Google killed off a previous attempt by gobbling up PeakStream.

What Red Ink? Wall St. Paid Fat Bonuses - NYTimes.com

What Red Ink? Wall St. Paid Fat Bonuses - NYTimes.com

"Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.

That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller."

It pays to be a banker, I suppose.

The Famous Fingers Were Live, but Their Sound Was Recorded at the Inauguration - NYTimes.com

The Famous Fingers Were Live, but Their Sound Was Recorded at the Inauguration - NYTimes.com: "“It’s not something we would announce, but it’s not something we would try to hide,” Ms. Florman said. “Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it. The fact they were forced to perform to tape because of the weather did not seem relevant, nor would we want to draw attention away from what we believed the news is, that we were having a peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.”"

But of course! So much for transparency.

Bush Approves Bill Reducing Secretary of State’s Pay - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com

Bush Approves Bill Reducing Secretary of State’s Pay - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com: "Mr. Bush signed a bill reducing by several thousand dollars the salary of the secretary of state. It was a crucial step in Mrs. Clinton’s confirmation process because of a clause in the Constitution that forbids a member of Congress from being appointed to a government position which was either created or given a compensation increase during the lawmaker’s current term."

How are these things checked? Automatically? Who writes this compliance software? The same folks who implement Sarbanes-Oxley?

An Online Farmers Market - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

An Online Farmers Market - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com: "The local food movement has been all about buying seasonal food from nearby farmers. Now, thanks to the Web, it is expanding to include far-away farmers too."

Not really. They don't sell produce. Mostly preserved stuff.

Fraud Rocks Satyam as Chairman Resigns - WSJ.com

Fraud Rocks Satyam as Chairman Resigns - WSJ.com: "B. Ramalinga Raju, founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. -- 'satyam' means truth in Sanskrit -- said in a letter of resignation that he also overstated profits for the past several years, overstated the amount of debt owed to the company and understated its liabilities. Eventually, he said, the scheme reached 'simply unmanageable proportions' and he was left in a position 'like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten.'"

Fascinating. Looks like Raju and Madoff deserve a Special Effects Oscar this year. Also brings to mind the astounding creativity of the in-house accountants (and possibly "outside" auditors). Never realized accounting could be this art-y.

Professional Sports Is Very Interesting | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Professional Sports Is Very Interesting | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: "Whenever a ball is hit, put into a hoop, or carried to a particular point of significance, my mind instantly races to consider all of the action's possible ramifications: 'How will this affect future hittings, throwings, and carryings of other, different balls?' I wonder to myself. What a joy it is to closely follow a random group of men thrown together in one geographic location working together to win contests of athletic ability. Each and every victory of a team full of people I'll never meet over another team full of people I'll never meet is a complex web of nuance and metaphor to contemplate at great length."

YouTube - Johnny Lee: Wii Remote hacks

YouTube - Johnny Lee: Wii Remote hacks: "Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. A multi-ovation demo from TED2008."

Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com: "These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions."

Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Another great article: Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
by Malcolm Gladwell.

Really liked the democratization of genius in the premise that a large class of them has to slog as hard and long as the rest of us.

Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Just finished reading this article: Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker .

My two takeaways are:

1. Malcolm Gladwell is a great writer. This is the first piece of his that I've read, and I like many things about it. I particularly liked the subject, the distinction between invention in art and science/technology, that the former is a unique, one-time thing while the other is a natural progression of ideas and emperical facts proposed by a bunch of people.

This obsession with the prodigy in technical fields reminds me of the superstar culture (or the rock-star culture in Bay Area tech companies). But rockstars don't exist in isolation, and that the other band members (or even other entourage members) are short-changed in most cases. Its quite evident in academia too, where the early bloomer gets a lot of mileage but at least in that case, the star student possibly does complete most of the assignments and projects singly, though I'm not sure how professors view collaborators and whether they give any points for assists.

