"The four members of pop group Abba have attended the Swedish premiere of Mamma Mia, the film which features 22 of their songs." - Anne Bouey via Bookmarklet
"Further damning evidence of the undemocratic nature of last week's election in Zimbabwe that returned longtime leader Robert Mugabe as president emerged Saturday in the form of video footage of blatant vote-rigging." - Anne Bouey via Bookmarklet
"Former South African President Nelson Mandela is to be removed from a U.S. terrorism watch list under a bill President Bush signed Tuesday. [...] Nelson Mandela was on list for fighting South Africa's apartheid regime." - Simon via Bookmarklet
"English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: "How many informations can your flash drive hold?" In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don't require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"" - Ana
This article was fascinating. Reshared from Chris's feed. For once, I wish that our FOAFing were less aggressive so I could just "like" it and more people would see it... - Ana
Heh I shared this on Reader as well with my personal favorite "Please do the needful" as a comment. - Erica Baker
Reminds me of a recent episode of Radio Lab on NPR. I never knew about tonal languages before hearing it. Fascinating. - Harvey Simmons
The title is misleading. Languages have been spoken imperfectly by foreign speakers since time immemorial, but has that impacted the way the standard dialects are pronounced? Also iiuc you don't have what's defind as a dialect until you have a group of native speakers. - j1m
@jim Yes. Language is ever mutating in large part to cross-cultural saturaton. Every language historically shows this. - Michael W. May via twhirl
well, we have similar effect in Russian where language norm is kept more stringently (since Russian empire) - like changing noun's gender for irregular (borrowed) nouns, etc - silpol
it is fascinating to see so many French words in english traced back to 1066 normandie conquest. - Pokai
English is very much like Chinese: damn simple grammar and words you can't imagine how to pronounce right given their written form: http://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/... - 9000
"Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.
At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google’s facilities and find less expensive child care." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Strangely written -- hard to believe this is in the NYT: "Faced with this dilemma, Google decided that the way to solve the dual problems of a too-long wait list and a too-large subsidy was — are you sitting down for this? — to get rid of C.C.L.C. and make the Kinderplex more like the Woods!" - Paul Buchheit
Sergey Brin comes off as a real gem. Looks like 'don't be evil' is morphing to 'let them eat cake'. Amazing what a 40%+ drop in share price can do. - Peter Simard
I found it odd that NYT quoted Sergey multiple times but each quote was disputed by Google PR after the fact. Seems like their PR folks are trying to do some "damage control"? - Alex Barbara
$57,000 just for someone to watch your kid? Remind me to not have kids for a while.. - Alex Barbara
Slowly but surely the shine will finally come off of Google and reality will set in. - AJ Kohn
The sense of "entitlement" is pretty stunning to an outsider who is an occasional visitor. It's pretty obvious (to me) that the "gimme" attitude is going to be an albatross around Google's neck when the time comes that their stock price returns from the stratosphere and settles around something reasonable and in line with the true value of the company. - Jason Wehmhoener
Geez. I don't know one solution that didn't generate new problems as a result of its having solved an old problem. Can't win no matter what in the eyes of the media. Also, this is news-worthy enough to be in the Times? - Ginger Makela
I have no thoughts on the day care issue in and of itself but people changing "don't be evil" into "do no evil" makes me grind my teeth. http://www.google.com/search?q... - Erica Baker
@Paul, agreed -- it's a strangely written story. The writer's bias is clear. Using heresay from employees then vaguely referring to the official statements. - Sprague D
$57,000 was for two kids... and after the price reductions, it won't be that expensive. - Michael Leggett
The author feels that employee-provided day care should be a requirement just like health insurance (not sure I agree), but fails to applaud Google's effort to make it available to those that want it. A 700-child waiting list (over 2 years) is unreasonable as is Google paying a $37,000 subsidy per child. I love working at Google... and I want them to stay around. Paying that large a subsidy is irresponsible to its employees and its shareholders. - Michael Leggett
You could argue that they should just lower costs then... but the main cost is the teachers (as it should be). Google believes teachers should be paid more and I'm proud that they are putting their money where their heart is by doing just that. If you don't want to pay so much, you can always find day care else where, right? Am I missing something? - Michael Leggett
When I visited HP I noted that they don't have the coffee carts anymore that they used to have. The employees noted that other benefits had gone away too. When the high profitability phase of a company ends, the benefits usually go away. At Microsoft they tried taking away things too, like towels in locker rooms, and the employees rebelled. - Robert Scoble
wonder what is average daycare costs there, in area? - silpol
It's absolutely incredible that day care would cost more than the mean national income ($48,201 according to Wikipedia). I understand that this is Silicon Valley, and therefore not applicable to the rules of the rest of the country, but still...it's astounding. - Spinn
We were paying $21,000 a year for two kids and that was top of the line in Charlotte. In theory I like the idea of company sponsored childcare but in reality I don't want my employer to have any influence over my kids. - Lori Reed
I posted this to reddit and got on the front page :P - Bjorn Tipling
