Technology

Google has revamped its search engine in an attempt to offer instant answers to search questions.

A new function, the Knowledge Graph, will make the site’s algorithms act more human, the site said in a blog post.

The feature will at first be available to US-based users, but will be rolled out globally in due course — via redwolf.newsvine.com

There’s another mining boom you may have missed. It too involves paying young people six-figure salaries in their first jobs, and exploring deeper for resources that may have been previously overlooked. But it’s not about driving trucks or digging holes. It’s about building algorithms and crunching facts and numbers. It’s mining for data.

Big data is the new business black. It’s a catch-all phrase for the billions of transactions and other bits of information about their customers, suppliers and operations logged by businesses and governments the world over every day. Yesterday’s storage problem has become today’s strategic asset. Turns out there’s gold in them thar files.

This is the biggest industry that people are only now starting to talk about, says Anthony Goldbloom, a 28-year-old former Reserve Bank of Australia statistician who has moved his start-up data analytics business, Kaggle, to Silicon Valley where NASA is among its clients. The whole place is big data mad. Industries like banking, insurance, and increasingly pharmaceuticals are competing on the back of predictive models that get built [by mining data].

Enterprises are using data analysis not just to improve their everyday business processes, but also to build predictive models of consumer behaviour. Retailers, telcos, airlines, hotels, healthcare and credit card companies are among those with information-rich customer data. In Australia only really leading companies have realised this as an opportunity, Goldbloom says. To his knowledge, Telstra, Myer, the University of Melbourne and the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority are among those known to have applied large-scale data analysis to their operations — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Cassette Tapes aren’t exactly the highest quality audio, but if you have a few rare tracks that you can’t buy on CD (or a few homemade cassettes you want to back up for posterity), CNET shows us how to easily record them to an MP3 file with Audacity — via Lifehacker

Light bulbs that are said to last for more than two decades while consuming very little energy may go on sale later this year.

US firm General Electric, Dutch company Philips and UK-based Sylvania all showcased their products at the Light Fair industry conference in Las Vegas.

Using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of filaments, the bulbs are meant to produce as much light as a 100-watt incandescent alternative.

However, LEDs are not usually cheap — via redwolf.newsvine.com

If you talk to US-based companies about hosting providers, they’re likely to rabbit on and on about the unholy dominant duo of the US market: Amazon and Rackspace. Amazon. Rackspace. Rackspace. Amazon. It gets to be a bit repetitive at times. If you’re not with one, you’re with the other. Or both. And now both are (reportedly) expanding into Australia. Like Amazon, Rackspace recently opened an Australian office and starting hiring local staff. Like Amazon, Rackspace has already notched up some Australian customers. And also like its eternal rival, Rackspace’s appeal to Australian customers has been somewhat limited by the fact that it doesn’t have any Australian infrastructure. But as iTNews reports today, all that may be about to change, as Rackspace follows Amazon in yet another way: Australian infrastructure — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Want a simple way to count characters, words, and paragraphs in any Mac program? Mac OS X Hints shares an Automator script that adds a right-click option to selected text so you can get a word count in any program you want — via Lifehacker

Lists of hashes help the sorting process but their usefulness is limited by the changes regularly made to images.

An image-processing tool that can ignore those tiny changes and work out what other images it resembles has been developed by Microsoft researchers.

Instead of a hash, this creates what its creators call a signature for each image. Unlike a hash this signature does not change when an image is altered or manipulated.

No matter how much it’s changed, the underlying properties of the image’s signature remain the same, said Stuart Aston, chief security officer at Microsoft UK.

Called PhotoDNA, the tool was developed to keep an eye on images uploaded to other Microsoft services and Facebook and now, with the help of Swedish firm NetClean, is being given to police forces to help them categorise images — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Now that Google Drive has built file storage into your Google account, it’s only natural that you’d like it to play nicely with your other Google apps. With a few tricks, it can — at least with your Gmail account. Tech blogger Amit Agarwal details how to set up a system in which applying a GoogleDrive label to any email in your Gmail inbox will automatically save its attachment to Google Drive — syncing those files directly to your desktop — via Lifehacker

Three years ago, the Christian Science Monitor began a jump-in-the-deep-end version of digital transformation. The Monitor killed its five-day-a-week print edition, started a weekly magazine version and shifted daily operations entirely to the Web.

A protracted period, most of the first year, followed where everyone was learning how to swim, editor John Yemma recalled in a phone interview last week. For news staff particularly, the break from the old industrial process of once-a-day deadlines was wrenching.

But over the last two years, a slightly reduced staff has hit its stride with big improvements in traffic and the news organisation’s finances — via redwolf.newsvine.com

I like Google Plus. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever read are on Google Plus, and the Hangout is amazing.

But Google is doing everything it can to force Google Plus on everyone, and it’s pissing me off.

Yesterday, I tried to like a video on YouTube. I tried to like a video on YouTube. I wasn’’t signed in to my Google Plus account, and this is what I saw…

Where the thumbs up and thumbs down used to be, there is now a big G+ Like button. When you go anywhere near it, you get a little popup that tells you to upgrade to Google Plus for some reason that I don’t remember, because the instant I saw it, I made a rageface — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Your 802.11n wireless network and devices are about to become passé. Although the official 802.11ac specification won’t be finalised until sometime in 2013, wireless equipment will soon appear on store shelves sporting the faster wireless protocol.

It’s been almost five years since 802.11n wireless routers and devices became available — also well ahead of the specification actually getting ratified. Now, IEEE is finalizing the 802.11ac standard. 802.11ac is also referred to as gigabit Wi-Fi and will be capable of significantly faster data transfer speeds than the current 802.11n — via redwolf.newsvine.com