According to Google's official blog,

In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.

The first tour, "Confronting Climate Change," was launched this week on YouTube:

In addition to the Google Earth program, Google has also launched a tie-in YouTube channel to allow people to upload questions and concerns that can be raised to decision makers attending December's UN COP15 Climate Change convention.

Google climate change tools for COP15 [Googleblog] (Via)

According to the Telegraph, "experts" have been called in to analyze the photograph, because so many unsolved murders happened in this square over the centuries. A medium is quoted as saying the image is clearly a ghost, because no contemporary woman would ever dress like this. So for evidence we have retro fashion, and a blurry area that makes the woman's legs appear cut off. I say call in the Winchester brothers to investigate this one.

What I love about stories like this is how they demonstrate that Google maps have so quickly been woven into urban legends. Remember the story we ran a few weeks ago about the lost island of Atlantis showing up in Google Earth images of the bottom of the Ocean? And there was another story about an alien showing up in a Google maps image from New Jersey. Want to find support for your superstition or fringe beliefs? Just Google for them in Maps! That's all the proof you need.

Google quickly pointed out that the grid was caused by its own terrain mapping equipment, which incorporates data in a grid pattern. Reps from the mega-mapping company called the grid an "artifact of the data collection process . . . The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data." That won't stop George Lucas from incorporating this into the next Indiana Jones movie.

Via C|Net and New York Times

To make its predictions accurate, researchers first looked over the data on where influenza-like illness (ILI) outbreaks took place in the U.S. over the past five years. Then they pored over search data, looking for key phrases that popped up again and again when the outbreaks occurred. You can see to the left a chart of some of the searches that correlated most strongly to a spike in ILI cases. Note that the terms listed in the chart are not exact search terms (nobody actually searches on the phrase "influenza complication"), but instead capture the idea of what people searched on. So "influenza complication" would mean people searched on things like "runny nose" or "aches and chills."

After analyzing the data, researchers came up with a system where they weighted certain search topics for how much they seemed connected to ILI outbreaks. In the chart, you can see searches on flu symptoms rank high for a correlation with hospital data on lots of flu patients. Searches on specific types of antibiotics might be connected to flu, but weren't weighted as heavily.

Eventually, they began using the list of weighted search topics against real-time data coming in during the early part of 2008, trying to see if a rise in certain topics in a given region meant that flu was on the rise there. And as you can see in the chart above, the Google prediction (in black) was uncannily similar to the actual rise in flu cases in the region they picked (in red).

So what's the advantage of the Google system of disease surveillance? Traditional methods of disease tracking rely on data from hospitals and pharmacies, and often it takes a week or more to figure out any pattern. The Google system takes about a day. If epidemiologists see a huge spike in data that points to a massive disease outbreak, they can begin to prepare for it. And more importantly, they might be able to track where the disease is heading.

What this means is that the Centers for Disease control will probably hear about the next big pandemic from Google, rather than hospital researchers. It also means that when you do a search on Google, you're revealing a lot more information about yourself than you probably realize.

Detecting Influenza Outbreaks Using Search Query Data [via Nature]

Anyone who Googles for 6860 Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles, clicks on the "Street View" and then rotates the camera 180° will see the chilling picture above of popular Sith Lord Darth Vader directing his faithful Stormtrooper guard to shoot the Google camera van so as to not reveal their contemptuous hidden plans (and Darth's real height; apparently, he wore platforms for the movies).

Obviously, the Stormtrooper was too late, but who knows how far the Imperial takeover of California has gotten since the picture was taken? There's no way of being sure, so all we can safely say is this: Nevada, Oregon and Arizona... Be warned. Be careful. And use the Force.

[Google Maps] (Thanks, Patrick!)

Back in the 1990s, we had Sealand, an abandoned military base in the North Sea that became a sovereign nation and gray-area server farm. But the tiny nation of Sealand has nothing on Google's latest plan, which would involve any number of these "datacenters." People stored their information in Sealand's "data haven" because they didn't want governments snooping around in it or subjecting it to weird national data-retention laws. Are there national laws that Google wants to evade?

BLDG BLOG's Geoff Manaugh has another idea: Google might be working on massive, mobile data services to serve municipalities:

Perhaps Google's literally offshore experiment in information technology implies a coming world of privatized services at sea. A fleet of tankers shows up in a nearby port one day... and suddenly your city has telephone services. It's Archigram's instant city all over again, but on the level of specific – and highly billable – urban amenities. The services show up. The network takes over. Your city will never be the same.

Manaugh suggests that this could mean anything from blimps showing up to provide a city with an instant wireless network, to a barge that provides a city with backup power. Auckland could certainly have used a roving generator/network provider during its five-week power outage.

But I prefer to imagine that Google's plan is to use these barges, floating in a no-one's-land unclaimed by any nation, to send uncensored data feeds to shore. Or, in the dystopian vision, to suck your data up and sell it to the U.S. government. After all, there is no Fourth Amendment in the middle of the Pacific!

Top image by Alexander Trevi.

