There’s a new Google-competing search engine called Cuil (which I guess is meant to be pronounced as slacker-speak “kewl” or something). If I search for myself on it, my Imperial homepage comes up first, but for some reason accompanied by this picture. I promise that’s not me. Just as strange, a picture that is of me comes up next to a blurb for a book written by another Andrew Jaffe who happens to be the director of the Clio Awards for advertising (there are a few of us Andrew Jaffes out there, but I’m egotistically happy to tell you that...
Posted by Andrew on July 29, 2008 3:10 PM
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the dawn of the Space Age, measured from the launch of Sputnik. Google has a good celebratory logo in its honor: Now that we're supposedly in the Information Age, does that mean the Space Age is over? I do spend most of my day on the internet -- but I also spend my day working out how to do science with Sputnik's great-great-grandchildren....
Posted by Andrew on October 4, 2007 3:12 PM
Google Sky has been adding scientifically interesting (and maybe useful) astrophysical data since its introduction a few weeks ago. In particular, Geoff Marcy has added known exoplanets (i.e., planets around other stars) and Joshua Bloom has added support for VOEvents, a data format for distributing information about astrophysical events happening in real time, such as supernovae (exploding stars) and intense gamma-ray bursts. Marcy and Bloom are both from Berkeley, which was savvy enough to issue a Press Release: it’s not often that astronomers get to mention billion-dollar companies in their work. That’s how I learned that two of Sky’s developers...
Posted by Andrew on September 9, 2007 1:53 PM
Google has just released a new version of its Google Earth software — one that lets you look up to the sky instead of down to the ground. It’s essentially a consumer-grade Virtual Observatory, like the UK AstroGrid, the US National Virtual Observatory and the Euro-VO project. It’s not so obvious when you fire it up and are presented with little icons for various stars and galaxies, but the underlying data is a continuous picture of the sky, although the resolution depends on what data exists in a given area. For example, type in “HDF” and it takes you to...
Posted by Andrew on August 22, 2007 2:00 PM
So apparently this weekend Google, Nature, and O’Reilly Media are hosting a ‘Science Foo Camp’ at Google’s Silicon Valley HQ. O’Reilly has held a few tech-oriented Foo Camps over the last few years, and apparently the list of invitees has always provoked some debate — if you’re not invited, you’re either not important enough, or you’ve somehow pissed off the O’Reilly cabal (like RSS inventor and all-round curmudgeonly presence Dave Winer). Like the tech events, SciFoo is invite-only, and is also run under a rather draconian set of disclosure rules about what participants can report about each other’s identities. In...
Posted by Andrew on August 14, 2006 12:08 AM
Went to see a talk at Imperial’s Department of Computing* by Vint Cerf, currently Google’s “Chief internet evangelist.” But Cerf’s roots are deep in tech: at Stanford in the seventies he co-invented the TCP/IP protocol which controls how information moves around the internet. I discovered that this was mostly a Google recruiting talk for Imperial’s Computer Science students (applications due this Friday!), but at least that gave him an audience with whom he could switch from “Evangelist” mode — “wow! there are almost a billion machines on the internet!” — to full-on techie, spouting acronyms like BPG4 that I had...
Posted by Andrew on March 7, 2006 8:49 PM
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