Archive for August 3rd, 2008
TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran said on Saturday it would not back down “one iota” in its nuclear row with major powers, voicing defiance on the day of an informal deadline set by the West over Tehran’s disputed atomic ambitions.
Western officials gave Tehran two weeks from July 19 to respond to their offer to hold off from imposing more U.N. sanctions on Iran if it froze any expansion of its nuclear work.
That would suggest a deadline of Saturday but Iran, which has repeatedly ruled out curbing its nuclear activities, dismissed the idea of having two weeks to reply.
The West accuses Iran of seeking to build nuclear warheads under cover of a civilian power program. Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, denies the charge.
“In whichever negotiation we take part … it is unequivocally with the view to the realization of Iran’s nuclear right and the Iranian nation would not retreat one iota from its rights,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said.
He made the remark in a statement posted on the presidential website after talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Assad visited Tehran a few weeks after he said in Paris he would respond to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s request and use his good relations with the Islamic Republic to help resolve the nuclear stand-off.
The statement quoted the Syrian leader as saying that based on international agreements, all countries had the right to enrich uranium and have nuclear power stations. Continued…
It looks like a team of UC Berkeley researchers led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang (pictured) have found a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces than ever though possible, which they say could lead to breakthroughs in the fields of optical communications, miniature lasers, and optical computers.
The key to this new technique, it seems, is the use of a “hybrid” optical fiber consisting of a very thin semiconductor wire placed close to a smooth sheet of silver, which effectively acts as a capacitor that traps the light waves in the gap between the wire and the metal sheet and lets it slip though spaces as tiny as 10 nanometers (or more than 100 times thinner than current optical fibers).
That’s apparently as opposed to previous attempts that relied on surface plasmonics, in which light binds to electrons and allows it to travel along the surface of metal, which only proved effective over short distances.
While all of this is still in the theoretical stage, the researchers seem to think they’re on to something big, with research associate Rupert Olten saying that this new development “means we can potentially do some things we have never done before.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) – The first pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s newborn twins have been sold to entertainment news magazines People and Hello!, with all proceeds going to charity.
Getty Images said on Friday it had done an exclusive photo shoot of the twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, with Jolie, Pitt and the couple’s four other children, Maddox, Zahara, Pax and Shiloh — three of whom are adopted.
Getty did not disclose the amount paid by the magazines for the photo rights but some news media reported it was about $11 million (5.6 million pounds). An industry source said that figure was higher than the amount paid by both People and Hello!
“The Jolie-Pitt family and Getty Images have agreed that all proceeds will be used for charitable purposes,” the agency said in a statement.
It said the photos will be published on Monday in People in North America and in Hello! elsewhere.
Oscar winner Jolie, 33, gave birth to the twins on July 12 in Nice, France. The family has rented a villa in nearby Provence.
Jolie and Pitt, 44, are one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples, dubbed “Brangelina” by the celebrity press, and the birth of their twins was the subject of obsessive media coverage.
People magazine reportedly paid $4 million in June 2006 for North American rights to pictures of Jolie and Pitt’s first biological child, Shiloh, although industry sources said that figure was wildly inaccurate.
Afghan and Indian officials removed a body from the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, after a bombing there on July 7.
American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.
The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.
The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Concerns about the role played by Pakistani intelligence not only has strained relations between the United States and Pakistan, a longtime ally, but also has fanned tensions between Pakistan and its archrival, India. Within days of the bombings, Indian officials accused the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, of helping to orchestrate the attack in Kabul, which killed 54, including an Indian defense attaché.
This week, Pakistani troops clashed with Indian forces in the contested region of Kashmir, threatening to fray an uneasy cease-fire that has held since November 2003.
The New York Times reported this week that a top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled to Pakistan this month to confront senior Pakistani officials with information about support provided by members of the ISI to militant groups. It had not been known that American intelligence agencies concluded that elements of Pakistani intelligence provided direct support for the attack in Kabul.
American officials said that the communications were intercepted before the July 7 bombing, and that the C.I.A. emissary, Stephen R. Kappes, the agency’s deputy director, had been ordered to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, even before the attack. The intercepts were not detailed enough to warn of any specific attack.
The government officials were guarded in describing the new evidence and would not say specifically what kind of assistance the ISI officers provided to the militants. They said that the ISI officers had not been renegades, indicating that their actions might have been authorized by superiors.
Movie Review ‘Swing Vote’ – Hey, America, This Guy’s for You – Review – NYTimes.com
Posted on: August 3, 2008
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Hey, America, This Guy’s for You
A pleasant muddle about life, liberty and the pursuit of Budweiser, among other noble and base causes, “Swing Vote” is also one of the most surprising, politically suggestive movies to come out of Hollywood this year. Topped by a gruffly appealing Kevin Costner as a good ole drunk whose vote will decide the American presidency, it takes place in the kind of New Mexico town that might once have been thought of as Capraesque, but in depressed spirit and hard-times veneer comes across like a Dust Bowl Hooverville. The film has a Red State setup — the Nascar champ Richard Petty zooms by — and a serious case of the blues.
Directed by the relative newcomer Joshua Michael Stern (“Neverwas”), who wrote the screenplay with Jason Richman after, it appears, watching Garson Kanin’s 1939 movie “The Great Man Votes” (in which John Barrymore’s boozer has a decisive vote), the film takes its sweet time getting going. Mr. Costner’s entrance as the resident everyman, Bud Johnson, couldn’t be less heroic or more symbolic: he’s passed out and snoring, stretched out in last night’s jeans, when his 12-year-old daughter, Molly (Madeline Carroll), disgustedly shakes him awake. A former cover-band musician whose life has become a blur of benders, Bud has turned his beery nickname into a lifestyle. This drink’s for him, and so are the next 11.
Bud isn’t bad, of course, just one of those good-time guys who has reached a dead end after too many wrong turns. He and Molly live alone in a tumbledown trailer (the girl’s mother went AWOL long ago) with stained walls and no telephone or hot water. He barely makes it to his factory job and when he gets there, you understand why. With his friends Walter (Judge Reinhold) and Lewis (Charles Esten), he packs chicken eggs in a swirl of feathers. It’s a living, if not anything like the high-flying kind that often shows up in modern Hollywood, where leading men tend to play cops and robbers or white-collar variations on doctor, lawyer and corporate chief. Factories belong in other countries (China), other movies (documentaries) too.
The story kicks in after Bud, having promised Molly he would vote in the presidential election, ends up zonked out in his truck. One thing leads to another flatly outlandish thing, and before you can grumble high-concept hooey, both the conservative presidential incumbent, Andrew Boone (Kelsey Grammer, all smiles), and his liberal opponent, Donald Greenleaf (a tamped-down Dennis Hopper), have descended on Bud’s town. Accompanied by the usual fast-talking handlers, stone-faced Secret Service men, news twerps and gadflies, the candidates take sneaky, then obvious turns pulling Bud this way and that — his choices come down to either nuclear annihilation or the rainbow White House — until they themselves have been bent so far out of shape, so contorted by politicking, that they’re almost unrecognizable.
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Search quality, continued
Posted on: August 3, 2008
A few weeks back Udi Manber introduced the search quality group, and the previous posts in this series talked about the ranking of documents. While the ranking of web documents forms the core of what makes search at Google work so well, your search experience consists of much more than that. In this post, I’ll describe the principles that guide our development of the overall search experience and how they are applied to the key aspects of search. I will also describe how we make sure we are on the right track through rigorous experimentation. And the next post in this series will describe some of the experiments currently underway.
Let me introduce myself. I’m Ben Gomes, and I’ve been working on search at Google since 1999, mostly on search quality. I’ve had the good fortune to contribute to most aspects of the search engine, from crawling the web to ranking. More recently, I’ve been responsible for the engineering of the interface for search and search features.
A common reaction from friends when I say that I now work on Google’s search user interface is “What do you do? It never changes.” Then they look at me suspiciously and tell me not to mess with a good thing. Google is fine just the way it is — a plain, fast, simple web page. That’s great, but how hard can that be?”
