My favorite 5 for the week:
- This week Google rolled-out its “universal search,” a revamp of its traditional web search results that now incorporates images, videos, news, etc. After playing around with it some, I’d say it’s an improvement, but not substantial. Microsoft has also launched a test search engine, Imagine Live Search, which attempts to do the same thing.
- Congratulations to Natalie Portman, the number one searched-for Star Wars term at Lycos.
- pipl - a new deep web search engine that focuses on finding information about people. The first result for Frank McCown? A former criminal.
- Scientists and ethicists are starting to give much more attention to rules governing robot-human interaction. The idea is if we can set ethical rules for how humans should treat robots and vice versa, we’ll avoid a world like the Terminator, Matrix, et al.
- This week I gave Stanford exams to elementary school kids at the Ivy League Academy. I’ve done this for three years now, and I really enjoy it... they are some of the best behaved kids I’ve seen. In giving the tests, I’ve come to learn more about what children think:
- When asked if either the moon or the sun is a star, most first graders will choose the moon.
- If a first grader were to come home and find their front door open when it shouldn’t be, most of them would either stand outside their door or go inside to investigate instead of seeking help from a neighbor.
- Most second graders do not know what an opinion is.
- And finally, if given the choice of doing an extra day of testing or doing homework that evening, most students will choose testing.
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