Another google news...

Fraud nags at Google's grand strategy from The Hindu

JOHN CARRERAS was once a contented Google advertiser. He used text adverts that appeared alongside searches to bring people to his trade exhibition website. He happily paid Google a few cents for every referral, believing that anyone who clicked through to his site from Google was a likely customer. But then he attended a conference in Las Vegas, and he noticed something strange: the number of Google referrals he was getting dropped dramatically, only to rise again once the conference was over.

Mr. Carreras became convinced the "missing clicks" were not from customers, but from his competitors, who had all been in Vegas along with him. He believed his unscrupulous rivals whiled away their office hours clicking on his Google ads, knowing that every tap cost him money.

If you add in a second kind of scam, where people earn themselves a little money from Google by clicking on ads they are hosting on their own sites, you can see the potential for malice. Click fraud, as it is called, is acknowledged by Google as a problem: last year, Google chief financial officer George Reyes described it as "the biggest threat to the internet economy."

It was bound to reach this point...

U.S. Seeks Google Records in Pornography Inquiry from NYTimes

Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine -- a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.

Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to hand over the requested records.

The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week -- a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.

In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yahoo Inc., which runs the Internet's second-most used search engine behind Google, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.

Race Science

Race Science heading for rehabilitation from The Hindu

Last month, Mr. Pinker told the Edge website that "the dangerous idea of the next decade" will be the notion that "groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." It is all the more dangerous for being bound up with ideas about how populations vary in their susceptibility to disease. The implication is that we must take these ideas as a package.
...
Over the years, the denial of race became almost absolute. Differences were only skin-deep, it was said — despite the common knowledge that certain groups had higher incidences of genetically influenced diseases. It became a taboo, and as the taboo starts to appear outdated or untenable, the danger is that unreflective denial will be replaced by equally uncritical acceptance.

This not the first article about race science that I am reading, it is something that is becoming a well know field of science.
How long it will be before this too will be used for or against someone? Good article none the less. 

Intresting isn't it!

Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service from NYTimes

There are bacteria that blink on and off like Christmas tree lights and bacteria that form multicolored patterns of concentric circles resembling an archery target. Yet others can reproduce photographic images.

These are not strange-but-true specimens from nature, but rather the early tinkering of synthetic biologists, scientists who seek to create living machines and biological devices that can perform novel tasks.

"We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics," said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and a leader in the field. "We want to design and manufacture complicated biological circuitry."

While much of the early work has consisted of eye-catching, if useless, stunts like the blinking bacteria, the emerging field could one day have a major impact on medicine and industry.

thought

I was trying to list the names of people who have crossed my life and was amazed how many memories came back... More than once I said to myself how the could I not remember that name? and when did I lose contact with this person?

Now I wish it had not rained and it would have a fantastic test match. 403/0doesn't that sound good :)

quote

I cannot love as I have loved,
And yet I know not why;
It is the one great woe of life To feel all feeling die.
-- Philip James Bailey