2. Nathan Myhrvold is a very interesting guy. I suppose there are many capable polymaths but not all of them have his means. This may probably mean that he was either lucky enough or smart enough to recognize a big commerical opportunity when he saw one. If it's the latter, then that's another skill he should get credit for, because many technically brilliant people are either clueless or don't have the stomach for the bump-and-grind of the pursuit of commercial success, though one could argue that the pursuit of publication counts, grants and awards is possibly more bumpy.

Functional languages

Discovering Philip Wadler and his work has piqued my interest in functional programming languages. I was surprised I hadn't heard about him given his hand in XQuery and Java generics.

His latest project, Links seems very interesting with its promise of write-once, run-in-all-three-tiers.

Given that its implemented in Objective Caml, I thought that would be a good way to start learning about functional languages. To this end, I'm going to try implementing some CLR-type problems in Caml and post it here. Since I'm a beginner at this, readers are welcome to provide comments, corrections and improvements in my code.

Of course, Caml is not the only language to consider for learning functional programming. There's the grand-daddy of them all: ML (and it's New Jersey variant: SML). There's Haskell, another Wadler influence. Microsoft's F# is Caml-inspired. Martin Odersky is working on Scala.

All of these languages have elements which I find fascinating, and I'm hoping that starting with an ML will give me sufficient insight to comprehend these other languages correctly.

Dependency Injection with Guice

I'd heard about Guice being a Dependency Injection framework, and was curious to see how it differed from Spring.

One big difference seems to be that Guice, being Java code (plus annotations) is strongly typed. It can check dependencies at compile-time.

Bob Lee also mentions that ease of testing is a big motivator for Guice. I wonder how that limits Guice vs. Spring, for example.

The talk also mentions similarities to Seam. It looks like features from Seam and Guice are going to be blended into Web Beans.

Looks like playing with it is the next thing to do...

P.J. O'Rourke on Starbucked by Taylor Clark

I don't read book reviews a whole lot before buying them. I check to see if the book made it on a decent list, like a NYT or WSJ review, and whether I care about the subject.

But, I happened to read this review today. I don't think I care about the book, but I've discovered P.J. O'Rourke. One choice gem:

Clark talks a lot about the determination, drive and persistence of the Starbucks Corporation. But if those were the sole qualities of success, toddlers would rule the world. Clark makes much of Starbucks’s discovery that it could put one store close to another and both could thrive. But you can line a street with fire hydrants and dogs will use them all; that’s not necessarily a recipe for wealth, especially if you try to charge the dogs.

Looks like I'll have to read more of his stuff..

Wireless networking..but what about power?

For the past few years, wireless networking came with the promise of being untethered by wires. You could sit in a cafe and work on your LAN. Wireless sensor motes could be scattered in a forest or on the ocean, and would faithfully transmit data. Intel even ran some ads a few years back, where a user would be working on a Centrino-equipped laptop in the middle of a nice, green lawn.

And I would always think, what happens when these gadgets run out of power? What we really need is to be able to transmit power wirelessly.

Voila!

Closures in Javascript

This is one of the most accessible explanations of closures (in Javascript, specifically) that I've read.

Pipes for the web

I used to think of web service orchestration as (UNIX-like) pipes for the web, where the output of one operation can be fed as the input to the next one.

So I was surprised to stumble across Yahoo Pipes. It's an RSS data (for now) processing and transformation service. It would be more interesting to able to wire together arbitrary web services (they do mention that's coming), but this might be worth checking out.

The other issue with a public mashup/data-flow service accessing public data is that joins, transformations and rendering take precedence over authentication and authorization, both of which are critical first steps in an enterprise application.

OpenInfoCard

I just joined the OpenInfoCard project; quite excited about it. It's a CardSpace selector plug-in for Firefox. Once Vista starts rolling out and people start playing with CardSpace on IE7, maybe they'll playing with CardSpace selectors on the other browser, and the other other browser.