The Berlin Wall: The 20th anniversary is coming up (Nov. 9, 1989). I'm getting requests for radio interviews and reprints of my article. Remember the wall? Read my story about the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Five million people were there in Berlin, and I was the only one who wrote about it.

Daryl Heron has a good collection of videos of key speeches by Kennedy and Reagan, plus the events at the Berlin Wall.

Nobody predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not the CIA, the US military... None. The collapse took them by surprise and they had no idea what to do. Bush Sr. spent a year trying to figure out what to do. Thatcher in the UK actively tried to prevent the collapse of the wall.

Could it happen here? Could the USA collapse? For the last 40 years, American economic theory has been based on Milton Friedman. In fact, Friedman's economic theory stated it was impossible for a collapse to happen. Nobody realized Wall Street could collapse as it did in September 2008. We now have no economic model for the USA. Nobody understand why Wall Street collapsed and nobody knows how to fix it. Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize in Economics) wrote a wonderfully clear article about the state of American economic theory. 0 comments

The Infinite Web. Is the web infinite? Is everything on the web? A squirrel comes to my glass door and taps the glass; I give her a peanut or two. Last week, I saw one of the peanuts looked like a duck. People saw it and said "Hey, that peanut looks like a duck!" Someone joked I could sell it on eBay for $50,000.

So... I typed into a search engine "peanut looks like a duck." Guess what? There's a website for that: ThisPeanutLooksLikeaDuck.com

Amazing. There's a website for literally everything. 1 comments

BusinessWeek is publishing a series of interviews on how Google manages search results. Rob Hob interviewed Scott Huffman (Director of the search results evaluation team); Udi Manber (Google vice-president of technology for core search); Amit Singhal (Director of the ranking team).

Interesting, but nothing new. They talked without saying anything.

Labels: google quality rater

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