Annoyed that I apparently couldn’t attend the Scientific Applications with Google Earth Conference without registering with the “Google Checkout” financial system, I emailed to ask if there were any other payment methods available. Well, I waited for a couple of weeks for their “Contact Us” link to go live, then once I had an email address to email to, I emailed it. No response came, then a form request that I complete the sign-up by joining Google Checkout. I was worried I was going to have to show up thrusting a greasy $20 bill at whoever looked official, but I’ve now received assurance that if I just bring a check with me everything will be fine.

So that’s all good then. Not that the informational aspects of our public and private lives has ceased to be increasingly mediated and recorded by a single for-profit stockholder-beholden corporate entity. But at least you can pay for their scientific conferences by check.

Here’s a fun bit of Google Earth-utilizing research:

Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer, Begall et al, PNAS

“We demonstrate by means of simple, noninvasive methods (analysis of satellite images, field observations, and measuring “deer beds” in snow) that domestic cattle (n = 8,510 in 308 pastures) across the globe, and grazing and resting red and roe deer (n = 2,974 at 241 localities), align their body axes in roughly a north–south direction.”

Apparently this work follows on from previous research the team has done on the sensing of magnetic fields by naked mole rats. In this case, they used Google Earth to scroll around looking for cows, then once they had documented 8510 of them, decided they tend to lie down facing north-south. And likewise for deer.

Here’s some more from NPR.

“Holland says that other researchers should confirm the finding. One way of doing that would be to “start going out and putting magnets on the heads of cows and horses and deer, to see how that affects them,” he says. “That’s one of the more traditional ways of testing if they have a magnetic sense.”

If they really do have an internal compass, he says, the magnet would mess it up.”

By the time you read this, Google will probably have released the first public beta of their new web browser. (You can read about it in this comic. Nobody ever said Google wasn’t smart, and commissioning a comic book from Scott McCloud is a brilliant way of showing off their brilliance.) Looks like it will eventually be a great browser, a real competitor for Firefox. Kevin Newcomb makes the point that it will be the first browser built primarily for running web-based-applications (email, document editing, photo editing…) rather than just being a webpage displayer that can be cajoled into front-ending such applications. He makes the further point that by building such a browser, Google is setting itself up as author of the de facto standard for future web applications. And we are all told again and again that web applications are the future of personal computing.

Here’s another of Kevin’s points:

“As with the Google Toolbar before it, Chrome will also present an opportunity for Google to collect more user behavioral data. On the plus side, that could help Google develop better Web analytics applications. More cynically, Google can also take this mountain of user data and use it to better monetize its ad platforms.”

To which I would add that anybody vacuuming up that much information about people is just a bad thing for privacy.

This seems like a good time for a how-to turn off Google’s Search History “feature”. That’s the one that keeps track of everything you search for through Google and everywhere you go from Google. It lets them show a reminder in your search results of how many times you’ve been to a given page and when you last went there. It also lets them build a lasting profile of your online behaviour. It only happens if you have a Google account and have signed in to it recently. Personally, I use my account for Google Calendar, but lots of people have one for Gmail or Picasa or any of their many other services. I think they give you the option of turning Search History on or off when you first sign up for an account, but I don’t remember ever seeing that option, or at least not fully explained.

To turn off and wipe Google Search History:

• Go to the google.com search screen.
• If you aren’t signed in already, Sign In at the top right corner of the screen.
• Go to www.google.com/history

. Hey, lookit all that stuff.

• On the list on the left, click Remove Items.
• On the right, click Clear entire Web History

That should have both cleared out Google’s history of your browsing, and “paused” the saving of future browsing. You can, of course, turn it all back on again if you want.

Here’s a video of Danny O’Brien convincing you not to put your data in cloud computing services, like 3rd party email, web document editors, photo hosting sites, social networking sites, and the like. He argues a) why would you give your own data, including your most personal data, to an anonymous corporate mediator to store in any case and b) we can probably get the same always-on effortless sharing and still store our data on our own boxes through the magic of technology. The video is terrible. But the idea seems awfully good.

And here’s a guy who makes heavy use of Google’s online services, such as Picasa and Google Docs and Gmail, who has been suddenly, silently and inexplicably shut out of the Google cloud.

