Whit Andrews

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Entries from November 2008

Spore for a Seven-Year-Old: Decay or development?

November 30th, 2008 · 5 Comments

My son wants a PC game. We have tried so long to help his creativity and intelligence develop in other ways, including, particularly, sports and art and music and language and all the things things that mattered so much to us when we were kids. Now we have to decide whether computer-aided creature design [...]

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Bombay

November 27th, 2008 · No Comments

I was in Mumbai last February. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia; I had never seen anything like it.
My mother called tonight — we talk most nights — and she asked if I had followed what is happening. I allowed that I hadn’t. I did, after I finished some simple tasks part of my job, [...]

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My fellow search dweeb

November 18th, 2008 · 3 Comments

I never met Jerry Yang. Or, maybe what I should say is, I haven’t met Jerry Yang yet, but I guess I might some day. Anyway, he’s not going to run Yahoo any more, he says. Seems likely you’ll see something more intelligent about this from Allen or Andrew soon — these guys cover Yahoo [...]

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On-Demand Indexing from Google Site Search

November 13th, 2008 · No Comments

Google announced it’s adding indexing on demand to Google Site Search, the for-pay big brother to Google Custom Search. It’s a good addition to the product — everybody wants to know that their stuff is indexed swiftly, and some verticals and horizontals need that assurance to be very strong. Google’s assertion that it indexes quickly [...]

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Another Victory for the Box and Button

November 12th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Me.dium, which had provided a plug-in with which I tried not to get all creeped-out looking at what people I kinda knew were browsing on the Web (ever get that Amityville Horror feeling? big rumbly voice in the attic moaning “Uninstall! UNINSTALL!” yes, I know it had privacy controls that I could invoke, but still, [...]

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No Twit

November 7th, 2008 · 5 Comments

I have written previously that I am baffled by some kinds of the Twitter phenomena. I was in particular mystified by a post from someone about how the Zappos guy’s Twitter account was so good, because he was basically flaying his life and showing everyone what he’s up to — personally. Personally, I think he [...]

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Google box

November 6th, 2008 · No Comments

What baffles me is when people seem to feel that there’s only one way to solve any given technological problem. How do you do math? In your head, sometimes, I bet. And then, sometimes, you get a piece of paper and write out the numbers on the paper, with operands. And then, sometimes, I bet [...]

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More on Hostile Information Ecosystem

November 5th, 2008 · No Comments

Dan Tunkelang sent me this pointer to A Survey of Attack-Resistant Collaborative Filtering Algorithms four months ago; I’m just reading it now. You might want to read it before I do. More on it later. (I printed it out! Imagine. PDFs do that to me.)

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Smart use of word cloud.

November 4th, 2008 · No Comments

At the New York Times, a mood cloud.

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