Currently:
- TOP DOC RECOMMENDS 5 PORTIONS OF CHIPS A DAY >>
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Apparently the House of Commons, doctors, and people with common sense have been stunned by the fact that the DoH is excluding potatoes from its campaign to have Britain eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day (individually, not the nation as a whole). After all, potatoes are vegetables, so it stands to reason these little starchy beauties would have the same benefit as any other vege? Maybe someone should buy the idiots at the DoH a dictionary?
Well, maybe that would be your impression if you read The Sun, where even a logical and reasonable policy can be spun into yet another ministerial bungle.
(posted 2003-12-17T13:32, link )MP: SPUDS NOT A VEG
(The Sun, 2003-12-17)An MP was eating her words last night after claiming potatoes were NOT vegetables.
Junior health minister Melanie Johnson stunned the Commons by saying spuds did not count under Government nutrition guidelines.
Speaking about a drive to encourage people to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day, she said spuds were excluded because they "provide mainly carbohydrate in the form of starch".
But Tory MP Christopher Chope scoffed: "Everyone regards the potato as a vegetable except the Department of Health."
Sun doctor Carol Cooper said: "This is very unfair on the potato."
- Stock Search Challenge >>
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"More important than knowing something, is knowing where to look it up." A half remembered quote, possibly attributed to Einstein. I'm not really sure, I couldn't find anything authoritative. You know how it is with quotes, remember something pithy but not who said it. Given a long enough time-line, Benjamin Franklin or Oscar Wilde will have.
But that's beside the point, it's been my mantra for the last few years. The most important skill I have developed is to google. And google well. I've learned to speak gooboolean, the tribal language of the internet hunter-gatherers. (A terse, brutish variation of English, low on common words. As if every sentence was spoken with the final, feeble-yet-vengeful, breath of a recently discovered murder victim. Or the Hulk.)
NTK has, in the past, run a few items pointing out where one site has copied more than a fair chunk of another site. A while back, Yahoo Mail used to have a picture of a couple of girls using a laptop on its front page. But the same image popped up on other sites (such as checkmyfile.com) and people sent it in, believing (I assume) that they were ripping off the Yahoo page.
They probably didn't steal the image from Yahoo's site, its likely the designers had access to the same stock photo CD. The use of the same stock photos on different websites, in itself, isn't covered by NTK, but there are exceptions. Such as when a site tries to pass-off stock photos as genuine pictures of its staff or offices, or when the two sites conflict in some way (e.g. the same person being used to promote two competing things.) But demonstrating something is stock photography is the trick.
So, the "Stock Search Challenge" is: given a suspected stock image and no other information, find the name and the photographer. Usually the title is a say-what-you-see description of the photo, perfect for our gooboolean brains. But, right now, Google might not be able to help.
For example, given the Yahoo girls, you can type what you want into Google Images, but you'll probably find it tough to come up with a query that gives the answer (it's "Girls Sitting on Inflatable Chairs With a Laptop" by Monica Lau).
So we turn to the stock libraries. Getty Images seems to be the "Google" of stock image searching. Today's challenge was the grinning beanie wearer on this Orange page who also appears to be promoting Oystercard. A search for "smiling man skateboard" gets the goods straight away ("Man standing in front of vintage skateboards, smiling" by Everard Williams Jr) but the search wasn't dependant on the title - there's a bunch of metadata associated with the image such as "Chainlink Fence", "Looking at Camera", "Beanie Hat", "Day". Even if you just get something that looks similar, all you need to do is keep ticking boxes until it's been narrowed down.
There's little chance that Google Images could get that useful any time soon. To automatically derive the same amount of information from each of the images on the web probably isn't viable right now. So unless people start getting obsessive about hidden metadata we probably won't see it.
Although, come to think of it, it might be feasible (given a copy of the Getty database) for Google Images to check algoritmically to see if any web is derived from a known stock image and then provide a link to "buy". Then not only could you search for images, you could also search for a webpage based on a description of an image you remember seeing on it. (You remember grinning beanie man being on a page, but not which phone company the page was promoting).
So, in that world, "Stock Search Challenge" could probably be solved by a tiny browser plugin, checking the URL of any right-clicked images with a Google API and popping up the details in a translucent overlay. The game would be up.
But then, as Ben Franklin put it, "the most valuable information is always that which cannot be returned by a simple Google query".
(posted 2003-12-06T18:54, link )
