Rajesh Rao: A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script

I'd like to begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that it's 4,000 years into the future. Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist -- no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost. Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities. What might they find? Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. Maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them. And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers -- buried in the hills somewhere in North America -- massive versions of these same symbols. Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future?

Now this is no hypothetical question. In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. Now the Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. So it occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. Now given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. They've found small objects such as these.

So here's an example of one of these objects. Well obviously this is a replica. But who is this person? A king? A god? A priest? Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? We don't know. But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say. And that's because the Indus script is undeciphered. We don't know what any of these symbols mean.

Now the symbols are most commonly found on seals. So you see up there one such object. It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. Now that's a magnificent piece of art. So how big do you think that is? Perhaps that big? Or maybe that big? Well let me show you. So here's a replica of one such seal. It's only about one inch by one inch in size -- pretty tiny. So what were these used for? We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? So these were used to make those kinds of packing slips. Now you might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text. So perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other -- we don't know. We need to decipher the script to answer that question.

Now deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. So first, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all. These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. Now there's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. So if you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit.

Now there's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. Now these people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian.

Now which of these hypotheses can be true? We don't know, but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. First, there's no Rosetta Stone. I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. So we don't have such an artifact for the Indus script. And furthermore, we don't even know what language they spoke. And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short. So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny.

And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. So in the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script. Now I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook. And why was I fascinated? Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. Now my career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on.

But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script. That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. And I'd like to describe some of the results that we have found. Or better yet, let's all collectively decipher. Are you ready?

The first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. So here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. So can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? I'll give you a couple of seconds. Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. Okay. Left to right? Oh, it's almost 50/50. Okay. So the answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you'll notice that there's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the sign. One of the signs is also below the text on the top. And so this suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left. And so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. And the Indus script now has this particular property.

What are the properties of language that would show? So languages contain patterns. So if I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? Most of you said U, which is right. Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? Now there's several thoughts. There's E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? Now the Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. So there's a lot of texts that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. And this is very similar to a Q and U example. This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. And furthermore, there's some signs that really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign. And this sign, in fact, happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script.

Now given such patterns, here was our idea. So the idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other. Now given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. So here are some examples. So you may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune.

So what we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. Now in the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. Now there's also practical use for this particular procedure. There's a lot of these texts that are damaged. So here's an example of one such text. And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. So here's an example of a symbol that was predicted. And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze.

Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model. So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this. Now such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy. This is a physics and information theory term. But just imagine it's a really random jumble of letters. Now how many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard? You might have encountered the stuck keyboard problem -- so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again. Now this kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all. Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random. What about the Indus script? Here's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences. So at the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters -- and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music. And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them with a very high range. Now at the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules. Linguistic scripts occupy the middle range.

Now what about the Indus script? So we found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts. Now when this result was first published, it was highly controversial. There were people who were raising a human cry, and these people were the ones who believed that the Indus script does not represent language. I even started to get some hate mail. My students said that I should really seriously consider getting some protection. Now who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession? Now what does this result really show? It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language. So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands. So what other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language.

Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages. So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet. Now if you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns. Some things are not right, and you'll say these words are probably not English words. Now the same thing happens in the case of the Indus script. So the computer found several texts -- two of them are shown here -- that have very unusual patterns. So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign. Now this sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair.

So why is that the case? We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley. They were found in present day Iraq and Iran. And why were they found there? But what I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising. They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived. And so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language. It's just like our English and Dutch example. And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley. So this suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages. The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language.

So if it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols? That's our next big challenge. So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds. So most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words. So as an example, here's a word. Can you write it using pictures? I'll give you a couple seconds. Got it? Okay. Great. So here's my solution. So you could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf -- and that's "belief," right. There could be other solutions. Now in the case of the Indus script, the problem is the reverse. So you have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense. So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles, because the stakes are so high if you solve it.

Now my colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola have been making some headway on this particular problem. And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. So here's a really short text. It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is "meen" which happens to sound just like the word for star. And so seven stars would stand for "elu meen" which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. Now similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to "aru meen" which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. And that could be translated into "mey meen" which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. So that was pretty exciting. It looks like we're getting somewhere.

But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? Well not yet. So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. So today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. Now the Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent.

So why should we care? The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. So these are our ancestors -- yours and mine. They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. Now if we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. So what would they tell us? What would we find out about them? About us? I can't wait to find out.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough

My name is Joshua Walters. I'm a performer.

(Beatboxing)

(Laughter)

(Applause)

But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. I reframe that as a positive, because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ.

(Laughter)

I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. They're just practicing. One day they'll get here. Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. "Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some -- why don't we give you some Zyprexa. Okay? Mmhmm? At least that's what it says on my pen." (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. I can feel your noise. The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. When I got out I had a choice. I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness.

(Bugle sound)

There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive -- at least the hypomanic edge part of it. Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible.

And there's a book -- John Gartner. John Gartner wrote this book called "The Hypomanic Edge" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called "Touched With Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. Some of them committed suicide. So it wasn't all the good side of the illness.

Now recently, there's been development in this field. And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough." Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum -- you know what I'm talking about -- not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum -- where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. (Laughter) Your call. Your call. And everyone's somewhere in the middle. Everyone's somewhere in the middle.

So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. Maybe no one's really crazy. Everyone is just a little bit mad. How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much depends on how lucky you are.

Thank you.

(Applause)

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If you want to look for life on another planet you don't build one radio telescope that's miles wide, you build a bunch of smaller ones and create an array out of them. As it turns out that basic idea works for capturing visible wavelengths as well. It's called a plenoptic camera, using an array of very small lenses that, when combined, can create an image as good as a larger one. Pelican Imaging is largely interested in the slim factor this kind of system could offer, potentially allowing for thinner phones, but this could also open the door to some interesting effects. Check out the video after the break for an example of the dynamic aperture control this sort of setup can allow, where you can change the focal plane of an image after it was taken. Given the small size of the array here you probably couldn't do anything too crazy, like take a picture through a tree, but the days of poorly focused cameraphone shots might finally be at an end -- whenever this actually comes to market.

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Is Nanosys’ awesome new screen technology gonna be in iPad 3? I hope so. Wow.

When Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove pulled two iPads out of his bag and turned them on one looked like when I first saw my first Kodachrome slide while the other looked muddy and crappy in comparison (I pulled out my own iPad and saw my screen looked muddy and crappy in comparison too). The new one was clear, beautiful, stunning, with richer colors than I had ever seen on a screen before.
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“What the f*** is going on here then?” I asked him. He calmly explained what Nanosys did and why they own 400 patents on what they were showing me, which they call Quantum Dot Enhanced Film (QDEF™) . 400!
This technology is so important Economist magazine just wrote about it (and they don’t write about startups very often). Even better, it’s designed AND made in the USA! For once Silicon Valley is seeming like Silicon Valley again.
Unfortunately you can’t really see the difference in the screen very well. Why? Because you are watching this video on an old crappy Dell, or a Macintosh, or an old-style iPad.
When Nanosys starts shipping its screen technology later this year our lives will change forever.
Every screen in your life will look dull and lifeless compared to a screen with Nanosys technology in it.
Now, let’s go through the business advantages:
1. Does not take more battery life.
2. Does not increase cost.
3. Does not require a new display architecture to push out more pixels or a GPU that is four times as fast to support more pixels.
4. They can make craploads of it.
5. They have patents up the yingyang so are gonna be the only game in town for a while.
6. This company is real and funded by the best VCs in the business. They also just won best new display technology at the Society for Information Display conference a couple of weeks ago.
If you watch one video of mine, watch this one. It’s awesome tech and I can’t wait to have it in all my screens. Unfortunately we gotta wait for Steve Jobs to bet on it big time.
I can just see the iPad 3 launch. We all know Apple is going to put in a double-pixel display (my sources have been talking about that for months now) but when you see this technology you’ll know just why the next displays are so freaking good on colors, too.

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It all started with boredom. Leo Laporte had a few gigs with TV and radio networks back in 2005, but his work schedule left him with nothing to do half of the month. So he started an audio podcast called This Week in Tech, also known as TWiT. He asked listeners for donations, which allowed him to hire production help and add additional shows. And then, one day, he told his then-bookkeeper Lisa Kentzell about his real goal: to become the CNN of tech.

“I said: Okay, let’s do it,” recalled Kentzell when I met her and Laporte in the TwiT cottage in Petaluma, California last week. Kentzell is now the CEO of TWiT, and the company is ready to take the next big step towards its ambitious goal in July with the move into a spacious new studio built with a 24/7 live video operation in mind.

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The new space is only a couple blocks away from the old studio, but in a way, the two studios are worlds apart. The old TWiT cottage, which has been Laporte’s home base since 2005, looks like your grandma’s small old summer house taken over by a bunch of geeks. Too many geeks, actually. The 18 staffers are literally bumping into each other all the time. The new studio, on the other hand, will have multiple sets, 40 cameras, state of the art tech and lots of room for future expansion.

