*michael parekh on IT*

ON NEW ORIGINS

SURPRISING START
Google's "Doodle logo" was a bit of a surprise today, given that it wasn't an immediate reminder for a national holiday or event.  Clicking it, takes one to this page from the National Geographic:

"Meet "Ida," the small "missing link" found in Germany that's created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins.

In a new book, documentary, and promotional Web site, paleontologist Jorn Hurum, who led the team that analyzed the 47-million-year-old fossil seen above, suggests Ida is a critical missing-link species in primate evolution (interactive guide to human evolution from National Geographic magazine).

(Among the team members was University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, a member of the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs.

"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Ida represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."

Pretty cool stuff indeed, and the article goes on to provide a lot more detail on the find and it's implications.  Most surprising though was this obvious question at the very end of the piece:

"What's more, the newly described "missing link" was found in Germany's Messel Pit. Ida's European origins are intriguing, Richmond said, because they could suggest—contrary to common assumptions—that the continent was an important area for primate evolution."

It'll be interesting to see where this line of research goes, shedding light on where humans really did come from.

ON DEALING WITH STAR TREK

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

With the new Star Trek movie in theaters this weekend, it was inevitable that Star Wars fans would get their  dander up. 

Looks like they're getting their revenge in this little bit as Wired Magazine explains:

"Stormtroopers celebrate after the Death Star vaporizes the Enterprise in the clip...

Mike Horn’s fan footage pits the two high-tech war machines against each other in the sci-fi franchise faceoff. As with his 2008 masterpiece “Death Star Over San Francisco,” the reel above was probably made on Horn’s computer using nothing more than After Effects, Final Cut and his fertile imagination. And an obvious preference for Star Wars over Star Trek."

It all makes sense in this Aliens vs. Predators world. 

Happy Mother's Day all.

ON THE WEB IN PICTURES

DIFFERENT TAKE

I've been warming up to a new Firefox extension from a company called Cooliris of late (Most other browsers also supported).

It's turning out to be of increasing use browsing the web, both on the computer, and on the iPhone, with the new Cooliris App.  This recent review by Macworld explains:

"...the minds behind the pictorial browser Cooliris believe there’s still benefit to the image as a means for relaying information. That benefit comes in the form of Cooliris’ 3D Wall—a three-high, ever-expanding string of related images and videos that link to locations around the Web.

A look at the free browser plugin gives you an idea of what Cooliris is all about. After installing Cooliris, its icon appears in the Web browser on your computer. Click the Cooliris icon in that browser and you can enter a search term in the Search field and browse sites such as Flickr, Yahoo, YouTube, and Amazon.com for pictures associated with your search..."

And what’s it good for? When looking at current events it’s an easy way to get a general idea of what the hot events of the day are based on the number of related images you see. Cooliris is also a wonderful way to browse image-centric sites such as Flickr as the interface is beautiful and shows off images to their best advantage. And, like Cover Flow, it’s a good way to browse catalogs of items as you would at many online emporiums.

The Cooliris iPhone application works similarly to the desktop client, though it’s not as full-featured as it doesn’t currently include a Shopping component. But its general operation is the same."

Think about it as a very visual StumbleUpon, an old favorite to serendipitously discover cool content on the web.  Cooliris is a different way to experience the torrent of content on the web.  And yes, they do have a blog.  The company has done a particularly good job making the software and service easy to install and figure out for first-timers.  Recommended.

*Image source.

ON A NEW USES FOR LASERS

WHY NOT?

Forget swatting flies with a cannon, or sharks with "frickin' lasers".  Some rocket scientists, are apparently working on a fusion of those two ideas.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

"A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the "Star Wars" defense system to knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams. Some of the same scientists are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito.

In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.

The insects survived this particular test, which used a non-lethal laser. But if these researchers have their way, the Cold War missile-defense strategy will be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito Destruction..."

"...The scientists' actual target is malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people. Ended in the U.S. decades ago, malaria remains a major global public-health threat, killing about 1 million people annually..."

"...The mosquito laser is the brainchild of Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who worked with Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and architect of the original plan to use lasers to shield America from the rain of Soviet nuclear arms."

The piece goes on to explain how all this came about, along with other creative efforts to come up with a solution against mosquitoes. 
But none of them hits the inner Dr. Evil as a frickin' laser for mosquitoes.

On the other end of the spectrum for innovative use for lasers, how's this from Thomas Friedman:

"What if a laser-powered fusion energy power plant that would have all the reliability of coal, without the carbon dioxide, all the cleanliness of wind and solar, without having to worry about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing, and all the scale of nuclear, without all the waste, was indeed just 10 years away or less? That would be a holy cow game-changer.

Are we there?

That is the tantalizing question I was left with after visiting the recently completed National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 50 miles east of San Francisco.
The government-funded N.I.F. consists of 192 giant lasers — which can deliver 50 times more energy than any previous fusion laser system. They’re all housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields — the rather dull cover to a vast internal steel forest of laser beams that must be what the engine room of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise space ship looked like."