probably I have to stop bitching about local tax - I pay monthly for not-full-day at kindergarten in about 100 meter from my house about 130 EUR, for full day it might reach 200 EUR/month max, i.e. annually 2400 EUR (~3600 USD)... hmmmmmmm - silpol
"Google can’t just have low teacher-child ratios — it has to have the lowest of anybody." - Shouldn't it be high teacher-child ratios? Unless they want more children to less teachers. - nadim
I had a hard time believing this was a NY Times article when I first saw it. Talks about child care at the beginning, then references a blog post talking about how Google is not a good place to work and then goes on to detail the child care issue. - Turker Keskinpala
@Michael -- $57G's .. not expensive? ... I don't even make that much in 2 years anymore .. - Steven Hodson
"If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries." - Gabe Schaffer
Even $33k for 2 kids seems like a lot -- at $16/hr it seems like you could just hire a babysitter for 8 hours a day to watch your two children. For $57k you could just hire a child psychologist full time. - Gabe Schaffer
@Steven I didn't mean it wasn't expensive. It is expensive. I meant it won't be as much as $57k. Maybe I'm not being fair... but I thought the article was bias (not invalid). It does raise some interesting issues... are companies responsible for providing child care? Something seems backwards with how we live when we work so much that we expect our employer to take care of our children. I don't know the answer... but good things to think about. - Michael Leggett
So basically by having my wife stay home and do a superb job of taking care of the kids and the house during the day she is worth about $90,000 a year. Thank you babe! You are awesome! - Christian Burns
But what about people who don't have kids, should Google pay them because they are saving the company money? And what about those people who want to have kids, but can't meet the right person, should Google pay for dating services? Google is an awesome place to work, and sometimes they go overboard. Witness the swimming in place pools with lifeguards that almost nobody used. Let's agree to compare them with other companies. It's only fair. - Chris White
hmmm... let's see, four years ago, i was making $45 000 a year before i quit to take care of my daughter full time while my wife continued her job; because it made more sense than spending my entire salary on a nanny just so i could go to work. plus i get to hang out with my kid(soon to be kids) all day and do cool stuff like help them learn the alphabet, count, play their first casual computer games, go to the park, swim, museums, etc. there's always that option. - Nathan Eckenrode
It seems like everyone has ideas on how to do this at a lower cost than Google. Maybe someone should open a competing "google" daycare near the Google campus -- from the sounds of it there would be hundreds of eager customers. - Paul Buchheit
I'm interested to see if these kids actually turn out to be uber-smart. How many of the Googlers went to intense, research-driven, daycares like these?We'll see in ten to twenty years, but at times, one has to wonder how people ever became intelligent without having the latest and greatest learning craze forced down their throat. A better indicator of their intelligence will most likely be how much learning is re-inforced (deep breath here) at home by their parents, instead of video games and TV. - David Adewumi
IMO, this is unusually harsh and unwarranted. Clearly the media likes being extreme... - Bindu Reddy
I don't know the rationales behind the actions, but a friend of mine at Google was brought to tears battling these changes before it ever made it to Valleywag or the NYT. There are Google parents who are very, very upset about this, no matter how badly the NYT article was written. - Kevin Fox
And for good reason, mostly self "inflicted", Google will always be held to a higher standard, - Deepak
IMHO, this is a case of a whole lot of wrongs. I'm not proud of the way this situation has been handled by EMG, I'm upset by the fact that some info was leaked from an internal meeting (TGIF) on Valleywag, and I've lost a bit more respect for the NY Times after reading that lopsidedly hysterical editorial. In the end, everybody's losing here, nothing to be happy about :-(. - Adam Lasnik
These stories about google as a company really bore me. - minus3
"... that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting ..." So if the NYT has several sources on this as they say, and a Google spokesman denies this, then someone's lying (either Google, or the reporter, or the people in the meeting). To better judge how well this piece was written it seems important to know who lied here. - Philipp Lenssen
What we're seeing in the article is a paraphrased comment and exactly five quoted words. You could dispute whether he uttered the phrase "bottled water and M&Ms", or whether he said something that meant something like what the reporter is implying. If you want to argue about what a comment in a meeting means and whether that meaning is accurately reflected in a piece like this one, well, you can have quite an argument even if nobody is actually lying. - ⓞnor
Based on the obvious bias of the article, and all the times that I saw this kind of thing from the inside of Google, I'm inclined to believe that the quotes are false or out of context. - Paul Buchheit
I don't use Google day care, but I've heard about all the screw-ups secondhand at the lunch table. I found the article to be quite representative of what I have heard expressed by fellow Googlers. - Jon McAlister
"Last week, Yelp purged an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can't they review it?" - Anne Bouey via Bookmarklet
anything chocolate rain is gold!!! err chocolate you know what i mean! :) - (jeff)isageek
Ugh! I don't even want to see this video. It's bad enough I saw the first version. That's one action (of many) for which I would very much like an "undo" button. - April Buchheit
"On a recent afternoon deep in the Amazon's rain forest, members of the Surui tribe, which made contact with the outside world less than 40 years ago, could not resist the urge known to modern man - they googled themselves.
