Tax sneezin'

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 1:43 PM

Posted by Sarah Payne, Book Search Support Team

Spring is in the air. I can tell because I'm sneezing.

Remember when April meant the Easter bunny and the promise of May flowers? Now, instead of flowers blooming, taxes are looming (no more rhyming, I promise).

I try to find things that will make money matters and taxes seem less, well, taxing. I need color, pictures, and a few laughs. Because I like my financial guidance with a little pizazz, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Personal Finance is one of the books that's been particularly useful for me. The snappy graphics and bulleted information make it an easy-on-the-eyes reference, especially during this time of year.

This pocket-sized powerhouse of tips and advice also includes some fun facts, such as how long the IRS expects you to spend on tax forms:

The IRS estimates it should take you about 4 hours and 33 minutes to fill out the 1040, plus 40 minutes to copy, assemble and send it to the IRS - after you've spent 5 hours and 40 minutes getting your records together and learning what you need to know about tax laws.

Geez.

One of my other favorites is The Motley Fool Personal Finance Workbook. Any finance company that admits its success started with chocolate pudding has to make the seriousness of planning for your financial present future a little less scary, right? They make learning the hows and whys of personal finance as easy as eating chocolate pudding (well, almost). Read the full post 0 comments

Finding "hallowed turf" on Google Book Search

Friday, March 23, 2007 at 10:35 AM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

This Saturday, London’s Wembley Stadium will host its first event after more than six years of reconstruction. It looks like the work has paid off, as this is what the stadium now looks like:

Photo courtesy of Craig Morey/pixelthing.com

The closure of Wembley for all this time has been a pretty big deal, as it’s the official (and spiritual) home of English football, or soccer as our American audience knows it. The English national team plays its most important matches there, and in 1966, it was the site of England’s greatest triumph on the world stage, a controversial 4-2 defeat of West Germany in the FIFA World Cup Final. Here’s a brief account of the match, along with tactical analysis, for those who are interested in exploring the finer points of the game.

Apart from its role as an important sporting venue, it regularly plays host to many major concerts. A band has definitely arrived if they make it to Wembley — just read rock journalist Mark Paytress's book, which includes a description of a 1972 T. Rex concert, to see how important a gig there can be. Some of the largest acts in popular music have played gigs there, and it was the natural place for the English half of the first Live Aid concert in 1985.

There are already a number of events on the new Wembley’s calendar: a Metallica concert, a regular season American football game, and, as is traditional, the final of the FA Cup, a major English soccer tournament. I’m definitely hoping to make it to a game there one day. In the meantime, I’ll keep reading up on it! Read the full post 0 comments

Thoughts from a roads scholar

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 at 6:15 PM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager

Once in a while, I read about a user's experience with Google Book Search and am blown away by the power of having over a million books full-text searchable. Take Jo Guldi, a Berkeley grad student in the depths of her dissertation research, who has spent the last two years deep in the stacks of libraries around the US and UK reading every book related to her area of historical research.

Last week, she rediscovered Book Search and quickly found twenty new books to add her to wealth of research. As Guldi writes, sometimes it's not easy without tools like Book Search:

To give just one example, this little puppy -- Henry Parnell's A Treatise on Roads (1833) -- one of the key texts for my dissertation exists on our campus in Berkeley's transport library, a quaint but understaffed, spare room hidden on the third floor of the engineering building, far, far away from where historians ever go. It wasn't actually on the shelf when I got there, so it took some patient emailing with the transport library librarians before the book was found, returned to the correct place, held at the desk for me, to be picked up during the library hours specific to that particular institution (10am-4pm, M-Fr). Wild with enthusiasm at having at last obtained it, I held the volume prisoner at my desk in San Francisco for six straight months. . . .But thanks to Google Book Search, these days of scavenger-hunt and tug-of-war are drawing to an end.

The rest of her post is definitely worth a read. And if you too happen to be interested in 19th century texts on road construction, Guldi includes a nice list complete with links. Read the full post 0 comments

Earth viewed from books

Monday, March 12, 2007 at 1:48 PM

Posted by Matthew Gray, Software Engineer

I love data. That was no small factor in my decision to join Google. I started a month ago and have already learned a lot, but I wanted to try and put together many of the components I've learned to solve an interesting problem. So, last week I made one up: map the world, based on the frequency of its locations mentioned in books.

