Google Digitizes Ancient Copies of the Ten Commandments and Genesis

in Google, History, Religion | December 21st, 2012

If dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy pos­es any threat to the mar­ket for words print­ed on real paper—and the jury is still out on that one—then it must also be cred­it­ed for expos­ing us to texts from the ancient world.

Last fall we post­ed about how the Israel Muse­um dig­i­tized the Dead Sea Scrolls, near­ly 1,000 texts found on the north­west shore of the Dead Sea in 1946. They are the ear­li­est known sur­viv­ing man­u­scripts from what is called the Hebrew Bible. Dig­i­tiz­ing the texts—most were on parch­ment but some were writ­ten on bronze or papyrus—allows view­ers to zoom in to exam­ine the writ­ing and even the paper fibers of hun­dreds of frag­ments.

Now the Israel Antiq­ui­ties Author­i­ty has expand­ed upon the col­lec­tion. Housed in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Dig­i­tal Library are the ear­li­est known copies of the Book of Deuteron­o­my (which includes the Ten Com­mand­ments) and Chap­ter One of the Book of Gen­e­sis.

Each scroll frag­ment was scanned using spec­tral imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy that allows for the recov­ery of writ­ing that had fad­ed to near invis­i­bil­i­ty over the years. The boon for schol­ars is clear, but for reg­u­lar folks this archive is bet­ter than a muse­um vis­it. The Leon Levy site is search­able by dis­cov­ery site, con­tent and ancient lan­guage.

Google is mak­ing its mark as a major facil­i­ta­tor of cul­tur­al preser­va­tion. Anoth­er recent project with ties to ancient texts and his­to­ry is Caminos de Sefarad, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Red de Jud­erías de España to cre­ate a dig­i­tal map of Spain’s Jew­ish her­itage.

More than 500 land­marks from the Sefarad—the Sephardic Jews before they were expelled from Spain and Por­tu­gal in 1492—are ful­ly anno­tat­ed with cur­rent pho­tos, text and spe­cial details. Vis­it Rib­a­davia, a once-pros­per­ous city in Spain’s north­west moun­tains, and learn about Jew­ish wed­ding tra­di­tions from the Mid­dle Ages. The Jew­ish Quar­ter of Léon is called the Bar­rio Húme­do (Wet Dis­trict) and is known today for its fine wine and food. Use the time­line to keep your­self ori­ent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal his­to­ry and click Street View to see this vibrant dis­trict as it is today.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

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Celebrity Statistician Nate Silver Fields Questions from Data Wizards at Google

in Books, Google, Math | December 3rd, 2012

Maybe the biggest win­ner of the 2012 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, oth­er than Barack Oba­ma, was Nate Sil­ver, the young sta­tis­ti­cian who runs the 538 blog at the New York Times. As you may recall (it was only a few weeks ago), Sil­ver gave Pres­i­dent Oba­ma rough­ly an 80% — 90% chance of win­ning dur­ing the final days of Octo­ber. The talk­ing heads railed against Sil­ver, call­ing him an “ide­o­logue” and a “joke.” But, just as Sil­ver accu­rate­ly pre­dict­ed the out­come of every Sen­ate race dur­ing the 2008 elec­tion cycle, so did he pret­ty much nail the big race of 2012. He esti­mat­ed Oba­ma would receive 313 elec­toral votes, a touch below the 332 the pres­i­dent actu­al­ly received. Sil­ver was vin­di­cat­ed. It was time to take a vic­to­ry lap … and sell a few books.

In late Sep­tem­ber, Sil­ver shrewd­ly pub­lished a new book, The Sig­nal and the Noise: Why Most Pre­dic­tions Fail but Some Don’t. The book tour even­tu­al­ly, if not inevitably, brought him to Google, where the celebri­ty sta­tis­ti­cian field­ed ques­tions from data-lov­ing Googlers for an hour. A grand old time was had by all.

Free cours­es on Stats and Prob­a­bil­i­ty can be found in the Math sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 550 Free Online Cours­es.

via Giz­mo­do

 

 

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Google Presents an Interactive Visualization of 100,000 Stars

in Astronomy, Google, K-12, Science | November 27th, 2012

Stargaz­ers of all ages will enjoy the lat­est Google exper­i­ment designed for Chrome. One Hun­dred Thou­sand Stars (access it here) is an inter­ac­tive map of space includ­ing the loca­tions of—you guessed it—more than 100,000 stars. (Note: Before you expe­ri­ence the map, you will need to down­load the Chrome brows­er.)

