Aishwarya Rai in Rituparno Ghosh's forthcoming film Raincoat.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Researchers of the world should be mighty pleased with this latest contraption that the folks at Google have come up with.
Its called Google Scholar and is basically a targeted search, catering specifically to research papers and theses and so on.

This is what Google has to say about it.

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

It did find the only paper I ever wrote :). Google Scholar: anirudh garg

What is interesting to me is how now search is becoming more compartamentilazed and how vertical search engines are being paned out which target specifc users/realms of knowledge thus leading to more relevant search results. Although why they had to have a seperate page for it beats me, why couldnt they have a keyword and you could search on the main google page itself, something like research:anirudh garg.

Update : Video graphically illustrating county results.

The US Elections have come and gone. There have been countless theories on why it turned out the way it did , from moral values being the deciding factor, to the Republicans registering more of their core base, to the Democrats not having a clear message and so on.
Along with that there have been a plethora of maps too, to show what really happened. I have put together a sort of library of maps to show what "really" happened as opposed to what you might actually see in "popular media"

1). This is the most popular simple map.
Just shows the different states colored with their majority party color. Looks pretty red doesn't it. A bit misleading though.

2). This represents the true picture as far as the electoral college votes by state go.
This is a cartogram which shows each state appropriately ballooned or shrunk based on the electoral votes that the state actually represent.(look at the super inflated California :) ). So in other terms while the one above was an area representation this is a more accurate population/electoral vote representation.

3). Now, still looking at states if we know look at the actual number of votes cast in each state and accordingly color the states (with blue being fully democrat and red fully republican) we see a pretty "purple" nation, not wholly red or blue.




d). Now, drilling down a bit and we have this map which shows the results county by county.
This is again like the first picture, just a binary picture though shows just which party had more votes in a particular county and paints the county with that color. Its red all over with few sprinkling of blue here and there. Again this doesn't take into account the actual number of votes polled.

I was an incurable news fanatic and needed some way to make it manageable.
Like so many of us I am a news junkie, with many interests ranging from politics to people, technology to cricket, from movies to foreign policy and many more. I had this constant, almost manic fear of missing out on the latest and I absolutely wanted my daily fix of browsing through several websites which gave me enough fodder to feed my ravenous appetite for whats newsworthy.
However it was all becoming too difficult to manage, especially with the advent of blogs, which
added to things I had to keep up with.

I had no real system of keeping appointments.
One of my colleagues at work had his marriage about a month and a half ago. It was on a Saturday, and I was going to attend the marriage. However I just forgot ! It totally slipped out of my mind. I didnt make it . I only remembered on monday when i saw him that I was to attend his marriage the saturday before.

I didnt have one address book which was recent and kept upto date.
My cell phone decided to die one day and with it went away all the contact numbers and email addresses that I had. Woosh like that !

Bookmarks in multiple computers
I had bookmarks at my computer at home and at work. I wanted an automatic system which would keep them synchronized.

The personalization site lets you add RSS feeds (which are now offered by most news sites and blogs) of your choice , it has a very usable calendar for keeping appointments (where you can set up reminders too, and never forget any birthday again ), you can link up an address book to store all your contact information and to solve my last problem you also have a facility of having your bookmarks stored on the site itself .

In additon to what i mentioned above you can configure it to your local and personal settings so that you can have links to your local weather, TV listings of your favourite channels (which you can add to your calendar automatically too), stored locations for Yahoo Maps, show timings for theatres near you,stock quotes and a lot more.
Ofcourse you can access your Yahoo mail box and Yahoo messenger right from this page.

And all of the above can be on a single page giving you a one click access to all of these.
Needless to say it has made my chaotic life much more under control. Do try it out !
Its all free ofcourse :) ..
It would be interesting to know if anyone has tried similar services and what their experience was with them.


In relation to this I was thinking about Google's business model. What Yahoo has done very well as I have illustrated above is to intergrate all these services under a single log-in and a similar look and feel. However in contrast Google seems to have many (very good) disparate services, Google search, Blogger, Gmail , Keyhole and Orkut, but with no central philosophy, no single access point or layout. Google almost seems like a small excited kid buying up whatever it likes without any grand central scheme of things. In contrast, for example, Yahoo has bought two thick client email applications OddPost and Bloomba, but they have not yet made a hullabaloo about it.They ofcourse must be integrating it with Yahoo mail, and are playing the waiting game therefore.