Mosquitoes or fusion energy power...didn't know lasers had this much versatility.

* Image source.

ON FULFILLING VISIONS

UNEXPECTED FUTURES

Microsoft over the past few days has gotten some buzz with some cool videos on what technology has in store for us over the next decade.  This piece in BoyGeniusReport elaborates:

"At the recent Wharton Business Technology Conference, Steven Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, unveiled the latest future montage video from Microsoft Office Labs.

The video, known simply as 2019, provides a sneak peek at the future according to Microsoft. The widespread use of surface and touchscreen devices coupled with ubiquitous wireless connectivity provides a future worthy of any science fiction novel.

It is an interesting watch and will be even more interesting as the future unfolds and we see which of these technologies come to fruition."

The video, running almost 6 minutes is definitely worth watching. 

Microsoft's name comes up only at the very end, implying of course how the company hopes to enable a lot of this future for us, and presumably profit along the way.

The whole thing made me think of a series of ads that AT&T ran in the early 1990s, with the tag-line "You Will".  YouTube has a 2-minute montage of these ads in case you need a refresher:

Again, it's amazing how much in those videos has come to pass, but it's also instructive how much of this future was made possible by companies that didn't pay for those cool ads over 15 years ago.

ON VALENTINE'S DAY 2009

EXPRESS YOURSELF

It's Valentine's Day today, as Google reminds us today (see picture below).  Wikipedia notes it's significance relative to Christmas, especially as it comes to sending cards:

"The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approximately one billion valentines are sent each year worldwide, making the day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year, behind Christmas.

The association estimates that, in the US, men spend on average twice as much money as women.^[3]

The economic downturn of course will impact this spending, as the San Francisco Chronicle notes:

"Valentine's Day spending is expected to drop this year to $28.6 billion, or 4.8 percent below last year, according to IBISWorld Inc."

But the overall numbers aside, Valentine's Day is of course really about communicating one's feelings to the special women in one's life.  In that context, this "geek poem" unearthed by Kara Swisher bought a smile to my face:

"Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, of course, so here’s a lovely sentiment on a T-shirt from the fine folks at ThinkGeek."

Well said indeed. 

But remember Guys, you've got to do a little more than a Geeky T-shirt in expressing how you really feel.

By the way, if you'd like more romantic geek stories, Wired tells some good ones in "5 Geeky Marriage Proposals that worked".  Enjoy. 

Happy Valentine's Day all.

ON TINY GEOLOCATORS FOR BIRDS

MIGRATION UNPLUGGED

Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated about the prodigious migratory capabilities of birds.  Recent innovations in tracking these patterns by scientists are dramatically adding to our understanding of the migration pattersn.  As this New York Times story start out reporting:

"Birds are famous for airborne speed and endurance. Some have been clocked flying 60 miles per hour or more. Others make annual migrations from Alaska to New Zealand, nonstop."

"But for scientists, tracking birds as they perform those feats has been an intractable problem.
Now researchers think they have cracked it with a novel device — a tiny bird backpack that contains sophisticated sensors and weighs less than a dime."
The new technology has opened up vast new possibilities for bird researchers. Already, it is yielding surprising findings — for example, that some birds fly even faster than previously thought.
But its real importance, biologists say, is the opportunity to unlock mysteries of bird migration that could help preserve species threatened by habitat loss and climate change."

Here's more on the technology itself, pictured on the left in this BBC News article:

"...at a 2006 conference, the British researchers said they had miniaturized their sensors to 1.5 grams. “That for me was a magic number,” she said. “I could put it on a large songbird.”
The instruments Dr. Stutchbury uses actually weigh even less and sit on a bird’s back, just where the hips are.
Each sensor is about the size of the nail on a person’s pinkie. “There’s a little loop that goes around each leg,” she said. “It would be like you wearing a backpack.”
"...The research, reported Friday in the journal Science, involved 34 birds, but only 7 were recovered with their sensors.
Still, the work “is an important step,” said David W. Winkler, an ornithologist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, where he said researchers were developing similar techniques. “This represents a whole new level of accuracy,” Dr. Winkler said.

The tracking system relies on instruments called solar geolocators that collect and store data on where the birds are in relation to the sun.

Researchers remove the sensors, download the information and calculate where the birds were, and when they were there."

As this Washington Post article explains, the data is not received real-time:

"The devices could not transmit data in real time, but they recorded the exact time of sunrise and sunset, allowing the researchers to download the data later and calculate where each bird was on any given day."

The results have been surprising to say the least:

"Analyzing the sensor data, the researchers found that their birds flew two to six times faster going north than south — up to about 370 miles in a day, which she said was much faster than had been thought. A female martin flew almost 5,000 miles in 13 days, including 4 stopover days."

The first study has resulted in round-trip tracking of seven birds, for the first time anywhere.  More studies are apparently under-way, and should go a lot further in helping understand this fascinating subject.

