Friday 17 December 2010

Google launches Body Browser, language database | ZDNet

Google launches Body Browser, language database

By Christopher Dawson | December 17, 2010, 10:54am PST

Summary

If you can’t sell the books, you might as well catalog a few billion words or map the human body in 3D, right?

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Christopher Dawson

Biography

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, then to a large biotech company in Cambridge, and finally, to his own consulting business. Now, he lives with his wife, five kids, a dog, and too many chickens in a small town in north-central Massachusetts where he spent several years teaching and managing technology in his local school district. Now he is a consultant and freelance writer in the areas of educational technology and web-based information systems. He writes a fair amount about his chickens, too.

Google launched two major efforts on Thursday, both with a research and science angle. Google Body Browser showcases HTML 5 to present detailed, layered 3D views of the human body. PC Magazine calls it a “Google Earth-like experience for the human body.” They also launched their Ngram Viewer, employing a variety of under-the-hood Google technologies to track word usage trends across all of the books scanned through their books project.

The Body Browser will only work on a select group of web browsers that support Web GL, a 3D, HTML 5-based rendering technology that works within the browser. The beta of Chrome will get you there, as will the beta versions and nightly builds of Safari and Firefox. The Chrome beta is generally quite stable and is worth the download for a look at both the technology and the Body Browser.

The picture above comes from the nervous system layer with labels turned on. Zoom and pan controls are identical to those from Google Maps and Google Earth and the system is both intuitive and graphically impressive. It’s still in Google Labs at this point, so a variety of enhancements can be expected. Although many Labs projects die on the vine, showcases for HTML 5, the web standard that Google is pushing over Apple’s native apps approach, are likely to see ongoing support.

While Google’s book scanning project has been fraught with legal wrangling, the company, in cooperation with many universities, has scanned millions of books. Now, bypassing the legal controversies, Google and Harvard have created a tool to examine only the words in those books, organized by time and area of interest. According to Scientific American,

A team from Harvard has teamed up with Google to crack the spines of 5,195,769 digitized books that span five centuries of the printed word with the hopes of giving the humanities a more quantitative research tool.

Researchers published a paper in Science, entitled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” The abstract, though somewhat laced with technical details, is actually fascinating in what the database can provide:

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of “culturomics”, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. “Culturomics” extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Have to make use of all those scanned and digitized pages somehow while they sort out the copyright issues around making such a vast library available to the public, right?

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Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems.

Disclosure

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson is a freelance writer and educational technology consultant. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation. Currently, his only business relationships of interest are with X2 Development Corporation (the supplier of the student information system he administers), Hewlett Packard (the primary vendor for computer hardware in the school district he supports), and Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools). He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 7-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. Microsoft gave him a free copy of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards. Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff.

Biography

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, then to a large biotech company in Cambridge, and finally, to his own consulting business. Now, he lives with his wife, five kids, a dog, and too many chickens in a small town in north-central Massachusetts where he spent several years teaching and managing technology in his local school district. Now he is a consultant and freelance writer in the areas of educational technology and web-based information systems. He writes a fair amount about his chickens, too.

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