The professor believes in reaching the people who truly have an aptitude for his material rather than just those who have the financial means. His goal is to reach students all over the World. Also, the professor would like to cover a wider range of topics than he could offer at Stanford.

Udacity:

We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth.

Starting on February 20th Udacity will begin online learning offering two classes:

CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE
Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!

CS 373: PROGRAMMING A ROBOTIC CAR
In seven weeks you’ll learn how to program all the major systems of a robotic car, by the leader of Google and Stanford’s autonomous driving teams.

Below is the video of his commencement speech:

Here is the full text from the speech, for those who might like to read through it:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

Thank you all very much.

This move makes sense for a number of reasons.  A post on the Official Google Blog explained, "Most important was Stanford’s openness to us experimenting with new fiber technologies on its streets."

Also, "The layout of the residential neighborhoods and small number of homes make it a good fit for a beta deployment."  And location was a key consideration, since the short distance between the subdivision and Google’s headquarters means engineers can check things and interview users whenever they like.

Finally, we must point out that Stanford faculty and staff are perhaps more likely than the average individual to use their fancy Internet connections to make scientific breakthroughs rather than view porn or pirate movies.

Google’s announcement doesn’t mean that all the ordinary communities vying for ultra high-speed broadband networks are out of the running, though, as the Stanford network is a separate matter.  So look for more statements about Internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second in the future.

Work on the Stanford network, meanwhile, is supposed to begin early next year.

M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has helped design WhatApp.org with the goal of reducing the risk of computer hacking, identity theft, spam and phishing.

The reviews are being written by lawyers, computer scientists, and privacy and security experts from Stanford and other institutions.

"People are going online to opine about the security and privacy of apps all the time," Calo said. "But none of that discussion is centralized. What we’re trying to say is that if you’re doing it already, come and do it here."

The site also reviews browsers like Firefox and Safari, social networks including Twitter and Facebook and mobile platforms such as Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile and Google’s Android.

Users will be able to register as "expert reviewers" and create public profiles that list their qualifications. Calo and his team will verify that new reviewers are who they claim to be, but will leave it to the WhatApp? members to decide for themselves.

"The idea is not to be exclusive and create a club," Calo said. "If you know something or have an opinion about how good or bad an app’s privacy is, feel free to weigh in."

Reviewers will be asked to rate an app based on a number of questions after reading an application’s privacy and security policy.

The reviews come in the form of written comments and badges that award applications up to five green bars for privacy, security and openness. Wikis accompany the reviews to summarize what the app does, and the site immediately offers a list of links to news stories about an app’s privacy and security issues.

"The entire point is to drive the application market toward better privacy and security practices by rewarding those who do a good job and penalizing those who don’t," Calo said.

"Privacy is about having control over information that pertains to you. I think we’re rapidly losing that control, and this is a way to monitor what’s being done with information being collected."
 

Stanford and Google first sealed a book-related deal in late 2004.  In fact, Stanford was one of five organizations that, on December 14th of 2004, joined what was then known as an expansion of the Google Print program.

Now, a post on the Google Public Policy Blog has stated, "Stanford University . . . has expanded our original partnership to take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States."

The post continued, "That means that if the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from Stanford’s library."

So obviously, this could be a significant agreement.  We’ll just need to find out how the settlement agreement fares before we can be sure that the terms will stick.

Related Articles:

> Google Bows To Chinese Authors On Book Scanning

> Three More Groups Rally Against Google Books Settlement

> Google Books Suffers Defeat In French Court

Okay, maybe not Congress just yet. But fresh on the heels of Harvard Law taking it to the RIAA over the recording industry’s litigation scare tactics against the nation’s universities and assumed pirate students. When the best profs at Harvard Law come after you, you know you’re in big, big trouble.

The AP is facing similar intimidating opposition from the other coast, this time from Stanford Law and San Francisco-based Durie Tangri Lemley Roberts & Kent, who just filed a lawsuit against the Associated Press. The suit seeks a declaration from the court that Shepard Fairey’s artistic transformation of an AP photograph of Barack Obama is fair use. The suit also seeks an injunction against the AP from further action against Fairey or anyone else using or displaying his work—perhaps like the Smithsonian, at the moment.

“There should be no doubt about the legality of Fairey’s work,” said Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School, who is leading Fairey’s legal team. “He used the photograph for a purpose entirely different than the original, and transformed it dramatically.

“The original photograph is a literal depiction of Obama, whereas Fairey’s poster creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message that has no analogue in the original photograph. Nor has Fairey done any harm to the value of the original photograph. Quite the opposite; Fairey has made the photograph immeasurably more valuable.”

Stanford and company become strong allies to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nonprofit legal organization that went fishing for YouTube plaintiffs last week to join the DMCA abuse fight against Warner Music Group.

Why are law schools and nonprofit organizations having to step in? Because these are areas where Google’s high-priced lawyers apparently fear to tread. Despite the inherent benefit each fair use precedent would offer Google’s business model (and scores of others on the net), the cost of litigating against major media companies is higher than cutting a licensing deal.

And that’s exactly what media lawyers are counting on.

In case you missed it. Though the RIAA, MPAA, AP, etc., didn’t really need any help going after alleged copyright infringement, you Congress (including then Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden) made it a lot easier for them just before the election in a unanimous Senate vote. 
 