Servers at Sea [via BLDG BLOG]

In fact, that's the premise of a trilogy that Robert "Humanoids" Sawyer is working on right now. Like a lot of scifi authors and futurists, Sawyer thinks it's plausible that the web itself might become a conscious entity. (This isn't a new idea: It was the basis for William Gibson's early-80s novel Neuromancer.)

So how does Google Suggest work? To return to my earlier example about the Booby Snatchers, you'll find that Google isn't mining your personal search history to make suggestions — it combs through popular searches from millions of people and guesses what you want based on what kinds of searches it sees the most often. Because far more people search on "invasion of Georgia" than "Invasion of the Booby Snatchers," you'll get the former suggestion.

According to the New York Times:

Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on the personal searches of users, although it does use information about the relative popularity of common searches to rank its suggestions, Google noted. Google Suggest searches are covered under Google's privacy policy, the company added.

So that means our first A.I. will have consciousness-by-popular-demand. It will make all its decisions based on what the majority of people would do. That's what frightens me.

Google Rolls Out Tool [NY Times]

Last fall, Funamizu starting formalizing his drawings using programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Shade, and posted them on his web site. The blogosphere quickly picked up on them, and that led to interest from developers. "In the future, gadgets will be much more intuitive to use," says Funamizu. Here are some of his and my personal favorites:

1. The Looking Glass
In a series of posts he calls The Future of Internet Search, Funamizu explores different ways in which an intelligent transparent looking glass can help us get information without having to type tons of info into a desktop or handheld. Curious how nutritious that apple is? Want to know what the cityscape in front of you looked like 30 years ago? Just slide the looking glass over to get the info you desire. "I always wondered why I have to use keywords to search for an object that I don't know about," he says. "In order to get the right results, you have to use the right words to describe it. It's a complete paradox."

2. Bookshelves for Super-Lazy People
Funamizu believes that bookshelves of the future will either be sliding hangers that rest under your desk to neatly tuck away and keep open pages intact (similar mechanically to a file cabinet), or they'll be staggered wall units with sliding tabs so that you can sort through and reorder books without pulling each one out. "I'm very lazy," Funamizu says. "With this, I'd be able to put all the magazines and books scattered on my desk away."

3. Desktop Holography
What if the thing you were thinking about buying showed up as a 3D image that projected out of your monitor? Or if your favorite web celeb showed up in front of your face as a holographic reality? "My kids would be so happy if their favorite cartoon characters popped up from the computer screen," Funamizu says. "Also, it'd be so convenient if I could check 3D models floating in the air. I think I'd be able to create better items that way."

4. Unmistakable Shampoo & Conditioner Containers
Funamizu believes that shampoo and conditioner will be much easier to tell apart if they were stacked on top of each other, not placed side by side so that the labels are obscured. I don't know what to think, but I like the corner design. It's space-efficient and space-agey. I think the yellow meter on the side tells you how much is left so you can gauge when you need to step out to buy refills.

5. Highlight-the-Line-I'm-On Plug-in
Reading things online could be a huge pain, in part because you can't put a crease in the page where you last left off. A lot of times, I end up just reading articles half way through and forgetting about them shortly thereafter. This solves that. "I read lots of blogs, but I lose the line I'm on all the time," Funamizu says. "Please, someone, develop this plug-in!" Images by Mac Funamizu

Petit Invention [Mac Funamizu's blog]

Carr's argument is a subtle one so I suggest reading the whole feature. But let me take a shot at a one-sentence distillation: The internet is giving us a form of ADHD when it comes to reading, and we should be scared of that.*

I don't entirely disagree with the first part of that thought, but the second doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In Carr's own words, humans have been developing technologies that change the way we thnk throughout our history:

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

Now I hate alarm clocks as much as the next guy, and it's true, we do live our lives by minutes and hours more than the cycles of the sun, moon, tides, or whatever. But is Carr really trying to say that the advent of the 9-5 job cancels out the advances of all of science, math, and our understanding of the universe? That's pushing it.

And so is this passage on how Google will one day turn into the HAL-9000:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

...their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Google's dominance of the digital world is admittedly a little unnerving, but HAL? C'mon now. Actually Carr's article leads and ends with references to the murderous and fictional computer, making it pretty clear what he thinks about the role artificial intelligence will play in our non-fiction future.

In the end Carr's article isn't entirely ham-handed — but his analysis is. He looks back on Socrates, who once wrote about how the invention of writing would be the death of us all. Later, other writers thought the printing press would ruin the pursuit of knowledge. Looking back, those sentiments seem shortsighted, and with good reason. They're actually evidence against Carr's case: If printing presses are any indication of how these things go, the internet will facilitate an intellectual revolution the likes of which no one could predict in the early going.

But Carr still argues that the internet is going to ruin the human mind. Who knows, maybe he just couldn't resist the opportunity to compare himself to Socrates. Regardless, both Carr and the ancient Greek were wrong on this one: their arguments are little more than over-intellectualized bellyaching that resemble old people's classic "kids these days" speech. But instead of moaning about modern youth, the refrain is more like "technology these days."