The move is also as sign of TWiT doubling down on live video. It’s a ambitious proposition, in part because most of its audience still thinks of TWiT as a podcast network. Kentzell told me that TWiT sees about 5 million downloads every month. Live is harder to track, she said, but still much smaller.

“The live audience isn’t here yet,” admitted Laporte. “It’s a big bet on the future.” And live is expensive: TWiT recently had to shut down the live feed of its Roku channel because of exploding bandwidth costs. However, Laporte believes that these things will eventually sort themselves out with bandwidth prices going down.

Taking a step back when things get too expensive is also a part of the TWiT way of doing business. Laporte and Kentzell thought about moving to San Francisco with the new studio, but decided to stay in Petaluma to get more bang for their buck. The company only spends as much as it can afford at any given time, and has been entirely bootstrapped from day one, declining many opportunities for outside funding. “We are very committed to bootstrapping,” said Laporte. Kentzell agreed: “We wanted to have full creative and financial control.”

Speaking of Kentzell, she’s one of the lesser-known folks on the TWiT team, but Laporte couldn’t speak more highly of her. “It really wasn’t a business until Lisa came along,” he told me. Laporte initially hired her to do his books; he soon discovered that she was outsourcing the actual bookkeeping to a whole team she managed. Impressed, he convinced her to bring some of that leadership to TWiT. Laporte credits her for doubling revenue every year in the past few years, up to the tune of $3 million in 2010.

Much of that money comes from advertising these days, which is brought in by an external sales team. Initially, TWiT was entirely donation-based, with listeners shipping in as much as $20,000 per month. The company is relying on some of that loyalty to finish its new studio, which will cost about $850,000, by selling commemorative bricks to fans. “Donations give people a feeling to be part of it,” said Laporte.

So what’s next for TWiT? 24/7 live streaming is one goal, a satellite bureau in New York is also in the cards. Laporte also wants to hire more talent and add more shows after poaching broadcaster Tom Merritt and producer Jason Howell from CNET last year. But he doesn’t believe in branching out too far. “I’m not trying to get bigger, I’m trying to serve our niche better,” he said, adding that he’s confident to have a good sense of the content that will be popular. “I really understand our audience. I am one of them.”

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Microsoft Looks to Mango to Make Windows Phone a Better Communicator

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“Our friends aren’t apps—they are people,” Sullivan said.
That said, even with Mango, users will have to do some switching. The feature that lets discussions move from chat to text message doesn’t extend to email, while Twitter users will still need a separate program to handle more advanced tasks.
Still, Microsoft hopes integrating more options into its People hub will help the company’s products stand out from rivals. Sullivan noted that Microsoft’s research shows people spend 2.5 hours a day socializing on their phone–more time than is spent eating. “It’s pretty dramatic,” he said.
The Mango release of Windows Phone is due to show up on phones later this year. In addition to current hardware partners that are planning new phones, Mango will work on existing Windows Phone devices and will form the basis for Nokia’s first crop of Microsoft-powered phones.

Three Things to Take Away From Apple’s WWDC Announcements

William and Harry open up about dating and friendships

ANGRY BIRDS theme!!! covered by Pomplamoose

Resistance to the "Arab Spring" is Futile

Resistance to the "Arab Spring" is Futile

Doha Debates: An overwhelming majority of Arabs are betting on reformist movements across the Middle East

Mode Vakschool - Het Klokhuis

ASML

Talking Social Media Success With Robert Scoble

Creator Video App Collabracam Talks iPhone Video

Kyle Hilla, speaks from his Grand Rapids, Mich. HQ about his app that aims to be a TV studio in your pocket, linking iPhones together to create a single, seamless video.

Deceptions

The Dangerous Infidel

My TV Remote

Using the iPad in the Classroom

Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation Grants $1.5M To Turn Human Waste Into Biofuel

Two of many challenges developing countries face are unsafe water and a lack of affordable energy. With the help of a new $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ghana may be able to combine these lacks into an asset in the form of biodiesel.

The grant, for a “Next-Generation Urban Sanitation Facility” in the country’s capital of Accra, will turn human waste from sewage into biodiesel and methane that can be used as fuel.

The project not only produces energy from waste, but tackles a major sanitation problem common in cities that are unable to pipe sewage to treatment plants. Bacteria in sewage can easily make its way into water sources used for cooking, drinking and irrigation, leaving locals, especially children, susceptible to dying of diarrhea-related diseases such as cholera.

