The author of the study had a financial interest in his so called findings. No one could reproduce those findings, though at the behest of concerned parents, many tried. And by now everyone of any integrity has disavowed the entire episode.

By that I mean to say that Jenny McCarthy claims the whole thing is a well orchestrated plot against the good doctor Wakefield who promoted the original autism/vaccine link. Yes, every scientist working for peanuts in terms of public money has decided conspire to ruin the life of one innocent man who stood to make considerable money from his so-called discovery. Brilliant plan! (reminds me of one not-too-bright former co-worker of mine who claimed the whole global warming debate was a devious plot by scientists to make more money).

Is it possible to issue a class action lawsuit against people who cause mass public stupidity leading to demonstrable harm? In my mind, it’s not much different than the fire in a theater scenario, especially when there is no fire.

Well, here’s an article about some election science that should be covered everywhere. The authors were apparently too busy to tweet, but they found the Washington Post just the same.

Update: here’s a blog roundup on #iranelection/Twitter that highlights the possibility that much of the so-called Twitter revolution is actually just ye old neocons up to their old tricks. Funny how TechCrunch fanboys (editors) are going ga ga over the fact that a neocon on FoxNews claimed twitter founders should get the nobel prize for keeping their servers running through the crisis. I’ll buy that for a dollar!

You will want.

Update: There’s a video on XBox.com that shows some of what they intend to deliver, with a disclaimer at the bottom. Also, check out Milo. Most impressive.

It’s easier to just download the CSV file and look at it in Excel…

My impressions — even at 3G speeds, it’s incredibly impressive. The touch interface is great, though not perfect. It’s probably an issue of sampling the device when framerate is low (Apple should ensure the UI is not bound to app or render rates). I did find that the two fingered motions tended get results that drifted from what I wanted, which I attribute to the size of the screen vs. my hands and not to any math error.

I’m not too surpried about performance. It reminds me of how the original Keyhole app ran on unaccelerated laptops. Without terrain, the number of triangles shouldn’t be the limiter (you only need about 1000 triangles to make a nice sphere, even less by the time you need to see placemarks). Texturing, caching, and download speeds seem like they would have been the biggest challenges.

I imagine the optimization work that Google did to make the app run 4+ instances in a browser was vital to this iPhone work as well. But keep in mind, even the idea of using 500MB of storage is problematic on an iPhone. Fitting the Universal Texture code to run in the small main memory must have required some significant tradeoffs, of which I can only speculate. But the results still look very good.

I’m looking forward to trying it out in the field.

Here’s the bit of text that I think did the trick:

The picture is definitely of me, and it is unlikely there is another Avi Bar-Zeev in Seattle Washington who might mistake himself for me...

Original:

This post comes as a result of having my identity stolen on Facebook.

Now, you hear about this happening for celebrities quite a bit. But why would anyone want to impersonate me? What could they possibly gain, except some fine fake friends, right?

Well, having a look at the fraudster’s current friends list indicates he’s already sent invitations to people at Microsoft. Perhaps all of them, I can’t tell. Those who friended him back probably know me and were just trying to be nice. And as result, the fraudster now has some idea who I know at Microsoft, or who the other targets know, which could be telling.

Ironically, Microsoft folks are so friendly in general, so many of them friended ‘me’ without ever having met me (some just saw a division-wide "welcome" email about me) that the usefulness of that list is diminished. But the potential exists for the criminal to email them from his faked account to obtain additional information about me or them, or at the very least violate their privacy by bypassing their "friends-only" controls. But more likely, the scammer will eventually put up some phishing attacks.

This is a major design flaw with Facebook, and a potential liability, IMO (note: I am not a lawyer).

Why?

Facebook has active controls to prevent you from changing your name to something they don’t like, but nothing to prevent you from stealing someone’s name in the first place. It has a place to report a copyright violation — god forbid anyone should use a stolen photo. But I couldn’t find a single link to report that an entire profile’s identity was falsely claimed or in violation of the terms of service in any way, nor do I see any attempt to resolve such issues thus far. I’ve emailed what I can only guess are the appropriate links and contact forms.

And if this exploit works in general, as it definitely seems to do, there’s nothing to stop someone from creating a false profile to parallel anyone’s real profile and inviting co-workers who might never do a search to see there are two profiles with identical names. It’s an open hole that Facebook seems to do nothing to fix. And that is why they are liable, IMO. (again IANAL).

Bottom line: if you received any email from my apparent Facebook account or from bar_zeev@live.com (the apparent account used to sign up), please report it to the abuse areas on Facebook or Live, if you can find them…

BTW, I use only one social network, LinkedIn, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to use Facebook now, except to post a note saying to stay away from this bullshit service.

Facebook’s new advertising slogan should be "Join Facebook, before someone else does it for you!"

My deepest consolences to his family.

It’s not easy to do two potentially life-changing job searches in any given year. And it isn’t exactly what I’d planned when I started out. But, as always, things seem to work out well in the end. So here’s the even bigger announcement…

But first, a little back story.

As I’ve mentioned before, I left Keyhole in 2001, whereas the Google acquisition came in 2004. So I was never an actual Google employee. But Google is a great company all the same. And so, when I started my long-term job-search last fall, I decided to see if there was a fit there, not necessarily on the same project, but hopefully doing something equally world-changing and fun.

The company seemed interested, though the machinery took a while to turn. I got as far as scheduling their first programming quiz (I never quite got a sense of who/what I might be interviewing with/for) when I had to politely bow out — Big Stage made a very time-limited offer and I took it.

So this spring, when I left that startup (I’ve already discussed that as much as I plan to), I contacted Google early, so they’d have more time. This time, Google HR looked around the company and told me they didn’t have any openings that fit my skills, 3D or otherwise.

