Google Summer of Code Midterms


This week marks the halfway point of Google Summer of Code 2011. Both students and mentors will be submitting their midterm evaluations of one another as indicated in our timeline through Friday, July 15th. If you would like to read more about midterm evaluations, please check out the “How Do Evaluations Work?” link on our FAQ.

The next milestone for the program will be the “pencils down” date of August 15th where students can take a week to scrub their code, write tests, improve calculations, and so forth before the firm end of coding on August 22nd.

Google Places: Google Removes Spam

It appears that Google has removed most but not all review spam from the Moishe’s Moving System’s Places page and from many of the other Places pages affected by this scam. On Moishe’s Places page, the spam that remains (besides their response spam) was posted between July 1 and July 3 and seems to still affect 35 or so other moving companies nationwide. Whether Google just removed the spam affecting the most companies or it is still a work in progress is not yet clear. Kudos to Google for moving on this problem.

Here are a few samples of the spam that still remains and is affecting moving companies country wide:

Another interesting sidelight is that Google is not alone in having been hit with this spam. According to Google’s index, Superpages has been seeing this stuff since February, 2010. It is also present in Rateitall.com, Judy’s Book, Yellowbot, InsiderPages, MyMovingReviews and  Kudzu starting last fall and continuing into early this year. While this dreck is visible in all of these sites, it is much less pervasive than at Google. Whether it was already taken down elsewhere or the extortionists are just ramping up their game is not yet clear.

Fake reviews are a problem whether perpetrated by the businesses themselves or by others attempting to gain advantage at the expense of the business. The answer to the problem is not totally clear but a solution probably will need a number of components:

  • More FTC enforcement and education
  • Better filtering algorithms on the part of the search engines
  • Improved and more viable business complaint options, dispute resolution and removal mechanisms.

Google Places is not the only environment in which this abuse is taking place. But Google can and should provide a lead in developing an exemplary review environment that is fair to the public and fair to the businesses being reviewed.

Google Earth is showing projections of forest dynamics

While Google Earth is often used to show past and present conditions on Earth, it’s rarely used to see the future. We’ve seen cool sites like the Blue Marble 3000 and the University of Corsica’s ForeFire, but most focus on showing what we know about right now rather than showing what could happen in the future.

That brings me to Michael Gerzon and his neat idea to use Google Earth to show projections of forest dynamics, both in terms of tree growth and the spread of potential forest fires.

forest.jpg

On his site, you can run a few sample demos to see how things work. It’s not using real GIS data at this point, but it’s a neat demonstration and I think it’s the first I’ve seen that shows tree growth in an area.

Expanding the idea out, there are some fun possibilities. For example, you could show what an area would look like after xx years of tree growth, maybe in a new housing development. Combined with 3D buildings, it could be very powerful.