Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

The Google Maps of 1917

May 9, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
communal-map

Our relationship with maps has evolved over the past hundred years. We don't have to unfold too-large sheets of paper, search out our destination, and trace back the route with a marker anymore. We can plug in an address or a point of interest, and a computer will tell us how to get there. But that might not be as new as it seems. This "electric directory"  from 1917 (pictured above) contains many of the elements any modern tourist in New York City might desire. Just push a button with the attached pen, and your route is illuminated. Local advertisers even had their own real estate on the ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Time Machine
Tags: , , , ,

Big Data, Big Money

April 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
stock-market-growth

Now that we know a single hacked Twitter account can erase $136 billion from the American stock market in seconds, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate this whole “let the machines do the trading” strategy. Or not. A remarkable study, published this week in Nature Scientific Reports, details how a simple Google Trends algorithm makes a better day trader than most of the suits on Wall Street. Tobias Preis, of the University of Warwick, led a trio of researchers in designing the trading strategy. It started with a simple idea: Investors—whether skittish or bullish—make financial ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Is Summer the Sanest Season?

April 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
mental-illness-search

Spring has sprung, at least for most of us, which means sundresses, seersucker, and boozy croquet parties on the front lawn. Goodbye happy lamp, hello mimosa. But it’s not just champagne that’s lifting our spirits and banishing the wintertime blues. According to Google (and a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins) mental illnesses—such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and anorexia—are far more seasonal than we think. The epidemiologists, led by John Ayers, combed through every Google search performed in the United ... Read More

More like this: Health
Tags: , , , , , ,

What Happens When You Die on the Internet?

April 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
google-plus

You exist on the Internet. At least, if you're reading this you almost definitely do. You communicate with people over email. You look at photos of your ex old friends on Facebook. You follow the news, re-post the news, and hit on supermodels after playing basketball well for 15 minutes on Twitter. You maybe don't use Pinterest because you're not a sociopath. And, if not, you still probably type lots words into Google to figure out how to do things away from the computer. But if you exist, you also must die. (I realize there are like 12 of you—along with all the people who can't ... Read More

More like this: Culture
Tags: , , , , ,

Using Google to Map American Stereotypes

August 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

It's easy to polarize America--minority/majority, Republican/Democrat, 1 percent/99 percent, religious/atheist, Simpsons-liker/Simpsons-lover. But America is made up of 50 very different states, and the people in those states all seem to have their own stereotypes about everyone else. Renee DiResta recently mapped out our stereotypes using Google: For each of the fifty states and DC, I asked Google: “Why is [State] so ” and let it autocomplete. It seemed like an ideal question to get at popular assumptions, since “Why is [State] so X?” presupposes that X is true.  You can ... Read More

More like this: The 101
Tags: , ,

Paint By Numbers

August 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Boy with a Pipe

Artists and collectors looking to cash in on the reported one percent’s run on the international art market can take cues from a recent Washington State University study on auction house sales of paintings by Picasso, Magritte, Munch, and a dozen other impressionist and modern masters. Among the preliminary findings, a single percentage point increase in Google hits on the artist—the assigned indicator of popularity—corresponded to a chunky price increase of 38 percent. Arzu Aysin Tekindor, an artist and economics PhD candidate, employed hedonic regression theory—a modeling system ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Culture, Findings
Tags: , , , , , ,

Analyzing Culture with Google Books: Is It Social Science?

August 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

For more stories about all things Google, see the links at the end of this article. Earlier this year, a group of scientists — mostly in mathematics and evolutionary psychology — published an article in Science titled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” The authors' technique, called “culturomics,” would, they said, “extend the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.” The authors employed a “corpus” of more than 5 million books — 500 billion words — ... Read More

More like this: Media
Tags: , , , , ,

How Google Disrespected Mexican History

July 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In September 2006, Google News launched News Archive Search “to help users quickly and easily search for events, people and ideas over different periods of time.” Google News, in turn, had been launched in September 2002 “to [use] computers to organize the world’s news in real time.” Then, in September 2008 (September must be some sort of talisman in Sunnyvale), Google announced it was expanding the News Archive Search back in time “to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online.” “History buffs: take note,” Google triumphantly proclaimed. Well, yes, ... Read More

More like this: Media
Tags: , , ,

The Government, Google and Lady Gaga

July 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In an editorial last week, The New York Times proposed a startling, if cautiously worded idea. "The potential impact of Google's algorithm on the Internet economy," the paper wrote, "is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google's tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google's other businesses." The national paper of record, in other words, was talking about government regulation of Google's famously classified search algorithm. (The mealy-mouthed language used to suggest this might explain why the ... Read More

More like this: Media, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , , ,