Google

Readings: Antidepressants, Wal-Mart, Google Plus

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

A few reads from today:

(1) “In Defense of Antidepressants” [New York Times] – a solid opinion piece by Peter D. Kramer, coming to the defense of antidepressants. This piece appears reactionary against Marcia Angell’s “The Epidemic of Mental Illness” (Part I) and “The Illusions of Psychiatry”(Part 2) featured in The New York Review of Books (which I called one of the best long reads of the first half of 2011). It is always good to hear the other side of the argument.

Could this be true? Could drugs that are ingested by one in 10 Americans each year, drugs that have changed the way that mental illness is treated, really be a hoax, a mistake or a concept gone wrong?

This supposition is worrisome. Antidepressants work — ordinarily well, on a par with other medications doctors prescribe. Yes, certain researchers have questioned their efficacy in particular areas — sometimes, I believe, on the basis of shaky data. And yet, the notion that they aren’t effective in general is influencing treatment.

(2) “Today’s Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird” [Wall Street Journal] – what happens in Wal-Mart stays in Wal-Mart…Unless you get written up in the WSJ:

Maybe a man dressed in a cow suit, crawling on all fours, will steal 26 gallons of milk from a Wal-Mart and hand them out Robin Hood-style to patrons in a parking lot, as allegedly occurred in Stafford, Va. in April.

Perhaps a glazed-eyed 20-year-old will take a truck filled with 338 boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts from a Wal-Mart before police find him drowsy and in possession of a bag of marijuana, as authorities say took place in Ocala, Fla., in March.

Or perchance a rapper named Mr. Ghetto will shoot an unauthorized, sexually suggestive music video paean to picking up women in the aisles of a Wal-Mart, full of ladies shaking their hindquarters in ways hindquarters typically don’t shake, as happened in New Orleans in May.

Hilarious.

(3) “Like it or Not” [Rethrick] – former developer of Google Wave and Google Plus speaks out about the innovation (or lack thereof) of the new sharing/social media service, Google+:

It might surprise you to learn that I don’t find Google+ all that innovative. It hits all the notes that a facebook clone merits, and adds a few points of distinctiveness that are genuinely compelling, sure–but I don’t find it all that interesting, personally. To my mind, Twitter was a far greater innovation that continues unchallenged. But broad product innovation is not exactly what they were going for, I believe.

Sheryl Sandberg and the Silicon Valley Culture

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes a detailed profile of Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook. She was previously at Google, and Auletta goes in depth describing how Mark Zuckerberg wooed her to join him at Facebook. The entire piece is meticulously researched (I’d say about three months of work went into it), and worth reading in entirety. Much of the piece deals with how women are perceived in the workplace (Sandberg “blamed them [women] more for their insecurities than she blamed men for their insensitivity or their sexism”) and the challenges Sandberg faced when coming over from Google to Facebook.

Sandberg’s familiar history is particularly fascinating:

Sandberg was born in 1969, in Washington, D.C. Her family moved to North Miami Beach when she was two. Her mother, Adele, gave up studying for a Ph.D. and teaching college French in order to raise Sheryl and her two younger siblings, David and Michelle. Her father, Joel, is an ophthalmologist. After a rabbi at their synagogue asked for volunteers, Adele and Joel helped found the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry. “Adele did most of the work,” Joel says, but he was the president. Their home became an unofficial headquarters for Soviet Jews wanting to escape anti-Semitism, and a temporary hotel for many who had finally won the right to emigrate. On weekends, Adele says, “we schlepped the kids to rallies.”

The Sandberg children attended public school, and Sheryl was always at the top of her class. “In public schools, for a girl to be smart was not good for your social life,” Adele says. She describes her daughter as “a mother’s helper,” aiding David in tying his shoes and Michelle in taking a bath. The only time she ever rebelled, Adele recalls, was when she was in junior high school. “One day she came home from school and said, ‘Mom, we have a problem. You’re not ready to let me grow up.’ ”

“I said, ‘You’re right.’ The minute she said it, I knew she was right.”

One point raised in the piece is the relationship between work and raising a family. Sandberg is a mother, and spoke with Auletta about the challenge:

One day this spring, I spoke with Sandberg about these issues. She had rushed to the office from her son’s school wearing sweatpants, a zippered sweatshirt, and white sneakers, with her hair jammed into a ponytail. She sat under a framed photograph of her holding her baby and pulled out a Baggie containing sugar-snap peas, which she began munching as we talked. She said, “The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home. . . . Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way—not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.” The second impediment is guilt, she said. “I feel guilty working because of my kids. I do. I feel guilty. In my TED talk, I’m talking to myself, too. I’m not just talking to other people. I have faced every one of those things myself.” Later, I asked her directly about Hewlett’s critique, and she simply said, “I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.”

