Google Expected to Target Phone Search:
What’s the next big killer app from search companies? Quickly and easily searching telephone calls for a particular word or phrase—in essence, to Google your calls—is a likely candidate. And it isn’t as far off as it might seem.
In the past two years, a number of customer service calling center operators for hire, some with thousands of employees working at the phones, have invested in the technology to identify inept operators and other measures of quality control.
While that’s far from a mainstream scenario, these pioneering commercial applications are nonetheless an important first step toward a future in which phone calls will be among the Web pages available by visiting Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
As an aside, I’m surprised one feature is still not being pushed by mobile service providers such as Cingular or T-Mobile: uploading contact information to a central server. Everyone I know has lost or destroyed at least one of their phones accidentally, losing many, if not all of their numbers/contacts. I would be willing to pay a small fee (maybe $1 or so) to update the database each month. If AOL can do it to a buddy list, why can’t Sprint?
Some more of this uploading notion at this older News.com story.
Sniff. I somehow am always the last guy to get the memo.
New trigonometry is a sign of the times:
Mathematics students have cause to celebrate. A University of New South Wales academic, Dr Norman Wildberger, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit.
What’s more, his simple new framework means calculations can be done without trigonometric tables or calculators, yet often with greater accuracy.
Established by the ancient Greeks and Romans, trigonometry is used in surveying, navigation, engineering, construction and the sciences to calculate the relationships between the sides and vertices of triangles.
“Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong,” says Wildberger, whose book is titled Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry (Wild Egg books).
Dr Wildberger has replaced traditional ideas of angles and distance with new concepts called “spread” and “quadrance”.
These new concepts mean that trigonometric problems can be done with algebra,” says Wildberger, an associate professor of mathematics at UNSW.
“Rational trigonometry replaces sines, cosines, tangents and a host of other trigonometric functions with elementary arithmetic.”
