Was just reading the charmingly titled blog post Google Scribe, You Autocomplete Me (via the even more charming Trevor Dawes). Scribe is a new Labs features that does exactly what you would guess — provides autocomplete suggestions for sentences. The Chronicle blogger does not like this. Predictably Scribe, when given sample text which must have [...]
Entries Tagged as 'google'
in which I continue to obsess about failure and organizational culture
August 21st, 2010 · Comments Off · Uncategorized
Jerry Remy, beloved New England sportscaster and former Red Sox player, in his book Understanding Baseball, wrote something that has stuck with me hard: if your team never gets called out at home, your third base coach isn’t doing his job. That is, if he’s being so conservative about sending runners that he never sends [...]
Tags:failure·google·jerry remy·organizational culture·peter norvig
I don’t have a good title for this post but I bet Google does (?)
June 8th, 2010 · 12 Comments · Uncategorized
A quick thanks to everyone who’s tweeted about the guest posts from a techie patron (part 1, part 2), and welcome to anyone joining us from Twitter! You would make my day if you subscribed (RSS above right) or commented. Today, though, we take a break from the woes of web design and shoes, reach [...]
what Google ethnography and research oncology have in common
January 25th, 2010 · Comments Off · Uncategorized
Here, we have an ethnographer talking about why (outside of academic/elite contexts) Google is not widely adopted in China. (A variety of reasons: the Google name is hard to pronounce and spell in Chinese and there is not a widely accepted, Google-promoted canonical form; many, many users have their primary internet access through mobile technologies [...]
google autocomplete tells us the true nature of libraries?
January 10th, 2010 · Comments Off · Uncategorized
A librarian plays with Google’s autocomplete feature. Hilarity ensues. (FWIW, if I type “andromeda is”, it autocompletes to “andromeda israel”. If I type “andromeda is “, it has no suggestions at all. Apparently I’m…nothing?)
Google Translate
December 14th, 2009 · Comments Off · Uncategorized
In the continuing saga of our information overlords, they’ve come out with Google Translate. As a former Latin teacher, I mostly love and partly dislike this system: + The on-the-fly translation is pretty sweet. In particular I love seeing how it recalibrates its concept of whole phrases as it gets new input — something I [...]
discovery interfaces in the Chronicle
October 12th, 2009 · 7 Comments · Uncategorized
Chronicle of Higher Ed article on discovery layers in library catalogs. Doesn’t say much I haven’t already seen (although if you have no idea what I mean by “discovery layers” do read it; it’s a good overview). I did like this bit, though: “It’s sort of our answer to, Why it is you need a [...]
Tags:chronicle.com·culture clash·discovery layers·findability·google·library 2.0·usability·user needs
out-of-print books
September 19th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Uncategorized
Google has rights to a gazillion out-of-print books, people freak in expected manners, Globe article here. One of the things that came up in my library automation class is the place of database aggregators in the marketplace. There are lots of databases out there, and it’s not realistic for every library to negotiate contracts separately [...]
Tags:copyright·digitization·google
