This week in search 2/28/10

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week, we had a number of exciting announcements:

Refine your searches by location
Location can tremendously aid the way you search, so we were pleased to add the ability to refine your searches by location to the Search Options panel. Say you're big on the outdoors and want to find bike rental information, bicycling blogs or the closest sporting goods store. There's a good chance you're looking for information that's relevant to your region, city or even a city you're visiting on vacation. That's where this tool can help. One of the really useful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding a city name (e.g., "Berkeley") to your query and missing webpages that are in a similar region (e.g., "East Bay", "Oakland") but might not specifically mention the city in your search.

Example search: [bike stores] - Click on "Show options" to adjust the location. You can narrow the location down to near you, the city you're in, the region or state. You can also select "Custom Location" and enter it directly.

Fetch as Googlebot Mobile added to Webmaster Tools Labs
Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs, and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we're happy to introduce an additional Labs feature to our line-up: the ability to fetch pages as Googlebot-Mobile.

This was a common request from users with mobile-specific sites, and we thought it was a great idea. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites) and XHTML/WML. We're excited to bring you this feature based on your feedback, and we look forward to launching more of them in future. Let us know what you think!


Facebook in real-time search
Starting this week we added Facebook content to real-time search in the U.S. Real-time search, which we launched in December, helps you tap into the most relevant, freshest search results on the web, many of which are just seconds old. With this latest addition, you can access the news, photos and blog posts that Facebook fan pages publish to the world. You can find the Facebook Pages updates in our real-time mode by clicking on "Show Options" and then "Latest" or "Updates."

Example search: [facebook]

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more next week!

Posted by Gabriel Stricker, Director, Global Communications & Public Affairs

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David Hume on Religion (Part 1): Terminology, Structure and Interpretation

This post in part of my short series on David Hume's critique of religion. For an index see here.

As mentioned in the index, I am working off an article by J.C.A. Gaskin from the Cambridge Companion to Hume. Gaskin begins his article with an overview of the terminology, structure and interpretation of Hume's critique. I follow suit in this part.

1. Terminology
Hume's writings on religion follow the terminology of such debates as it was in his lifetime. This may be confusing to the modern reader. So it is necessary to provide a short bluffer's guide to the somewhat recondite language.

a. Type of Information
The first set of definitions relate to the different types of religious information to which we have access. The first type is that emanating from natural theology. This is the application of reason and logic to observations of the natural world.

The second type is revelation. This is the information which God has revealed to humankind. There are two varieties of revelation: (i) general and (ii) particular. General revelation comes from everyday experience of the presence of god; particular revelation comes from supposedly historical documents such as the bible.

b. Types of Argument
The second set of definitions relates to the different types of argument one encounters in religious philosophy. Nothing too spectacular here, just a distinction between a priori arguments and a posteriori arguments. Hume deals with the latter.

c. Types of Belief
The third set of distinction all relate to the type of belief one has. Deism rejects the existence of an interventionist god but accepts the existence of some divine creating intelligence. Providence accepts the existence of an interventionist God. Hume appears to have objected to being labelled a deist and was certainly not a providentialist.

Two corruptions of religious belief were discussed in Hume's day: (i) supernaturalism and (ii) enthusiasm. Supernaturalism is a state of emotional dread or fear that arises from ignorance and melancholy, and manifests itself in ceremonies, observances and sacrifices. Enthusiasm is equivalent to what we would now call fundamentalism.

Finally, we have fideism: belief grounded in faith, not reason. Hume's critique of early modern philosophical reason is often thought to mandate fideism.


2. The Structure of Hume's Critique
I mentioned this in the index, but a little repetition never hurt anyone. Hume adopts a two-pronged assault on religious belief. First, he critiques the standard reasons and arguments offered for the existence of god. Once he has effectively demolished these arguments, he moves on to consider why religious belief persists in the absence of a sound intellectual foundation.

Hume's critique is spread out over several works. His Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding contains his famous criticisms of belief in miracles and a first-airing of his criticisms of the design argument. These criticisms are more fully developed in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which is arguably his best work on religion. His explanation of the persistence of religious belief is contained in Natural History of Religion. Several other essays cover religious topics, such as "Of Suicide" and "On the Immortality of the Soul".

It should also be noted that Hume's work, taken as a whole, advances a deeply sceptical attitude to all knowledge claims. This supports and complements his work targeting religion. Indeed, it may be the extension of the sceptical approach into the domain of religion that is Hume's most original contribution to philosophy. After all, many of his predecessors promoted sceptical arguments (Decartes and Berkeley spring to mind). But they all rescued objective knowledge by grounding it in God; Hume made this an illegitimate move.


3. Interpretation of Hume
One thing that is never clear from Hume's work is the actual content of his religious beliefs. It may seem that someone who advances such a rigorous scepticism is an obvious candidate for atheism. But Hume, famously, nearly always followed his sceptical arguments with apparent professions of piety. For example, after demolishing the design argument he says no one can doubt the existence of supreme intelligent force.