Through the use of real-time data firm Wise Window’s software as a service for qualitative data, Stanford constructed a tracking tool for the 2008 Presidential election.

As the Democratic primary continues to grind across the country (we get our shot at voting next Tuesday), more news items emerge about its two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the Republican candidate,John McCain.

Stanford built its tracker to express the opinions surrounding candidates in a visually-friendly way. One may visit the Bubble Tracker and see how positive or negative recent commentary appeared about the candidate.

Green bubbles mean good comments, while purple ones reflect bad ones. Visitors to the Stanford site make click on one of the bubbles to see a link to the story driving that opinion.

Viewing past opinions and the bubbles they made may be done through the use of a slider control below the bubble window. Each change with the slider alters the bubbles for each candidate.

And when you pass the mouse pointer over the candidate’s window, the bubbles begin to circulate. So cool! Links we observed hit news stories appearing on Topix and Diggin our unscientific look at Stanford’s bubbles.

When we first covered Yahoo Answers in its December 2005 debut, we saw a striking similarity to Usenet. Instead of newsgroups, Yahoo provided Answers with web-based tools for asking questions, providing answers, and rating the responses questions received.

Yahoo Answers proved so successful that even Google could not compete with the service and shuttered their competitor at the end of 2006.

The appeal of Yahoo Answers drew the interest of researchers at Stanford. Resource Shelf picked up on their paper, Questioning Yahoo! Answers.

The researchers cited the rise of various forms of social media sites, like Flickr, Facebook, and StumbleUpon, and attempts by Microsoft and Amazon.com to mimic the success of Yahoo Answers with their services.

Among their findings, the researchers tell us some topics are more popular that others. From August 2005, the start of testing with Yahoo Answers (it did not open to the public until December 2005) through May 2006, Love & Romance proved the most popular topic, followed by Entertainment. The least popular topics were of a local nature: Dining Out, and Local Businesses.

When it came to participation, the same pattern seen in social media happened with Yahoo Answers. People were more interested in receiving than giving, according to the researchers:

Overall, we observe three interesting phenomena in user behavior. First, the majority of users are askers, a phenomenon partly explained by the role of the system: Yahoo! Answers is a place to “ask questions”.

Second, only a small fraction of these users gets involved in answering questions or providing feedback (votes). Hence, it seems that a large number of users are keen only on “receiving” from rather than “giving” to others. Third, there is a small portion of the user population that provides answers or votes.

They also noted the difference in the amount of participation, depending on the topic:

General, lighter, topics, which interest a large population, such as Love & Romance, attract many inquiries. On the other hand, topics that do not require expert opinions, such as Social Science, or that can be answered based on personal experience, such as Pregnancy & Parenting, attract many answers.

The researchers noted a lot of ‘noise’ in the current iteration of Yahoo Answers. They suggested what a more ideal question-answering system should do for its users:

Ideally, it should facilitate users finding answers to their information needs and experts providing answers. That means easily finding an answer that is already in the system as an answer to a similar question, and making it possible for users to ask (focused) questions and get (useful) answers, minimizing noise.

Their recommendation may be in practice already, at a site they did not mention in their paper. We have seen the model in action at Answerbag, which does try to route people to existing answers based on their questions.

The folks at Resource Shelf also noted another omission in the research paper. "We wonder if the researchers were aware of library virtual reference services and how they compare to what Yahoo Answers provides?" they asked.

So far, Google has never penalized any site for link selling. To the foremost, what Google does is prevent links from a site to pass page rank. But now the scenario is changing. For selling links, Google might penalize your site and your PageRank score can also get down.

To explain his point more clearly, Danny Sullivan gives the example of the Stanford Daily. Earlier, in one of his post titled, "Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?", he has highlighted as how the student newspaper of Stanford University used to sell links, even when the news came into the limelight. Even there was no penalty imposed by Google at that time.

Around a week ago, the PR of Stanford Daily dropped. Interestingly, there is no apparent reason for this to happen. Drop in the PageRank is reported by others also. It has been confirmed by Google that sites that sell links will have a lower PageRank. In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached, to prevent them from ranking well.

Danny Sullivan has his own views for all this, such as:

• It’s Google’s search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
• Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links.
• Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want.
• Despite Google’s policy and even this latest action, they’ll never catch all the paid links. It’s part of the reason I’d like to see them back off the paid links war and instead work out other ways to determine if a link deserves credit, paid or not.

One the question is "What if someone sells links and gets their PageRank dropped or traffic reduced under this new policy by Google? In regard to this question, Google says , "Most people hit with a PageRank decrease will likely notice this, and then they can request a review. Eventually, it may be something flagged within the Google Webmaster Central system."

Instead of doing all this, Google can simply change the PageRank meter to something like a red bar. This will warn the buyers from buying a nabbed site. Google also believes that by doing this, it would be easy for anyone to detect which sites have not had their paid links discounted. Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about.

Once Matt Cutts said about paid links as an issue with his drop in rankings, when asking if they were gone and not coming back.

But Google itself is allowing paid links to be promoted in another way via its own ads. Here’s an example:

Whatever be the outcome, this step takes Google into a new era of attacking paid links. If Google traffic is important to you, it will ge good if you don’t sell links.

Comments