Error Forum Blog

Earlier this week a British researcher came out with findings that Nobel Prize winners live two years longer, on average, than those who were mere finalists for a prize. The killer quote is this one, from University of Warwick economist Andrew Oswald: “Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic.”

Oswald says he doesn’t know what that magic is, but the report reminded me of the compelling work of UC Berkeley’s Len Syme. Syme is the former dean of the Berkeley School of Public Health, and he’s worked on some landmark studies over the years. Syme is the rare researcher who’s willing to admit when his research doesn’t pan out, or that it is based on wrong assumptions - and from those negative results he’s gone on to make remarkable insights. Most famously is his notion of “control of destiny,” the idea that he defines as “the ability of people to deal with the forces that affect their lives.” It seems that the more control we have over our lives, the healthier we are. Even if we’re at the relative top of our social/economic food chain, if we don’t feel that we have control, we’ll be more likely to suffer adverse health effects. Here’s Syme describing the effect:

A few years ago Dr. Michael Marmot studied coronary heart disease in 10,000 British civil servants and made an interesting discovery. He found, as you would expect, that workers at the bottom of the civil-service hierarchy — guards and delivery people — had heart disease rates 4 times higher than workers at the very top of the hierarchy. But Marmot also observed a gradient of disease from top-to-bottom of the civil-service hierarchy. Workers at the top had the lowest rates of disease, but those one step below them — professionals and executives, doctors and lawyers — had heart disease rates twice as high as those at the very top.We might be able to explain the high rates among those at the bottom in terms of poverty, poor education, inadequate nutrition, or poor housing, but that would not explain why doctors and lawyers had rates of disease twice as high as those at the very top. Doctors and lawyers are not poor; they do not have bad educations or poor medical care or poor housing, and yet they have disease rates twice as high as those above them. A very similar gradient has now been seen for virtually every disease in every industrialized country in the world.

So it seems to me that this ‘control of destiny’ phenomenon is in effect even among Nobel Prize finalists - if you win, you’re the king of the world, in total control. If you don’t, you’ll always know that there’s always somebody out there better than you, even if it’s just one punk physicist at MIT…

“Microsoft may have been willing to spend years developing Vista, the long-delayed upgrade of its Windows operating system, but when Bill Gates was presented with a plan for finally beating Google in Internet search technology, he gave the engineers just 100 days“

When I was invited to Redmond to get a sneak peak of the new MSN search engine a few years back as part of SearchChamps, I left a little underwhelmed. I’m not sure how much more I can say due to still-existing non-disclosure agreements, but from information already published on the web, others clearly felt the same way. I thought that was a lot of potential from Microsoft Research, and clearly Microsoft has immense capability, and resources, but they haven’t really fired in the search space, as yet.

Are Microsoft the new IBM, and Google the new Microsoft?

Or are MS waiting for Vista to provide leverage?

They’ve been a little quiet of late. A little too quiet. As the article wisely states: “Don’t underestimate Microsoft�.

If there’s one prediction I’d make this year, it would be that this is the year that the MS search beast wakes.

Or maybe next year

 

Mobile Browsing - Access maps and directions directly on your phone’s browser. Simply enter mobile.live.com/search into your phone’s address bar and select Map. Choose from the scopes of Local, Web, Map, News and Spaces and get Live Search from your mobile device.

Text Messages (SMS) - If you don’t have a data plan, you can simply send a text message to 95483 (WLIVE) with a query like “Toys Chicago, IL� or “Coffee 90210� and you’ll immediately receive a text message reply with the nearest business listings with address and phone numbers.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this beta so we can continue to improve. Just send them over to wlsmbeta@microsoft.com and, check out mobile.search.live.com for more information.

And just maybe these will help you find your way to everything on your wish list this season ;)

-Darwin and the Mobile Search Team

• Live Search is going to have a great presence in the Microsoft booth at CES this year, and we would love for Live Search blog readers who are going to CES to stop by and talk to us. We will have program managers and product managers from the search team there all week, so it’s a great opportunity to give feedback directly to the product team, and get your questions about Live Search answered on the spot. convention map The Live Search team will be in four kiosks in the Microsoft hall (C2) in the Las Vegas Convention Center (see map for details.) The Microsoft hall is divided into scenarios, and you will find Live Search and Live Search Maps kiosks in the Productivity Scenario area and Live QnA kiosk in the Communications scenario. People from our team will be at these kiosks during all the normal show hours. Free Stuff Alert: In addition to the usual booth giveaways, we have some special stuff for Live Search blog readers. Stop on by the Live QnA kiosk, say hi to Betsy and get a snazzy QnA t-shirt for participating on the site (asking questions, giving answers, voting). We are also taking feature suggestions and improvements since we are not yet out of beta. We look forward to seeing you and hearing what you think of Live Search in person. We look forward to seeing you and hearing what you think of Live Search in person, and showing you some of our cool new features like 3D Maps, QnA, new instant answers and more that can help you have a great time in Las Vegas next week.

Well, probably not in search. However, they are very proud of the fact that their Live Maps is now incorporating 3-D, photo-realistic cityscapes, which puts them ahead of Google.

And they’re right - that is cool. How about some cities outside the US?

Microsoft also plan to leverage these 3-D maps for advertising purposes:

“Microsoft will integrate ads into these 3D models in a way it considers organic, by displaying them on virtual billboards the users will encounter as they zip around the cities, Figueroa said�

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