Here’s a collection of webservices for finding out geographical-related information. There are currently three services available for finding the time zone or local time, the sunrise and sunset times, and the height above sea level at a given latitude and longitude.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Is God an Accident?
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question…
Yahoo gives up quest for search dominance
‘We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,’ Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. ‘It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.’
Yahoo’s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google’s dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo and Microsoft Corp. in Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising.
GeoNames
The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.
Campaigner in row over tax on oil
A green campaigner who runs his car on vegetable oil is challenging the government over whether it should be taxed at the same rate as diesel fuel.
Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye
A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.
We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information.