Google and Commitment
October 31, 2019
Google may have an uphill battle. Instead of a big rock, the GOOG must move trust from Death Valley to the top of Huascarán in Peru. Google’s TensorFlow comes with a three year commitment. However, Google has a reputation for abandoning projects. Google Groups, Web Accelerator, etc. etc.
New Scientist has some questions about Google too. Navigate to “Will Google Bail If Its Quantum Computer Doesn’t Turn a Quick Profit?”
Oh, and don’t miss the write up’s subtitle:
Google is famous for ditching projects it loses interest in. The road to workable quantum computers will be long, but we must stick with it…
The idea is that Google is spending money on a high school science project. Granted the project has promise, but the reality of the Google is that its costs are becoming more and more difficult to control.
The crazy PR battle with IBM over quantum supremacy makes Google look — how shall I put it? — like a high school math whiz without a date to the homecoming dance. But staying home and playing an online game is way better, right?
Trust? Who needs that. Just climb the mountain or zap it with a nifty digital weapon.
Stephen E Arnold, October 31, 2019
Google: The World of Borges Is Real
October 27, 2019
“Google CEO: The Company Is Genuinely Struggling with Transparency, Employee Trust” is paradoxical. Google has become similar to one of the imaginary confections of Jorge Luis Borges’ Shadows and fantasy are difficult to distinguish, even more problematic to understand.
The write up channels Bloomberg:
In early October, Google employees reportedly discovered a previously unknown team within the company that is building a surveillance tool to “monitor workers’ attempts to organize protests and discuss labor rights.
How can a company which asserts “Google understands your search requests better after altering its algorithm.”
DarkCyber wonders if Google’s senior management relies on the company’s “machine learning fairness” methods.
As Borges noted:
It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.
Poor Google.
Stephen E Arnold, October 27, 2019
Google NLP Search: Fortune Loves It. Simple Queries Reveal Shortcomings
October 25, 2019
I read “Google Says Its Latest Tech Tweak Provides Better Search Results. Here’s How.” DarkCyber enjoys Fortune Magazine’s how to explanations. They are just. So. Wonderful.
We learned:
Google’s goal is to make it easier for users, who often don’t know how to enter queries for the information they want. Since its search engine debuted in 1997, Google has focused on getting its technology to better understand natural language to produce relevant results even in cases where users enter a misspelled word or a query that is off target. With the latest change, Google will also now consider the sequential order in which words are placed in a search, instead of returning results based on a “mixed bag” of keywords.
Yes, but what about tuning search to advertising? What about ignoring bound phrases? What about Boolean logic? What about words like “terminal” which have different, often difficult to disambiguate meanings?
Fortune jumps over these questions.
Try this query on the “new” Google?
What companies compete with Subsentio?
What about this one?
Amazon law enforcement products
Not what I had in mind. I was thinking about QLDB and digital currency deanonymization.
Sorry, Google. Not yet. Personalization does not work either, by the way. (You know. Examine the search history, etc. etc.)
Fortune, check out where Google’s ad revenue comes from. Just a small clue to put Google search in its context.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2019
Google and Privacy: Our Way, Please
October 25, 2019
Google has made its privacy stance known. The Register reports, “Google Takes Sole Stand on Privacy, Rejects New Rules for Fear of ‘Authoritarian’ Review.” The company’s solitary “no” vote halted a proposed charter revision at the W3C’s Privacy Interest Group (PING). The proposed revision would have slightly changed the charter to allow for recommendations to be made to groups that set processes, consult reviews, and approve the progression of standards, as well as require considering existing standards alongside new ones, according to PING member and author of the original charter, Nick Doty. The vote had to have been unanimous to pass, and Google says it put its foot down to avoid “unnecessary chaos.” Writer Thomas Claburn reveals:
“As The Register has heard, the issue for Google is that more individuals are participating in PING and there’s been some recent pushback against work in which Google has been involved. In other words, a formerly cordial group has become adversarial. The required context here is that over the past few years, a broad consensus has been building around the need to improve online privacy. Back in 2014, not long after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of online surveillance transformed the privacy debate, the Internet Engineering Task Force published an RFC declaring that pervasive monitoring is an attack on privacy. That concern has become more widespread and has led to legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (opposed by Google) and efforts by companies like Apple, Brave, and Mozilla to improve privacy by blocking ad tracking. ‘The strategic problem for Google, with Apple, Brave, Mozilla, Samsung all blocking tracking, is how to preserve their business advantages and share price while appearing to be “pro privacy,”’ said Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, in a message to The Register.”
