Warning: squirrels.

Young people not so good at searching, should get off my lawn

One of the common urban legends in the education world is that that children are born with the innate ability to operate electronics but, sometime in their early to mid-twenties, these [former] children go through some sort of technological menopause and become technologically-challenged like you and me.  Researchers at the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee decided to investigate the validity of the first part of that theory by measuring how well [British] children born after 2003 perform certain internet tasks. 

The results are disappointing. While information literacy is now embedded into the curriculum, "[a] careful look at the literature over the past 25 years finds no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills." Children may be swift at searching, but "the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority." This may be because "young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies."

In other words, kids kind of suck at Google.

You can download the complete report in Adobe Acrobat format.

GaETC 2007 Podcasts

About three weeks ago I had the honor of being a featured speaker at the 20th annual Georgia Educational Technology Conference. As in years past, the folks at the conference recorded two of my sessions and turned them into podcasts:

Keeping Up With the Googlebots: What’s New at Google (as of November 2007)

• Podcast
• PowerPoint presentation [zipped]
• Flash presentation

What’s New and What’s Different in Microsoft Office 2007

• Podcast
• PowerPoint presentation [zipped]
• Flash presentation

Podcasts for presentations of many of the conference's other featured speakers--including David Pogue, Leslie Fisher, Gail Lovely, Curtis Bonk, Doug Johnson, Annette Lamb, and many others--can be found on the GaETC Podcast page.

Enjoy!

New Google Maps feature: drag directions

Well, the evil scientists at Google are at it again.  They just added a new feature where you click and drag your driving route to create new, custom, turn-by-turn driving maps.  The following video demonstrates this new feature far better that I could:

More Google traffic info: What cities are covered?

Yesterday I mentioned that Google maps now shows real-time traffic information for over 30 US cities.  But what cities?  Well, if you go to maps.google.com and click on the Traffic button, you'll see a map of all of the cities whose traffic data is currently available.

Google maps now shows real-time traffic

Google maps now shows real-time traffic for over 30 US cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta.  Just go to maps.google.com, search for a US city, and click on the new Traffic button in the upper right corner of the map.

Up pops a real-time, color-coded map showing you which highways are congested and which ones aren't.

What do the colors mean?  Well,

• Green: more than 50 miles per hour
• Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
• Red: less than 25 miles per hour
• Gray: no data currently available

Happy motoring!

 

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Conventional wisdom states that the more you use your hard drive -- or, for that matter, the hotter the hard drive gets -- the more likely it is to crash.  That certainly sounds plausible, but is it true?  According to Google, the answer is a resounding "NO!"

Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, and Luiz Andre Barroso gathered in-depth data from over 100,000 disk drives deployed throughout Google and discovered that

• Contrary to previously reported results, there is very little correlation between failure rates and either elevated temperature or activity levels.
• Some SMART parameters (scan errors, reallocation counts, offline reallocation counts, and probational counts) have a large impact on failure probability.
• Given the lack of occurrence of predictive SMART signals on a large fraction of failed drives, it is unlikely that an accurate predictive failure model can be built based on these signals alone.
  

Their complete report, titled "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population", is a 241 KB, 13 page PDF file that reads a bit like stereo instructions.  If you aren't a techie, skip the PDF and check out Gizmodo's or StorageMojo's summaries instead.

Long story short: Most of what we know about hard drive failure rates and causes is wrong.