Google’s Moving Ad About 1947 Partition of India & Pakistan Tops 10 Million Views

in Google, History, Television | December 9th, 2013

Recent­ly, Wired writer Steve Sil­ber­man (aka @stevesil­ber­man) shot us a note on Twit­ter, say­ing, “@openculture, do not miss this bril­liant ad. Most touch­ing movie (in 3 mins!) I’ve seen in years.” Released on Novem­ber 13th, the video has already clocked over 10 mil­lion views. But chances are you haven’t seen it. And that’s because it’s tar­get­ed to the web-enabled mid­dle class of India and Pak­istan. As The Dawn, Pak­istan’s old­est Eng­lish news­pa­per, describes it, the Google-cre­at­ed ad enti­tled “Reunion” “por­trays two child­hood friends, now elder­ly men, who haven’t seen each oth­er since they were sep­a­rat­ed by the 1947 par­ti­tion that cre­at­ed India and Pak­istan from the old British empire in South Asia. Par­ti­tion sparked a mass exo­dus as mil­lions of Mus­lims and Hin­dus fled across the new bor­ders amid reli­gious vio­lence.” Now Google search prod­ucts are help­ing to bring old friends and neigh­bors back togeth­er.

Cyn­ics may be quick to judge this a sac­cha­rine, manip­u­la­tive ad. But oth­ers are see­ing in it some­thing else — a sign that “per­son­al con­nec­tions between Indi­ans and Pak­ista­nis run deep.” Even if their gov­ern­ments gain some­thing from keep­ing the con­flict alive, every­day peo­ple in India and Pak­istan are increas­ing­ly ready to put his­to­ry aside.

Note: If you click CC at the bot­tom of the video, you can use cap­tions to trans­late the film into nine lan­guages, includ­ing French, Malay­alam and Urdu. It is pre­set to Eng­lish.

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Trace Darwin’s Footsteps with Google’s New Virtual Tour of the Galapagos Islands

in Biology, Environment, Google | September 23rd, 2013

As famous­ly stud­ied as they are, the 18 Gala­pa­gos Islands haven’t been well mapped. And research in the Gala­pa­gos, sit­u­at­ed more than 500 miles west of Ecuador, is expen­sive and dif­fi­cult. Maybe that’s part of the islands’ allure—that and the stun­ning bio­di­ver­si­ty.

In part­ner­ship with the Charles Dar­win Foun­da­tion and Gala­pa­gos Nation­al Park, Google sent a team armed with Street View Trekker cam­eras to cre­ate an entire­ly new 360 degree Street View expe­ri­ence that makes three major islands, a frag­ile tor­toise breed­ing area and coastal areas, avail­able to vis­i­tors locat­ed any­where with an Inter­net con­nec­tion.

Dar­win made his first expe­di­tion to the islands 178 years ago. This might have been his first view of San Cristo­bal Island.

GalapagosApproach

After explor­ing San Cristobal’s rocky coast, Google trekkers made their way to Gala­pa­guera, a giant tor­toise breed­ing cen­ter, where they saw new­ly hatched babies and adults munch­ing on leaves and stalks.

Off the coast of Flo­re­ana Island, trekkers went under­wa­ter and caught images of seals play­ing in the water. They also shot images inside the Charles Dar­win Research Station’s ver­te­brate, inver­te­brate and plant col­lec­tions.

Google does a good job of doc­u­ment­ing its own process. Trekkers trav­eled to Gala­pa­gos in May and spent 10 days hik­ing, boat­ing, and div­ing. It’s fun to watch them climb and scoot around the islands loaded with a geo­des­ic cam­era back­pack.

Sci­en­tists get real­ly excit­ed when they find new tools to do their work. And why shouldn’t they? These islands are amaz­ing and are home to so many unique species, like the Marine Igua­na. We land­lub­bers may not get there any­time soon, but this is the next best thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read the Orig­i­nal Let­ters Where Charles Dar­win Worked Out His The­o­ry of Evo­lu­tion

The Genius of Charles Dar­win Revealed in Three-Part Series by Richard Dawkins

Dar­win: A 1993 Film by Peter Green­away

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Fol­low her on Twit­ter.

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Google & edX to Create MOOC.Org: An Open Source Platform For Creating Your Own MOOC

in Google, Harvard, MIT, MOOCs | September 11th, 2013

mooc org

Almost exact­ly a year ago, we told you about Google’s release of Course Builder, an open source plat­form that would let you build your own online courses/MOOCs for free. This week, Google has a new announce­ment: it’s join­ing forces with edX, (the MOOC provider led by Har­vard and MIT), to work on a new open source plat­form called MOOC.org. The new ser­vice will go live in the first half of 2014. And it will allow “any aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tion, busi­ness and indi­vid­ual to cre­ate and host online cours­es.” This will give inno­v­a­tive edu­ca­tors the oppor­tu­ni­ty to put a MOOC online with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly mak­ing a steep invest­ment in a course. (When added all up, the costs can oth­er­wise be enor­mous.) If MOOC.org sounds of inter­est to you, you can put your name on a wait­ing list, and they’ll con­tact you when the ser­vice launch­es next year.

