Google and Random House

Random House, the world’s biggest book publisher, is considering joining a book-search project run by Google.
It came as a surprise, or not?
Google has agreements with more than 10,000 publishers, large and small, to have their books scanned in full. Google then makes them partially available — according to agreements with each publisher — for online readers.
Meaning that, at least theoretically, Google should be the arch-enemy of the paper publishing industry.
Google has so far digitised the full texts of more than 1 million books. The total number of books in the world is unknown but global library collective WorldCat has more than 91 million bibliographic records in its database, the biggest of its kind.
Google now works with 27 libraries worldwide, up from seven a year ago, and its book search is available in 11 languages Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and Japan’s Keio University library.

The company, which does not charge or pay its publisher partners, gains depth and authority for its Internet search engine by making not only Web pages but also books searchable.

At the same time, Google has been thrown into legal dispute with U.S. publishers as Google also scans works from its U.S. library partners that are still in copyright without asking the publishers first.

The alleged venture has not been confirmed by Google.

Personally I like the feeling of a paper book, the convenience of reading it before going to bed. I would consider an ebook only if I have no other choice and probably I would try to print it out as soon as possible.

What is Occam’s Razor?

It’s no secret that I am a big fan of House; I’ve liked the show since the beginning.
Long time ago, in 2004, it was an episode called ‘Occam’s Razor’. I came across this name again today, reading a pretty interesting blog

According to the definition:
‘Occam’s razor (sometimes spelled Ockham’s razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory’

The title of the episode is borne out in that a very likely condition, a cold, combined with a somewhat unlikely mistreatment, the pharmacy error in this case, lead to a collection of conditions which could only be explained by a far more unlikely combination of maladies. The cause, though difficult to envisage, was actually the simplest and most likely of those that they had considered, thus conforming to Occam’s Razor.

The Plot:
A guy (Brandon),while having sex with his fiancee, passes out.
Symptoms revealed by House and his team: cough, nausea, low blood pressure, fever and abdominal pain.
Everybody has a theory about what it might be, leading even to a bet between House and his friend, Dr. Wilson.
Finally we discover that House was right (almost all the time he is) and the patient took by mistake a drug for gout instead of one for cold.