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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Feb. 15

2012-02-15T05:01:00Z

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle, and the previous day’s answer (in invisitext) posted here.

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

You’ll find me with wings, overlooking the intersection of Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. What do I stand on?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (mouseover to see):

Search [Battle Born State] to learn that the state is Nevada. Search [Nevada sent Lincoln constitution] to find that Lincoln received Nevada’s entire constitution by telegraph. Why so much hurry? To help with Lincoln’s re-election and abolitionist causes!

Wired Opinion: Can Brands Become Money-Making Publishers Themselves?

2012-02-14T16:30:00Z

Major brands are slowly discovering that e-commerce may not be the only revenue stream the digital world has to offer them. There may be gold for them in advertising as well.

It has always been assumed by media industry pundits that brands could not become advertising-supported digital publishers because they did not reach enough eyeballs to make advertising financially meaningful to them. But that appears to be changing.

Take a look at the Comscore rankings for December 2011: Major brands are rapidly becoming publishers themselves. Amazon, E-Bay, Wal-Mart, Sears, Target, Best Buy, and AT&T have all moved into the top 50 U.S. online publishers. Of those seven, Amazon, E-Bay, Wal-Mart and Sears are already running ads on their websites.

It is true that these brands are nowhere close to the Facebooks, Googles, Microsofts and Yahoos of the world when it comes to advertising impressions and, no doubt, advertising revenue.

But these brands have been moving up the leaderboard for months and are now giving a number of other online publishers a serious run for their money, at least in terms of unique visitors and page views.

Consider that the seven brands listed above now represent 14 percent of the publishers in the Top 50 publishers in the United States, and all of these brands were basically nowhere to be found in the rankings a year ago.

In December, each of them finished higher in the Comscore rankings than premium advertising sites like Yelp, Scripps, Fox News, the Washington Post, IGN and the NFL.

It may seem obvious at first blush, but it makes perfect sense for brands to leverage their massive audiences to become advertising-supported publishers. These brands have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of advertising opportunities on their Web pages every month. Why not take advantage of those opportunities and pick up what could be found money?

Amazon, for example, has made a business out of listing and selling a wide range of products. Why shouldn’t it sell advertising on those same product pages? It would be kind of like those “end caps” at the supermarket: close to the context. Without the ad, maybe you wouldn’t have thought to buy that salsa otherwise. Let the best brands win, or at least, extract money from other brands to prominently advertise their wares.

And I’m sure that the big e-commerce sites like Amazon, E-Bay and Orbitz have figured out that the margins on advertising are a whole lot healthier than the razor-thin margins they get from selling retail products.

It would be foolhardy to think that advertising revenue on e-commerce sites would replace the product revenue anytime soon. But accepting advertising would provide these sites with another revenue stream and one with very high margins.

It is also worth pointing out that brands usually have a fair amount of first party data about the visitors to their web sites. Setting aside privacy issues, why wouldn’t Bank of America target Mercedes ads to its high net worth individuals and KIA ads to its savings account customers?

The democratizing force of the internet forced traditional publishers to scramble to compete online with new digital publishers who built their brands purely in cyberspace.

Yahoo owned the online news space more than a decade before the New York Times created digital subscriptions. The Huffington Post perfected the art of aggregation and community (some publishers would have other choice words for what Huffington did). And Pandora flipped the iTunes revolution with the oldest broadcast medium that still exists, offering music lovers the chance to create “ideal” radio stations.

So here’s a fresh example of the internet’s law of unintended consequences: corporations who never had an interest in publishing may find that there is money to be made by sharing their customers with other brands.

It’s not exactly Macy sending you to Gimbel’s, but it’s pretty damn close.

Up Your Game With Banned Sports Gear

2012-02-09T11:30:00Z

Up Your Game With Banned Sports Gear | Magazine | Wired.com

Photo: Jason Pietra

1// Heavy Metal Senior Hockey Stick
Perfect for: Getting a grip like Gretzky’s.
Geek factor: Banned by the NHL. Puck control is all in the wrist, and practicing with this heavy steel stick encourages muscle development to gain that control, helping players score between visits to the penalty box.
$235, Heavy Metal Senior Hockey Stick
2// Prince NXG Silencer Racket Dampener
Perfect for: Keeping your backhand rock solid.
Geek factor: Not yet approved by the ITF. Vibration is your enemy when...