Columbia University’s Dr. Kartick Chandran will lead the project. In collaboration with Moses Mensah, a Chemical Engineering professor at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and Ashley Murray founder and director of Waste Enterprisers, the team will build a biorefinery to recover energy from fecal matter, turning it into a useful resource instead of something to be inconveniently discarded. When completed, the project will reduce fecal sludge in Accra’s water supply and offer an affordable energy source to its residents.

The Gates Foundation estimates that 2.5 million people, or half of the world’s developing world population, doesn’t have access to safe sanitation. Chandran is familiar with Ghana, having worked for two years as faculty advisor to the an Engineers without Borders team there.

This isn’t the first time fecal matter has been used to create energy, but it could be a step towards a brighter future for areas struggling with wastewater sanitation and high fuel costs.

Here is video of Chandran discussing some of his wastewater treatment research.

MyVoice, a Great App for the Speech-Disabled, Is Foursquare Meets Text-to-Speech

The MyVoice app offers up location-based searchable phrases and helps users easily navigate social situations.

A new GPS-enabled app will give millions of speech-disabled people a simplified way to communicate in the local tongue. MyVoice is a text-to-speech app that uses location-aware dialogue and customizable phrases to streamline the search for the perfect phrase. Additionally, because its a smartphone app, using it in social situations isn't as awkward as a proprietary device.

"Usually, people would have to navigate through a huge hierarchy of words on a traditional device in order to find these seemingly unrelated words. But using our technology, using MyVoice, they're able to very quickly get to the words that they actually need to say at that time," designer Aakash Sahney tells Canadian broadcaster CTA.
The GPS and customization is what drives the experience. As an example, at a movie theater, the app may pull up words like "tickets" or "seats," or, at a coffeeshop, users can program their regular purchases.
"It fits in really well in social situations, too. It's natural to have an iPhone in your pocket and take it out somewhere," he adds.
MyVoice plans on being a monthly service with an online, syncable web component. It will be available for $30 a month, and Aakash says it will be available next week.

Video – Neil Gaiman on Copyright Piracy

“My God, it’s full of stars!”

Plains Milky Way from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

Dynamic Perception Stage Zero Dolly dynamicperception.com

During the month of May, I shot Milky Way timelapse in central South Dakota, when I had the time, and the weather cooperated. The biggest challhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifenge was cloudy nights and the wind. There were very few nights, when I could shoot, that were perfectly clear, and often the wind was blowing 25mph +. That made it hard to get the shots I wanted. I kept most of the shots low to the ground, so the wind wouldn't catch the setup and cause camera shake, or blow it over. I used a Stage Zero Dolly on the dolly shots and a "Milapse" mount on the panning ones.

Canon 60D and T2i
Tokina 11-16
Sigma 20mm F1.8
Tamron 17-50

Keen On… Suzanne Vega: Music, Like Oranges, Shouldn’t Be Given Away for Free (TCTV)

Question: Who is the mother of MP3?

Answer: Singer songwriter Suzanne Vega, whose iconic 1981 song “Tom’s Diner” was used by MP3 inventor Karl-Heinz Brandenberg to calibrate the standard of the revolutionary codec that would change the music industry forever.

Vega’s attitude to the music industry is pretty matrimonial too. On Wednesday, she keynoted the “CREATE: Protecting Creativity from the Ground Up” conference in Washington DC, put on by the technology and media coalition Arts and Labs (for whom, full disclosure, I consult). Not only did Vega play us an haunting intimate version of “Tom’s Diner”, but she also spoke uncompromising in favor of the artist’s right to be paid for his or her work. Arguing that if she wasn’t paid for her songs she would have to go back to being a receptionist, Vega argued that music, like oranges, shouldn’t be given away for free.

Whatever else one might say about Vega’s critique of free culture and piracy, she can’t be accused of being a Luddite. As she confessed to me when I caught her on camera after her CREATE speech, she is a big fan of Twitter and particularly Facebook where she goes “eight or nine times a day”. Nor does she defend the status-quo of the old record industry. “The audience is the most important thing”, she explained the new reality of the business, telling young musicians that it’s much more important to build a loyal following than get a record deal.

