Bikers, pedestrians seeking better Web maps

With the old gas-guzzler in the garage, you’ve got your bicycle ready and your sneakers laced up. Now all you need is a map of the quickest, safest routes for riding around town. Well, not so fast.

As more commuters consider ditching their cars to save money on gas, Internet mapping services, cities and community groups are being pushed to lay out the best routes for biking and walking – just like drivers have found online for years.

Technical and practical roadblocks stand between such a network becoming ubiquitous, but there are signs of progress in this world of $4-a-gallon gas.

Google Inc. just launched a walking-directions service. MapQuest is reporting more use of its “avoid highways” function and offering a walking directions service on cell phones. And some cities have developed detailed online maps to help walkers, bikers and transit-riders find the fastest routes.

“They haven’t yet reached the Holy Grail of `I want to go from here to there, show me my options,’” said Bryce Nesbitt, a walking and biking advocate in the San Francisco area.

The first challenge: how to account for factors that make bicycle and walking routes different from driving paths.

Pedestrians need sidewalks, but don’t have to abide by one-way streets. Walkers and bikers can cut through paths or trails not meant for cars, but they must avoid highways. Bikers, unlike walkers, need to think about whether a road is paved, and are prohibited from sidewalks in some cities.

All these variables mean the fastest, easiest route for a driver may not be the same as for someone on foot or riding a bike. And developing a comprehensive system for non-drivers requires a tricky step: collecting huge volumes of local metadata and getting them on national databases used by mapping services.

“In the U.S. we are primarily a driving country, or have been for a very, very long time,” said Christian Dwyer, MapQuest’s senior vice president and general manager.

Advocates believe making electronic walking and biking directions available on the Internet could help change that culture, especially in urban areas.

The technical challenge involves overlaying detailed information for walkers and bikers onto existing online maps, and then applying it to algorithms used to lay out the quickest routes. If some path, walkway or shortcut is on a map but not accounted for in the algorithm, it may be useless.

“There are some horror stories of the past of people being routed onto the Appalachian Trail or a couple driving off the ferry dock,” said Jay Benson, vice president of global strategic planning for Tele Atlas, an international mapping company that supplies data to Google, MapQuest and others.

But if these tweaks are done right, the Internet mapping services could tell a biker to use, say, a riverside trail to avoid congestion, while showing a walker to dart through a parking lot to cut off a corner – or at the very least to head against car traffic on one-way streets.

Some local efforts are already having some success.

In Atlanta, a nonprofit group set up a Web site last fall that lets people punch in whether they are walking, biking or using transit – and then get specific directions. New York also has a site that helps bikers avoid roads that aren’t meant for biking and make maximum use of roads with bike lanes and greenways.

In Broward County, Fla., planners are working on a project that would let users factor in things such as speed limits, traffic volume, lane widths and shortcuts.

The project, shooting for online launch by next summer, has programmers looking at aerial maps and punching key factors into the route-setting algorithms. They also incorporate things like where people or bikers can make left turns but cars can’t.

“I get a lot of calls from people, especially now with gas prices being up, looking for routes for how to get to work,” said Mark E. Horowitz, the county’s bicycle/pedestrian coordinator.

This week, Google Maps launched a feature that offers walking directions for trips shorter than 6.2 miles. That is being added to a feature already helping visitors find the best mass transit routes.

Mapmakers and route planners say they need to capitalize on existing community knowledge. That would be a change for companies like Tele Atlas, which typically goes out and test drives road routes itself. But it is open to accepting bike and pedestrian route information from cities and community groups if it can be verified from multiple sources.

In Philadelphia, for example, regular walkers and bikers know many shortcuts that save time. A bicycle commuter traveling from the northern edge of downtown to residential and commercial areas to the south knows he doesn’t need to meander through the congestion of Center City; taking a paved trail along the Schuylkill River takes time and heartache off the trip.

Such “secrets” could be shared with newcomers or tourists if they were added to online maps.

“The easier you make it for people … the more they’re going to do it,” said Joe Minott, executive director of Philadelphia’s Clean Air Council.