Gaskin suggests that Hume is clearly adopting a prudential irony in these passages: his professions of piety are attempts to protect his reputation in an era in which public pronouncements of atheism would have been dangerous. Nevertheless, Hume does not seem to embrace a complete atheism: his scepticism would appear to extend to professions of negative belief as well.

In conclusion, Hume would appear to be a practical atheist, but an intellectual agnostic.

Hobbes on Lust

As a coda to my recent entries on the morality of sex, I thought I might share this quote from Thomas Hobbes on lust.

Hobbes is, of course, known for his pessimistic attitude toward human nature. And yet for all that he appears to be lust-loving humanist at heart. (Quote is from The Elements of Law Natural and Politic 1994, OUP, p. 55)

The appetite which men call LUST . . . is a sensual pleasure, but not only that; there is, in it, also a delight of the mind: for it consisteth of two appetites together, to please and to be pleased; and the delight men take in delighting, is not sensual, but a pleasure or joy of the mind, consisting in the imagination of the power they have so much to please.

So we see here that Hobbes saw the sexual act as not simply an expression of animal instincts, but as an intellectual act of moral reciprocation. An act in which the humanity of the other person is appreciated.

I mention this simply because, in his article on sexual morality, Belliotti argued in favour of a Kantian approach to sex. This required the existence of a hypothetical sexual contract that did not commodify the parties to the contract, but recognised their moral agency. It appears that Hobbes got there first.

I read A.P. Martinich's biography of Hobbes some years back, and I can't recall many details emerging about Hobbes's sex life. He certainly wasn't married and died without heirs, as far as I recall.

David Hume on Religion (Index)

Not only was Hume one of the greatest philosophers of all time, he also seems to have been a great guy. You certainly get that impression on reading about his jovial attitude towards his own demise in Boswell or in letters from his close friend Adam Smith. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if I could aspire to be like anyone it would be David Hume.

Apart from the unhealthy adoration which his writings instill in me (one should never really aspire to be like another), Hume was perhaps the quintessential religious sceptic. He articulated a devastating critique of religious belief that remains cogent to this day. 

If you are yet to read the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion then you are seriously missing out. I always like to imagine myself a participant at the after dinner conversation imagined therein. Nothing can beat that: good food, congenial surroundings, intelligent companions and intelligent debate. Actually one thing can beat that: when you "win" the debate with a combination of wit, charm, logic and evidence (in that order).

Hume's religious critique was a total critique. Like everything that he did, Hume approached religion with the equivalent of an intellectual pincer movement. The first arm of the pincer took on the arguments in favour of religious belief. In particular, Hume targeted the design argument, the argument from revelation and miracles, and the argument from morality. The second arm of the pincer tried to explain the persistence of religious belief in psychological and cultural terms.

I want to give an overview of Hume's attack on religion in the next few posts. To help me accomplish this, I will rely on the article "Hume on Religion" by J. C. A. Gaskin in the wonderful Cambridge Companion to Hume.

Gaskin's article is divided into two main sections. The first section covers the terminology, structure and interpretation of Hume's critique; the second section gives a summary of Hume's main arguments against religious belief. I will follow Gaskin's order in subsequent entries.

Index

1. Terminology, Structure and Interpretation

2. The Design Argument

3. The Credentials of Revelation

4. The Religious Perversion of Morality

5. Natural Belief

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On line layout generator tool for WeBloggers

Here is a link to a layout generator, that I found that I thought might be of interest to alot of you bloggers out-there. On this blog you will come to find all sorts of different items that can be of use to you all so I hope you all enjoy visiting my blog and I sincerely hope you all will leave comments if you like or dislike this blog. There are more interesting and different things to come. So do stop by and check out what is happening in Cyberspace. I do the search for you so you don't have to. Its simple to use for those who want to design and generate a 2 - Colum Layout or a 3 - Colum layout. Go and check it out Firdamatic™ is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customise layouts easily only by completing forms, making creating skins for your Firdamatic-based layout a breeze. This tool is available for free for personal/non-commercial use only and comes with no technical support as my interest in web design has died down. Use it at your own risk. If you find it useful, please consider making a donation.........................
Be Sure to Leave Your Comments! Also be sure to subscribe to my feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/dotblogger and Follow Me on Googles Friends connection Recommend @lilruth to @MrTweet on Twitter....VOTE FOR ME at http://bloginterviewer.com/animals/dogcents-ruth

Sex by Raymond Belliotti (Part Two)

This post is part of my series on the Blackwell Companion to Ethics. This entry is my second on the article about the ethics of sex by Raymond Belliotti.

In Part One, I covered Belliotti's discussion of the historical views on sexual morality. In this part I cover contractarian approaches, along with some critiques from the political left.