Her faith in today’s digital technology to build viable new business models was echoed by a number of other speakers at CREATE. On a panel about the future of the digital economy that I moderated, for example, all the panelists agreed that the digital economy provided exciting opportunities for all creative industries in the 21st century. From Mike Fricklas, Viacom’s General Counsel to Matt Serletic, CEO of Music Mastermind to Jim Cavanagh, President of the American Society of Media Photographers to Tom Adams, Rosetta Stone CEO, everyone agreed that new streaming and anti-piracy technologies and devices offered incredibly exciting opportunities for media entrepreneurs. But, like Suzanne Vega, too, all the speakers on my panel agreed that digital content, like analog oranges, couldn’t and shouldn’t be given away for free.

Make-o Lego

Nazi Germany’s Secret Army of Flying Beetles: The Volkswaffe!

Google Scaling Solar, Commits $280 Million To Finance SolarCity Installations

Google today announced a new partnership with SolarCity, committing $280 million from its coffers to finance SolarCity installations, namely solar rooftops for homes in North America.

Google Doodle

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif




http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html#tune=IAR1xrg0PodcODaAAAdYuxUy5nSNgA**

Conan O’Brien’s Dartmouth Commencement Speech

Walt Talks About iCloud With Charlie Rose

This week, post-WWDC keynote, Charlie Rose sat Walt down to discuss the implications and impact of Steve Jobs’s iCloud announcement, and of cloud computing in general. In clip one, Walt lays out cloud computing basics. In clip two, Rose asks Walt about Jobs’s vision of the “post-PC” era.

Twenty Feet lets you know more about your social media stats

I love Twenty Feet. Every morning it sends me an email and lets me know if something weird happened in my stats for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other places. For instance, did more of my videos get favorited than usual? Did more people subscribe or unsubscribe than usual?

Here CEO Martin Seibert explains more behind what TwentyFeet does and shows off a preview of a new iPhone app coming soon.

Twimbow brings color to social media

Twimbow looks a bit like TweetDeck, but look again and you'll see a colorfully different approach! By using colors you can uncover tweets and status messages from people and brands you care about. Here Luca Filigheddu, CEO of Twimbo, shows me what it does and what his philosophy is behind social media clients.

Apple to Lodsys: Now, Youse Can’t Leave

Apple to Lodsys: Now, Youse Can’t Leave
JUNE 10, 2011 AT 1:00 PM PT



Lodsys has really stepped in it now.
Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the patent infringement lawsuits that the patent holding company has brought against seven iOS developers, a move that could add significant legal heft to their defense.
Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, the motion explains that developers who’ve been targeted by Lodsys “are individuals or small entities with far fewer resources than Apple and … lack the technical information, ability, and incentive to adequately protect Apple’s rights under its license agreement.”
So Apple would like to intervene on their behalf.
“While the Developers will likely be interested in resolving this case as quickly and inexpensively as possible, Apple’s interest is in protecting its broader license rights with respect to thousands of App developers for Apple products who may be the subject of future Lodsys lawsuits or threats.”
In other words, Lodsys, which has been harassing independent developers who lack the means to fend off its litigation, may soon find itself grappling with Apple legal, which is an ugly, ugly proposition indeed.
The situation reminds me of a scene midway through “A Bronx Tale” in which a group of bikers disrespect a local Mafia don’s bar (video below). When asked to leave, they refuse. The don walks over to the door, locks it — trapping the bikers inside, turns to them and says, “Now, youse can’t leave.” A group of heavies emerges from the back of the bar and beats the bikers senseless, while this narration runs in the background.
“I will never forget the look on their faces. All eight of them. Their faces dropped. All their courage and strength was drained right from their bodies. They had a reputation for breaking up bars, but they knew that instant, they’d made a fatal mistake. This time they walked into the wrong bar.”
If the court grants Apple’s motion to intervene, Lodsys may have just done the same.

Big Live: fostering real-time interactions around content

Producers of online video content are always looking for ways to get their audience more involved and more engaged beyond just leaving comments. By leveraging the social network, Big Live is providing a solution that fosters real-time discussion among audiences.

"Big Live is a synchronous video platform," explains Jonathan Zakin, President, CEO & Co-Founder of Big Live. "It's a social network built around the idea of sharing experience around viewing content that you enjoy with other people. We've looked out there at the other video platforms that have basically a chat room next to a player, and they approach that problem through the player side. We approached it through the social networking side. We built a social network around that, and so as a result, you have a very immersive social experience around this content."

Big Live recently released a widget that allows content providers to embed the app into other sites or their own site using an iframe. Users can still view the content anonymously, but you must log in using Facebook Connect in order to socially interact. Once you have logged in, you can see everyone else that is also viewing that content simultaneously, you can roll your mouse over the audience and see the profile of individual audience members, and you can sort the audience members based on several criteria.

