SEARCH: the Now and the Future

I received a personal email reply from Goodsearch upon signing up, thanking me for blogging about Goodsearch. Granted it could have been mass-generated by simply inserting my name as a field entry, it still feels good as I don’t take much to feel appreciated. So that’s one up for the little guys in this age where size matters.

As my wife was shopping in a local WalGreen store, I caught up on my reading by planting myself at the Magazine/Book section. After surveying the many titles on display, I picked up the Oct 2006 issue of the WIRED magazine. As usual, I first scanned the Contents page for interesting articles and one caught my attention: The Information Factories. I could have finished the article there and then if not for the fact that it was check-out time on my wife’s cue. Time must have flown by faster than I have imagined, lost in the myriad images that the article conjures up (Moore’s Law, Bell’s Law, Grosch’s Law) and marveled at the scale that the future holds for computing (tera-scale to peta- and exa-scale, the last being with 18 trailing zeroes).

I recall a talk That I attended in 2003 in Malaysia delivered by Dr. Ahamd H. Zewail, Nobel laureate in Chemistry for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy. Now, a femtosecond is 15 trailing zeroes after the decimal point of a second. Remember the days when a billion seems astronomical (world population is just over 6 billions) and angstrom units and nano-seconds are really minute. So practically overnight we have doubled the order of magnitude of spread.

However, I felt a bit let down for not being able to finish reading the article. Buying it did cross my mind but I decided against it as it is not one of the regular magazines that I read. Then back home when I was surfing, I decided to do a search for the magazine and the article. Imagine my delight when I found that the online version is available (read here). Such a magnanimous act.

If you're fascinated by the impending dawn of the petabyte age where teleputers would outpace the current crops of mobile gadgets to oblivion, and would like to have a glimpse of what "cloudware" portends for netizens, the article would be a good read. Hope you'll be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

Charity Starts at Home

We always have a soft spot in our hearts for people who are less fortunate. While many of us are unable to offer personal assistance, we are nevertheless generous in our offer of financial assistance in the form of monetary donations. Thus was born an industry unto itself: charities. These are not-for-profit organizations staffed full-time by professionals who garner donations and channel them to various foundations that need funds to provide for the poor/handicapped/needy. In most cases, a certain portion of the proceeds is used to sustain this intermediary role. And that proportion can, and does, vary from charity to charity.

Recently, the Tampa Tribute, in their Oct 8, 2006 edition, reported on the results of an "investigation based on public records requests and an analysis of state and federal financial records" under the news heading “Cause for Misgivings”. Among the findings are:

• Of the 20 major charities in Florida that rank the worst in terms of using donations to help the needy, 18 say they help police officers, veterans or other public servants. Those groups - including several based in the Bay area - took in more than $24 million last year and used just $20 of every $100 in donations to help the needy. The majority of the money went to for-profit fundraisers.
• An efficient charity spends no more than 25 percent of revenue on fundraising and administration, according to federal guidelines.
• Analysis of the state's database shows that thousands of charities do good work with minimal fundraising or administrative costs - relying instead on volunteers and community-based fundraising, not telemarketing.

All in all, the results can be considered as a mixed bag. While there is certainly cause for misgivings, that should not deter us from continuing the charitable streak in us. Instead, we should be circumspect as statements such as "all proceeds will go to the charity" can mean that only the donations net of administrative and fundraising expenses would trickle down to the recipients.

With the advent of the Internet, similar charity organizations, the click version, have sprung up. I have described one of them, Goodtree, previously in my blog (see here). An anonymous comment to my blog pointed out that perhaps the intention of Goodtree could be less than noble and that its search capability certainly does not qualify as “being having the best of the best serves you” as I have described it.

So I did something that I should have done before I blogged on my supposedly great find: I goggled Goodtree. And look what I found: an evaluation of GoodSearch vs Goodtree.

I don’t know about you but I have already decided to switch to GoodSearch and also pick the charities I would like to contribute to with open eyes from now on. We all have finite resources and should therefore channel them to causes that would result in the loudest bang. My brother put it best: The softness of the heart must be matched with the hardness of the head to avoid pseudo-charities or for profit charities.

The moral of the story is do your due diligence, be it a brick or click outfit, and do not be afraid to change your option when what is claimed does not fit the bill or when a better alternative comes along.

And today's pleasant surprise is made possible by the efforts of the Tampa Tribune, the anonymous commentator, my brother, and Goodsearch.