Finally, I enjoyed the part about where Sandberg was to give a graduation speech at Bard College and said the following:

She described a poster on the wall at Facebook: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” She said that it echoed something the writer Anna Quindlen once said, which was that “she majored in unafraid” at Barnard. Sandberg went on, “Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold. I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try. You’re going to walk off this stage today and you’re going to start your adult life. Start out by aiming high. . . . Go home tonight and ask yourselves, What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it! Congratulations.”

So, what would you do if you weren’t afraid? It’s such an important question in how we guide ourselves in life: fear tends to brings us back down to Earth…

###

Related: The Face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg 

Readings: Google in the News

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Two interesting stories in the New York Times appeared this weekend, both relating to Google:

1) “Google Grows, and Works to Retain Nimble Minds” [New York Times] – a nice explainer about Google’s unparalleled growth, and a side effect: employees who are leaving the company for smaller companies or for start-ups:

Recent departures include low-level engineers, product managers and prominent managers like Lars Rasmussen, who helped create Google Maps and Wave before he left for Facebook, and Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob who was vice president for mobile ads at Google and is now looking for his next project. At least 142 of Facebook’s employees came from Google.

I like this phrase used in the article: “Corporate sclerosis.” In the last five years, Google has grown from 5,000 to 23,000 employees, while its revenue has increased by more than seven-fold, from $3.2B to $23.7B. So what is Google doing to prevent employees from leaving the company?

Google is taking aggressive steps to retain employees, particularly those with start-up ambitions. Google has given several engineers who said they were leaving to start new companies the chance to start them within Google. They work independently and can recruit other engineers and use Google’s resources, like its code base and servers, according to half a dozen employees.

This is a highly innovative move, and rarely seen in other companies (I think). Of course, financial motivation is there too: this month Google gave every employee in the company a 10% raise.

Nevertheless, the biggest takeaway for me was this: if someone has the drive to do something on their own, compensation packages and promises to work on independent projects can only go so far. This was the best line in the story:

Part of Google’s problem is that the best engineers are often the ones with the most entrepreneurial thirst.

Is it that surprising that these engineers are looking for greener (but perhaps riskier) pastures?

2) “A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web” [New York Times] – an amazing and horrifying story of a sunglasses merchant who thrives on negative feedback to boost his Google search rankings (which leads to more people buying fake/poor merchandise from him). Not much is below this merchant: threats, intimidation, non-delivery (or fake delivery) of product.

This story left me fuming (I refuse to provide the name of the merchant). What’s interesting, and other people have pointed this out, is that Google does not appear to perform sentiment analysis; that is, a “negative” link to a website might be as beneficial as a link of praise, and Google’s algorithms (which are, in fact, a secret) don’t distinguish between them. So for instance, we have this from the NYT, where people posted complaints about the company:

Between then and now, hundreds of additional tirades have been tacked to Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and sites like them.

But because those web sites are reputable, if they point to the offending website, it’s essentially more “Google juice” and the merchant described in the article benefits.

One last note: the reporter, David Segal, appears to take a liking to this merchant:

It’s almost painful to say, but Mr. [Redacted] is amusing company. He is sharp and entertaining, although much of the entertainment comes from the way he flouts the conventions of courtesy, which he does with such a perverse flair that it can seem like a kind of performance art.

I thought the sympathy was undeserving, but perhaps this is a psychological phenomenon: if we tend to get close to someone (even if we do so objectively, such as reporting for the New York Times), we tend to begin liking the one we’re with to help us cope and/or help us approach the subject. Familiarity breeds good journalism, it seems.

Update (12/01/10): News of the New York Times article has made the rounds at Google headquarters, and Google has acted swiftly. In a blog post titled “Being Bad To Your Customers Is Bad for Business,” Google explains that they have modified their search rankings, incorporating user reviews in Google’s search algorithm:

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

Huge props to Google on this quick, worthy update.