"You can sort on age, location and gender and whether or not they are Facebook friends of yours," says Zakin. "Once you do that, you can begin to interact with them in real time around that synchronous video experience either through group chat or through a one-on-one chat, so if you find somebody in the crowd that you're interested in talking to, you can take them offline and chat with them that way. We're trying to emulate going to an event, turning to the person next to you and saying, 'Hey, this is very cool.'"

MovieClips Raises $6M To Curate And Mashup Scenes From Movies

Online movie clips site Movieclips.com has raised $6 million out of a $7 million round, according to a recent SEC filing. The startup has previously raised $3 million. We’ve confirmed the new funding with the company.

Movieclips.com, which launched in 2009, offers a clip engine with over 14,000 different clips from 1,400 titles from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. Last year, the startup also launched a new product, called Movieclips Mashups, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, which allows anyone to make montages of two minutes clips.

Along with the studio partnerships (which is half the battle for licensing movie content), the company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, mood, director, genre, etc.

The site also launched a specialized video player and features an API developers can use to integrate Movieclips on other sites; AOL’s Moviefone actually uses the technology on its platform.

Google vs Apple: The Cool Factor [Video]

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html





Earlier today I was invited to do a quick guest spot on CNBC’s Power Lunch, where we discussed a question that’s fundamentally important to the future of Silicon Valley: Who is cooler, Google or Apple?

Okay, so the topic was a bit goofy. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it: after all, public perception can play a role in how quickly products from each company get picked up by new users, which in turn can impact their bottom lines.

Tune in to hear my thoughts. Because if there’s a guy who knows cool, it’s me. Oh, and there’s an interview with the folks who made the awesome Les Paul Google Doodle gracing the search engine’s home page today. You can watch that one here:

Google Earth, Columbia University Map Seafloor Area Bigger Than North America

Thursday marked World Oceans Day, a United Nations effort to “raise global awareness of the challenges faced by the international community in connection with the oceans.”

「兩岸皆中國軍」 退將登陸失言？

現在的兩岸關係，既不是敵人，也不是朋友，經濟、觀光、甚至血緣都密不可分，可是一扯到主權和尊嚴，馬上你是你、我是我，今天退役將領是否赴陸失言這個話題，再一次牽動了這條敏感的神經，編輯台時間邀請到聯合報大陸中心記者陳東旭來探究。

恐龍法官多 凸顯社會觀感差？

宜蘭法官違失案以及大法官資格審查這兩件事，讓民眾對司法改革的期待再次浮上檯面，「編輯台時間」邀請聯合報資深立法院記者楊湘鈞，來談最新的司法議題。

About : Expeditionary Learning

Expeditionary Learning from Expeditionary Learning on Vimeo.

Over the course of our 17-year history, we have grown from a small adventurous group of ten schools into a network the size of a substantial urban school district.

伏流水

Wednesday Was A Good Day (Official Jawbone JAMBOX Music Video)

What would Ice Cube's "Good Day" have looked like if Cube had a SOMA loft, a fixed gear bike, and a boatload of apps? You're about to find out.

http://jawbone.com/jamchain

Inspired by Ice Cube's original: http://youtu.be/QWfbGGZE07M

Starring
Hasan Minhaj: youtube.com/hminhaj

Featuring
Ashkon: youtube.com/ashkeezy
Strawburry17: youtube.com/strawburry17
The Black Nerd: youtube.com/blacknerdcomedy
Cyr: youtube.com/cyr1216
Jimmy Wong: youtube.com/jimmy
SupRicky06: youtube.com/supricky06
KEEPtheHeat: youtube.com/keeptheheat
Asian Glow: youtube.com/asianglow
Turf Feinz: youtube.com/statussilver
Daveed Diggs: youtube.com/getacknews

Written, Produced, and Directed By:
Portal A Interactive: http://portal-a.com/

Lyrics:

Just wakin up in the morning gotta thank Jobs
I dunno but today seems kinna odd
Hella email, got no spam
All these fools straight obsessed with my instagrams
Morning fitness on the Wii, you know I do
Girls textin me as I rock a Warrior Two
JAMBOX blastin' so you know I packed it
Forgot to lock up the bike, nobody jacked it
Organic produce to my door all pre-pay
Damn. Bout to be a nice little Wednesday

CHORUS

Thirty minutes late but my game's still tight
Got a blast that the boss is at an off-site
Now it's feet up, time to chill
Angry Birds cause I always got some pigs to kill
Troubleshooting for the cuties, that's my joint
Backrubs as I re-install her PowerPoint
My deal's almost tipped, could use one more
You want in on a self-guided Segway tour?

