Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: search

  • Science News

    News about scientific topics annoys me. The latest, on the melting of the Martian polar ice caps hinting at a warmer than usual Sun causing global warming makes me wonder if Kate reads about science as voratiously as I do? I mean, as I started to read this, I recalled that the number and size…

  • Let There Be Life!

    Discovery Channel :: News – Space :: Did Viking Lander Kill Alien Life? Last month, scientists excitedly reported that new photographs of Mars showed geologic changes that suggest water occasionally flows there — the most tantalizing sign that Mars is hospitable to life. In the ’70s, the Viking mission found no signs of life. But…

  • No More Public Anonymous Photos

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    Early in the history of the WWW, people thought a document which did not have an inbound link, a link from some external location to the file, was private. Search engines looked for content on web sites in locations for which there was not a link already pointing. To truly respect the privacy of those…

  • Fake + Kidnapping = Bad Idea

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    Woman fakes kidnapping to avoid work – Yahoo! News: A 21-year-old German woman who did not feel like going to work at a fast food restaurant sent her parents a text message saying she had been kidnapped. Police in the Bavarian town of Straubing said Wednesday they had launched a massive search throughout the region…

  • Unplugged for the Holidays

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    How to spend a long holiday weekend – Lifehacker: Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, most likely you’ve got the day off this coming Monday. I hope you’ll spend it doing as little as possible. Forget the email, the IM, the RSS feeds, the Google searches, what Wikipedia has to say about the origins of…

  • Turn the Tables

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    CrossRoads Newsletter and Career Development Center: With corporate recruiters and executive search firms now using blogs as a prescreening tool for candidates, Whitcomb advises people to create online journals to demonstrate their skills, share their expertise, and lend potential employers insight into their personality. “You can write about projects you are working on, industry events,…

  • What About Mixed People?

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    These companies use mitochondrial DNA to trace one’s genetic lineage. So, they take a sample from my mitochondria (which I got from my mom) and compare it to samples that have been taken from mitochondria samples found in their database to match it. Well, my mom’s mom has lots of English and Scottish ancestry. So…

  • Multiple Guess

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    Security Watch: The myth of online anonymity – CNET reviews: In his talk, Kazwetz mentioned several studies on gender use of keywords which, when weighted–with specific numerical values for male and different numerical values for female–can determine the gender of the author. Sounds too simple to be true, but research (including Gender, Genre, and Writing…

  • Look for a Patent Wiki in 2007

    Patent review goes Wiki – August 21, 2006: That’s the basic concept behind a pilot program sponsored by IBM and other companies [including HP and Microsoft], which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appears poised to green-light. The project would apply an advisory version of the wiki approach to the patent-approval process. The issue is…