Solar I sort of get since I don't think anyone does it the scale like Google Sunroof, but not sure what the added value is for Google to create the APIs for Air Quality and Pollen? There are service providers and models that do these already at global scale (e.g. https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/air-quality & https://silam.fmi.fi/).
If a company already uses Google APIs, integrating a new API from Google may be easier than integrating a new provider. So for Google, there's certainly a market, even if they have to source the raw data.
But if Google introduces something new, there's a strong likelihood that it will be killed off in 18 months. Going with a new provider that has been around longer than that would be a much more logical idea.
This is certainly true for consumer products, but it’s a lot less true for enterprise. Google Cloud had a few missteps with product shuttering (domains?), but largely google has a better track record serving enterprise customers.
Google has to slowly build better trust among customers, clearly. But “new provider” may sound like it’s logically obvious but the benefits of an established relationship goes deep into the complexities of businesses managing contracts and payment relationships. It’s a huge effort for random teams in big companies.
I get that defining an endpoint Tom all and managing a token is some overhead but is it that much to manage that using Google offers that much benefit? my point is that this is trivial to setup
> According to the World Health Organization, up to ⅓ of the global population suffers from allergic rhinitis,
Has anyone yet figured out why so many humans suffer from an allergy to many natural plants which we have lived around for millions of years?
It looks like the first documented case of Hayfever was March 1819[1], and at the time it was considered a very unusual and rare affliction. When and why has it now become so common?
There was a very interesting discussion recently on this topic. [1]
There are various hypothesis:
* changes to gut microbiome composition due to modern diets and overuse of antibiotics
* excessive cleanliness and hygiene. The "hygiene hypothesis" suggests that lack of exposure to diverse microbes leads to improperly trained immune systems
* increased exposure to chemicals, plastics, and pollutants that may disrupt immune function
* Cesarean sections and formula feeding rather than vaginal birth and breastfeeding
Exposure to cigarette smoke was also considered a candidate or reason, when I was younger. I haven't kept up with the thinking on or about this, but I believe it's still considered valid.
Remember, a few decades ago, a lot of the "Western" world smoked, including in public spaces and around kids. As I understand it, a lot of the rest of the world has caught up and still does so. And the Western world isn't exactly rid of the behavior, either.
P.S. I wonder whether anyone's studied possible multiple-generation, genetically-communicated knock-on effects of this.
P.P.S. "Pollen" is also a Racket language based blogging and authoring tool or environment. A bit sorry to see the name become overloaded.
Some allergies are triggered by a disease[1]. It is possible that hayfever is an outcome of a disease which has become common since 1819. The disease may have no other symptoms, and hay fever a symptom in only some people, and therefore be very hard to track.
> Has anyone yet figured out why so many humans suffer from an allergy to many natural plants which we have lived around for millions of years?
For those of us in the Americas most of us aren't living in the same places our ancestors lived for millions of years and so are living around a different set of plants than humans evolved with.
For example I've lived all my life in the western United States, about 30 years in California and 30 years in Washington.
According to DNA testing I have very little Native American ancestry, so it is very likely that almost all of my ancestors from more than around 300 years ago were not from here. The DNA tests say my ancestors were almost all British and German, so almost all of my ancestors from 600 or more years age weren't even on the same continent that I am.
How many generations does a population have to live in a new area before they adapt sufficiently so that the native plants don't give them allergic rhinitis?
> How many generations does a population have to live in a new area before they adapt sufficiently so that the native plants don't give them allergic rhinitis?
Assuming it is even hereditary, presumably it would also have to factor into reproductive selection (you mean runny noses aren't sexy?) for that to happen?
People often plant more male than female trees in cities to avoid having to pick up fruit, which perhaps doubles the pollen load. So it's a cultural problem that overlaps with the homelessness crisis, because the status quo applies pressure to keep everyone working within the system to feed themselves rather than adopting stuff like permaculture and no-till agriculture.
Also the immune system can get confused by two or more simultaneous stressors. So maybe a child has a cold while pollen is present, and develops too many antibodies to the pollen. I saw an animation once showing a normal immune system destroying cells covered in viruses. Then it showed a confused immune system destroying cells covered in allergen molecules. Which releases histamine and triggers a positive feedback loop. Multiple triggers may also be a root cause of many cancers, which can be thought of as autoimmune disease in the extreme. So for example, rheumatoid arthritis responds to methotrexate the way cancer does. Western medicine is often blind to this because it's too hard to do root cause analysis without large epidemiological studies, which are funded through the government and vulnerable to anti-government spending sentiment. Nobody wants to pay for it so we self-medicate rather than solving the underlying mystery.
