UNR Students for Liberty » Google

Visualize Your Taxes

John Russell — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:17:34 +0000

Google sponsored a contest where contestants would submit data visualizations on the federal taxes people in America pay. Today they announced the winners of the competition which can be found here -> http://www.datavizchallenge.org/ With the American central bank beginning to lose its grip on a good credit rating, one can only conclude that taxation is inevitably going to rise in the future.

How Copyright Laws, a Judge, and a Bad Decision Have Crippled the World

Barry Belmont — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:58:18 +0000

Today, Judge Denny Chin ruled against Google‘s plans to make available some 12 million books in a digital library that could be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. “While the digitisation of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” Chin wrote in his decision, Google “simply go[es] too far, [...] giv[ing] Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission.”

More depressing, however, was the fact that the judge rejected the agreement Google reached with the plaintiffs allowing them to continue the digitization and redistribution of books in exchange for an cool $125 million annually. Sounds like a fair deal. But the judge said ‘No’ citing that the ownership (copyrights) of many of the works scanned by Google could not be established.

If you didn’t catch that, I’m going to repeat it, because it is that awful: Since no one is sure who owns the copyright of a particular piece of work, no one is allowed to touch it. What!? Why? That’s like saying you can’t pick up a penny (or a dollar bill) from the street because you can’t properly trace its origins. That. does. not. make. any. sense.

And the judge was able to make this decision so easily because it is not he that will ultimately bear this cost. It’s the hundreds of millions of people who will lack access to tens of millions of books and the vast catalog of information associated with it. This judge’s decision doesn’t just minutely hurt every single human being, it damages the human condition.

What reason could their possibly be to prevent the access to free and open exchange of information? Is the world not better with the internet, with Wikipedia, with knowledge? Cloistering information such that it is not allowed into the hands of others has never been the path of progress and this will be no exception.

It is better to light the world one booklight at a time than to see it cast in darkness as the next chapter of humanity is written.

Google Data Explorer and Knowing the World

Barry Belmont — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:38:25 +0000

If you thought the Ngram viewer from Google was amazing then you’re really just going to have your mind blown by its latest and greatest contribution to understanding the world: The Google Public Data Explorer. It’s incredible and shows a lot of correlations that make scientists of us all. The correlations that all your favorite talking make on a daily basis are now free and open for individual interpretation. (Hate it when someone just plain lies about the facts of GDP but never knew where to look to disprove them? Wait not longer!)

As just an example of what it is capable of, check out this little graph on fertility rate vs. life expectancy in all the countries around the world:

Please feel free to explore the data for yourself.

The Rise of Corporate Bullshit

Barry Belmont — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 19:20:58 +0000

I’m telling you this Ngram viewer from Google is awesome. This comes from the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog over at Discover magazine.

…also if you’re interested in tracking the rise of the Rickroll…check out the trending of the words “never gonna give you up.”

The Good of the People: Words

Barry Belmont — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:43:18 +0000

So, Google, with it’s 3 billion or so books cataloged, has given us the ability to track how words have been used throughout the years. Wanting to test a couple pet theories, I stumbled upon the rather remarkable trend in how people think in terms of positive and negative. I leave you to interpret the results.

Love, Hate

Good, Evil

Happy, Sad

Share, Steal

Just some food for thought.

Chrome for a Cause

Barry Belmont — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:52:28 +0000

By now you should all be using Google Chrome to do all your web browsing. It’s fast, safe, reliable — in a word: awesome.

To increase the “slacktavism” of its users, Google is sponsoring a charitable event from December 15-19. For every tab the user opens in those five days, Google will donate a certain amount (proportional to the number of tabs opened) to a charity of the user’s choice.

It is one of the most perfect combinations of business models incorporating charitable work.

So do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and let the charity flow with every new page you (are lucky enough to) open on the internet. Chrome For a Cause.

Googling the Midterm Elections

Barry Belmont — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:42:38 +0000

Below is a gadget by Google that allows for tracking of the political landscape across the country. Go ahead and play around with it, see what conclusions you can draw using just the facts presented and not what some commentator in the news might suggest.

I am extremely…

Barry Belmont — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:47:00 +0000

Google can tell us many things: how to spell, what word or phrase we might have meant, etc… One of its newest–and I think best–features is its auto complete feature that completes your thoughts for you. It does this by basically taking what you’ve written and matching it up with what the most people have searched for (I’m sure the algorithm is a little more involved than that, but on a basic level that is what it does). So say for instance I type “anarcho” it would give me the options of “anarcho-capitalism,” “anarcho-syndicalism,” “anarcho punk,” and so forth.

Well, it turns out that if you type “I am extremely” into the search engine, it will give you the following options, I don’t know what it says about people who use the internet, people in general, or their nature, but I am sure it says something: