R.I.P. Addwaitya

Reuters has a story from Kolkata, India announcing the death of Addwaitya, a 250 year-old giant tortoise said to have been the pet of Robert Clive, the famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century. It's odd to think of an animal having been alive for so long, literally a contemporary of Samuel Johnson and Frances Burney.

Of course there are plenty of plants around that are much much older, but few with such personal associations as this venerable reptile. Here is a list of some ancient plants:

A 5000 year-old yew tree in Scotland
The “oldest potted plant in the world” at Kew Gardens
A 40,000-year-old shrub, known as King's Holly, in Tasmania

The King's Holly is interesting in light of Celtic mythology about the Holly King and the Oak King. According to the myth, the Holly King and the Oak King represent two sides to the Greenman. The Oak King is born at Yule, and his strength grows through the spring, peaks at Beltane and then he weakens and dies at Samhain. The Holly King lives a reverse existance, and is born at Midsummer, waxes more powerful through the summer and fall, to his peak at Samhain. His influence then lessens until Beltane, when it is his turn to pass away.

Since the Holly King lives a reverse existance and Tasmania has its seasons reversed because it's in the Southern Hemisphere, it seems like a fitting place for the Holly King to live.

Bots with a Limited Vocabulary

There was an article in the New York Times recently that pointed out an interesting trend: newspapers are beginning to alter their prose style to entice the search engine bots of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

One of the biggest changes involves headline-writing. In order to attract readers, a headline writer often tries to use a witty quip or a clever play of words. Literary or cinematic allusions and puns are common. But such nuances are lost on machines. A bot is trying to figure out the content of an article as quickly as possible, and wordplay just gets in the way. This dilemma is known in A.I. circles as “the problem of synonymity.” When a writer pens the line, “A horse of a different color,” a machine doesn’t know that she’s not talking about horses. The bot might accidentally slot that story into the sports section, even if the piece is actually about politics.

Granted, most newsbots are capable of very sophisticated language-processing techniques that parse complex word relationships. But not always. The upshot is that many news web sites – including the BBC – have begun to put two different headlines on each article. One is literary and intended to draw in human readers; the other is terse and written for bots.

Technology has always affected the way journalists write. The advent of the telegraph created the inverted-pyramid style: Since journalists weren't sure how much text they'd be able to transmit before the fragile and expensive line went dead, they wrote the most crucial facts in the first paragraph or two, and less-critical ones as they went on. If they were cut off after 60 words, the gist of the story would still be there. Now, as the Times article notes, search engine algorithms may drive even more changes in how we write.

This is Now

Information is power, and in the hands of 10x10, it's also art. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale (culled from a number of leading international news sources, such as the BBC World Edition, Reuters and New York Times International), and serves it up as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames.



To access 10x10, you simply click on the “This is Now” link on the website's splash page, which reveals a screen capture of the current grid and a link to the 'live' version of the Flash application. The active grid displays images from the hour's top stories, arranged by rank in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequence, while to the right, a key word is posted for each of the images. The two navigational methods are linked to each other as well - so scanning the words will highlight the corresponding images, and scanning the images will enlarge the corresponding words.

Click on an image or word, and a pop-up window appears with a larger thumbnail and links to stories related to the word. While any of the stories can be found by more conventional means, 10 X 10 presents them in a fascinating chronological/cultural context, showing not only what major news sources are considering the important stories of the moment, but also inviting questions about what might be influencing those choices.

It's a simple but powerful idea beautifully done.

Waiting Impatiently in Searchville

Microsoft announced its beta release of Windows Live Academic, an academic search engine set to compete with Google Scholar. It lets researchers search the contents of academic journals to find abstracts and, if they subscribe to the journals, get the documents from the publishers' sites. From the press release:

The Windows Live Academic Search beta is designed to enable consumers to search through thousands of academic journals, serving as a powerful research aid. Key innovations in the user interface and sorting functionality have been designed to help consumers find information faster and truly give them an advantage in their research efforts.

Inevitably, people have started to make comparisons between Google Scholar and Windows Live Academic. At the moment, Windows Live Academic Search only supports a handful of subjects. Google Scholar has more substance, but, then again, it's been out sixteen months longer. Microsoft's interface is slicker, but Google has the advantage of familiarity.

Academic has one controversial but potentially useful personalization feature: macros, which means users can create tighter, refined searches to get specific results. It's conceivable that professors could create macros to direct their students to specific Web content, or that researchers could create specialized macros to search specific sources. But macros depend on the tech-savvy to build them. In any case, both products are still in beta. It'll be interesting to see how they develop.