Readings: Diller’s Creative Process, Google Cars, Africa’s Soccer Impostors

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Some interesting articles I’ve read recently:

1) “Picturing Failure, Sketching Dreams” [Wall Street Journal] – an excellent profile of Elizabeth Diller and her creative process. She’s the architect behind The High Line in New York City. This passage about the creative process resonates with me strongly:

Ms. Diller said her creative breakthroughs usually come when she isn’t working. She might be watching a play by the experimental Wooster Group, or seeking out work by late French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, known for his irreverent use of everyday objects. They might come while she’s reading—from an academic journal to People magazine. (Mr. Scofidio [Elizabeth Diller’s husband] sticks mostly to novels; the frequent traveler sometimes rips out each page of a paperback after he finishes it to lighten his load.)

Read the entire piece here, and please also check out my photo essay on The High Line.

(2) “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic” [New York Times] – very interesting development from Google. This is fascinating:

With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.

So is Google competing with DARPA’s Urban Challenge?

(3) “Africa’s Soccer Impostors” [Slate] – this is a sad, incredible story about a team that pretended to be Togo’s national soccer team while playing a game in Bahrain in September 2010. How did it happen?

After what must have been a grueling piece of detective work, the investigators pinned their suspicions on Tchanile Bana, a former national-team coach who had recently been suspended for taking another fake team to a tournament in Egypt.

The story is even more insane than most people would expect… In January 2010, Togo’s real national team traveled by bus into Angola’s Cabinda province, the site of its first match in the Africa Cup of Nations tournament, and this is what happened:

As the Togo team’s bus crossed into Cabinda, armed soldiers from a separatist sect opened fire, killing the driver and two staff members and wounding several players. The team’s French manager, Herbert Velud, was shot in the arm. For around half an hour, the rebels fired on the bus with machine guns and fought with the team’s Angolan security force while the players crawled under the seats.

So unfortunate and bizarre. Are there any national soccer teams that have had worse luck and misfortune? I should mention that the article is written by Brian Phillips, who authored a post that I claimed is an absolute must-read.

Readings: Skydiving from Space, Beethoven in Kinshasa, Google in Antarctica

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Here are some interesting articles I’ve read over the last few days:

1) “Skydiving from the Edge of Space” [The Guardian] – this is a fantastic profile of two daredevils, Felix Baumgartner and Michel Fournier, who’ve long had plans to travel to the edge of space, skydive from there, in order to try to break the sound barrier. The introduction of the piece sets a thrilling pace:

At around 120,000 feet, on the fringes of space, the air is so thin that a falling human body would travel fast enough to exceed the speed of sound. A skydiver, properly equipped with pressurised suit and a supply of oxygen to protect against the hostile elements, could feasibly jump from that height and, about 30 seconds later, punch through the sound barrier – becoming the first person ever to go “supersonic” without the aid of an aircraft or space shuttle.

The two daredevils have been plotting their jumps for years:

Baumgartner has been plotting his space jump for four years, Fournier for 20, and this autumn both projects are coming to a head – 50 years exactly since anyone even came close to leaping from such heights or plummeting at such speeds. That was Colonel Joseph Kittinger, a test pilot, who completed a series of high-altitude jumps from a helium balloon in August 1960, part of an equipment-testing project for the agency that would become NASA.

The jumps cannot take place from an airplane and must be done via a balloon:

It can’t be done from an aeroplane (even a spy plane can only ascend to about 80,000 feet), nor from a rocket (any hopeful parachutist opening the hatch to jump out would be torn to pieces). Ballooning directly up is the only realistic option, but an option still fraught with difficulties. A helium balloon launched into the stratosphere needs continually to enlarge because of the changes in atmospheric pressure, and so must be made of a special expandable material that is less than a 1,000th of an inch thin; clingfilm thin. It also needs to be huge, about the size of an office block.

2) “Playing Beethoven in Kinshasa” [Der Spiegel] – this is actually a two part series (part one | part two) on a story about central Africa’s only orchestra. A new German documentary film, “Kinshasa Symphony,” tells the story of the orchestra’s most recent major performance and how it came to be. I want to see this film. A trailer below:

3) “Explore the World with Street View, Now on All Seven Continents” [Official Google Blog] – Google is making its presence felt, once again. This time, they sent an expedition to Antarctica and came back with views like this. The question: how much do penguins care about privacy?

Readings: Compressed Sensing, Future of Money, Google’s Search Algorithm

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I finished reading, from cover to cover, the March 2010 edition of Wired magazine last week. Today’s links of the day are all from Wired.