Okay, I figured. I’d done my part.

Now, the startups* I found in my search were all pretty interesting. Some might even make it big someday. I was less concerned with money, to be honest, than with the game-changing-ness of the companies, and with my level of responsibility and fun. Most of the startups essentially wanted someone senior in experience but junior in expectations. It’s not unusual, given the way things work in the valley — engineers are often viewed as interchangeable, whereas capital isn’t, strange as it is. But I have more options too.

I received offers from a few big companies. I hadn’t worked at a really big company since Disney, which was in many ways my first real job. That role actually worked out pretty well, despite some naivety on my part. The main reason I left, in fact, was to join an old friend’s startup*, moving from LA to Seattle (it goes full circle).

In this current job search, one of the big companies actually surprised and impressed me, not only in their offer, but throughout the process, the people and professionalism. The two days of on-site interviews weren’t as much about testing my coding skills as they were about vision, work styles, and that ever-elusive "fit."

Turns out, I actually had fun. And in the end, my bosses-to-be offered exactly the kind of role I wanted with the freedom to define it myself — new, challenging, and some potentially very big wins on the horizon, straddling both R&D and productization with the goal of adding value wherever I can.

The thing I really had to think long and hard about was this: is Microsoft really making the switch from Kergan Warrior to Highlander or even Ramirez, and not in the decapatative "There Can be Only One" sense of it, but in terms of their style and attitude towards competition and innovation.

And I think the answer is yes, to an extent, and at the very least because they had to.

Truth is, one could find fault with every company out there, even the ones that take as their mantra to do good. In the end, it comes down to either accepting things as they are, improving what you can, or staying home. I can and do believe that Microsoft can be a better company.

Hell, some people I’ll be working with openly use Macs…

Some of you will no doubt wonder if I’m going to be directly competing against Google Earth. Some of you might wonder if I’ll need to change what I say here, or if I’ll become a shill for the "evil empire."

And the short answer to all of the above is no. Microsoft doesn’t want or need me to re-do or out-do anything I did for Keyhole. I wouldn’t want to do the same thing twice anyway. The plan is to focus on bigger ideas and a much broader vision of the future.

And, no, they won’t ask me to change or stop this blog. Realistically, I might cover some Microsoft projects more than before as I naturally learn more and get more excited about them. And I might self-censor random criticisms of Google Earth, just so no one thinks I’m carrying an ax. But I’ll try to be open and fair, as always, and keep this site free of financial influences.

Truth is, I’ve always been fairly restricted in what I can say because so much of what I learn comes from friends and former colleagues. It’s their projects I often write about. I’ve told them that if they don’t want me blogging about their secret projects, the surest way to guarantee that is to tell me all about them. On occasion, that pitch even works. But I still do my best to find a path through the minefields to get you some useful intelligence or at least some timely analysis without burning any sources.

As to what I’ll be working on, keep in mind, my new supervisor actually found me and recruited me via this blog. That might help you make some guesses as to what we’re interested in. The opportunity for me is most certainly having direct access to the talent, experience, and resources that Microsoft affords.

I hope the move to Redmond turns out to be the best one yet.

P.S. One thing is clear though, this does put a damper on Part Two of "How Google Earth Really Works," since I don’t want to be falsely perceived as giving away any of Google’s secret sauce, whether it’s in public or otherwise, or whether my knowledge is current, or, as is likely, seven years out of date.

_________________

* My philosophy of startups, btw, is thus: they’re all someone’s baby — someone’s deformed, gurgling baby. Their parents love them as much as anyone ever loved a kid. But to outsiders, the extent of the deformities should be clear, at least before the kool-aid sets in. So my rule about startups is this: only join if you love that baby as much as its parents do and are willing to care for it like they do, because you’ll have to. If it’s just a babysitting job, you won’t be paid nearly well enough for what that baby will put you through. In that case, go have your own baby, if and when you can, put 200% into it, and pray it’s not deformed too.

A senior executive at Electronic Arts (EA), the company which owns the Sims franchise, said that in light of the popularity of virtual worlds and other computer games which allow players to compete with each other via the web, the Sims may soon become a multi-player game.

It has to be a joke, right? Nancy Smith, if anyone, should be familiar with the now-euthanized EA-Land, nee The Sims Online, which was, in fact, a MMO experience based on The Sims.

But I’m thinking maybe the reporter missed the story here. I’m thinking that the point is not to turn the Sims 2 or 3 into another MMO, but to take a page from Facebook and Spore and make the Sims more of a massively single player experience, but with extensive social elements.

In other words, the doll houses are not all in the same shared town — you might visit a friend’s house, but don’t expect shared public spaces, since that’s most likely where TSO went wrong. The point is to put our creations in a shared, explorable experience (not necessarily one big space), but leave the personal drama to someone else.

Which only goes to bolster my "anti-social" theory of on-line fun. Yes, some people want to discover strangers randomly. But given how badly strangers can and do act in on-line spaces, ranging from usenet to Second Life, I think my theory works pretty well for the other 90% of us who prefer to meet new friends more through mutual interests, activities, and introductions, than via common coordinates and/or curious costumes.

The other major announcement, the magnitude of which probably won’t sink in for a year or so, is the agreement with ESRI to release ("from jail," as MTJ puts it), most of the world’s ESRI-based GIS information, such that Google Eartth and Virtual Earth can show it and, perhaps more fundamentally, search and index it. All it takes is the latest ESRI update and a single click of a checkbox to let the information be free. This is where the rubber meets the road (or the mashup meets the world beyond the metaverse).

I was pleased to hear about his pitch to US governors and counties to release the info — the abstract fear of terrorism is insignificant compared to all the good that can and will be done with this information. Not to get political, but I suggest you all add "Release the GIS" to your regular communication with your elected officials.