The Informed Consent Model
Before getting into the philosophical details, let's just set the scene by imagining a caricatured example of casual sexual congress. It's a Saturday night. Young (and not so young) men and women are gathering in gloomy pubs and nightclubs, tempted by the prospect of carnal interactions with the opposite sex.

Let's take two of these individuals (say, male and female as a bow to the heterosexual majority) for illustrative purposes. They meet, talk inanely, drink, dance and retire to one of their places of residence. To describe the remainder of their evening, I'll hand things over to Simon Blackburn:

The boy and girl back from the bar, stumbling and stripping in the hall, tongues lolling and panting for "it," know what they want. It's simple enough. They want sex.

So what are we to make of this? Is their sexual encounter morally acceptable?

For the contractarian, the answer is simple. As long as both parties know what they are about, and both consent to the activities, their sexual encounter is morally acceptable. We can call this the "informed consent model". This seems to chime well with moral intuitions. For instance, the crime of rape is defined as sexual penetration without consent.


Kantian Modification
Belliotti thinks the contractarian model just described is libertarian in form. It permits an excessive commodification of the human body. He illustrates his concern with the example of someone agreeing to sever their finger in order to please a sadist. For a real life example, I suggest you read about Armin Meiwes, the infamous German cannibal whose victim agreed to be eaten.

Belliotti suggests we cannot agree with this level of commodification. He thus argues for a Kantian modification of libertarian contractualism. This modification would force us to consider the other party to the contract as a complete moral agent and not simply as a means to your own gratification. In other words, we accept the basic merit of the contractual approach but adds a need for moral reciprocity.

Although this Kantian modification is Belliotti's preferred approach to sexual morality, he admits that it is always somewhat fictional. In the sweaty, fumbling urgency of the one night stand, no one stops to formulate a contract (oral or written) that could be morally significant.



Marxist and Feminist Critiques
Traditional heterosexual sex is often criticised by those of the political left. Most prominent among them are the Marxists and Feminists (indeed feminist critiques owe much to Marxist theory). How could they object to good clean fun between consenting adults?

Easy, by arguing that the consent is the product of indoctrination in a particular bourgeois or patriarchal ideology. For Marxists, sex within the bourgeois family is merely a form of prostitution and exploitation. Legitimate heirs are needed to perpetuate the system of private property. So, women are deliberately excluded from the public sphere and limited in their sexual freedom in order to prop up capitalism.

For Feminists, the position is similar. Catherine MacKinnon argues that women are simply socialised to meet the sexual wants and needs of their male oppressors. In doing so, MacKinnon seeks to unmask the political implications of sex. The most extreme expression of this philosophy is the lesbian separatist movement within radical feminism (e.g. Jill Johnston). They argue that lesbianism is the only way to undermine the patriarchy.

The following are some critical questions that can asked of radical feminism (they can be modified to embrace Marxism):

• Is it really true that men are capable of nothing but oppression and exploitation?
• Does radical feminism demean women by suggesting they can never be autonomous or exercise informed consent?
• Does it too readily assume that sexual activity is the core aspect of feminine identity?
• Is it impossible to argue with? If we assume people are indoctrinated into an ideology, we assume they can never be sincere if they claim to embrace this ideology. 
• How did radical feminists manage to escape indoctrination?

And with that, I call this entry to a close.

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Refine your searches by location

Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we've added the ability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and missing webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities." Check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."


You can choose to see results nearby either your default location or a custom location, and you can narrow down to results at the city, region or state level. Try these examples:

[things to do on st. patrick's day] - In the Minneapolis region
[food blogs] - Near you
[farmers market] - Near the city of Ithaca
[dmv] - In the same state as Tucson

The new "Nearby" search option is available now on the google.com domain in English.

Posted by Jackie Bavaro, Product Manager

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A meeting of the minds: Google's 2010 EMEA Faculty Summit

As the world's premier athletes assembled in Vancouver for the Winter Games, Googlers in the equally snowy Zurich, Switzerland were preparing for a prestigious event of a different sort. On February 8, 100 top academics from 62 leading universities throughout EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) descended upon our Zurich engineering headquarters for our third annual Faculty Summit — three days of in-depth technical presentations, discussions and networking sessions, all targeted at strengthening partnerships with EMEA's foremost computer science thinkers. Like their athletic counterparts in Vancouver, Faculty Summit attendees face big challenges. EMEA is a huge and very diverse region where companies and universities alike have huge mountains to climb. By sharing information about our projects, plans and initiatives, we hope to foster mutually beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities — working together to solve the big problems and drive technology forward.


We designed the Summit to allow maximum potential for debate, networking and reflection. Attendees participated in day-long "stream" discussions on themes ranging from privacy and security — with the participation of leading researchers such as Ross Anderson (University of Cambridge) — to natural language technologies, featuring NLP expert Fred Jelinek (Johns Hopkins University). Academics selected from a range of opt-in "teach the teacher"-style workshops on Google tech (including mobile platforms, MapReduce and web technologies). Additional events included a Google Wave demo geared towards educational use and special sessions for guests from Africa and the Middle East, showcasing Google's ongoing work in these regions. This year, we added extra time for 1-1 break-out sessions, in which academics and Google engineers met, chatted and developed ideas in an intimate, face-to-face setting.

The Summit also gave us a chance to see long-term relationships maturing and generating concrete outcomes inside and outside academic settings. Notable guests included keynote speaker Professor Andy Hopper, Head of the Cambridge Computer Lab, whose research initiative Computing for the Future of the Planet (CFTFP) received a Google Focused Research Award earlier this month. Andy's project promises major results in the areas of privacy and green computing research. We were also happy to welcome back former Google Visiting Faculty member Professor Hannah Bast (University of Freiburg). Hannah recently completed a year-long sabbatical with our Zurich development team for Transit in Google Maps, contributing major improvements to an application that started out as a 20 percent project and is now available in over 400 cities around the world. Privacy and security expert Dr. Frank Stajano (University of Cambridge) — our newest Visiting Faculty member — and Sara Adams, Anita Borg Scholar, former Google intern and current software engineer, joined us from the Munich office where they're working on privacy-related projects. We also had several Faculty Research Award winners in attendance, including Dr. Simon Harper (University of Manchester), Dr. Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh), Lawrence Muchemi (University of Nairobi) and former Visiting Faculty member Dr. Hinrich Schuetze (University of Stuttgart). The Faculty Research Award supports academics working within universities on areas of mutual interest; for instance, Lawrence's Award-funded project creates a new mobile application development course for Kenyan students, while Hinrich and his Stuttgart team are improving search engine results by investigating the structure of queries. Hinrich, Lawrence and our other awardees offer examples of how partnerships can lead to amazing results, on local to global scales. We hope their stories inspired both academic and Googler attendees to take advantage of existing programs and help build new opportunities for all tech users.

Our engineering teams in EMEA and our academic partners have lots of work to do in 2010. This year's Faculty Summit offered an opportunity to explore new solutions, kick-start collaboration and prove, yet again, that our combined efforts always yield results far greater than the sum of their parts! For more information about how Google supports university programs and partnerships, check out our Google Research site and stay tuned for news of the North America Faculty Summit — planned for late July.

Posted by Nelson Mattos, VP, EMEA Product and Engineering

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Review: Bioshock 2

You guys may not know this, but I've got a daughter. Her name is Eleanor. She's smart, precocious, crafty, has a penchant for getting into my head, and can kick ass when I need her to. She learns from me and grows with me.

But someone’s got her captive. So I'm going to level an entire city to save her.

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That's the premise of Bioshock 2, which is immediately a much more personal story for the player than the first game. In Bioshock 1, you "chance" upon a beautiful, haunting world that is falling apart, and learn how it has come to be this way. You listen to people talk about ideals, capitalism, communism, the Self, and politics, but you never truly feel like its your own story.

In the second game, you need to save you daughter, plain and simple. Everything you do and everything presented to you in this game is geared to this end.

You play the iconic Big Daddy and so have access to the most important character in the city of Rapture, the Little Sister. Whilst on your quest to save Eleanor, you'll come across Little Sisters attached to other Big Daddies. If you want Adam (the juju that'll make you stronger) you need to get that little girl. So far, same as the first game. Kill Big Daddy, then take little girl.


But where it gets interesting is that harvesting/rescuing the Little Sister there and then will not produce much Adam. Instead, you can take her with you until a corpse is spotted filled with more juju. This is where it gets fun. Set her down to collect the stuff and watch the splicers (the game's common enemies, bottom-feeders of Rapture) come out of the woodwork to grab her.

It's your job to defend the Little Sister until she finishes collecting the Adam. It's a phenomenally challenging experience; the game ramping up the chaotic tension almost instantly with multiple bad guys coming at you from all sides, throwing everything from fireballs, to hot lead, to grenades. It's not for the faint of heart.

Twitch-skills are not enough. Splicers, and later, brutes and prototype Big Daddies take a lot to kill, so it's a case of juggling all your skills at once, finding the right combination of plasmids and weapons. But as punishing as the combat can get, playing smart will get you through just about anything. It also emphasizes the need for survival - searching every little nook and cranny for extra ammo, researching, hacking shops to lower prices, and using traps to take out enemies so you don't have to waste any bullets.


Where fighting Big Daddies in Bioshock 1 was just a case of shooting them dead before they come charging at you down cramped corridors, Bioshock 2 excels for offering gamers much greater freedom to devise strategies against their foes. Environments are varied with open spaces and bottlenecks, have natural sweet spots for traps/defensive maneuvers, so there's no excuse to go into a fight unprepared. Juggling multiple abilities and weapons is definitely hard at first but once you get the hang of it, I cannot stress enough how fun the combat is. Bioshock 2 is truly the thinking man’s shooter.

And then you have the new Big Sisters. Big Sisters are grown-up Little Sisters jacked on plasmids, incredibly fast, and are the most formidable mini-bosses in the game, definitely striking fear in my heart each time they come around. When you've successfully harvested/rescued all the Little Sisters in a given level, one will appear out of nowhere, shooting fireballs and use telekinesis to throw large rocks at your face. So collecting Adam to power up is now a more difficult process: kill a Big Daddy to get Little Sister, defend Little Sister, and kill Big Sister. But the pay-off is worth it and it prolongs the game in a good way.

More about the story. The basic plot is that you need to save your daughter from the clutches of her mother, Sofia Lamb, who has taken over Andrew Ryan as top villain. She brainwashes people to her cult in an aim to create a new utopia and spews out lots of her personal ideologies which, whilst interesting to hear at first, soon becomes tiresome. Also, Sofia Lamb’s love for her own daughter Eleanor is warped, wanting to turn the poor, innocent girl into some relic of ultimate power.


Frankly, the story is not as complex as the one found in the first game. Nor is it anything completely new. It's more of a different perspective presented on the decline of Rapture. It's interesting to note that, though Sofia Lamb is a ruthless woman capable of making people suffer to further her own cause, she is essentially a megalomaniac trying to take over a "sinking ship". That she seems oblivious to this fact makes me pity her more. But really, the only thing that matters is that Lamb is using Eleanor against her will, and that will not stand in my book.

And those who couldn't get enough of Andrew Ryan will be happy to know he makes a post-humus cameo appearance through some audio logs early on in the game. It's nice to listen to some of his more personal entries, like his contemplation on whether or not to have a child. The writers at 2K are good at creating characters that are wholly human. As opposed to being one-dimensionally evil, the villains are instead deeply flawed, warped by their own desires and fears.

Also, unlike the first game, there aren't any "OMG WTF" surprises at the end; more of a quiet "Ah, I see" kinda' revelation. It's still good though, toning down the intellectually high-brow subtexts for a more poignant commentary on family and parenthood.

Not only is your role as a father emphasized by the protecting of little girls/saving your daughter, the game adds elements that further drills this responsibility into your brain. Like how as you progress through Rapture, you can follow the audio logs of one Mark Meltzer; someone from the surface who has his daughter kidnapped and taken to Rapture. The search for his missing daughter undoubtedly parallels your own.


Fans of the first game will be delighted with Bioshock 2’s reveal on the origins of Big Daddies and Little Sisters. A story that is both tragic and endearing, especially with the clever twist of gameplay near the end. As you care for Little Sisters, they’ll chirp in adoration of you, "No one is better than MY Daddy", "Are you going to take care of me, Daddy?" And they giggle with glee as you lay waste to the splicers, all for their sake. It's strangely encouraging.

Unfortunately, the most important aspect of the story: that of your daughter and you, I honestly found to be the most tenuous. Sure, Eleanor is my daughter and I'm supposed to save her but the game's writers didn't play up enough of that relationship. She flits in and out of my consciousness to speak with me, drops off surprise gifts to help in my battle against evil, and is generally a sweet girl... but I didn't feel all that moved by her.

Maybe I'm just cold-hearted, or not old enough yet to realize the beauty of having kids (or too cynical about it, for that matter), but whatever it was, I wanted Bioshock 2 to make me feel more like Liam Neeson in Taken. It was only towards the end of the game that my relationship with Eleanor started to take on a kick-ass dimension. Granted, I did feel a twinge of pride at something cool she did, "that's my daughter, right there".


I think the most important thing about Bioshock 2 is the impact on choices you make throughout. The choices aren’t as ground-shaking as in Mass Effect 2, but whether you choose to rescue or harvest Little Sisters, kill or not kill certain people, etc. is going to change the way the last half hour or so of the game plays out. Especially the ending, which there are about four dramatic and different ones in total. It is definitely less artificial then the choice-consequence mechanic in Bioshock 1. This is also where the twist is revealed, tying in cleverly to the overarching idea of parenthood.

Graphics may have gotten a new sheen of gloss, but for the most part, looks the same as Bioshock 1. Which is to say, it's still damn pretty. Rapture is even more richly crafted, highly detailed, with lots of secrets for the intrepid explorer to uncover. Water is as watery as ever, no qualms there. Overall the graphics may not be the best around, but it does the job. The only issue I have, that may affect some people and not others, which was also the case in the first game, is that there were too many contrasting strong colors in some levels that it may disorientate, making it harder to navigate.

Sound is great; the voice-acting superb, all characters are delectably interesting to listen to. Though some people, i.e. Sofia Lamb can start to grate after awhile. She keeps saying stuff like how she's going to kill me, or that I'm lame, a blight on the people, blah blah blah. Say something interesting for a change, or shut up bitch. And honestly, Andrew Ryan is a heck load cooler a villain than Sofia Lamb. Kudos to whoever played Augustus Sinclair though, that guy is awesome in his slimy, snake-oil salesman-like voice.