In my case, I never had seasonal allergies until I was about 11-12, when my elementary school sprayed broadleaf herbicide to kill the dandelions. By coincidence, a family friend had me mow a lawn overtaken by dry cheatgrass, and all I had was a weed eater, so I was out for hours breathing the dust. From that day forward, I had flu-like symptoms for the entire month of May in my hometown, until I reached about 40 and grew out of it. I believe that the herbicide was the second stressor. So my quality of life was impacted by someone else's judgment call which categorized dandelions as weeds instead of, say, bee food. I finally found peace with this when I realized that saving the life of a child who is deathly allergic to bee stings is worth the other students suffering a lifetime of allergies.
I feel now that all questions that seem unanswerable, even with our considerable economic advantage, speak more about our cultural failings than our technological limitations.
Exposure, especially kids. Also food it I had to guess.
It seems that we are shielding ourselves ever more from exposure to nature. Which has tremendous benefits, but allergies seem to play into that.
As for food, I have now seen too many people cure themselves from hayfever and other allergies by ditching carbs, or other significant dietary changes. No accident if you ask me. And would line up somewhat with industrialization of food production post 1800 or so.
According to Wikipedia [0], Hayfever was already described in the 10th century. It is less common among people who grew up on a farm and more common with rising temperatures and air pollution. Hayfever is also significantly more common in urban areas.
Assumably all of these factors play a role in the prevalence today, though that doesn't rule out the existence of other undiscovered factors (e.g. a disease, as some people speculated).
In addition to other answers, I’d speculate there’s no strong negative selection against moderate allergies. There might simply be no evolutionary disadvantage to being slightly itchy and having running nose for H.sapiens.
> Pollen data presents a unique opportunity for businesses–whether it’s an opportunity to build brand loyalty and trust, increase engagement and product value, or become a catalyst for a more resilient community.
Such a perfect example of Google-speak. Every data point is an engagement hack.
The Air Quality and Pollen data in these APIs are from Google's fairly recent purchase of Breezometer, the same company Apple uses for AQI across iOS weather products.
Yep, and the Breezometer homepage now redirects to Google’s map platform page (subpages still seem to work, such as https://www.breezometer.com/air-quality-map/air-quality/unit...) and they had previously announced plans to sunset the Breezometer app in September.
Breezometer is also the air quality data source for Apple Maps and I’m sure other weather apps too, so assuming the pricing is comparable there’s probably a decent business here just from existing customers.
Fan of these interesting APIs, even if they feel experimental. Google also used to have a Flu Trends API [1], based on search query data in 25 countries.
The title mentions "Providing actionable info" but I don't see what's actually actionable here? The text also mentions "Actionable tips to minimize pollen exposure", what besides avoid going outside or wearing a mask could you actually do?
If this does take off, it might actually turn out to be extremely dangerous.
Lets say you buy into all the marketing nonsense about how it can value add to your business and maybe even someone decides to create something genuinely useful for people with crippling alergies, maybe different routes, or some kind of alert system.
Then Google in their usual way shuts down the api service with no recourse or alternative. Now you've left people who were using it, maybe heavily during certain seasons etc, stranded.
I agree with the other posts, this smells of a "POC" that was pushed forward to demonstrate work done. Will be interesting to see how good the data is, but moreso how long the service will last.
There's a difference between 'lasting forever' and pulling the plug without warning as Google are known to do after people/companies have invested into the services.
Came to the comments for this. A pollen API smells exactly like the sort of product that Google will rug in a few short years when it inevitably turns out that nobody is building apps that need pollen data.
I’m a bit surprised to see a single geodata theme packaged as a whole “thing.” And goodness the marketing fluff is quite repetitive given they have so little to talk about.
Call me jaded but it feels like someone’s really announcing, “I shipped something! Give me my promotion!”
> Our Pollen API is based on a model that calculates the seasonality and daily amount of pollen grains on a 1x1 km2 grid in over 65 countries worldwide, supporting an up to 5-day forecast, 3 plant types, and 15 different plant species. The model uses various inputs like land cover, climatological data, annual pollen production per plant, and more to deliver reliable output predictions of the local pollen level and exposure risk.
The maps look like what you get when you throw Ordinary Kriging at a dataset of very limited coverage. I’d be skeptical of this model without thorough analysis.
Once upon a time, google was obsessed with aggregating the worlds data. Today, google is all about AI generated or sourced data. And building a complex model to estimate pollen levels is definitely what they’d do.
(Plus the cost of those sensors would not be justified for such a small product).
I think crowdsourcing data's more of an open source thing. I don't think Google's ever been into that? Their approach is more "we're gonna scan all the books in the library/photograph every street in the world". (Interested to hear counterexamples).
crowdsourcing data is exactly what the Googs does. CAPTCHA to train it's models of data of dubious origins is the SEP (someone else's problem) nobody wants to talk about
There’s nothing wrong with building a model using related data if the thing you care about is hard/expensive to measure at that scale (which I don’t know if that’s true or not). But you’d want to validate your model using actual pollen samples.
The data here is pretty much worthless without a paper explaining the model and the validation.
Imagine if they said that about street view? At this point, with so much capital at google, it probably makes sense to just have measuring equipment shipped, installed and have hosted/maintained at these locations. At the very least, snap some kalmann filters together with these "models" and adjust your model predictions with real-time actual values.
Yeah same here, a much more challenging project would be to aggregate data from the thousands of individual pollen services in various countries. I know of at least two here in Sweden. Isn't this what we should use AI for?
No I mean we should use the potential flexibility of AI to gather data from many varying APIs that might change at any moment without prior warning. Some of these national pollen sites may not even have an API, may require scraping.
Yeah given that they don't describe any sort of innovation on the sensing side of thing, I'm guessing they just trained a neural net with nebulous inputs and expect everybody to believe in the output.
It's both funny and sad how "Google" has become synonymous with "time-limited". You start treating a new API like a pop-up store downtown — it's okay or even good to be interested, but relying on it would be folly.
Could be, but unfortunately, this isn't an entirely unreasonable question regardless. Given Google's track record, I would be very hesitant to integrate new APIs right after launch.
1. Threads on HN aren't expected to remain on-topic, especially top-level comments (like the one you're replying to). HN's content guidelines place no restriction on comments to be on-topic, let alone decide what on-topic is.
2. I see no vitriol in your parent comment. Sarcasm yes, but employing sarcasm alone does not make speech vitriolic.
3. You commented _about_ your parent, rathering than responding to the content of it, adding nothing to the conversation it started.
4. That you interpreted your parent's sarcasm much more strongly — as, instead, vitriolic — perhaps voices one of "your own little issues".
> HN's content guidelines place no restriction on comments to be on-topic, let alone decide what on-topic is.
Do you really think there needs to be a guideline saying "comments should be on-topic"? Wouldn't you assume that based on both the guidelines and how we generally conduct ourselves in the comments? The guidelines don't say anything specifically about racism but surely you would agree that racist comments have no place here, right?
But despite all that, the guidelines do ask us to avoid generic tangents and to not post shallow dismissals. I'd say the comment at the top of this thread qualifies on both counts.
Now we're many messages deep here arguing about what belongs and that itself is a violation of the most important guideline: this is boring to read.
> Do you really think there needs to be a guideline saying "comments should be on-topic"?
Of course not. I thought the way I wrote made it very clear that I was championing the fact that there's no such rule. If you really misconstrued my comment as the twisted opposite of that, perhaps I need to learn to write better.
> Wouldn't you assume that based on ... the guidelines ...
Actually, no. I see nothing in the guidelines that even urge us to stay on-topic.
> ... and how we generally conduct ourselves in the comments?
Definitely, no. Comments on HN — especially toplevel comments — frequently fork and/or launch entirely new conversations. In fact, that is one of the reasons I enjoy reading HN. I always know, when I click on the comments of a link post, to not expect any discussion about what's contained in the link, because of how reliably often that happens.
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> But despite all that, the guidelines do ask us to avoid generic tangents and to not post shallow dismissals. I'd say the comment at the top of this thread qualifies on both counts.
Maybe it does; maybe it doesn't. That's not the point. This is the point: shutting down a thread because someone thinks the conversation is not "on-topic" for the post.
Oh wait. Did you want to change the topic of conversation? Isn't that how we generally conduct ourselves in the comments? Do you now see what I mean?
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> Now we're many messages deep here arguing about what belongs ...
No, "we" are not. You are. I am not engaging in this conversation that you are trying to start by going off on a generic tangent.
> ... and that itself is a violation of the most important guideline: this is boring to read.
I just didn't want the shallow dismissal that my parent was using to shut down discourse to become more commonplace on this forum. I _like_ HN for that kind of discourse. I learn more because of "off-topic" discussions. It is precisely because I do not want HN to become what my parent was advocating — all comments shall stay on one topic only, that of the submission — that I replied. Because _that_ would be boring.
I am sorry you found my comment boring. I wasn't arguing to argue about what belongs here. I was defending the presence of sth I didn't believe was too boring to be allowed here. Of course, such writing can be boring to read. I tried to do what I could to make it less boring. But, as always, there's room for improvement.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/going-b...
It's a new initiative with multiple new API's: Solar API, Air Quality API, Pollen API. And that link gives an overview for them all.