In a move some called “privacy gas lighting,” Google proposed a “privacy sandbox,” their plan to change the very way cookies work to preserve privacy without sacrificing advertisers’ tracking ability. Why would they go there before PING got the chance to review other specifications? There are already browser-based privacy protections that need standardization, Eich emphasizes, and the W3C is obliged to do so. Google did not respond the Register’s request for comment.
Cynthia Murrell, October 25, 2019
The Google: We Are Supreme Because We Say So
October 23, 2019
The quantum supremacy PR stunt is aloft. Navigate to “What Our Quantum Computing Milestone Means.” The write up does not mention self-serving public relations. Nope. Here’s an example:
While we’re excited for what’s ahead, we are also very humbled by the journey it took to get here. And we’re mindful of the wisdom left to us by the great Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
Aw, shucks. Google is just plain folk.
And the write up has a reminder to IBM, an outfit somewhat troubled by the supremacy thing:
As we scale up the computational possibilities, we unlock new computations. To demonstrate supremacy, our quantum machine successfully performed a test computation in just 200 seconds that would have taken the best known algorithms in the most powerful supercomputers thousands of years to accomplish. We are able to achieve these enormous speeds only because of the quality of control we have over the qubits. Quantum computers are prone to errors, yet our experiment showed the ability to perform a computation with few enough errors at a large enough scale to outperform a classical computer.
And Google sees an upside too:
Quantum computing will be a great complement to the work we do (and will continue to do) on classical computers. In many ways quantum brings computing full circle, giving us another way to speak the language of the universe and understand the world and humanity not just in 1s and 0s but in all of its states: beautiful, complex, and with limitless possibility.
Yep, our work. Let’s see. That includes:
- Online advertising
- Me too mobile phones
- Hiring Microsoft executives
- Implementing interesting management methods related to personnel- executive interaction
- Employees sleeping in their vehicles.
Great stuff. Quantum PR.
Stephen E Arnold, October 23, 2019
Quantum Baloney Spat: IBM Dismisses the GOOG over Supremacy
October 23, 2019
I am not holding my breath for quantum computers which do something semi-useful. Science club experiments are interesting but not something welcomed in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
Not long ago a Googler announced that the GOOG was king and queen of the quantum hill. “IBM Upends Google’s Quantum Supremacy Claim” suggests that Google’s statement and subsequent removal of the document containing the claim was baloney. Hence, the quantum baloney spat.
The capitalist’s tool states:
Dario Gil, head of IBM quantum research, described the claim of quantum supremacy as indefensible and misleading. In a written statement, he said, “Quantum computers are not ‘supreme’ against classical computers because of a laboratory experiment designed to essentially implement one very specific quantum sampling procedure with no practical applications.”
Why believe IBM, the master of the Watson hot air balloon?
The answer:
Yesterday, IBM published a paper that backed up their claim. The paper points out that Google made an error in estimating that a classical computer would require 10,000 years to solve the problem.
There you go. Two self published papers. Real news.
Forbes included a useful point:
According to IBM’s blog, “an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.” The blog post went on to say that 2.5 days is a worst-case estimate. Additional research could reduce the time even further. Google’s 10,000-year estimate was overstated because of an erroneous assumption. They believed that RAM requirements for running a quantum simulation of the problem in a classical computer would be prohibitively high. For that reason, Google used the time to offset the lack of space, hence their estimate of 10,000 years.
Cheese with that baloney?
Stephen E Arnold, October 23, 2019
Tracking Trends in News Homepage Links with Google BigQuery
October 17, 2019
Some readers may be familiar with the term “culturomics,” a particular application of n-gram-based linguistic analysis to text. The practice arose after a 2010 project that applied such analysis to five million historical books across seven languages. The technique creates n-gram word frequency histograms from the source text. Now the technique has been applied to links found on news organizations’ home pages using Google’s BigQuery platform. Forbes reports, “Using the Cloud to Explore the Linguistic Patterns of Half a Trillion Words of News Homepage Hyperlinks.” Writer Kalev Leetaru explains:
“News media represents a real-time reflection of localized events, narratives, beliefs and emotions across the world, offering an unprecedented look into the lens through which we see the world around us. The open data GDELT Project has monitored the homepages of more than 50,000 news outlets worldwide every hour since March 2018 through its Global Frontpage Graph (GFG), cataloging their links in an effort to understand global journalistic editorial decision-making. In contrast to traditional print and broadcast mediums, online outlets have theoretically unlimited space, allowing them to publish a story without displacing another. Their homepages, however, remain precious fixed real estate, carefully curated by editors that must decide which stories are the most important at any moment. Analyzing these decisions can help researchers better understand which stories each news outlet believed to be the most important to its readership at any given moment in time and how those decisions changed hour by hour.”