Music-wise, a highlight would be whenever you hunker down for the Little-Sister-defense bits, there is a cacophony of violins like an Alfred Hitchcock movie which is exciting in a heart-attack inducing kinda' way. And I just love period music, with its mellow jazz singers over languid trombones and pianos.

In conclusion, Bioshock 2 is a sequel-worthy game. 2K Marin did an amazing job balancing between great entertainment with a solid, free-form shooter, as well as presenting thought-provoking art. The plot may be simpler, but no less compelling. In fact, because it's a more personal story, I enjoyed this one better than the first game. So definitely a must play for the fans, and for newcomers, they'll be impressed by how different this is from a lot of other shooters out there. Bioshock 2 is a striking beacon of brilliance in a sea of shooter monotony.

PS. Not on a totally separate note, you folks should check out this song by Sade off her new album, called Babyfather. I reckon 2K Marin should've got it playing as the credits rolled. It's bittersweet and totally in line with what Bioshock 2 is trying to tell us.

Your daddy knows you're a flame,
For you, he's the best he can be,
Oh, child don't you know,
Your daddy love come with a life time guarantee...

Now Playing: Passage in 10 seconds

Back in July last year, I played this awesome indie game by artist Jason Rohrer, called The Passage. Profound stuff, and totally worth everybody's time (my review of it here).

Now Marcus Richert, an independent flash dev/journalist has distilled the entire experience into 10 seconds. Albeit with tongue-in-cheek added. If you've played The Passage, this'll amuse you. If you haven't, play that first before you play this.

Oh what the heck, play this now if you want.

News: Bioshock 2's Collector's Edition spooks

Spotted this on Rock, Paper, Shotgun who picked it up straight from the source: a Bioshock 2 fan with a Collector's Ed copy comes home in the dark to an interesting surprise!

A lot of publishers keen to keep retail sales alive are willing to throw Collector's Edition stuff at fans, ranging from the simple like artbooks to outlandish like Modern Warfare's 2 fully-functioning night vision goggles. But I have to say, 2K's glorious art-deco posters with deadly secrets to hide, takes the cake for sheer creativity and relevance to the game.

Videos and photos below.

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http://s844.photobucket.com/albums/ab6/BioshockFan52/Hidden Message/?action=view&current=MVI_0777.flv



http://s844.photobucket.com/albums/ab6/BioshockFan52/Hidden Message/?action=view&current=MVI_0778.flv

Creepy, very creepy. Photos here.

BioShock 2 Games for Boys

BioShock 2 Games for Boys

BioShock 2 Computer Games

BioShock 2 Games to Play

Serious threat to the web in Italy

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that's where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel - Europe, Middle East and Africa

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Update

Don't worry, I haven't abandoned this blog. I'm exceptionally busy at the moment trying to write my PhD thesis. I'll have to be more modest in my posting schedule over the next few months. But I will still try to get stuff up a couple of times a week.

Also, I appear to be getting constant hits from the same google images search (unknown browser, unknown location). I have removed the image, but it hasn't stopped the constant hits. Does anybody who is more knowledgeable than I know how to stop this, or whether I should even care?

The next generation of ad serving for online publishers

Today, we're announcing the next generation of ad serving technology for online publishers — DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both.

For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content.

Imagine you're a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser may want to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii may want to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.
• A fast-food restaurant wants to run their burger ads before noon and their pizza ads in the afternoon.
• You've sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.
• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn't predict this, so you're potentially left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network which has ads available.

This is really just scratching the surface. Managing ad space can involve faxes, emailed orders, the manual scheduling of different ad campaigns across multiple sites and difficult decisions about how to allocate ad space most effectively.

Major online publishers use ad serving technology to manage the complex process of how and when the ads they have sold appear on their websites. In recent years, we've invested significantly in our ad serving products — DoubleClick's DART for Publishers for large publishers and Google Ad Manager for growing publishers. Thousands of major online publishers use these products to serve billions of ad impressions every day.

But we see an opportunity to improve ad serving even further by combining Google's technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick's display advertising and ad serving experience. Since we acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, our engineering and product teams have been working with online publishers to tackle the obstacles that prevent them from maximizing revenues from their websites.

The upgraded DFP includes a wide variety of features that will help publishers to get the most value out of their online content:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange's "dynamic allocation" feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks. Dynamic allocation is described in this document [PDF].

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. We'll be upgrading current DART for Publishers publishers to DoubleClick for Publishers over the next year as we continue to add features and modules, and we'll be moving Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks.

To reflect our continued investment in DoubleClick's products, as well as the central role of DoubleClick's technology products within Google's display advertising business, we're also today unveiling some changes to the DoubleClick logos — including typeset changes, incorporating a new "by Google" theme and retiring the "DART" brand.

The upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers is a perfect example of our continuing innovation in this area, and we believe that it will add significant value to online publishers' content. You can read more about the features of the upgraded DFP on the DoubleClick blog and on the DFP website.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

This week in search 2/21/10

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week, real-time search took center stage, along with a surging interest in the Winter Games in Vancouver.

Real-time search in Russia and Japan
Since the release of real-time search in December, we've seen that finding real-time content — often the only source of online information at the time — can be quite profound. For example, recently when California experienced a few earthquakes, real-time content appeared in search results just seconds after the ground shook. As you can imagine, getting this functionality out to the rest of the world has been a top priority. Because of this, we recently launched real-time search with Russian and Japanese, the first of the languages we plan to support. We want to bring you this functionality globally, so stay tuned as we add more countries.

MySpace in real time
Also in real-time news, starting this week we officially added MySpace content to real-time search. Now you can tap into the pool of news, photos and blog posts that MySpace users have chosen to publish to the world. These updates are all ranked to reflect the most relevant, freshest results, many of which are just seconds old. In all, real-time search includes more than a billion documents and processes hundreds of millions of changes daily. We're quite excited to offer this enhancement so that real-time search becomes even more useful. You can find the MySpace updates in our real-time mode by clicking on "Show Options" and then "Updates."

Example search: [myspace]

Better site searches for Images
Based on feedback from users and webmasters, we have improved the [site:] operator for Google Images. In the past, the [site:] operator filtered based on the image URL, not based on the URL of web pages linking to the images. Now, the operator will run your search over web sites that include images, no matter where the images themselves are hosted, which removes a lot of noise from your results and gives you more control over what you're searching for.

Example searches: [site:digg.com space shuttle], [site:morbidanatomy.blogspot.com], [site:flickr.com/photos/polvero]

Trends in searching for the Winter Games
It's been a week since the Winter Games in Vancouver began, and it's clear you have great interest in finding out more about the games. From women's downhill to curling rules, we've seen searches rise as people everywhere watch the quest for gold. Check out Google Trends to see what's of greatest interest now.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Game sfx maker tool ... sfxr in flash!

What's all this then? This is as3sfxr, flash port of sfxr. It makes sounds for your games. You only have to press buttons and listen and press buttons again.

This is great: no need to understand how sound synthesis works, ability learn a little about sound synthesis by pressing buttons/moving controls randomly, no need to download/compile/install anything either. Oh how I would wish for more tools of this kind, maybe specialized stuff like (non-8-bit) fire effect generators, ice effects, explosions... There are some sfx gens for pure data but it will take a little more time to get them running.

At the top of this post, there is an embedded flash applet. If you are a user of an open source flash player: do you see it? Can you use it? How many of you already knew of sfxr but only now did try it through as3sfxr?

I hope this 'no info about games' post does not shock you.

Now Playing: Bioshock 2

What do Arnie Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, and a Big Daddy have in common? They all have experience as babysitters.

The first is muscle-bound and speaks in funny accented English, the second does crazy kung-fu, and the third is just plain badass, throwing lightning and fire out of one hand and shooting bad guys dead with the other.

Should be a pretty easy decision who to choose to babysit your kid right?

---

(Minor spoilers abound)

I'm having a rollicking good time with Bioshock 2. I was apprehensive about it at first, my concern being that there may not be anything left to talk about, after the first game so blew our minds with its philosophies. I also thought putting you in the suit of a Big Daddy was just a novelty.

But it appears there's a whole lot more left unsaid in the world of Rapture, and playing the Big Daddy rocks the socks off the John Doe protagonist of the first one. I could talk about plenty of awesome things in Bioshock 2 like the improved combat, open-world design, etc. but I'll leave that for the review.

There's just one thing I want to talk about now, and that's the mysteries of Rapture. Bioshock 2 is doing what good sequels should do. Not only is it revealing little by little revelations on the first game, it also keeps adding new layers of mystery to further frustrate us. It's like a lasagna.

And this is a good thing because we've seen Rapture already, in its splendor and initial decline into oblivion. What is new is seeing the city's grimy underbelly, the locales you visit aren't the larger than life fronts that the average citizen will have a gander at but places tucked away, hidden from the public - cesspools of degeneration, rebellion, and squalor. These are also places that were the built the earliest, before gradually becoming forgotten as the city expanded in the name of "progress" and "capitalism".


It's definitely an interesting return to Rapture, especially for fans of the first game. Newcomers will have a good time too no doubt, but I can't help but feel that they are missing out on a lot of nuances and subtext in the second, because they didn't play the first (so go play it).

The levels are all self-contained and connected via an old monorail system. It's a mode of level transition that harks back to the days of Doom's elevators, very static and surprisingly a backward move by 2k Marin; especially when the world in the first game felt more seamless. But when I think about it deeper, the use of this transportation is very much in line with the antiquated, obsolete nature of the world in Bioshock 2. Even the Big Daddy that you play is an obsolete model.