Then they looked up football." - Anne Bouey via Bookmarklet
"Serena Williams will face sister Venus for the third time in a Wimbledon final after bringing Zheng Jie's incredible run to an end with a 6-2 7-6 (7-5) win." - Anne Bouey via Bookmarklet
"Archaeology pushes its history ever deeper in the past; a racing market economy makes Chinese-ness a mutable identity, under continual revision. Art institutions seem caught in the tension between self-images: the sovereign civilization apart on one hand, and the ambitious scrambler in the global game on the other." - Jessie Norris via Bookmarklet
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, this is bowling. There are rules." (Tickets went on sale for today for Lebowskifest in SF. Highly recommended good times. I will be there, Abiding. White Russian in hand.) - Sacca via Bookmarklet
70% for me...jeez I suck...granted I moved to the States when I was 11; but still I am American....it's how I identify myself and believe it - Snay Trivedi
95%. I misread one of the questions. *sigh* - Mark Trapp
70% and I'm not even American! Damn that western influence! - Rahul Das
35% .. seemed more like a high school history test than anything to do with citizenship .. and since I didn't take the class, (in the US, at least) I failed ... - Andrew Perry
80% I always think the constitution was written in 1776, I should know better by now. - xero
Hum... NoiseRiver was supporting this two days before :p - directeur via NoiseRiver
Very cool. If you go back a couple days, it has the proper timestamp format e.g. Tuesday at 12:15pm etc. I guess the question is what time zone are these based on. I'd guess Pacific time due to FF being in the Valley/Bay Area. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
About time too! :-) I think they should either allow me to pick my timezone or detect my regional settings so that the historical date/time always displays correctly for my timezone. - Tony Ruscoe
The great thing about the timezone issue is that it doesn't matter much. Small time deltas are done relatively "6 hours ago" so time zone doesn't come into play. Long time deltas are done absolutely and since FF doesn't ask what time zone you live in are likely off but it doesn't matter too much because it is a long time delta and thus it's ok to be off by a few hours because is 2 weeks ago really different from 2 weeks and 1 hour ago? Brilliant. - Benjamin Golub
I like it. The only problem I see though is it also displays over people's names when you hover over their name. It gets in the way. - Nick Munson
Translation to local time is pretty easy isn't it? FF (server side) doesn't know the time zone you are in -- but the browser can - Brian Sullivan
@Benjamin, that's completely true. So I'd argue why bother displaying the time at all for comments older than 24-48 hours. (Philipp's been doing that in the Google Blogoscoped forum for years: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/) @Brian, absolutely. - Tony Ruscoe
From IMBD: Following the successful feature film 'Paris, je t'aime' that opened the 2006 'Un Certain Regard' section of the Cannes Film Festival and was distributed worldwide, we are thrilled to present 'New York, I Love You'. 12 filmmakers will direct a short film (5 minutes) illustrating the universal theme of encountering love within the five boroughs of New York City. 'Paris, je t'aime' has proven to be a wonderfully creative experience for all the talents involved. Internationally acclaimed directors such as the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne, Gus Van Sant, Alfonso Cuaron, Wes Craven, Walter Salles, Tom Tykwer, and artists among which Elijah Wood, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Natalie Portman, Nick Nolte, Gena Rowlands, Gérard Depardieu truly enjoyed this enjoyable and inspiring project. - Diane Ensey
