Google Project 10^100 Reaches Voting Phase 154
An anonymous reader writes "In autumn last year, Google announced Project 10 to the 100, through which it aimed to commit $10 million to implement the best philanthropic idea. The project was suspended indefinitely after receiving more than 150,000 submissions. Google has now announced sixteen finalists — each of which was inspired by many individual submissions — and issued a call for votes. The voting deadline is October 8 and the Project 10^100 advisory board will then select up to five ideas to be implemented."
Re:Plex (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. Alliterate assholes.
That's assonance.
Transportation promising, Tax option too political (Score:5, Interesting)
The tax option looks interesting, but a little too in line with typical ideas of the conservative right in the United States to win my vote. Eliminating income tax and taxing consumption directly through sales tax would severely detriment lower income brackets and reward the affluent. The research on sales tax being more detrimental to lower income groups is pretty solid. I was actually surprised Google passed this idea through given its obvious politics.
The transportation option, on the other hand, while somewhat far-fetched, would revolutionize commerce and local economies if it were widely adopted.
Since all of the ideas are a bit of a long shot, I voted for what I would like to see in an ideal world. In addition, the idea of riding blimps to work is just too cool to pass up.
Geek heaven! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now we know why there were sixteen finalists. It's 10^100 in binary (a.k.a. 2^4 in decimal).
Re:Those ideas are crap (Score:2, Interesting)
I submitted an idea to Project 10^100. A damned good one too. One that was worth a $1.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health. One that was good enough to be selected as a Saatchi and Saatchi World Changing Ideas finalist. The idea will help millions of people, potentially tens of millions. It will, however, not involve the internet, not involve Googly stuff, and won't be all cool and PC. It won't preferentially help people in Africa, or people who are perceived to be underserved by some arbitrary metric. But the NIH thought it was good enough to warrant a New Innovators Award.
The 16 ideas that Google selected are an embarrassment. I can name 20 off the top of my head that are better. Hell, I was in the company of 9 others at the Saatchi and Saatchi celebration that were better right there. There are 54 other New Innovators this year who would also qualify.
With 150,000 submissions, I'm certain Google had some damned fine ones -- the fact that they chose these particular 16 is an indictment of their judging process.
Dependencies among projects (Score:4, Interesting)
Voting for the ideas. (Score:4, Interesting)
I consider Google a smart company.
But I don't think they have manage this project very well.
Instead of going trough 150000 suggestion and let the
public vote for 16 made-up projects.
They should have used the wisdom of the crowd to vote for the 150000 suggestions
and have the advisory board chose between the top 100.
What I would like to see is a open funding network.
Where people can post ideas like this, vote on there favorite projects
and where funds can find and support this projects.
ps. yes, I did submit this idea to 10^100.
It would have been better if they
Re:Anonymous coward (Score:4, Interesting)
Some americans have some pretty funny ideas about things which they don't have well implemented but work quite well elsewhere. Where the hell do you get these ideas about public transport?
From lots of research.
The scale and layout of much of the US makes mass transit impractical. In some places (like post-fire Chicago and dense-rectangular-grid New York City) it does work - quite well. But in others (like the San Francisco Bay area) it does not. Even if the various agencies worked together rather than building little fiefdoms studies indicate that it would never approach the per-ride total cost of private cars.
In still others (like rural Nevada or even outside a dense city) it's a joke. To have practical mass transit you need masses of people in some places and masses of destinations in others.
A car is in 99.9% of all cases more risky and more expensive for the owner.
You're not counting things like muggers and gangs working bus and train lines or exposure to seasonal flu, TB, and other diseases among "risks", are you?
As for cost I'm not comparing the tax-subsidized fare paid by a rider. I'm talking the total cost of the construction and operation of the bus/train service divided by rides vs. total cost of ownership and operation of an automobile (including its share of road construction and maintenance where it's not double-counted due to gas/license taxation) divided by equivalent rides. Cars beat buses or trains by a factor of several, even if the latter use exisiting rail lines.
Indeed, here in the SF Bay area we have several bus lines where the per-ride cost is in the thousands. It would be cheaper to decommission the line and use the tax money to take each of the regular riders, lease them a Mercedes every year, provide enough gas to make the equivalent trips. As for BART the cars are non-standard, built in France, and cost six million each as of a decade ago. Divide the depreciation over the cars' lifetimes by the number of riders, add in the amortized cost of the land under the (non-standard-gauge) rails, the construction, and the operation. Cars come out 'WAY ahead - even paying the horrible bridge tolls that help subsidize the BART system.
Re:Scroogle (Score:3, Interesting)
That has nothing to do with philanthropy. If you want to use a anonymity proxy, you're free to do so. And that would give you better protection than Scroogle, which only hides your IP from Google. If you're not bothered by other web servers logging your IP, then why would you be concerned with Google? Of all [searchenginewatch.com] the online megacorporations [csmonitor.com] out there [boingboing.net] to fear having your privacy invaded by [slashdot.org], you're worried about Google [pbs.org]?
If you don't want to be tracked by your credit card purchases, then pay for your purchases with cash. It would be unreasonable (and unwise) to ask that banks and credit firms store no digital records of your financial activities. Likewise, in age of information and with the ubiquity of the world wide web, you can't expect there to be no trace of your online activities anywhere (unless you live completely off the grid). You can't go frolicking through the snow and then get mad at the snow for preserving your footprints. Now, you can take care to conceal your tracks, or even create misleading tracks to fool anyone who might be following you. But the only way to ensure there's no trace of your presence is to not tread on the snowy ground.
So, instead of expecting search providers to keep no server logs, store no cookies, and store no session data (things that all modern websites do), perhaps it'd make more sense to focus on other areas of privacy protection that actually matter. For instance:
IMO, it's much more important to choose a search provider you can trust than to try to obtain perfect anonymity (which is simply unrealistic). The reason people like Google is because they provide the best search results as well as many innovative/useful auxiliary services. Now, if they couldn't collect search data, then they wouldn't be able to analyze them to identify search trends, usage patterns, etc. that have helped them to optimize their search algorithm over the years. Likewise, it's only by collecting this type of anonymized search data that they're able to offer many of their useful derivative services or user-friendly features incorporated into Google search or Gmail.
Google has shown that they can be trusted with user data (at least with regards to Google Search. Orkut and YouTube may be a different matter.) by being the only major search provider to outright refuse to hand over search records to the DoJ. They have also expended considerable resources lobbying for intellectual property reform, green technology, net neutrality, open w
Re:Voting for the ideas. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah... 154,000 world-changing ideas turned into 16 vague paragraphs of crap.
This is totally doable. Rather than propose a wisdom of the crowd project to Google, let's just do it. Maybe we can get many of the original submitters to send resubmit their entries. I still have mine.
We wouldn't want to use old-fashioned "vote for your favorite" methods because it would produce crap results completely skewed by Pareto Effect, But I think there are some real/viable options for approaching this in a manner which would build collective intelligence.
Then we just have to team up with various social enterprise funders to support the projects. ;)