Mean­while, let me men­tion that 125 MOOCs will be launch­ing between now and the end of Octo­ber. To see a full list, vis­it or our col­lec­tion of 625 MOOCs/Certificate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. You’ll find many inter­est­ing titles on the list — His­to­ry of Chi­nese Archi­tec­ture: Part 1; Søren Kierkegaard – Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, Irony and the Cri­sis of Moder­ni­ty; Dark Mat­ter in Galax­ies: The Last Mys­tery, and Explor­ing Engi­neer­ing, just to name a few. If you have ques­tions about what MOOCs are all about, please see our new MOOC FAQ.

via The Chron­i­cle of High­er Ed

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Releas­es “Course Builder,” an Open Source Plat­form for Build­ing Your Own Big Online Cours­es

Har­vard and MIT Cre­ate EDX to Offer Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs) World­wide

Stephen Col­bert Tries to Make Sense of MOOCs with the Head of edX

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A Planetary Perspective: Trillions of Pictures of the Earth Available Through Google Earth Engine

in Education, Environment, Google, Science, Technology | September 9th, 2013

In 1972 the Earth Resources Tech­nol­o­gy Satel­lite, or Land­sat, launched into space with a mis­sion to cir­cle the plan­et every 16 days and take pic­tures of the Earth. For more than forty years, the Land­sat pro­gram has cre­at­ed the longest ever con­tin­u­ous record of Earth’s sur­face.

Now those images are avail­able to every­one. And thanks to Google Earth Engine, it’s pos­si­ble to down­load and ana­lyze them.

Five years ago NASA and the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey rewrote their pro­to­cols and made the images avail­able for free, tril­lions of them, a ridicu­lous­ly mas­sive col­lec­tion of pic­tures tak­en from more than 400 miles away, some of them unrec­og­niz­able.

Is that green patch in the Ama­zon basin a for­est or a pas­ture?

But with a lit­tle help from Google’s cloud, this data has amaz­ing pow­er. It used to be that only a big insti­tu­tion, like a uni­ver­si­ty or a coun­try, had the pro­cess­ing pow­er to down­load the data. With a sin­gle CPU it would take months to suck down the images. Now, it only takes a few hours. With that free­dom, small envi­ron­men­tal watch­dog agen­cies and mon­i­tor­ing groups have access to the same data that the big guys have had for years. All they need to do is write the algo­rithms to help inter­pret what they’re see­ing.

And best of all, we can all see the results.

Watch Las Vegas grow from a dusty casi­no town into sub­ur­ban sprawl.

See the Palm Islands bloom into being off the coast of Dubai between 1984 and 2012.

One of the most dev­as­tat­ing is to watch the her­ring­bone of roads devel­op in the Ama­zon over just 28 years.

Down­load GoogleEarth’s free plu­g­in to view pre­com­put­ed datasets, like this one ren­der­ing the few remain­ing places on the Earth that are more than a kilo­me­ter from the near­est road.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Bomb­ing Remem­bered with Google Earth

Google Presents an Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion of 100,000 Stars

Cut­ting-Edge Tech­nol­o­gy Recon­structs the Bat­tle of Get­tys­burg 150 Years Lat­er

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Vis­it her web­site and fol­low her on Twit­ter. 

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Building The Eiffel Tower: Three Google Exhibitions Revisit the Birth of the Great Parisian Monument

in Architecture, Google, History, Technology | July 19th, 2013

eiffeltower

One of the most stun­ning views a trav­el­er can have in Paris is to round a cor­ner and see the mas­sive four-legged base of the Eif­fel Tow­er. One of the beau­ti­ful things about Eiffel’s tow­er is that it is so colos­sal and yet so airy and del­i­cate.

The view from the top is also amaz­ing (though truth be told the views from Notre Dame and Sacré-Coeur may be bet­ter because they include the Eif­fel Tow­er too)—so much so that Google pho­tog­ra­phers hoist­ed their panoram­ic Street View cam­era into the tow­er and record­ed breath­tak­ing views from the three main lev­els.

The day Google showed up was a typ­i­cal­ly over­cast Paris day. The sky is even a lit­tle threat­en­ing. After so much gaz­ing out at the city, you might want to dip into a café for un petit café crème.

But keep your lap­top with you. The Street View exhib­it is one of three that Google now offers about the tow­er. Google’s Cul­tur­al Insti­tute col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Eif­fel Tow­er Oper­at­ing Com­pa­ny to cre­ate three addi­tion­al exhibits: The Birth of the Eif­fel Tow­er, the tower’s con­struc­tion, and anoth­er about its inau­gu­ra­tion and ear­ly vis­i­tors.

One of the coolest pieces of archival mate­r­i­al is a record­ing of tow­er engi­neer Gus­tave Eiffel’s voice made by Thomas Edi­son, who was a big fan of the tow­er.