(1) “Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets into High-Res Samples” [Wired] – a fascinating look into the Compressed Sensing algorithm. This article explores how the algorithm, discovered accidentally by Emmanuel Candès, has applications in medical imaging, satellite imaging, and photography. On the origins of the algorithm:

Candès, with the assistance of postdoc Justin Romberg, came up with what he considered to be a sketchy and incomplete theory for what he saw on his computer. He then presented it on a blackboard to a colleague at UCLA named Terry Tao. Candès came away from the conversation thinking that Tao was skeptical — the improvement in image clarity was close to impossible, after all. But the next evening, Tao sent a set of notes to Candès about the blackboard session. It was the basis of their first paper together. And over the next two years, they would write several more.

If you’ve never heard of Terence Tao, you should find out more about him. He’s one of the most brilliant mathematicians alive today (when he was 24, Tao was promoted to full professor at UCLA, the youngest person to achieve full professorship at UCLA; Tao also won the Fields Medal in 2006, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics). Tao maintains a very popular blog (among mathematics and those who really enjoy math, as the majority of the topics are quite esoteric for the general audience) here.

So how does compressed sensing work?

Compressed sensing works something like this: You’ve got a picture — of a kidney, of the president, doesn’t matter. The picture is made of 1 million pixels. In traditional imaging, that’s a million measurements you have to make. In compressed sensing, you measure only a small fraction — say, 100,000 pixels randomly selected from various parts of the image. From that starting point there is a gigantic, effectively infinite number of ways the remaining 900,000 pixels could be filled in.

So is this a revolutionary technique? The implication, of course, is that you can create something out of nothing. I remain unconvinced whether this technology will be used in digital photography in the future, but I do anticipate that for gathering large data sets, such as in satellite imagery, this technique will become very popular…

(2) “The Future of Money” [Wired] – an excellent, comprehensive piece explaining how the role of paying for things online has evolved since the days of PayPal. This is a must-read if you’re unfamiliar with the history of PayPal, don’t know how credit card transactions are made, and if you haven’t heard of recent developments of TwitPay and/or Square.

(3) “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web” [Wired] – most likely, you use Google every single day. This article explores the fascinating story behind the Google search algorithm (beginning with PageRank to the rollout of real-time search in December 2009), its adapation and evolution over the years. This article is a must-read.

Links of the Day (01/22/10)

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Here are some of the interesting articles and blog posts I’ve read recently:

(1) “Hope” [Sergey Brin’s Blog] – Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, traveled to Haiti after the catastrophic earthquake struck the tiny island nation on January 12. In his blog post, he talks about what he has seen and concludes with this powerful message:

While each of us is a citizen of a particular country, we are all citizens of the world. The responsibility falls on all of us to lend a hand when a tragedy of this magnitude befalls some of us.

(2) “A Culture in Jeopardy, Too” [New York Times]- a beautiful, moving photo essay by Maggie Stebber for the New York Times Lens blog. On the resilience of the Haitian people:

Haitians are not waiting for handouts. They are rebuilding their homes and getting on with their lives, getting back to business in the markets and on the roads. They cannot afford to wait for foreigners who can’t get organized quickly enough.

(3) “Architect, or Whatever” [New York Times] – interesting to read what some people are doing in these hard economic times.

Links of the Day (01/12/10)

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Two must-read posts from today, one slightly humorous and the other much less so.

(1) “Conan O’Brien Says He Won’t Host ‘Tonight Show’ After Leno” [New York Times] – Conan came out with a marvelous statement saying that hosting The Tonight Show after midnight will “will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting.” The statement is so bold and refreshing that perhaps he should have started the statement with “Inhabitants of the Universe” rather than the more mundane “People of Earth.”

(2) “A New Approach to China” [Official Google Blog] – in this groundbreaking post, Google outlines a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their infrastructure coming from China. The entire post is a must-read, and the conclusion cannot be missed:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Robert Scoble called it the “bravest corporate move I’ve ever seen a tech company make.” I think it’s a very strong statement, but we shall see how Google actually responds in the coming weeks.

Update: Another worthy reaction to the Google news comes via Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?. Jeff Jarvis writes:

I have been consistent in my criticism of Google’s actions in China. And so now I have not choice but to become even more of a fanboy. I applaud Google for finally standing up to the Chinese dictatorship and for free speech.

Will the Chinese people revolt at losing Google? We can only hope. Will other companies now have to hesitate before doing the dictators’ bidding? We can only hope. Will Google be punished by Wall Street? It probably will. But as I’ve argued, we should hope that Google’s pledge, Don’t be evil, will one day be chiseled over the doors of Wall Street.