Petros Venetis, Hector Gonzalez, Christian S. Jensen, and Alon Halevy:

Studies find that at least 20% of web queries have local intent; and the fraction of queries with local intent that originate from mobile properties may be twice as high. The emergence of standardized support for location providers in web browsers, as well as of providers of accurate locations, enables so-called hyper-local web querying where the location of a user is accurate at a much finer granularity than with IP-based positioning.

This paper addresses the problem of determining the importance of points of interest, or places, in local-search results. In doing so, the paper proposes techniques that exploit logged directions queries. A query that asks for directions from a location a to a location b is taken to suggest that a user is interested in traveling to b and thus is a vote that location b is interesting. Such user-generated directions queries are particularly interesting because they are numerous and contain precise locations.

Specifically, the paper proposes a framework that takes a user location and a collection of near-by places as arguments, producing a ranking of the places. The framework enables a range of aspects of directions queries to be exploited for the ranking of places, including the frequency with which places have been referred to in directions queries. Next, the paper proposes an algorithm and accompanying data structures capable of ranking places in response to hyper-local web queries. Finally, an empirical study with very large directions query logs offers insight into the potential of directions queries for the ranking of places and suggests that the proposed algorithm is suitable for use in real web search engines.

Sandy Pentland:

Phones can know.

Eric Schmidt:

We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.

D'Angelo Barksdale:

It ain't about right. It's about money.

Straw Man:

Don't worry about the consequences ... there's no consequences. If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money.

Hyper-Local, Directions-Based Ranking of Places

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality.

Jay Keasling:

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Charles C. Mann:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

Anne Frank:

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

Experience Human Flight

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

My National Security Letter Gag Order

Nicholas Dames, in n+1:

If the ethics or the histories of humanities education are not quite helpful in regaining some collective nerve, perhaps a less abstract genre would work better -- something, that is, that would tell us in intimate terms why one studies in the humanities, what it feels like to do so, and how doing so changes the ways one feels. If that is what is wanted, Terry Castle's The Professor could scarcely be bettered. Not quite a biography, it is a witty phenomenology of humanistic life; it opens up what such a life feels like from the inside. One of its happy paradoxes is that its essays, each seemingly written as a jeu d'esprit, elegantly perform the public service of articulating the claims of the humanities.

Take, for instance, the question of why one devotes a life to such a pursuit. The budding graduate student has no Paper Chase, no ER, no thrilling fantasy of the intellectual rigors and erotic enticements of professional initiation that would mitigate the shame involved in gaining entry (or re-entry) to middle-classness. Even the few official bureaucratic hoops of a doctoral student -- the oral exams, the reading lists -- are anticlimactic, presented with a dully comforting reassurance that they're not really all that frightening. And of course the stories of unpaid rent, half-employment, and the neo-Victorian social struggles of men and women past their first youth have no glamour about them. What is left is a culture of defensive shame: shame about so many things, but mostly about the tremendous gap between exalted goals and humble everyday routines.

Why Bother?

Terje Sorgjerd:

This was filmed between 4th and 11th April 2011. I had the pleasure of visiting El Teide.

Spain's highest mountain @(3715m) is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world's best observatories.

The Mountain

Newsweek profiles Francis Fukuyama.

As the communist era vanished, he declared history's end. With the Middle East in revolt and China rising, Francis Fukuyama is back. What is he thinking?

The Origins of Political Order

Otomata is a generative sequencer. It employs a cellular automaton type logic I've devised to produce sound events.

Each alive cell has 4 states: Up, right, down, left. at each cycle, the cells move themselves in the direction of their internal states. If any cell encounters a wall, it triggers a pitched sound whose frequency is determined by the xy position of collision, and the cell reverses its direction. If a cell encounters another cell on its way, it turns itself clockwise.

This set of rules produces chaotic results in some settings, therefore you can end up with never repeating, gradually evolving sequences. Go add some cells, change their orientation by clicking on them, and press play, experiment, have fun.

Otomata

A drug court program that we believe is run differently from every other drug court in the country, doing some things that are contrary to the very philosophy of drug court. The result? People with offenses that would get minimal or no sentences elsewhere sometimes end up in the system five to ten years.

Very Tough Love | This American Life

I shot a photo roughly every two miles between take-off in San Francisco and landing in Paris CDG to make this airplane time lapse.

SF to Paris in Two Minutes on Vimeo

I spent a half year writing software art to generate special effects for Tron Legacy.

jtnimoy - Tron Legacy (2010)