New villain. Sofia Lamb, a psychologist - strangely unmentioned in the first game - and new tyrant to fill the shoes of deceased Andrew Ryan.

She's a strange 'un. Very school headmistress-like, the kind apt to smacking your bottom if you do wrong. She's an A-class uptight bitch hell-bent on killing you. Lamb's also a Collectivist, believing in the power of Many over the Individual, the latter the very ideology that Andrew Ryan built Rapture on and their conflicting beliefs is what got them fighting in the first place.


It's gotten annoying to hear Lamb's voice constantly over PA speakers crowing to splicers to come together as a "group" to destroy "one" person, you. But it definitely emphasizes the herd-like mentality of the citizens of Rapture. They are in need of something new to turn to for "guidance" and "solace" as they watch the city fall apart. It's only in Bioshock 2 that I came to the realization that despite Ryan's well-thought fail-safe plans, he couldn't count on the stability of the very people he sought to build Rapture for.

This sequel is also about "daddy issues". About fathers, mother and daughters, what does it mean to have a relationship with a child, at what lengths will a parent go to protect their own. But Eleanor, my supposed daughter, I'm not really sure whether or not I should trust her. As far as I've gotten into the game, she flits in and out of my mind with our psychic connection, telling me to save her and stop Lamb (her mother). In fact, a tonne of characters, strangers who I hardly see or trust, keep telling me what to do and that annoys the hell out of me.

In Far Cry and the first Bioshock, the protagonist is dropped on a mysterious island/underwater utopia so conveniently aided by a stranger, only to be f*cked in the ass by them ("betrayed", to put it less crudely) at the end of the game. If Bioshock 2 did that to me again, I'd be really pissed. Also, where the hell are the NICE people in Rapture? It's such a tragically depressing game when you're surrounded by bad people all the time (Tenenbaum doesn't count, she's boring). Even Sinclair, your new ally, is not all clean.


Bioshock 2 also reveals the historical development of Big Daddies and Little Sisters, and how that in turn led to the creation of Big Sisters over time. It's quite interesting, but I still can't help but feel, like the sudden emergence of Lamb, that it's all convenient and we're just supposed to digest this information as if it's canon (remember that legendary Ken Levine, creator of Bioshock is not working on this title). And whilst the protagonist of the second game is definitely an insider to the ecosystem of Rapture, he is no different from the first game's protagonist in that both are observers to the thoughts, beliefs of the major players as well as innocent to the city's decline. It would be interesting to play a character that had a part in Rapture's destruction (devs take note for Bioshock 3).

Anyway, it's good so far. The more I play, the more I'm seeing that this is a tighter, more focused experience than the first. This is what good sequels should do (i.e. Mass Effect 2). I'm hoping the story will also culminate into mind-blowing-awesomeness like the first.

Review soon.

Google Apps highlights – 2/19/2010

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been busy adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Web clipboard for Google Docs
As more and more people are getting work done in the cloud with Google Docs, a common stumbling block has been copying and pasting formatted content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On Wednesday we made this a whole lot easier with a web clipboard for Google Docs. Just highlight what you want to copy, select from the web clipboard menu, move to your other Google Docs window and choose what you want to paste from the web clipboard menu. Your pasted content will retain its original formatting so you don't have to spend time reformatting.


New saving buttons in Google Docs
One of the most frustrating things about using traditional software is losing your work if something unexpected happens before you remember to save. Google Docs helps solve this problem by frequently saving your latest changes automatically. Still, we've heard from people that they want that extra reassurance that autosave is happening, and to be able to manually save their work more easily. New saving buttons in Google Docs do just that. The buttons let you know when your document is fully saved, in the process of being autosaved or has unsaved changes that haven't been picked up by autosave yet. Now, if there are unsaved changes the "Save now" button is clickable.

Google Buzz
Last week we launched Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting, like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind. Buzz lets you share right from Gmail, or from your mobile phone. You can connect other sites you use like Twitter, Picasa, and Google Reader, and you can post buzz privately or publicly. Since we released Google Buzz, we quickly made a number of improvements based on input from users, and we're committed to keep improving it. Individuals can use Google Buzz now, and we plan to make it available to businesses and universities using Google Apps within a few months.

Google Apps Script for Google Sites
Google Apps Script lets you create programmatic interactions between a whole variety of Google services including contacts, calendars, email, finance data, spreadsheets and more. Businesses often use scripts to automate repetitive processes. Last week, we added Google Sites to the list of products that you can control with scripts. Now, instead of manually updating the content in a site, you can use Google Apps Script to automatically populate pages in your site with calendar data, contact information and data from the other services that work with Google Apps Script. Scripts can even add attachments and be used to update the sharing preferences for your site.

Who's gone Google?
With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they'll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.

The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University and Davenport University are just a couple of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.

Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Update Feb 22: Corrected "gone Google" list.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

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