Up Your Game With Banned Sports Gear | Magazine | Wired.com

Photo: Jason Pietra

1// Heavy Metal Senior Hockey Stick
Perfect for: Getting a grip like Gretzky’s.
Geek factor: Banned by the NHL. Puck control is all in the wrist, and practicing with this heavy steel stick encourages muscle development to gain that control, helping players score between visits to the penalty box.
$235, Heavy Metal Senior Hockey Stick
2// Prince NXG Silencer Racket Dampener
Perfect for: Keeping your backhand rock solid.
Geek factor: Not yet approved by the ITF. Vibration is your enemy when returning a 100-mph serve. This plastic clip-on, which fits all tennis rackets, reduces pesky string movement by more than 50 percent.
$3, Prince NXG Silencer Racket Dampener
3// Louisville Slugger SL12Z5 Z-1000 Composite Bat
Perfect for: Making pitchers cower in fear.
Geek factor: Banned by the NCAA. Aluminum and composite bats must adhere to rules on how quickly balls fly off them. Those that don’t, like this 32-inch, 24-ounce cudgel, are supposed to be used only during practice. Rules are for suckers.
$310, Louisville Slugger SL12Z5 Z-1000 Composite Bat
4// Polara Ultimate Straight Golf Balls
Perfect for: Slicing a few digits off your score.
Geek factor: Banned by the USGA. Dimples influence a golf ball’s flight, so Polara placed this orb’s 386 variously sized dents at strategic depths to minimize sidespin. The result: Hooks and slices cut by 75 percent.
$25 (box of 12), Polara Ultimate Straight Golf Balls
5// Spira Men’s Stinger XLT
Perfect for: Proving to your kid that you can still run (sort of) fast.
Geek factor: Tech not approved by the USATF. Elite runners can win or lose by a hundredth of a second. Spira says that its patented WaveSpring tech returns up to 96 percent of the force of each step, which might be just enough to help you finish first.
$130, Spira Men’s Stinger XLT

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Feb. 9

2012-02-09T05:01:00Z

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to...

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

If you live to be 110, how many times will you be able to see Uranus orbit the sun?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (mouseover to see):

Search [3-headed muscle radial nerve] to find that this is the triceps. Search [triceps overhead dumbbell extensions barbell curls] and read to learn that barbell curls work your biceps, while overhead extensions strengthen your triceps.

Homepage photo: NASA

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."
Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

Photographers: Chances Are, You Suck

2012-02-08T13:00:00Z

Chances are, you suck. Worse yet, nobody is going to tell you.

In the past, before the internet made us equal, your friends, the ones you had actually met in person, would let you know when your pictures didn’t quite cut it. Most of the time they wouldn’t even have to say anything.

You’d know it yourself as soon as you showed them.

Of course, plenty of other times they’d publicly bust your chops, but that was a different time. Before we all became so polite. Back when respect was something earned and not a right of birth.

Do you know that feeling? The one when you’re showing images to someone (perhaps an editor that you were hoping to work with) and you get to that picture, the one that looked perfectly acceptable moments before, but as soon as you show it, you’re filled with regret.

Yeah, I hate that feeling.

There are plenty of things photography-wise that I’m not very good at. I’m not great at creating images, but I’m pretty good at finding them. I’m terrible at self-promoting, marketing and the business stuff makes me squirm. Yet I’m a decent journalist, travel well and strangers often accept me into their lives. (Maybe I’ve got one of those faces).

There’s nothing really exceptional or surprising about that evaluation. It’s fairly common among photojournalists.

So that’s me, those are my strengths and weaknesses. I also publish too many pictures on my websites. I’d look better if I kept the numbers down, but this post isn’t about me. It’s about you and why you suck.

There’s nothing wrong with not being any good at photography. Everybody started out bad and none of us do all aspects of it well. But it’s a crying shame to want to be good at it, to spend time and money trying to be good at it, and not getting any better.

This isn’t like teaching a child to read. Positive reinforcement is your enemy. Your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers … hate you. Instead of taking 10 seconds to say, “This doesn’t work. You need to do better,” they readily push that “like” button because it’s easy and they hope to get the same from you. But also because they’re cowards.

They’re afraid of the internet mob. Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of a mob, so it’s easier to play nice. Go along to get along seems to be the secret to a happy online life.

The first night before a shoot, I never sleep. It could be something easy, a situation that I know will produce a good image, but that doesn’t help. Fear of failure is a great motivator. The trick is to use it to get as well prepared as you can possibly be, and then ignore it once the shooting starts.

You shouldn’t be afraid of risk, just failure. I suppose that’s another trick.

So how do you become a better photographer when you’re reinforced with so much unearned praise from your interent buddies? What’s your motivation, to get a hundred likes instead of just 10? There’s an easy recipe for that. Start making pictures of cats. Better yet, kittens … kittens and children. You’ll soon be more awesome than you could possible imagine.

I only bring this up, because I stumble upon (as do you) so many Facebook groups (or other social networking sites) that are just filled with hideous images underscored with meaningless praise. I find it depressing. If nothing is bad, can anything be good?