New search engine unveiled by Ex-Googlers

Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable – only this time it’s not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won’t divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn’t ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn’t index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn’t quantify the size of Google’s index.

A search index’s scope is important because information, pictures and content can’t be found unless they’re stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google’s method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil’s technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil’s results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil’s results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users’ search histories or surfing patterns – something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have been losing ground to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

“Search has become as much about branding as anything else,” Weiner said. “I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night.”

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals. “Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space,” Watson said. “It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that.”

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won’t be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay’s online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson’s husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp., where he worked on an “analytic engine” called WebFountain.

Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”

DYLAN AT HOLLYWOOD

A lost manuscript about Hollywood in the sixties reveals Bob Dylan’s take on the Mecca of cinema
Barry Feinstein, the rock ‘n’ roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures of Hollywood in the early 1960s. Tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan.

“It was the lost manuscript,” Feinstein recalled, “Everybody forgot about it but me.” The poems were so lost that Dylan, when told of the discovery, had forgotten that he had written them. But after more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November as Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript. It includes more than 75 of Feinstein’s photographs and 23 of Dylan’s prose poems.
The book was created in the 1960s when Feinstein was a 20-something “flunky” at a movie studio in Hollywood, eager to be part of the industry and having landed a job working for Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures. He roamed around movie sets, snapping pictures backstage and in dressing rooms, and during off hours he drove around with his camera in tow.

The pictures are sometimes dreary and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, shots of movie props and roadside stands, topless starlets and headless mannequins. After assembling the photographs, Feinstein thought of Dylan, whom he had met before on the East Coast. “I asked him as a joke, ‘Wanna come out and maybe write something about these photographs?’” Feinstein said. “So he came out and wrote some text.” Dylan, then in his 20s, examined the photographs and wrote his own prose poems to accompany them. The poems are by turns sparse, playful, witty and sarcastic. As the 11 Outlined Epitaphs begin: “I end up then/ in the early evenin’/ blindly punchin’ at the blind/ breathin’ heavy/ stutterin’/ an’ blowin’ up/ where t’ go?/ what is it that’s exactly wrong?”

After the photos and text were pulled together into a rough manuscript, Dylan and Feinstein took it to a publisher, Macmillan, where executives were afraid that the pictures would bring a lawsuit from the studio. So Feinstein kept it for more than four decades in his vast collection of photographs, books and other papers. He went on to develop a close collaboration with Dylan. He shot the cover photo for The Times They Are A-Changin’, and dozens of photos of Dylan throughout the years.
Christopher Ricks, a professor of the humanities at Boston University and the author of Dylan’s Visions of Sin, noted the contrast between the Hollywood book, in its black-and-white starkness, and Dylan’s most recent book, the collection of cheerful, brightly coloured paintings. “From the beginning, he’s been a mixed medium artist,” Ricks said.

Sleep helps people better remember aspects of an emotional event

Sleep helps people better remember aspects of an emotional event while allowing memory of the background information to fade.

The brain makes adaptive decisions about what to remember and what to forget. To find out the way brain remembers emotional or negative incidents and events while sleeping, researchers from America made 88 college students participate in recall tests after seeing pictures that depicted either neutral subjects on a neutral background like a normal car parked on a street in front of shops or negatively arousing subjects on a neutral background like a badly crashed car parked on a similar street. The participants were then tested individually on their memories of both the central objects in the pictures and the backgrounds in the scenes.

Some of the students viewed the pictures in the morning and took memory recall tests 12 hours later after a full day and no napping. Others viewed the pictures at night; slept for 12 hours, and completed memory recall tests in the morning, while a third group of students viewed the pictures either in the morning or the evening and completed recall tests 30 minutes later.

It was found that the memory for negative objects was enhanced 68 percent by a sleep period compared with 44 percent by a wake period. The participants who stayed awake all day largely forgot the entire negative scene that they had seen, with their memories of both the central objects and the backgrounds decaying at similar rates. But, those who were tested after a period of sleep, memory recall for the central negative objects (i.e. the smashed car) were preserved in detail.