To help answer that question, let me start with our main goal in web search: to get you to the web pages you want as quickly as possible. Search is not an end in itself; it is merely a conduit. This goal may seem obvious, but it makes a search engine radically different from most other sites on the web, which measure their success by how long their users stay. We measure our web search success partly by how quickly you leave (happily, we hope!). There are several principles we use in getting you to the information you need as quickly as possible:
- A small page. A small page is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display. This results in a minimalist design aesthetic; extra fanciness in the interface slows down the page without giving you much benefit.
- Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Many search features require a great deal of algorithmic complexity and a vast amount of data analysis to make them work well. The trick is to hide all that complexity behind a clean, intuitive user interface. Spelling correction, snippets, sitelinks and query refinements are examples of features that require sophisticated algorithms and are constantly improving. From the user’s point of view search, almost invisibly, just works better.
- Features that work everywhere. Features must be designed such that the algorithms and presentation can be adapted to work in all languages and countries. Consider the problem of spell correction in Chinese, where user queries are often not broken up into words or Hebrew/Arabic, where text is written right to left (interestingly, this is believed to be an example of first-mover disadvantage — when chiseling on stone, it is easier to hold the hammer in your right hand!).
- Data driven decisions – experiment, experiment, experiment. We try to verify that we’ve done the right thing by running experiments. Designs that may seem promising may end up testing poorly.
There are inherent tensions here. For instance, showing you more text (or images) for every result may enable you to better pick out the best result. But a result page that has too much information takes longer to download and longer to visually process. So every piece of information that we add to the result page has to be carefully considered to ensure that the benefit to the user outweighs the cost of dealing with that additional information. This is true of every part of the search experience, from typing in a query, to scanning results, to further exploration.
Having formulated your query correctly, the next task is to pick a page from the result list. For each result, we present the title and url, and a brief two line snippet. Pages that don’t have a proper title are often ignored by users. One of the bigger recent changes has been to extract titles for pages that don’t specify an HTML title — yet a title on the page is clearly right there, staring at you. To “see” that title that the author of the page intended, we analyze the HTML of the page to determine the title that the author probably meant. This makes it far more likely that you will not ignore a page for want of a good title.
We have been making improvements to our snippets over time with algorithms for determining the relevance of portions of the page. The changes range from the subtle — we highlight synonyms of your query terms in the results — to more obvious. Here’s an example screenshot where the user searched for “arod” and you can see that Alex and Rodriguez are bolded in the search result snippet, based on our analysis that you might plausibly be referring to him:
As a more obvious example, we now extract and show you the byline date from pages that have one. These byline dates are expressed in a myriad formats which we extract and present uniformly, so that you can scan them easily:
For one of the most common types of user needs, navigational queries — where you type in the name of a web site you know — we have introduced shortcuts (we refer to them as sitelinks). These sitelinks allow you to get to the key parts of the site and illustrate many of the same principles alluded to above; they are a simple addition to the top search result that adds a small amount of extra text to the page.
For instance, the home page of Hewlett-Packard has almost 60 links, in a two-level menu system. Our algorithms, using a combination of different signals, pick the top ones among these that we think you are most likely to want to visit.
What if you did not find what you were looking for among the top results? In that case, you probably need to try another query. We help you in this process by providing a set of query refinements at the bottom of the results page — even if they don’t give you the query that you need, they provide hints for different (likely more successful) directions in which you could refine your query. By placing the query refinements at the bottom of the page, the refinements don’t distract users, but are there to help if the rest of the search results didn’t serve a user’s information need.
I’ve described several key aspects of the search experience, including where we have made many changes over time — some subtle, some more obvious. In making these changes to the search experience, how do we know we’ve succeeded, that we’ve not messed it up? We constantly evaluate our changes by sharing them with you! We launch proposed changes to a tiny fraction of our users and evaluate whether it seems to be helping or hurting their search experience. There are many metrics we use to determine if we’ve succeeded or failed. The process of measuring these improvements is a science in itself, with many potential pitfalls. Our experimental methodology allows us to explore a range of possibilities and launch the ones that work the best. For every feature that we launch, we have frequently run a large number of experiments that did not see the light of day.
So let me answer the question I started with: We’re actually constantly changing Google’s result page and have been doing so for a long time. And no, we won’t mess with a good thing. You won’t let us.
In the next post in this series, I’ll talk about some of the experiments we are running, and what we hope to learn from them.
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