Sixty deep for the line at the taco truck
Guess what? The intern's gonna let me cut
Going nuts on the guac, extra layer
They show respect cause they know that I'm the mayor
On a conference call and I'm feelin no stress
This thing's wireless, act like you're not impressed
Closing deals from the Valley to Bombay
Turnin' out to be a nice little Wednesday

CHORUS

Later on in the evening got it going off
Sick wine and cheese rager up in my loft
Keds so fresh, they know not to step
Don't call it plaid, it's a gingham check
Get me in the game and I'm trouble
Droppin bounce shots in and they countin double
Camera phones flash when we take the tourney
Now put your head back and move it like Bernie
Checked my hip and got a re-tweet from AK!
Gotta say it's been a nice little Wednesday

Media Contact
Katie Boysen

Jobs To Cupertino: We Want A Spaceship-Shaped, 12K Capacity Building As Our New Apple Campus

After having a banner WWDC start yesterday, Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs humbly presented his idea for a new Apple campus at the Cupertino City Council today. Jobs wants to build one building that will hold 12,000 Apple employees on a former Hewlett-Packard property in the area between Tantau North Wolfe, Homestead and the 280 freeway.”It’s a little like a spaceship landed,” Jobs says. No kidding.

Jobs began the presentation referring to the fact that Apple is growing “like a weed,” and that its current campus at D’Anza and the 280 isn’t enough — fitting only about 2,800 people. Apple currently rents buildings to house its other 6,700 employees in the area. The new building will augment the current campus.

Paving the way for these plans, Apple purchased about 100 acres from Hewlett Packard in 2010 and added them to the 50 it owns adjacent. Jobs says he has corralled “some great architects … some of the best in the world” to come up with a design that will house 12,000 people in one four story high building on the property. The area is now mainly apricot orchards.

With the futuristic design Apple apparently is relying heavily on its experience building retail stores, and it will be creating one massive piece of curved glass if the proposal goes through. “There’s not a single straight piece of glass in this building,” Jobs says. The parking will be underground.

Jobs also wants the building to function as its own power source, with an “energy center” as its primary source of power (“with natural gas and other ways that are cleaner and cheaper”), using the grid as a backup.

The campus will include amenities like its own auditorium similar to Apple’s current Town Hall (“We’ve got an auditorium, cause we put on presentations, much like we did yesterday but we have to go to San Francisco to do them.”) and a cafeteria that will feed 3,000 people at one sitting.

“We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” Jobs told the Council members, “Architecture students will come here to see this.” Ideally Apple wants to move into the campus in 2015.

The individual members of the Cupertino City Council seemed like they were in awe the entire time the infamously charismatic Apple CEO spoke (which isn’t surprising), asking Jobs for free Wifi and iPads for constituents as well as for an Apple store that’s actually in Cupertino and not in the Valley or Los Gatos. Jobs shyly responded to the requests, “I think we bring a lot more than free Wifi.”

Key facts about the new Apple campus:

Design will include a courtyard in the middle and curved glass all the way around.
Jobs is planning on transforming an area that’s 20% landscaping to 80% landscaping by putting most of the building’s parking underground.
There are 3,700 trees in the area at the moment, Jobs has hired an arborist from Stanford to take the area up to 6,000 trees.
The plan is to build a four-story high building and four-story parking structure.
The campus will incude an energy center, and natural gas will be the primary source of power, using the grid as backup.
There will be an auditorium, fitness center and some R & D buildings.
Jobs plans a 40% increase in Apple employees going from 9,500 today to 13, 000 in 2015.
He wants to increase the campus’ space 20% from 2.6 million to 3.1 million square feet.
Landscaping will increase 60% from 3,700 to 6,000.
Surface parking will decrease 90% from 9,800 to 1,200 .
The building footprint will decrease 30% from 1.4 million to 1 million.
Cafeterias will fit 3,000 people at a sitting.
The whole building will be designed with the utmost concern for employee safety.
Apple currently has 20 buses running on bio-diesel fuel for its employees and Jobs thinks that system will work well with the new campus.
The plan for the new design will submitted asap. Jobs hopes to break ground next year and eventually move in 2015.

