I use PhotoShop CS and been wondering if the High Dynamic Range tools in CS2 would make it worth thinking about an upgrade. This astonishing picture of Tokyo by night has made me think it might be time to think about it. Basically HDR enables one to create a composite image from a number of photographs made with different exposures, thereby increasing the dynamic range of the image. Useful introduction here. There’s also a HDR pool on Flickr.
Thanks to James Cridland for the link.
Interesting Guardian piece ny Nick Carr…
Last week, after years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward Googlebombing, Google decided to put an end to the popular sport. It incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.
Googlebombing was amusing at first, but it got old fast. So I’m perfectly happy that Google is giving it the heave-ho. It’s like scrubbing graffiti off the side of a subway car.
But there’s a deeper story here, and it lies in Google’s explanation for why it finally decided to defuse Googlebombs. You might assume the company was acting out of a desire to present better results, or to counter internet vandalism, or simply to serve the public interest. But you’d be wrong.
What drove Google to act was its fear that Googlebombing was tarnishing its painstakingly controlled image.
One of the company’s top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: “Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”
Good piece. Comes to the right conclusion too.
Google’s software has become much more complicated over the years.
Its search engine operates according to an array of sophisticated and secret algorithms crafted by the company’s brilliant coders.
It’s a machine that’s been tweaked to do precisely what Google instructs it to do, even if that might mean filtering results to protect the company’s reputation.
Google may have good in its heart. It may, for the time being anyway, be fighting on our behalf to bring order to a chaotic internet. But let’s not forget that Google’s machine is not our machine. It’s Google’s, for better or worse.
How’s this for a first blog post?
A woman laughs at a baby that has just died in her arms. Behind her a soldier is slumped on the floor, his brain splattered across the bottom of the wall. Close by, the woman’s abusive lover is shuffling on his knees, his arms stretched out in front of him reaching desperately for the touch of her body. He is blind. His eyes were sucked out by the soldier, who swallowed them and then raped this rapist using first a gun and then a part of his own body, and then stuck the gun in his gob and pulled the trigger. Later the woman buries the baby in a hole in the floor, and then leaves the room to hunt for food. While she is out her blind lover eats the dead child and shortly after that he, too, dies. The woman returns. She is humming and singing. She sits down, swinging her legs, gazing out at the emptiness.
This is how Blasted, written by the late Sarah Kane, ends. The play is a hopeless reflection on war; its achievement is to show the truly miserable detail of conflict and how acts of great violence are within us all. The individual quest for survival will in the end always defeat our dreamy desire to be humane…
Lara Pawson, whose blog opens with this post, is a talented journalist and an alumnus of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme which I run. She’s a specialist on Africa (especially Angola) and has seen some horrible things in her time. And she’s good at telling it as it is. I’ve been encouraging her to start blogging because I thought she’d be good at it. Looks like I was right.
Trinity College, this morning.
Brookside, Cambridge, last Friday evening. Photographed while waiting for the Uni4 bus (which was stuck in traffic). That’s one good thing about using public transport — it leaves one plenty of time for photography!
Here’s an interesting development. If you have a Gmail account and receive (or send yourself) a Word or RTF document as an attachment, Gmail will now offer you the option of opening it as a “Google document” — which immediately makes it shareable (enabling other people to work on it collaboratively). And it’s seamless. Very neat — and immediately useful for people like me.
Well, just check here for enlightenment!
Thanks to Martin Weller for starting my day with a laugh.
An open letter from Michael Moore…
Dear Mr. President,
Thanks for your address to the nation. It’s good to know you still want to talk to us after how we behaved in November.
Listen, can I be frank? Sending in 20,000 more troops just ain’t gonna do the job. That will only bring the troop level back up to what it was last year. And we were losing the war last year! We’ve already had over a million troops serve some time in Iraq since 2003. Another few thousand is simply not enough to find those weapons of mass destruction! Er, I mean… bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice! Um, scratch that. Try this — BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST! YES!!!
You’ve got to show some courage, dude! You’ve got to win this one! C’mon, you got Saddam! You hung ‘im high! I loved watching the video of that — just like the old wild west! The bad guy wore black! The hangmen were as crazy as the hangee! Lynch mobs rule!!!
Look, I have to admit I feel very sorry for the predicament you’re in. As Ricky Bobby said, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” And you being humiliated in front of the whole world does NONE of us Americans any good.
Sir, listen to me. You have to send in MILLIONS of troops to Iraq, not thousands! The only way to lick this thing now is to flood Iraq with millions of us! I know that you’re out of combat-ready soldiers — so you have to look elsewhere! The only way you are going to beat a nation of 27 million — Iraq — is to send in at least 28 million! Here’s how it would work:
The first 27 million Americans go in and kill one Iraqi each. That will quickly take care of any insurgency. The other one million of us will stay and rebuild the country. Simple.
Now, I know you’re saying, where will I find 28 million Americans to go to Iraq? Here are some suggestions:
1. More than 62,000,000 Americans voted for you in the last election (the one that took place a year and half into a war we already knew we were losing). I am confident that at least a third of them would want to put their body where their vote was and sign up to volunteer. I know many of these people and, while we may disagree politically, I know that they don’t believe someone else should have to go and fight their fight for them — while they hide here in America.
2. Start a “Kill an Iraqi” Meet-Up group in cities across the country. I know this idea is so early-21st century, but I once went to a Lou Dobbs Meet-Up and, I swear, some of the best ideas happen after the third mojito. I’m sure you’ll get another five million or so enlistees from this effort.
3. Send over all members of the mainstream media. After all, they were your collaborators in bringing us this war — and many of them are already trained from having been “embedded!” If that doesn’t bring the total to 28 million, then draft all viewers of the FOX News channel…
Here’s a clever Web 2.0 application — a site that reads blogs looking for certain kinds of phrases denoting emotions…
At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.
Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.
If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.
If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.
Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post’s author. Given the author’s username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user’s profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog’s owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.
This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for spotting it.
