google – Page 21 – DECISION STATS

Google News

In the time I last wrote on Google, the biggest text mining algorithm company in the world ( or advertising company, depending on your perspective) has done the following updates-

1) Successfully patented MapReduce but with a wait and watch attitude on monetization especially on Hadoop derivatives. If the West was built and won by intellectual property rights, Google has all the right -legal and moral to enforce its patents on behalf of it’s shareholders, never minding discordant notes by money, err I mean many…… including the notable Curt Monash in his superb piece-

http://www.dbms2.com/2010/02/11/google-mapreduce-patent/

Oracle has long been able to parallelize ala MapReduce. I don’t see anything in the claim that isn’t preceded by what Oracle did, except maybe the emphasis on key/value pairs. (And the same statement applies to the other 15 claims in the patent, at least on a quick skim.) I forget the details of SenSage’s quasi-MapReduce, which also preceded the Google patent filing, but I imagine something similar would be true about it.

There is no doubt that Google popularized the ideas of MapReduce — which turns out to have been a worthy public service. In one great example of that popularization, the seminal paper on parallel data mining is almost laughable in how it deviates from MapReduce key/value pair formalism — but it still seems to have been inspired by Google’s MapReduce. But that’s a different matter; popularization != invention, even though there’s a certain connection between the two in patent law.

2) Launched a Twitter clone called Buzz, revised it for privacy updates but without adding basic functionality like that done by ping.fm services

http://www.google.com/buzz

3) Bought out Aardvark at http://vark.com/

4) Continued the Chinese hacker investigation

Google Cyberattack Linked To Two Chinese Schools

One of the schools has ties to the Chinese military and to a network company with ties to Google’s rival Baidu.

5) No it did NOT launch Google Mox to search within your soul

http://www.fakingnews.com/2010/02/google-launches-mox-to-help-you-search-within-your-soul/

California, USA. Google announced today that it is launching a new service to help users search deep within their soul. “This would not only maximize the untapped potential of our search technology, but also the untapped potential of the human race”, said Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, in an exclusive interview with Faking News business reporter SK Wimwian.

6) Did propose an experimental fiber network for high speed internet.

7) Did launch the Google Nexus One with apps

All in all a very fast 1.5 months in 2010 for Google- with developments continuing in Google Googles ,Google Chrome extensions and Google Voice- 2010 seems to be Google ‘s year to make or break the cloud OS.l

China bans Chinese Food for Googleplex

This is a direct result of Google ‘s stand on principles (see below). No Google for China means no Chinese food for Googlers. But seriously.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

Algorithms and Ads: No Free Lunches and Hill Climbing

From http://www.no-free-lunch.org/

More formally, where
d = training set;
m = number of elements in training set;
f = ‘target’ input-output relationships;
h = hypothesis (the algorithm’s guess for f made in response to d); and
C = off-training-set ‘loss’ associated with f and h (‘generalization error’)
all algorithms are equivalent, on average, by any of the following measures of risk: E(C|d), E(C|m), E(C|f,d), or E(C|f,m).

How well you do is determined by how ‘aligned’ your learning algorithm P(h|d) is with the actual posterior, P(f|d).

Wolpert’s result, in essence, formalizes Hume, extends him and calls the whole of science into question.

Bing Ad

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Google Ad

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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing

hill climbing is a mathematical optimization technique which belongs to the family of local search. It is relatively simple to implement, making it a popular first choice. Although more advanced algorithms may give better results, in some situations hill climbing works just as well.

Hill climbing can be used to solve problems that have many solutions, some of which are better than others. It starts with a random (potentially poor) solution, and iteratively makes small changes to the solution, each time improving it a little. When the algorithm cannot see any improvement anymore, it terminates. Ideally, at that point the current solution is close to optimal, but it is not guaranteed that hill climbing will ever come close to the optimal solution.

For example, hill climbing can be applied to the traveling salesman problem. It is easy to find a solution that visits all the cities but will be very poor compared to the optimal solution. The algorithm starts with such a solution and makes small improvements to it, such as switching the order in which two cities are visited. Eventually, a much better route is obtained.

Hill climbing is used widely in artificial intelligence, for reaching a goal state from a starting node. Choice of next node and starting node can be varied to give a list of related algorithms.

Bing Ad for Hill Climbing-

Climbing at Amazon

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Amazon.com/books

Google Ad for Hill Climbing Algorithm

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A year after Google’s Kill Bill OS announcements and Ballmer’s lets buy our way outta here- there seem still more sense to stick to Google ‘s ad algols. Unless you want to climb Microsoft’s online hills only to find there is no free lunch in their ad rates and offers.

Like the free and virus prone browser.

Google and Me on Privacy and Openness

Finally, I have to admit it, Google Rocks. Check the video above on the website if it does not show in your inbox.

The Google Privacy Centre is much needed.

ps I resigned yesterday from the Technology Advsiory Board of University of Tennessee protesting the inferior solution to giv away everything to Microsoft on a platter without even evaluating Google Wave for the Volunteers., or even having an Open Source Lab for two computers even when I asked for it months ago.

Lastly I apologize for the sometimes spelling and grammar mistakes in my blog to the readers- I found out that I may be suffering from a mild learning disorder ( a bit like dylexia – adrenal glan tests are still awaited). It which was untreated for almost 32 years as I was in relatively bad health care for most of my life..

The Google Privacy Centre is at http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html