More depressing, Google “great photography.” Better yet, don’t. Some things, once seen cannot be unseen (either me or Gandalf said that first).

There are some sites that are doing an amazing job at publishing great photography. If you want to become a better photographer, look at these sites. When looking at the work, ask yourself, “How would I have approached this situation?” and/or “Would I have done better or worse than this photographer?” Also pay attention to simple technical things, like what shutter speed or aperture was used.

Navigating the Legality of Autonomous Vehicles

2012-02-07T11:35:00Z

I wasn’t long in the backseat of Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius, cruising smoothly down California Highway 85, before a sober, gray-flannel question pierced my giddy techno-utopian buzz: Is this legal?

On principle, it would seem downright churlish to penalize Google’s upstanding Prius — which kept letter-perfect lane position, following distance and speed-limit compliance — while all around us human drivers committed a panoply of illegal acts: talking on their phones, speeding, changing lanes without signaling, tailgating, you name it.

But what does the law say about autonomous vehicles?

“The law in California is silent, it doesn’t address it,” Google’s Anthony Levandowski told me. “The key thing is staying within the law — there’s a always a person behind the wheel, the person in the seat is still the driver, they set the speed, they’re ready to take over if anything goes wrong.”

Ryan Calo, who studies, among other things, the legal aspects of robotics at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, notes, “generally speaking, something is lawful unless it is unlawful — that’s the whole idea of having a system of so-called ‘negative liberties.’”

He has parried on this issue with economist Tyler Cowen, who counters with one local driving code, which states “No person shall operate a motor vehicle upon the streets of the city without giving full time and attention to the operation of the vehicle.” And yet by this definition alone there was nothing illegal about what the Google engineers, sitting up front and busily monitoring the Prius’ various operations, were doing. They were within both the spirit and letter of the law.

In fact, you could argue they were paying more attention than any of the drivers around us.

One reason Google’s autonomous Prius was not unlawful is autonomous vehicles have not been on society’s radar — or roads. As with drivers talking on cellphones (or any number of Internet issues) legislation tends to follow the adoption of new technology. Google, of course, isn’t taking chances and sent representatives to Nevada, which has a history of autonomous vehicle testing, to lobby in favor of Assembly Bill 511. The law “requires the Department of Motor Vehicles to adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada.” It defines an autonomous vehicle as “a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator.”

As at least one commentator has noted, although the bill defines artificial intelligence as “the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings,” many modern cars already do this, in any number of ways: Adaptive cruise control, anti-lock braking, lane-departure warning systems, self-parking, even adaptive headlights.

One of Google's autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids struts its stuff. Photo: jurvetson/Flickr

So is Nevada simply reaffirming what’s on the road, or raising the specter that existing in-car technologies would be subject to the requirements laid out in the draft regulations? For example, would the requirement that “prior to testing, each person must be trained to operate the autonomous technology, and must be instructed on the autonomous technology’s capabilities and limitations” apply to someone test-driving a new Mercedes-Benz?

Calo doesn’t think so.

“It sets out a definition of autonomous technology that is based in part on the statutory definition of autonomous vehicle that the legislature gave to the DMV, and then it very explicitly excludes essentially all of the individual technologies that are commercially available today,” he says. “It’s an open question if it would exclude them in their combination or in their particular uses but it reflects the DMV’s effort to say no, no, no, we’re really not talking about things you can buy today, we’re really not talking about the driver assistive technologies, we’re talking about autonomous in its extreme sense.”

Welcome to the brave new world of autonomous vehicle law. When the rules become official, Nevada will become the first state to broach the subject (largely thanks to Google’s influence). But as increasingly autonomous technologies enter our cars, the legal questions, liability in particular, have grown more relevant. As a report by the RAND Corporation notes, “As these technologies increasingly perform complex driving functions, they also shift responsibility for driving from the driver to the vehicle itself…. [W]ho will be responsible when the inevitable crash occurs, and to what extent? How should standards and regulations handle these systems?”

But the legal picture is still incredibly murky. For one, standards for many of these systems are still evolving, and there’s a certain level of mystery regarding their performance and their performance failures. Consider, for example, that it took the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and NASA investigators months of involved study to determine that the notorious Toyota unintentional acceleration incidents were less likely an electronic malfunction and “most likely the result of pedal entrapment by a floor mat [holding] the accelerator pedal in an open throttle position.”

