Archive for November, 2008
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
A New York Times article on Google Flu Trends reports that Google's methodology "has been validated by an unrelated study" based on Yahoo! search data whose lead author is Philip Polgreen, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Iowa.
I was glad to learn about the Polgreen study, first, of ...
Posted in Google Flu Trends, PicsNo, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
The CDC data above shows that the occurrence of flu generally peaks in February; the data below from Google insights : flu symptoms, not surprisingly, has a similar peak in February.
Google insights, which uses the same data as Google Flu Trends, shows quite a different pattern for flu shot (below), ...
Posted in Google Flu Trends, PicsYes, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Google Flu trends is an elegant application of search data to medicine. Working on Hardin MD, I’ve long noticed seasonal variations in certain diseases — Colds, flu, & respiratory illnesses peak in winter, and insect bites & sun exposure conditions peak in summer. I pay a lot of attention to ...
Posted in Google Flu Trends, Hardin MD, PicsYes, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
Peter Suber, at Open Access News, has a good article on Google's recent announcement that they are now OCR'ing scanned PDF documents so that they become searchable text documents in Google Web Search.
Scroll down especially to Suber's comments, in which he describes the background to this Google advance, which is ...
Posted in Google Book Search, PDF, PicsNo, Uncategorized, eBooks | No Comments »
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
Google recently announced that scanned PDF documents are now available in Google Web Search. PDF documents have been in Google before, but most PDF documents that have been scanned from paper documents have not, so this will greatly improve access to PDF's. As described below, it's important to be able ...
Posted in Google, PDF, PicsNo, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Kalev Leetaru (Univ Illinois) recently published a lengthy and interesting article comparing Google Books and the Open Content Alliance. It's especially interesting because it brings together a good description of many nitty-gritty details of Google Books that are not easy to track down. I'm excerpting a few passages on the ...
Posted in Color, Google Book Search, PDF, PicsNo, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Color pictures in full-view books in Google Books are generally not common. This is not surprising, since color pictures in books generally before the pre-copyright date (1923) were uncommon. Searches in Google Books for likely subjects -- museum, sculpture, french painting, history -- do find many books with pictures, but ...
Posted in Color, Google Book Search, PicsYes, Uncategorized | No Comments »