I’ve decided to start spelling Google with a capital G again, to remind myself that Google and Google services are not randomly beneficent forces of nature. Google is a company, and it lives a corporate life. Is that (or Yahoo, or Facebook or whomever) the cloud where you want to keep all your stuff?

I’ve made a Google Earth-compatible .kmz file with all the AVIRIS flightline locations from 2000 to 2006, as listed on the AVIRIS website. Google Earth is a relatively painless and speedy way to get a sense of the landscape sensed in each imagery dataset.

More information and the file itself is available on this page.

(AVIRIS is NASA’s plane-mounted hyperspectral sensor. It is entirely a coincidence that I’m posting this on NASA’s 50th birthday but hey, happy birthday NASA.)

I’m trying to find some additional study sites for my research. I’ve recently realized how stupid I’ve been by not using Google Earth as my main exploratory site-search tool. Way way waaay faster than trying to download overview imagery raw from USGS or wherever. It also occurred to me that there are thousands of people who cruise around in Google Earth every day, looking for interesting things and talking about it in the forums. So I posted there, in case anybody might have seen the kinds of semi-arid plant patterns I’m looking for. I’m interested to see if there will be any response.

update: the post has been moved to the “Moderated” section of the Nature and Geography forum. The above link has been updated.

A study site in Arizona.

If you’re interested in the tension between correlation and causation in ecology and don’t feel like standing up, it turns out that great chunks of R.H. Peters’ “A Critique For Ecology” is available online in Google Books. Apparently Cambridge press is experimenting with sticking big swaths of its books up on the internet. It makes a lot of sense to me: it doesn’t cost them anything, and there is no way I would actually sit and read through all of a book on a computer screen. Ouch. But on the other hand, I’m at least ten times as likely to buy or otherwise get a hold of a physical copy of the book if I read a bunch of it first. So there you go.

If it sounds like a boring topic to you (causation v. correlation etc) it may be, but if you’re interested in ecology it may not. Peters argues that ecology’s obsession with explaining the whys behind the way things are in nature has led to a vague and muddled science, given that it’s functionally impossible to prove why something happens. In his mind, ecology goes around identifying problems and never really solving them, so the longer it exists as a science the less we seem to know. He points out that if you want to contribute to solving problems you have to be able predict what will happen in the future given the current state or possible current states. And prediction is all about correlation, which is a separate issue from causation. He thinks we need to be worse natural historians and better statisticians.

It’s an interesting argument, but childish and silly of course. Which is obvious if you read the book. Which, hey presto, you sort of can!

A Critique for Ecology By Robert H. Peters

Australia: Copyright ruling puts hyperlinking on notice.

“Mp3s4free was different in the sense that it actually catalogued MP3 files that were infringing copyright material - Google doesn’t do that,” she said.

“There is, however, action that is being taken against Google in other jurisdictions, and we’re awaiting that eagerly.”

Yeah, that’s going to be great.

I can’t remember even seeing this one in the Google Labs selection. But there it is, Google has a music search.

For example.

I’m not sure how to explicity access it, except to search for an artist (or presumably an album or track) and click on the very special search result that will hopefully show up as the first option.

Holy crap.

Personally I think Wired got it wrong. I think the really interesting ungoogleables are the ones who aren’t making an active effort to stay out of the search engines’ grand indexes but who nonetheless live their lives in some way such that their names just don’t get typed out and uploaded to the internets. I have a couple of friends like that, or more specifically I had a couple of friends who I’ve since lost touch with and who I have been googleing every few months for years with no results. Where are you and what are you doing? Google shall not tell me.

And unless the boffins at our favourite search engine decide to make a change, Google will never be able to tell you about the band !!!, as I learned tonight trying to do a search for them. Try googling them, it’s kind of an interesting result. While you’re at it, try a search for their song “Me And Guiliani Down By The Schoolyard (A True Story)”, 9 minutes well spent. Kind of ballsy, making your band structurally ungoogleable.

