The way we eat in the developed world is causing needless death — and shortening the lives of the next generation of kids. Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
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Google acquired Aardvark, a start-up that helps you find answers to your questions in an interesting way.
“Aardvark is a new kind of tool that lets you tap into the knowledge and experience of friends and friends-of-friends. Send Aardvark a question (from the web, IM, email, Twitter, or iPhone) and you’ll get a quick, helpful response from someone with the right knowledge and experience to help,” explains the FAQ page.
Instead of sending a question to all your Twitter followers or Facebook friends, you could use Aardvark and send the question to those that have the expertise to answer it. When you sign up for Aardvark, you need to enter your main interests. Aardvark automatically tags questions, tries to find the users that could answer the questions and sends them the questions.
Aardvark uses a lot of signals to determine the people that receive your question: related topics in profiles, how you’re connected to people, who you trust, your history of training Aardvark, people who share your favorites (for taste-related questions), people in the right location (for location-related questions). It’s quite clever and it’s very similar to Google’s ranking algorithms. Instead of matching a query to the best search results, Aardvark matches a question to the best people that can answer it.
“On average, we have to contact eight people to get two who are willing and online. But we look at thousands in order to build the list of the top prospects,” explains Nicholas Chim, a senior engineer at Aardvark.
This is the future of social search and Google is already in the process of integrating social search with standard search results. For now, Google indexes existing user-generated content from your social connections, but it’s not difficult to anticipate that Google Social Search will generate new content.
“When you need an answer to a very specific question, sometimes the information just isn’t online in one simple place. For example, let’s say you want to know if there’s snow on Skyline Boulevard on a given day or the best time of year to plant beans in the Bay Area. You might find weather reports and planting guides on many different sites, but for these kinds of questions, a person with the right expertise can be a lot more useful than a webpage,” mentions Google’s blog.
Aardvark’s acquisition is special for many reasons: Aardvark’s chief executive is a former Google employee, the service is still available even if it was acquired by Google and it’s the first acquisition directly added to Google Labs.
“Aardvark is meant for tips, advice, opinions, and recommendations that pull knowledge from a trusted network.” Here’s an example of conversation:
A Google Labs user posted a way to find if it’s a good idea to ask a question using Aardvark:
“Ask subjective questions that are interesting for someone to answer and rich in context. My rule of thumb is to ask anything that could be better answered if I gave a second sentence of context. If no second sentence would really help get me a better answer (like “who was the 40th president?”) then it’s probably a better question for Google.”
It will be interesting to see how Aardvark integrates with Google Buzz, Google Talk and Google Search.
This was sort of shocking, at least to me:
I was talking to a religious leader, someone who runs a congregation. She made it clear to me that on many days, it’s just a job. A job like any other, you show up, you go through the motions, you get paid.
I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.
But isn’t your work spiritual?
I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art form, a calling, and an important (no, an essential) thing worth doing.
In fact, I don’t think there’s a relationship between what you do and how important you think the work is. I think there’s a relationship between who you are and how important you think the work is.
Life’s too short to phone it in.
Grafico is an open source JavaScript charting library built with Raphaël & Prototype.js.
It is possible to create multiple types of charts like line, area, bar & stacked charts, sparklines and more.
Each chart type has numerous API options to customize it’s look & behavior.
Charts created with Grafico can, optionally, be interactive which means they can provide data when hovered, clicked, etc.
The library is well-documented & supported with examples.
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Mattel just unveiled Barbie’s 125th and 126th careers – and by popular demand, Winter 2010 will bring us (along with News Anchor Barbie, much less interesting) Computer Engineer Barbie!
The Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering worked with Mattel on designing her wardrobe and accessories. It’s a little over-the-top (binary and sparkly pants?) but hey, at least she’s not wearing a mini skirt. The press release gushes about how they’re hoping to inspire a new generation and “show girls that women can turn their ideas into realities that have a direct and positive impact on people’s everyday lives in this exciting and rewarding career.”
This of course is just the latest in a long line of Barbie’s career changes over the years, and it isn’t the first time she’s been a little geeky. So I guess the girls who were wearing out Paleontologist Barbie and Starfleet Officer Barbie now have someone new to play with!
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