If the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, then what of the hand that rocks the world? Dr. Jeffrey Toney reports that Google recently showed its revolutionary colors with speak2tweet, a service that enabled netless Egyptians to access Twitter over the phone. After breaking with China over censorship issues last year, Google's political conscience is becoming clear. Their Android operating system powers smartphones around the world, their driverless cars turn heads in California, and the new information services just keep on coming. Jessica Palmer shares the Google Art Project, where you can virtually tour the world's museums and inspect artwork at incredible levels of detail. PZ Myers decries the indiscriminate filtering of Google Scholar, which returns creationist sources among its academic search results. And Frank Swain plugs the phrase 'apparent death' into Google's Ngram Viewer, which plots the rise and fall of word usage in its concordance of digitized books. Google's mantra is 'don't be evil,' but as their influence grows, here's hoping that power won't corrupt their good intentions.
- Egyptians' Voices via Twitter Thanks to Google on Dean's Corner
- Art break at your computer, courtesy of Google on Bioephemera
- How to game Google Scholar on Pharyngula
- Best Google n-gram yet: how thinking about death changed in 1767 on SciencePunk
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