We've all seen views of the Earth from space, where the numerous pinpoints of light on the ground combine to yield a speckled map of the world. I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations in books combine to yield another interpretation of the globe. The intensity of each pixel is proportional to the number of times the location at a given set of coordinates is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search.

Fortunately, the hard part was already done: someone had already written the code to get place names and map coordinates from books. As he explained in a previous post, books like this guide to Boston now show a Google Map with the locations mentioned in the book marked on the map. So, I wrote a little program using MapReduce, Bigtable and other cool Google stuff. Running on my desktop would have taken days, but thanks to the wonder that is the Google infrastructure, I had a map in forty-five minutes.


Naturally, this yields some biases towards cities, but it's still interesting. And there's a lot of additional analysis that's fun to do. Filtering the map by publication date, you can see global patterns like the growth and westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century.

1800s

1830s

1860s

1890s

Wow, data is fun. Read the full post 0 comments

Laughing with Google Book Search

Thursday, March 08, 2007 at 4:15 PM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

I'm currently reading Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious...to get some new material, of course! You see, along with Freud's analysis of humor, he also recounts some jokes that aren’t half bad. They all date from around 1905, which means that a couple of them fall flat. Connoisseurs of comedy in our audience, however, may enjoy anecdotes such as this one:

The King condescended to visit a surgical clinic and came on the professor as he was carrying out the amputation of a leg. He accompanied all its stages with loud expressions of his royal satisfaction: 'Bravo! bravo! my dear professor!' When the operation was finished, the professor approached him and asked him with a deep bow: 'It is your Majesty's command that I should remove the other leg too?'

In all seriousness, there's a lot of humorous material available on Google Book Search, especially if you have a taste for bygone ways of joking. Here’s Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, one of the most celebrated works of American wit. Be warned, though, that the humor in this title is driven entirely by cynicism. For example:

FRIENDSHIP, n. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs.

We kindly ask that the pedants among you hold your emails, as we're aware that a frog isn't a reptile! For more humorous titles on Google Book Search, have a look at this series of titles that collects American, French and German humor. Or, if you want a tailor-made joke, try searching for “joke + [your keywords of choice]” on Google Book Search — the possibilities are endless. Read the full post 0 comments

The Bavarian State Library becomes largest non-English library partner

Tuesday, March 06, 2007 at 7:52 AM

Posted by Jens Redmer, Head of Google Book Search Europe, Middle East, and Africa

I love books. We Germans love books. And we read them enthusiastically. Germans are not only known to be among the most intense sauerkraut (legend) and beer (fact) consumers worldwide, but even more so among the most avid book consumers — and book creators.

My fellow German national Johannes Gensfleisch, much better known as Gutenberg, created a machine that changed the way mankind gained access to information forever. We all know the incredibly positive impact his press had on the development and dissemination of culture. In our era, digitisation can substantially improve access to information in a similar fashion. Today, everyone with internet access — regardless of age or location — can discover information on their specific subject of interest, in almost any language, with only a few strokes on a keyboard. I find that absolutely fantastic.

Europe is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions of the world. This multilinguality fascinates and drives us at Google — reason enough for us to adapt and operate our products in far more than 100 languages. Did you know you can even search on Google in Romantsch, a language little known outside of Switzerland?

That is why today, I am truly excited and pleased to announce a significant step towards enriching our multilingual index: we are adding our largest non-English library to the Google Books Library Project, thanks to a new partnership with the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library). Book lovers around the world will soon be able to access the library's public domain works online through Google Book Search, tracing the rich history of German literature through the centuries.

As one of Europe's most important and renowned international research libraries, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek will add more than a million out-of-copyright books to the program, from well-loved German classics by the Brothers Grimm and Goethe to extensive collections previously only available to those able to consult the library's stacks. In addition to German-language works, the library's collection includes numerous out-of-copyright works in French, Spanish, Latin, Italian and English. Some of the works of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek date back to the very first moments of book printing and bear incredible cultural meaning.

I grew up in the very north of Germany, and I used to fall asleep as a child hearing my parents reading a tale from the Brothers Grimm, such as Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) or Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), so I know and adore these true classics only too well, much like every child in Germany, and it is very exiting to know that early editions will now come online.

I am not only thrilled about this partnership as a German, but even more so as a European. Helping to make the diverse European culture discoverable and accessible to a worldwide audience is one of the most fascinating jobs one can ever imagine. Servus und herzlich willkommen, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Read the full post 0 comments