Fortnightly Mailing

The mathematical theory behind Google

January 29th 1998 paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, by Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd:

The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the readers interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a mathod (sic) for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them. We compare PageRank to an idealized random Web surfer. We show how to efficiently compute PageRank for large numbers of pages. And, we show how to apply PageRank to search and to user navigation.

Your Work and Your Health Information System

Back in the early 1990s I was involved in the development of an "expert system" which generated advice to workers about the likely effects on health of different jobs, and the legal and technical remedies. The main architect for the system was my friend Jos Kingston (featured here previously for her work on HTMLtag, which produces clean, automated html from simple Word files, as well as for her candid writing about being terminally ill). Jos has just put full details of the information system on her web site, partly for the record, and partly in case anyone wants to develop the idea further.

My Lai hero Hugh Thompson dies

Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968. He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians.

For some reason I'd never registered Hugh Thompson's role in stopping the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, nor how he was treated subsequently, nor that it took 30 years for him to be awarded the US Soldier's Medal. Article and links on BBC web site.

Structured procrastination

Don't miss this 1995 essay by John Perry about "an amazing strategy that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time".

Miss Beazley

Acres of state-funded, platinum-plated, risible, anthropomorphic kitch on the White House web site about George and Laura Bush's dogs. Too ghastly to miss.