Pop superstar Madonna promotes good friend Britney Spears

Pop superstar Madonna is doing all she can to promote good friend Britney Spears who is trying to stage a comeback.

According to reports, Madonna gave fans a glimpse of the transformed Spears in a recent concert in Nice as part of her Sticky and Sweet tour. Madonna was seen strumming the guitar as an image of Spears loomed large in the background.

There are also reports that Spears will join Madonna in some of the concerts.

Legendary singer Neil Diamond surprised fans

Legendary singer Neil Diamond surprised fans when he gave their money back after a sore throat left him barely audible on stage.

Diamond could not sing because of the sore throat so he cancelled the concert. Some fans had to shell out 60 pounds, but they got their money back.

The 67-year-old singer even issued an apology statement, saying “forgive me.” Fans were pleasantly surprised by the deal.

Sultry Bipasha Basu had a great time with Cricketer Yuvraj Singh

Sultry Bipasha Basu had a great time with Cricketer Yuvraj Singh while shooting and ad campaign.  “it was fun and Yuvi is a bundle of energy. It feels great working with him,” Bipasha said about shooting the advertising campaign with him.

“The Stylish clothes and patterns are amazing.  Being a fitness conscious person myself, I associate with the brand as it is the kind of clothing I wear.  I am sporty person and these clothes are a part of my life,” Bipasha said about the brand.

The company spokesperson said there was great chemistry between the actress and the cricketer during the shoot.  “The chemistry between the duo is evident.  And the combination looks classy not just in this ad campaign, but for the other sub-brands too.  We will have the classic, rugby looks among others that will be revealed,” said the company spokesperson.

40-year-old Wimbledon champ Boris Becker is engaged to Sandy Meyer-Woelden

The 40-year-old Wimbledon champ Boris Becker is engaged to Sandy Meyer-Woelden, the daughter of his late manager and 16 years his junior.  Meyer-Woelden’s representative confirmed the engagement.  “Boris and Sandy got engaged in the closet circle,” Cotactmusic quoted the rep as telling German newspaper Bild.  Becker split from his wife Barbara in 2001.  They have two children together.  He has also fathered a daughter with Russian model Angela Ermakova.  Sandy Meyer-Woelden, 24, is the daughter of former Becker manager Axel Meyer-Woelden, who died in 1997.  A jewelry designer, Meyer-woelden dated German tennis star Tommy Haas for several years.

Tom cruise says Ben stiller is his inspiration

Tom cruise says Ben stiller is his inspiration.  Tom, who has a executive in Ben’s new comedy Tropic Thunder, loved working with the comic star and has praised his achievements in Hollywood.  He said, “One can’t fully appreciate what Ben has accomplished in acting, writing, directing, producing, and starring in a film like Tropic Thunder without recognising that any singel one of these functions alone is a full-time job.”

Tom, who worked with Ben on 2000 mockumentary Mission: Impossible, has also revealed he didn’t hesitate at the chance to team up with him again after Ben described the movie as his “dream project”.  The 46-years-old Top Gun star added to Men’s Vogue magazine, “To make a long story short, I read it, I loved it, and we started working on it.”  Meanwhile, Ben has praised Tom’s comic timing in Tropic Thunder.

Barrack Obama has found a great Hollywood pal

Barrack Obama has found a great Hollywood pal in none other than George clooney, who is offering the presidential candidate expert advice on body language, presentation, and policy.  Sources have revealed that the superstar and the Democratic presumptive candidate have struck a close relationship, and are constantly in touch.  The duo is also said to be sharing views  on policy, with clooney asking obama to take a more “balanced” approach towards US-Israel relations.  However, one Democratic insider said that the unlikely friendship could prove to be “very risky” for Obama’s election chances.

“George is pro-palestinian.  And he is also urging Barack to withdraw unconditionally form Iraq if he wins,” the Telegraph quoted an insider as saying. “His hope of becoming America’s first black president depends heavily on winning over conservative voters and it would be perceived as a tool of a Hollywood Leftie, which is how they regard George”, the insider added.

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