Built to dis­play France’s engi­neer­ing prowess at the cen­te­nary of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, the tower’s con­struc­tion is amaz­ing to con­tem­plate. Four men were need­ed to install one riv­et: one to heat it up, anoth­er to hold it in place, a third to shape the head and a fourth to beat it with a sledge­ham­mer. A total of 2,500,000 riv­ets were used to hold the tow­er togeth­er.

For a much old­er view of the ride up the tower’s ele­va­tor, check out this film by the Lumière broth­ers, made the year the tow­er opened in 1898.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Climb Three of the World’s High­est Peaks on Google Street View

Google Street View Takes You on a Panoram­ic Tour of the Grand Canyon

Google Street View Opens Up a Look at Shackleton’s Antarc­tic

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Fol­low her on Twit­ter @mskaterix. Learn more about her work by vis­it­ing .

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Google Wants to Provide Internet Access to Remote Parts of the World with Solar-Powered Balloons

in Google, Technology | June 17th, 2013

Per­haps you live in a devel­oped nation, or a pock­et of a devel­op­ing nation, where inter­net access is a rel­a­tive­ly cheap com­mod­i­ty. Count your­self lucky. Right now, 5 bil­lion peo­ple — or two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion — lack access to an afford­able and reli­able Inter­net con­nec­tion. Which means they lack access to crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion — med­ical infor­ma­tion that can save lives; sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion that can improve farm­ing; tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion nec­es­sary to build a mod­ern econ­o­my; and edu­ca­tion­al resources that can cul­ti­vate young minds.

With Project Loon, Google is launch­ing an auda­cious exper­i­ment that will hope­ful­ly make a dent in this seri­ous prob­lem. The exper­i­ment involves putting a fleet of high-alti­tude bal­loons into the air. Pow­ered sole­ly by the wind and the sun, the bal­loons will fly high into the stratos­phere, well above where com­mer­cial planes fly, and they’ll beam Inter­net access back to the ground “at speeds sim­i­lar to today’s 3G net­works or faster,” claims Google’s main blog. (The clip below explains the gist of the tech­nol­o­gy.) Right now, they’re run­ning a small scale test in New Zealand (in Christchurch and Can­ter­bury, to be exact) and you can mon­i­tor the progress over at Project Loon’s Google Plus page. In the mean­time, we’ll keep our fin­gers crossed and hope the entire world can soon enjoy our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es, not to men­tion the oth­er ran­dom curiosi­ties found on the web.

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Google Reveals the Evolution of Our Planet in Timelapse Motion

in Google | May 10th, 2013

Columbia_400Yes­ter­day Google released a trove of time­lapse images that offers, it believes, “the most com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of our chang­ing plan­et ever made avail­able to the pub­lic.” Fea­tur­ing a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry of images tak­en from space by NASA and the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, the repos­i­to­ry lets you wit­ness the retreat of glac­i­ers (see above), the defor­esta­tion of wide swathes of rain­for­est, the growth of sprawl­ing cities, and the build­ing of huge arti­fi­cial islands, all hap­pen­ing in time­lapse motion.

To cre­ate its Time­lapse web­site, Google “sift­ed through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 ter­abytes of data—to find the high­est-qual­i­ty pix­els … for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth.” They then used this data to cre­ate com­pos­ite images for each year, all view­able in brows­able HTML5 ani­ma­tion. Some strik­ing images have also been post­ed on Google+.

via Google

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of our Ocean Cur­rents

Har­vard Thinks Green: Big Ideas from 6 All-Star Envi­ron­ment Profs

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Celebrate Saul Bass’ 93rd Birthday with an Animated Google Doodle

in Design, Google | May 8th, 2013

When it comes to title design, no one did it bet­ter than Saul Bass (1920–1996). Dur­ing his long career in Hol­ly­wood, Bass designed sequences for Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Gold­en Arm, Scorsese’s Good­fel­las and Cape Fear, Kubrick’s Spar­ta­cus, and sev­er­al clas­sic films by Alfred Hitch­cock. And that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face. (You can delve into Bass’ oth­er cre­ative work via the links below.)

Today, Google is cel­e­brat­ing what would have been Bass’ 93rd birth­day with an ani­mat­ed doo­dle (above). Accord­ing to Metafil­ter, the doo­dle “pays homage to Bass’ visu­al work on Psy­cho, The Man With The Gold­en Arm, Spar­ta­cus, West Side Sto­ry,Ver­ti­go, North by North­west, Anato­my of a Mur­der, and Around the World in 80 Days.” It’s also set to Dave Brubeck­’s 1961 tune, “Unsquare Dance.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Saul Bass’ Advice for Design­ers: Learn to Draw, and Cre­ate Beau­ty Even If Nobody Else Cares

Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Pon­ders Why Man Cre­ates

Saul Bass Gives Ma Bell a Com­plete Makeover, 1969

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