Clumps of disease

Small clumps of misfolded protein might be the cause of many incurable diseases, including Alzheimer’s. While the results are still preliminary, they sound wildly optimistic:

Alzheimer’s disease may be caused by small clumps of wrongly folded proteins, two new studies suggest. Stopping rogue proteins ganging up might prevent or reverse this and other diseases, including diabetes and CJD

Google makes me fickle

A recent study performed at Penn State looks longitudinally at Excite queries: web search patterns are evolving. This is the same study that has underpinned a number of stories touting the recession of porn on the web. This new article a few results related to user interaction:

The number of search engine users who viewed only one page of results – Excite displays 10 Web sites per page, the study noted – jumped from 28.6 percent in 1997 to 50.5 percent in 2001.

Google has set the bar for our expectations. It’s hard to admit, but I am in the class of people mentioned who now expect top-10 results, and it’s embarassing. I used to be a search expert, but now I’m just a search plebeian. If only Google wasn’t so damn good.

Journalist sides with blogs

James Lileks, columnist for the Star Tribune, received this email from Alex Beam, before publishing his rant yesterday:

James, weren’t you once a talented humor writer? Why are you churning out this web dreck? I can’t tell if these bleats about Rod Serling or the Palestinians are diluting your humor work, because I can’t claim to know it well enough, but I certainly have my suspicions.
Feel free to respond: I am writing a column (deadline: Monday 11 am) on bloggers who might benefit from a less arduous writing schedule.
Alex Beam, Boston Globe

To which James has a nice response, a refreshingly optimistic capital-J-journalist’s approach to web content that avoids the either/or argument so many are riled up about: The newspaper is a lecture. The web is a conversation. Somehow I missed this yesterday, which is unfortunate, because it deserves more attention than Beam’s uninformed rant.

Another month, another tow

Every month Cambridge scours its streets, to a much larger extent than most cities (including nearby Boston). Every month that is, except January-March, when the city deems it too cold to sweep. And just about every month, my stupid ass gets towed.

Of course, this being the first week of April, I unexpectedly walked out onto an empty sidewalk to realize that yes, of course, my car had been towed. When I went to the tow joint (the venerable Phil’s this time, leaps and bounds above the slimeballs at Pat’s), I was confronted with a $55 fee, $5 more than the last time my volvo was incarcerated against its will. When I inquired, Phil himself informed me that Cambridge lets them raise it $5 every year. “So next year will be $60, the next $65, and $70 after that..” Yeah, thanks Phil. I’ll write that down so I remember when you ream me next year.

Just me here in lower Blogovia

Now that blogging has tipped in trad-journalism, it’s not uncommon to see a local story as bitter as this: In the world of weblogs, talk is cheap. Choice statements:

The Web loggers’ main shortcoming is their compunction to ”say” something several times a day, consequences be damned.

Another cloying attribute of bloggers is their intense admiration for other bloggers. Many of their Web sites link to one another’s, which serves to build collective audience. But clicking beyond the above-mentioned writers, or the likes of Virginia Postrel and Mickey Kaus (both too smart to write every day), lands you in the remote wilds of Lower Blogovia very quickly.

If you’ve read this far, you may have enough time on your hands to become a blogger yourself… Maybe you will even be mocked in a medium that people actually read.

This of course from Alex Beam, one of the Globe’s most prolific columnists. Don’t be confused, he’s not a luddite: as the story notes, he’s got his own e-dress: beam@globe.com.

Teoma aims at Google’s throat

I’ve used Teoma a few times before, but the flurry of articles today about Teoma taking aim at Google necessitated a bit of further inquiry.

Given that Teoma’s index is only a tiny fraction of Google’s (200 million compared to 3 billion), the results are difficult to compare. The technology used is termed “Subject Specific Popularity,” (SSR) which I assume is a context-specific version of Google’s Page Rank. The generality of weblog content would appear to be a negative bias in Teoma’s ranking system. This might very well fix the bias that weblogs currently have in Google.

Here’s an example. Search for “jason” or “meg” on Google and you find kottke.org at #2 and megnut.com first, above the ever-popular Meg Ryan. Performing the same searches on Teoma (“jason” and “meg”), we see that these popular blogs aren’t tops by Teoma’s standards.

One of two things might explain this discrepancy. First, Google uses the text in anchor tags as a more representative description of the content than the content itself. This is based on the theory that content is not always the best descriptor of itself. Take Ford Motors for example, whose website has the term “ford” only once. Anyone linking to Ford will of course use the word “ford” in their anchor tag, since it is most relevant descriptive term for the site. Teoma may not use anchor tag text at all, which would significantly decrease the correlation between our webloggers and their names.

Secondly, Teoma may simply favor sites with specificity. Weblogs tend to link to a number of different types of content (since peoples interests are usually quite varied). It would make sense that SSR would give more ranking power to those sites that have a cohesive subject. As they say, SSR “ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site’s level of authority.” This doesn’t bode well for weblogs content.

Of course neither company goes into detail about their actual ranking algorithm, so we can only postulate what is actually happening. One thing is for sure, Google thinks much more of themselves than Teoma does.