“In the slipstream of this uncertainty,” Dutch researchers Rob van der Heijden and Kiliaan van Wees note in an article in the European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, “another source of uncertainty concerns doubts on whether legal regimes are adequate to cope with ADAS [advanced driver assist systems] or that they might create problems with regard to their development and implementation.” The fear of product liability always looms as an obstacle to innovation in the auto industry (and liability is a particularly American issue; one study noted that in 1992, Ford was hit with more than 1,000 product liability in suits in the United States and exactly one in Europe). As Rand notes, automakers initially opposed air bags because they worried about shifting responsibility from drivers to themselves; Calo points out that people have sued when a car in a crash does not have an air bag “because someone said at this price point you should have an airbag.”

It’s not hard to spin complicated crash scenarios involving autonomous vehicles and the tangled webs of post-event liability. Take a scenario envisioned by Rand: “Suppose that most cars brake automatically when they sense a pedestrian in their path. As more cars with this feature come to be on the road, pedestrians may expect that cars will stop, in the same way that people stick their limbs in elevator doors confident that the door will automatically reopen.”

But what if some cars don’t have this feature (and given the average age spread of the U.S. car fleet, it’s not hard to imagine a gulf in capabilities), and one of them strikes a pedestrian who wasn’t aware the car lacked this technology? If a judgment is found in favor of the pedestrian, are we encouraging people to be less careful? Or simply hastening the onset of universal pedestrian-crash avoidance features in cars? As Calo asks, “do we force the vehicles to adapt to our legal regime, to our motor vehicle code that sets out what is reasonably prudent or what a vehicle must do?” Or, he asks, “do we make some changes to these legal and social infrastructures to incentivize or encourage or speed up the adaptation of autonomous technology.”

Imagine another scenario: What if a driver in a car that uses lane markings to maintain its position goes off the road on a section where the markings have worn away? Is the local department of transportation at fault? Or the manufacturer of the road striping paint whose product didn’t last as long as promised? Or the automaker for not having a more robust backup system? Or the driver for failing to maintain the necessary vigilance? As der Heijden and van Wees write, “under fault-liability regimes drivers and vehicle owners will not be liable if they acted as a careful person.” But what’s the definition of a careful person in an autonomous vehicle? How could we prove ex post facto they were monitoring the car’s performance and not simply daydreaming?

Or what if the autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle is a Mercedes-Benz using a hypothetical Google geolocation product and it crashes into a barrier while headed for an off-ramp because it misjudged its location? Is fault attributed to Mercedes (acting on the information), or Google (providing the information), or the driver for not correcting for the error?

An interesting and related area of inquiry here is product liability in the case of crashes that occurred as drivers were given incorrect coordinates by navigation systems. As legal scholar John Woodward notes in an article in the Dayton Law Review, finding fault in that case requires not only locating the source of the malfunction (software, hardware, or a triangulation snafu involving a wayward satellite in the heavens), but ascertaining whether the navigation instructions doled out by GPS constitute a product or a service — which would render product liability claims moot.

Observers like Rand are optimistic that it all will be sorted out, and that liability concerns will not hold up the adoption of safety-oriented autonomous technologies.

“On the contrary,” they argue, “the decrease in the number of crashes and the associated lower insurance costs that these technologies are expected to bring about will encourage drivers and automobile-insurance companies to adopt this technology.”

Photo: Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval took a spin in one of Googles autonomous cars on July 20, 2011 in Carson City. He called the experience “amazing.” Sandra Chereb/Associated Press

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Feb. 2

2012-02-02T05:01:00Z

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

What job did Poor Richard’s first-born son take that effectively ended their relationship?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER :

Search [Europe’s largest parliament building] to find the Hungarian Parliament Building. Search [Hungarian coat of arms] to learn that the item is the Hungarian Crown, which is housed in the Parliament Building.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 31

2012-01-31T05:01:00Z

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Did Florida vote for the last elected U.S. president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (mouseover to see):

Use Google Translate to learn that “Ritter” means knight. Translate “chevalier” to confirm that “knight” is the answer.

A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 26

2012-01-26T05:01:00Z

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2 dxc4 5.Nf3 Be7. What is the ECO code of this opening?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (mouseover to see):

Search [arrested by Catholic church 1633 pardoned 1992] to find that this was Galileo. Search for [Galileo story stone scrolls] and find that Vicenzo Viviani had Galileo’s life story written on huge stone scrolls at his Palazzo dei Cartelloni.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 25

2012-01-25T05:01:00Z

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

I was arrested by the Inquisition in 1633 and then pardoned by the Catholic Church in 1992. One of my students had my story written in stone scrolls at his castle. What was my student’s name?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (mouseover to see):

Search [terrapin stew inaugural ball] to learn that terrapin stew was served at President Lincoln’s 1865 inaugural ball. Searching [1865 inaugural ball location] yields the U.S. Patent Office.