I’ve been playing with Google Earth, the free 3D earth visualizer that you can download from Google. Three things strike me. First, I’m suprised that more people aren’t excited by this program. Using it is such a striking experience that I would have expected a meme-ish propagation of interest in it. Given that there is some capacity for user upload of points of interest and commentary into the “keyhole community” space, I also would have expected more interest in user-repurposing. Perhaps it isn’t an open enough platform to encourage data-mashing on the scale of Google Maps, which seems to spawn off a new user side project daily. Regardless, just as a beautiful toy, I’m suprised more folk aren’t obsessing about it.

Second, I’m intrigued that some versions of the program exist that allow importation of some standard GIS data formats for overlay. ERDAS Imagine and TIFF image files, and shape files for vector. The program has no analysis tools of course, so it has no pretensions of being a real GIS platform, but as a data visualizer it could be hard to beat. How many times have I seen wary biologists converted to a belief in spatial computing by seeing their study site spun about in 3D? Well, okay, 3 that I can remember off hand, but that’s a lot. Google Earth’s visualizations are wildly compelling in their intuitivness and scalability - you can see scenes as small as a barnyard placed concretley in the context of the relief of a valley or the expanse of a continent in a few smooth shifts of a mouse. Plug some data into this thing and it could make a major difference doing hard-sell for a project proposal. Everybody likes colourful maps, and these are some colourful maps.

And what if Google did decide to go into GIS analysis? They are the information people. Could be interesting.

Finally, it takes me at least 10 minutes of playing with the globe before I feel comfortable without having north close to being up. After a while I get used to the idea of north not having a specific direction, but I really have to overcome a mental barrier to do it. Once that barrier is past, it opens up some striking new vistas and ways of looking at the earth and it’s forms. But it definitely doesn’t come naturally.

Google google google. I would estimate that someone somewhere points out that Google is now analagous to a natural resource about once a second. I suppose the ideas surrounding the search-engine debates aren’t new, in fact I bet if I could be bothered to read Marchall McLuhan, he was probably making some pertinent points was back there in the 60s or 70s or whatever. Probably he pointed out that with the emergence of more channels of information flow, the main problem of information access is no longer finding but filtering: how best to drink from the firehouse. There are too many answers out there for your question, so how do you find the ones that are most useful?

Of course, search engines have become our main firehose mouthpiece. And google has, through good hard work and smartness, become our main search engine. And so it has become one of our main filters on the world, arguably as important as the news media for those of us who use the internet a lot.

And of course, controversy has ensued.

I’ve just sort of woken up to this debate and I find it mucho interesting. I’d always seen google as a nuetral thing, doggedly returning what really was the best and most relevant answer to my question. I shouldn’t really be suprised that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Back in March or April (when are we going to standardize numerical date formats?), The Register printed off a great story on the use of googlewashing to, in a sense, change the meaning of the term “the second superpower”. It hits on and illustrates many of the themes in the search engine controversy. If you are interested, here it is. Be breifly warned: the writing is about on level with my own. But the topic is sticky and the insight is deep, something you get from people writing about their own field (as opposed to news journalists, who do a great job of making their quickly researched shallow insight accessible). It’s sort of a like a conspiracy-theory story, but one you can verify yourself by playing around with Google. And they never point out that Google is like a natural resource, which is refreshing.

Study this chart:

It comes from google-watch.com. Turns out there is a brewing controversy over the practices and technologies used by Google. Is it all conspiracy theory hyperbole, or is there a kernel of truth worth worrying about?

“At another level, it’s a struggle over who will have the predominant influence over the massive amounts of user data that Google collects. In the past, discussions about privacy issues and the web have been about consumer protection. That continues to be of interest, but since 9/11 there is a new threat to privacy — the federal government. Google has not shown any inclination to declare for the rights of its users across the globe, as opposed to the rights of the spies in Washington who would love to have access to Google’s user data. “

If that worries you, you have the option of searching google through Google-Watche’s own privacy-protecting, ad-free Google proxy:

http://www.google-watch.org/cgi-bin/proxy.htm

It doesn’t have google’s simple to type URL. But, if you read further in google-watch.com, you may find yourself compelled to use it anyway.

Thanks to Chiron for alerting me to this. I can say from my own small experience as a non-rich internet author with a non-profit website, that it was a very difficult to get ranked on the search engines unless you’ve got cash to spend. That doesn’t only apply to Google, but it applies to google as well. And if your information isn’t showing up on the search engines, it might as well not exist.