ON A WHOLE LOT MORE GOOGLE EARTH

DEEP BLUE

As someone who's long been a fan of relief globes of the Earth depicting the depths of the oceans, I was glad to see this announcement by Google today.  As the New York Times explains:

"Two and a half years ago, the software engineers behind Google Earth, the searchable online replica of the planet, were poised to fill an enormous data gap, adding the two-thirds of the globe that is covered by water in reality and was blue, and blank, online."

As the Official Google Blog goes on to elaborate:

"...starting today we have a much more detailed bathymetric map (the ocean floor), so you can actually drop below the surface and explore the nooks and crannies of the seafloor in 3D.

While you're there you can explore thousands of data points including videos and images of ocean life, details on the best surf spots, logs of real ocean expeditions, and much more.

We were joined at the Academy by many of the dozens of ocean scientists and advocates who helped make this project a reality: friends from National Geographic, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the US Navy, Scripps Oceanography, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to name just a few.

Above all, I would like to acknowledge the work of Dr. Sylvia Earle, who cornered me at a conference three years ago and told me that Google Earth was great but that it wasn't finished (you can read more about that encounter on the Lat Long blog).

As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. We on the Google Earth team had been working hard to build a rich 3D map of the world, but we had largely ignored the oceans — two thirds of the planet. Inspired by Sylvia, the team got to work. I hope you are as excited as I am to explore our new Ocean and all of the fascinating stories and images our partners have contributed.
But that's not all we launched today. In addition to Ocean, we introduced new features that we hope will enhance the way people interact with Google Earth and use it to communicate with the world.

• Historical Imagery: Until today, Google Earth displayed only one image of a given place at a given time. With this new feature, you can now move back and forth in time to reveal imagery from years and even decades past, revealing changes over time. Try flying south of San Francisco in Google Earth and turning on the new time slider (click the "clock" icon in the toolbar) to witness the transformation of Silicon Valley from a farming community to the tech capital of the world over the past 50 years or so.

• Touring: One of the key challenges we have faced in developing Google Earth has been making it easier for people to tell stories. People have created wonderful layers to share with the world, but they have often asked for a way to guide others through them. The Touring feature makes it simple to create an easily sharable, narrated, fly-through tour just by clicking the record button and navigating through your tour destinations..."

"For those of you who keep track of version numbers, this is Google Earth 5.0."

The whole thing is very cool and definitely worth checking out.  And who knows, it may actually end of doing a whole lot of good in a whole lot of unanticipated ways.

ON SULLY'S PERFORMANCE

BEFORE AND AFTER

That US Airways Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III and his crew turned in a heroic performance a few  days ago and saved over 150 souls is something we can all agree on. 

What's almost as incredible in the eyes of this observer is his humility after the heroic act. 

It's amazing that at least until now, Captain Sullenberger has not attempted to cash in on his very deserved 15 minutes of fame and tried to capitalize on it in some manner or another with the media.  It's certainly not been due to lack of opportunity. 

Everyone from President Obama to the mayor from his hometown has called and celebrated Sully's actions.  But it's been refreshing to see the low-key manner in which Captain Sullenberger has responded, as this brief speech at his homecoming in Danville, California illustrates:

"When it came time to speak, the tall, thin, gray-haired Sullenberger was a man of few words. He said it was "great to be here in Danville" and expressed his family's gratitude for the celebration. He made only a brief mention of the event that has won him worldwide fame.

"I know I speak for the entire crew when I tell you we were simply doing the jobs we were trained to do," Sullenberger said in a strong, clear voice. "Thank you."
With that, he sat down, and the crowd again erupted."

Bravo, Captain Sullenberger, bravo.  For both amazing performances.

ON THE FOLKS UPLOADING TO YOUTUBE

WHO AND WHY?

Every time I use Google's YouTube, I'm amazed that someone took the time somewhere to upload a clip of some video from somewhere else.  
And while we've all come to take for granted how incredibly useful that is for millions of YouTube viewers every-day, it's easy to take for granted that there is a pretty amazing community of folks globally who take the time to slice and dice video and then upload it into the Google/YouTube cloud.  Most of the time, it's stuff they like and/or find notable and they think it might be of interest to someone somewhere sometime.  And as a user, it feels like magic when one finds something you're curious about on YouTube.

Maybe I've missed it somewhere, but I've yet to find any information on this community on the web.  How large is it, how is it growing, what are it's demographics, and simply what kind of hardware and software tools do they like to use to do their YouTube uploading.  So many other questions also come to mind.

What made me think of all this is re-reading a post from some time ago by entrepreneur and programmer Andy Baio, who was curious along similar lines about another innovative web service, this time courtesy of Amazon:

"When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic.
I've seen the demographics, but that was too abstract for me.
You toss 500 questions into the ether, and the answers instantly start rolling in from anonymous workers around the world. It was great for getting work done, but who are these people?
Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?"

The rest of the post goes into the clever survey he implemented to get some answers, and the cool results of the experiment:

"The final results: 30 people total — 10 women, 20 men. Almost all were white, mostly in their 20s and 30s. 21 said they turked for money, 9 for fun or boredom."

It'd be fascinating if something like this were done to query the many folks who contribute to YouTube every day.  Who knows, it may even be doable using YouTube.