*I realize the paradox here — if Carr's right, no one's going to go read the whole feature. You probably won't even read this whole post. You'll scan the headline, maybe a paragraph or two, then go flitting off to the next item. I've got more faith in io9ers, though.

Church has good reasons for wanting piles of genomic data. As a Bloomberg article on the project says:

By matching genetic data from each person with his or her health history, Church would build a database that would link DNA variations and disease for scientists and drugmakers, the first step in deciding on treatments that can block the mutations or adjust how they work within the body.

Church also said he'll explore other human traits under genetic control. Participants will give facial and body measurements, tell researchers what time they get up in the morning, and detail other behaviors, he said.

Church has already partially sequenced genomes from 10 people, and the jump to 100,000 is under review by a Harvard ethics panel. The project ``only stops when we stop learning things,'' Church said.

We should note: there's no evidence of wrongdoing here, and Google has never explicitly said "we want to organize genetic information." True, they are major investors in the personal genomics company 23andMe, but we have every reason to believe that Big brother "don't be evil" Google will play it straight, keeping any information they have access to safe and anonymous.

But still you've got to wonder, does Google want direct access to DNA information? And if so, why?

Source: Bloomberg via SciGuy

Graphic: Personal Genome Project (Church's outfit)

Part of what I like about the Virgle prank is that it's so well thought-out, including a detailed discussion of choosing the correct site for a Mars base, with protective lava tubes, sources of water and climate. And then it dips into total science fiction, predicting "a glistening blue bay" within a couple of generations of terraforming. And here's the funniest part:

Here's the Virgle Pioneer pitch: Things will get better. Eventually. Sure, the work will be hard, the broadband rates low, the commodes decidedly open source, and yes, your life might be extinguished in a fiery instant of catastrophic technological malfunction. But your enriched descendants will appreciate your sacrifice, which should render worthwhile your choice to spend the rest of your (perhaps radically foreshortened) life in deprivation and uncertainty.

Up until now, the only planets outside of our solar system that we've successfully detected are way bigger than earth. This is because most satellites detect planets by observing the pull their gravity exerts on the stars they orbit, so it's easier to find large planets orbiting close to their stars. TESS does things a little bit differently: it'll search for planets by measuring the amount of starlight it obscures, allowing astronomers to see a lot more planets of different calibers all at once. Examining the spectrum of a planet's star as it passes through its planet's atmosphere also lets researchers gauge the planet's size, temperature, and atmospheric chemistry much more accurately.

If all goes as planned, TESS could launch in 2012, and we could be making friends with aliens by 2013. Image by Tess Team

MIT aims to search for Earth-like planets with Google's help [MIT News]

A google brain implant could work in lots of ways. With technology we have right now, people could wear a brain-computer interface helmet like the one sold by Emotiv, and use that to control the cursor on a wearable computer with a tiny monitor that's attached to your classes. So the thing wouldn't be implanted in your brain, but it would be responding to electrical signals from your brain. More sophisticated wearables like those described in Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End might allow you to google via subtle movements of your body, and then display results in special contact lenses.

A more far-future implant might actually have a direct neural linkup to your brain, allowing you to see google results on your retina. No matter how the instant, subtle, brain-controlled access to google works, the same benefits and problems are likely to exist.

PRO:

Ability to "remember" many details about a person or issue in the middle of a conversation, so that you can marshal facts quickly and check the accuracy of what other people are saying.

CON:

The person you're talking to could much more easily pretend to be somebody they are not by googling information and feigning expertise.

PRO:

You will never get lost because you've got maps at your synapse tips, and you'll always know what's playing at your local theaters. You'll also get the latest news headlines and stock quotes at the twitch of an eyelid.

CON:

You'll spend so much time in your head reading google news and watching YouTube that you'll zone out during conversations and forget to pay attention to what your best friends are telling you (unless they're telling you in the form of a google news alert).

PRO:

Instant access to infinite data storage allows you to quickly store your every interesting thought, and search through them instantly. More innovative ideas result.

CON:

Over reliance on "offloaded" memory means people make less of an effort to remember important things and therefore brain flexibility actually erodes. Ideas become boring repetitions of what you've thought up before, or what other people have thought up and posted on the Web.

PRO:

You can cheat on tests.

CON:

You can cheat on tests.

PRO: Need something desperately and can't get to the computer to order it? Just buy it through Froogle.

CON: Google ads are constantly running in your head, perhaps designed to respond to thought patterns.

PRO: Every time Google ads a cool new service, like Gmail or Picasa, you've got instant access to it in your brain.

CON: Google is famous for its "silent update" system, which occasionally results in pretty buggy services. Imagine what it will be like when Google silently updates your brain.

Our evil video tool cut off the credits from this video, alas. So here they are. Starring: Jeff Grace and Blaise Miller. Directed by: Todd Berger. Written by: Jeff Grace. Produced by: Kevin Brennan and Jeff Grace. Cinematography: Helena Wei. Edited by: Todd Berger. Music: Kevin MacLeod. Production Assistant: Derrick Guyton. [The Vacationeers]