Nanodot-boosted LCD

Nanodot-boosted LCD

Nanosys's Quantum Dot Enhancement Film does two things: It really boosts the color of a traditional LCD display, offering "OLED color depth without OLED power consumption and OLED price," and it proves that quantum mechanics isn't a dusty old physics concept with no real-world applications. It's been around for a while but at the Society for Information Display conference, Nanosys just showed their tech hacked into an existing iPad design to show off its powers, and revealed it's actually coming to market in a "mobile device" from a Korean firm in late 2011--is this the new screen tech for Samsung's Galaxy tablets and smartphones?

Apple WWDC 2011 Done as a Song

song-a-day one thousand... and beyond

Hi! My name is Jonathan Mann, and I've been writing, recording, producing and uploading a song a day since January 1st, 2009. On September 28th, 2011 I'll be reaching my 1000th song a day song.


It's been an incredible time in my life, full of interesting people and places and experiences.

Ultimately, though, there's been one crucial aspect of the creative process that's been missing: Collaboration. I have a ton of really talented musical friends, many of whom I play music with regularly, but they all have jobs and, you know, lives! Because of the blisteringly fast pace of one song (with a video) every single day, it has been virtually impossible to bring other musicians into my process.

the project

With all that in mind, and to celebrate 1000 days of Song-A-Day, I'm going to invite all the musicians I know to come help me shape and create 30 songs in 30 days for the month of June. We'll have a live stream set up so you'll be able to watch as the creative process unfolds over each 24 hour period. At the end of the month, you'll be able to vote for your 10 favorite songs, and the tracks with the most votes will end up on the 1st official Song A Day album which will be released on September 28th!

the more the merrier

In addition to all the musicians who will be coming and going (including the guys from my band: Nic Kaelin, Sam Douglass, Norman Famous, David Douglas and Eric Yeargan) there will be 4 core team members who will be with me all-day every-day, helping me with the nuts and bolts of recording, arranging and producing. They are as follows:

Nick Krill and Thomas Hughes (of The Spinto Band) will travel to Berkeley from their homes in Delaware. Nick is an amazing guitar player and a great recording engineer. Thomas is a wonderful multi-instrumentalist; with whom I have a long history of collaboration. My friend Matt Payne (of the Glowing Stars) is also a multi-instrumentalist and a wonderful producer and arranger. Liam McCormick (of The Family Crest) is going to write string arrangements for the songs.

Pad Apps Review - Flipboard vs Pulse News Reader vs Zite

E3: Nintendo announces Wii U, handheld device that extends the screen of Wii game play -

Salesforce Invests In Video Messaging Startup (And Skype Rival) VSee

VSee, a video collaboration service provider, has received a capital injection from Salesforce, TechCrunch has learned. The amount was not disclosed, but we’ve been informed that the investment amounted to ‘multiple millions of dollars’.

Coinciding with the investment announcement, the company today announced the upcoming release of ‘One-Click Collaboration’, which it calls a ‘no install experience’ that instantly starts a rich video collaboration session between distributed users.

VSee offers a service that supports multiparty video calling, application/desktop sharing and file transfers over the Web. See video below for a demo.

The startup’s CEO, Milton Chen, says this concept of ‘One-click Collaboration’ combines the scalability and performance of p2p approaches such as Skype with the no-install simplicity of web technologies like Flash, overcoming the limitations of both.

The service will be released for general availability in July 2011.

The company says it already provides services to more than 6,000 enterprises worldwide, including Shell, Intel, Primerica, U.S. Navy SEALs and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

It currently only runs on Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

VSee was founded in 2008 following Chen’s human-computer interaction PhD research at Stanford University. Aside from Salesforce, In-Q-Tel has invested in the business.

Also worth noting: Chen is one of the authors of the XMPP video standard.

Earlier this year, Salesforce announced that it had acquired DimDim, a web conferencing service, for $31 million in cash.

NASA | Aquarius Climate

Sea surface salinity has a massive influence on Earth's climate. With Aquarius, scientists will have a new way to measure that influence in a consistent way. With its unprecedented accurate and consistent salinity measurements, Aquarius will help climate modelers to better understand the ocean-atmosphere processes that are changing Earth's climate.

NASA | Aquarius Water Cycle

Scientists need a breadth of information to understand the ocean's processes. That's where Aquarius comes in: the sensor will use advanced technologies to give NASA its first space-based measurements of sea surface salinity, helping scientists to improve predictions of future climate trends and events.

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: ‪http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10709

Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast:
‪http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/iTunes/f0004_index.html‬

Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center o http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn facebook:
‪http://www.facebook.com/NASA.GSFC‬

Or find us on Twitter:
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Apple - Introducing iOS 5

Get a closer look at a few of the over 200 features that make iOS 5 the best update yet for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.