Google To Offer Free Database Storage for Scientists

An anonymous reader writes "Google has revealed a new project aimed at the scientific community. Called Palimpsest, the site research.google.com will play host to 'terabytes of open-source scientific datasets'. It was originally previewed for scientists last August . 'Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.'"

Re:mining for ads

[Seto89]

It managed to pick ads accurately even when I view a GPG encrypted [wikipedia.org] emails through the web-interface - it gave links to proprietary PGP, some Fedora related sites and a page about encryption - all that from a standard header and encrypted text...

Google Everything

[Dirtside]

The other day my wife said she wants there to be Google Bank. They'd certainly get the online banking thing done right...

Re:Fantastic for Students and New Researchers

[Unoti]

But its very easy to think you understand things after a few weeks when infact your missing some incredibly subtle point and so I'm sure we would be flooded by bogus results due to misinterpretations from the data if we release it.

You sound very intelligent and I'm sure you're correct. But I couldn't help but think how much that sounds like the reasons why the Catholic Church conducted mass in Latin for so long, and why they were initially reluctant to have the Bible translated to English.

Re:Google Everything

[ScrewMaster]

The other day my wife said she wants there to be Google Bank. They'd certainly get the online banking thing done right...

Not necessarily ... nobody in their right mind would trust the Google File System to anything remotely mission critical (not even Google: last I heard they use Oracle for all their in-house data processing needs.) Banks actually do pretty well keeping track of financial data.

Now having said that, as I look at my credit card's online statement, I see several days of Avis car rental charges for a vehicle that was picked up in San Diego and returned somewhere in Virginia. The problem is I didn't rent the car. Okay, so maybe a Google Bank wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.

Re:Are they insane?

[jd]

The whooshing sound you heard was the set logic joke flying overhead.

Even so, though, unions only have a bad rep in America. Interestingly, America is also the country with the greatest number of stress-related illnesses in the western world (more than twice as many heart attacks from stress as in England), and that is tied to their self-destructive yet amazingly narcistic "work ethic" which simultaneously creates unbearable stresses on the human frame whilst producing only minimal extra productivity. Trade unions were founded as a form of cooperative, providing heath benefits, life insurance, education and training, back in the days of King James II. Remind me, when precisely did Americans provide these to their workforce? Oh, you mean 50% of them still don't have them? How quaint.

Unions as a political, rather than a socialist, entity is partly because many in America also hate all forms of socialism. This explains why the rest of the world regards them as anti-social. So much time and effort has gone into linking socialism with communism, communism with Communism, and Communism with Stalinism (even though none of those are even remotely connected) that all you have left is a bunch of paranoid spoiled rich kids and a bunch of equally paranoid serfs. This is a violently unstable system which must either correct itself or risk the fate of other violently unstable civilizations. Oh, the US won't vanish overnight, no matter what. Even the Roman Empire survived in some form or other for a millenium after it imploded. There will likely be an identifiable United States of America in 3000 AD for that reason alone. The question is, will it a stagnating copy of how it is now, or something that has learned from its mistakes and corrected them?

Re:Fantastic for Students and New Researchers

[cortex]

20th century or not, the fact is that if I don't publish papers with my name as first or last author I don't get tenure. I'd be happy to have people publish papers using my data as long as I have already gotten a few first author papers out of it. Of couse, that would only apply to my data that is several years old. Also, what is to stop someome from publishing using my data and not having me as an author at all? The TOS to access the data are going to be very important.