Day: January 18, 2004

Google Improves Searches In a Number of Ways

Report in The Washington Post

Google added five features last week that boost its numerical smarts, providing specific results in response to particular numeric searches.

Enter an airline flight number — for example, “united 80,” — and the popular search engine will provide links to reports on that flight’s status at Travelocity.com and Fboweb.com, including maps showing its progress.

Type an area code into the search box, and you’ll be pointed to a MapQuest.com map of the general region that area code covers. A U.S. Postal Service package tracking number yields a link to a delivery-status page at the Postal Service’s Web site. A vehicle identification number will call up a page describing the car’s year, make and model type.

Or you can type in a universal product code number — minus the dashes, but including any tiny numbers appearing to the far left or right under the bar code — and Google will look up the product’s full name, then generate a list of Web sites selling the item or providing other information about it. This can spare shoppers from trying to guess which search keywords would bring up the same information.

White Sands…

was proclaimed a national monument by President Herbert Hoover on this date in 1933.

At the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert lies a mountain ringed valley called the Tularosa Basin. Rising from the heart of this basin is one of the world’s great natural wonders – the glistening white sands of New Mexico.

Here, great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert and have created the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The brilliant white dunes are ever changing: growing, cresting, then slumping, but always advancing. Slowly but relentlessly the sand, driven by strong southwest winds, covers everything in its path.

Most stressful cities

From Reuters and AP via CNN.com

1. Tacoma
2. Miami
3. New Orleans
4. Las Vegas
5. New York
6. Portland
7. Mobile, Alabama
8. Stockton-Lodi, California
9. Detroit
10. Dallas

Move over New York, take a hike Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Dallas and Detroit. You may have stress but none of you have that rare combination of suicide, unemployment, theft and gloomy weather that Tacoma, Washington, has.

The city of 195,000 just 30 miles south of Seattle was named America’s most stressful city in a survey…

Tacoma ranked at the top of 100 large metro areas surveyed by the BestPlaces ranking researcher, which also took into account other factors such as commute times, alcohol consumption and self-reported mental health.

“America leads the world in stressful living,” said Bert Sperling, who runs Portland, Oregon, based BestPlaces, “The average vacation time in Europe is five weeks a year but our attitude is almost ‘Thank God it’s Monday”‘

The city where convicted Washington, D.C. area sniper John Muhammad lived is home to large blue-collar and military populations. “On a brighter note, Tacomans can feel safe from bodily harm thanks to the low violent crime rate,” Sperling wrote in his report.

High violent crime put Miami second on the list of most stressful cities, in addition to high property crime, long commutes, high unemployment and a high divorce rate.

The third most stressful U.S. city was New Orleans, despite being known as the “Big Easy,” followed by Las Vegas, which had the highest suicide and divorce rates in the study, and New York, which boasted the longest commute times.

The sixth most stressful city was Portland, followed by Mobile, Alabama, Stockton-Lodi in California, Detroit and Dallas. Sperling, whose BestPlaces ranking is published yearly by Money magazine, said he used publicly available census, crime, weather and health data to create a “stress index” in order to rank the cities.

“One of the key factors was the unemployment rate, but we also used the suicide rate — that’s the ultimate unhappiness factor,” Sperling said.

The study also produced the least stressful cities in the United States, which all share low unemployment rates, as well as short commutes, lower divorce rates, less crime and lower suicide rates.

The multiple-city enclaves of Albany-Schenectady-Troy in New York and Harrisburg-Lebanon-Carlisle in Pennsylvania tied for the least stressful metropolitan areas.

Other metro areas with less stress included Orange County, California, Nassau-Suffolk in New York, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.