The project has now collected more than 134 billion such links. The article describes how researchers have used BigQuery to analyze this dataset with a single SQL query, so navigate there for the technical details. Interestingly, one thing they are looking at is trends across the 110 languages represented by the samples. Leetaru emphasizes this endeavor demonstrates how much faster these computations can be achieved compared to the 2010 project. He concludes:
“Even large-scale analyses are moving so close to real-time that we are fast approaching the ability of almost any analysis to transition from ‘what if’ and ‘I wonder’ to final analysis in just minutes with a single query.”
Will faster analysis lead to wiser decisions? We shall see.
Cynthia Murrell, October 17, 2019
YouTube: Tidying Up Script Kiddie Crumbs
October 15, 2019
An interesting series of comments flowed on Reddit (Monday, October 14, 2019). You may be ablt to access the original post and the comments at this link. No guarantees, however. The subject: Alleged Google censorship. The topic: Methods for penetrating other people’s computers.
Is Google actively removing videos which violate the Jello-like terms of service?
DarkCyber hopes so.
YouTube is TV for hundreds of millions around the world.
There is some interesting material available on YouTube.
The post includes links. DarkCyber suggests you do some clicking and forming your own conclusion. Google often lacks consistency, so it is difficult to know where the Googley ball is bouncing.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2019.
What to Be Found Via Google?
October 13, 2019
Do you want your business and/or Web site to be at the top of Google’s search results? It is a hard race to the top, but it can be won and Business 2 Community explains how in, “How To Use Google My Business Posts.” Google My Business (GMB) posts are part of the Google My Business profile, one of the many services that Google offers users to optimize their business’s profile. According to the article, Google My Business (GMB) posts are mini-ads for your business or the goods/services you offer.
The GMB posts allow users to publish products, services, events and other information directly to Google’s search and maps. Your content is then placed in front of potential customers. The biggest clincher is that the GMB posts are placed in Google’s many services in real time. That is a big deal! Being able to view and interact with content in real time is part of the augmented reality.
“Google offers four different types of posts to help you promote your business:
• Events, like a wine night or networking event
• Offers, such as sales or discounts
• Product updates, like new merchandise
• Announcements, such as “We’re open late” or “Closed due to inclement weather!”
There are two ways to create a GMB post, on a desktop or mobile device. Videos and photos can also be added to posts. All posts appear in a user’s GMB profile and are live on Google search for seven days, unless an event is more than seven days in the future.
GMB is like Facebook or LinkedIn, except for businesses. How long will it take before it becomes spam filled? Also Google Ads works too, but that requires some monetary investment.
Whitney Grace, October 13, 2019
Google: Practical, Pragmatic, and Logical
October 3, 2019
I am not sure if this news item about the GOOG is accurate. Nevertheless, it does provide a Googley solution to a thorny problem; namely, where can one get images with which to train a facial recognition system.
One could scrape Ancestry.com. One could scrape Yandex Images. One could retain the enterprising Yahoo engineer who hacked accounts for interesting images.
Or
One could snap pix of homeless people. Atlanta. Hmmm. Atlanta?
The allegedly accurate factoids appear in “Google Contractors Reportedly Targeted Homeless People for Pixel 4 Facial Recognition.” I noted:
a Google contractor may be using some questionable methods to get those facial scans, including targeting groups of homeless people and tricking college students who didn’t know they were being recorded. According to several sources who allegedly worked on the project, a contracting agency named Randstad sent teams to Atlanta explicitly to target homeless people and those with dark skin, often without saying they were working for Google, and without letting on that they were actually recording people’s faces.
Legal? Illegal? I don’t care.
The idea and the execution is troubling.
If true, classy. Like the yacht death involving drugs and an alleged person for hire. Somehow Googley.
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2019
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