Ren­dered in three dimen­sions, our know­able, mapped galaxy is both stag­ger­ing­ly vast and easy to nav­i­gate. With imagery and data from NASA and the Euro­pean Space Agency, Google’s Chrome Work­shop built a 3D mod­el of our lit­tle cor­ner of the uni­verse.

You can pre­view One Hun­dred Thou­sand Stars above. Or you can enter the map, click on the upper left cor­ner, and take a tour of your own. You’ll start just beyond the stars that astronomers have stud­ied and named. Swipe all the way into our own solar sys­tem. The first thing you’ll notice is that Plu­to isn’t includ­ed, invit­ing a new mnemon­ic for the plan­et names (My Very Earnest Moth­er Just Served Us Nec­tarines?). That hazy cloud about a light year from the sun is the Oort Cloud, a mass of comets that’s thought to mark the out­er edge of the sun’s grav­i­ta­tion­al pull.

Swipe out a bit to see 87 rel­a­tive­ly near­by stars. Click on their names to read about them. Sir­ius is the bright­est in the night sky, part­ly because of its own lumi­nos­i­ty but also because it is com­par­a­tive­ly close to Earth. Vega is so well stud­ied that its bright­ness is used as the base­line to clas­si­fy stars accord­ing to their col­or.

Swipe out fur­ther for a galac­tic view of the Milky Way. It appears as a beau­ti­ful illu­mi­nat­ed disc cen­tered around a bright bulge. This shape is called the Galac­tic Plane. Click and drag to tilt the disc this way and that. Total­ing to some 400 bil­lion stars and as many plan­ets, the Milky Way does in fact bulge at its cen­ter, though astronomers think that the true core is real­ly an intense black hole.

Notice the tiny icon to “Tog­gle Spec­tral Index” up in the left cor­ner. On one set­ting, each cloud is pix­i­lat­ed to high­light its col­or (a key iden­ti­fi­er for astronomers).

Here’s where it helps to know a lit­tle about stars and how they form. Stars begin as clouds of most­ly hydro­gen, becom­ing grad­u­al­ly so dense through the process of nuclear fusion that even grav­i­ty can­not make them fly apart.

The amount of light a star gives off is mea­sured as dif­fer­ent col­ors and tem­per­a­tures. “Hot­ter” stars are younger and give off more blue light, and so are indi­cat­ed as blue. “Cool” stars are old­er, give off less blue light, and are indi­cat­ed as red.

By the way, the music behind One Hun­dred Thou­sand Stars is by Sam Hulick, whose music gamers may rec­og­nize  from Mass Effect.

We’re adding One Hun­dred Thou­sand Stars to our new col­lec­tion: 200 Free K‑12 Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Mobile Apps, Free Books & More.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site and her blog, thenifty.blogspot.com.

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Google Revisits the Fall of the Iron Curtain in New Online Exhibition

in Google, History | November 13th, 2012

I like to col­lect sounds while trav­el­ing. A few favorites that come to mind include the whine of scoot­ers buzzing down the streets of Paris, the calm female voice announc­ing the next stop on the Prague Metro and the clink clink of peo­ple chip­ping away chunks of the Berlin Wall.

That was 1990, just a few months after mil­lions of Germans—from both sides of the wall—succeeded in end­ing the East Ger­man regime through street protests.

The Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute cap­tures this amaz­ing peri­od of recent his­to­ry with The Fall of the Iron Cur­tain, a new col­lec­tion of his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments, videos and pho­tos curat­ed by Niall Fer­gu­son, an emi­nent Har­vard his­to­ri­an.

The 1980s saw the Cold War come to an end with a wave of cit­i­zen protests that swept across Europe. Google’s col­lec­tion includes 13 exhibits that begin with Poland’s Sol­i­dar­i­ty Move­ment but then con­sid­ers the his­to­ry and sig­nif­i­cance of the Berlin Wall.

Google part­nered with major Ger­man and Pol­ish muse­ums to cre­ate the exhibits so the expe­ri­ence is rich with con­text, includ­ing inter­views with his­to­ri­ans and images from the pop­u­lar cul­ture of the time.

Fol­low the riv­et­ing events of Decem­ber 14, 1989 as Roman­ian cit­i­zens crowd­ed Maria Plaza in Timisoara call­ing for lead­ers Nico­lae and Ele­na Ceauces­cu to step down. By evening the crowd filled all of the roads off the plaza and the mil­i­tary opened fire, killing 62 peo­ple. The peri­od of the Ceauces­cu tri­al and exe­cu­tion is brought to life in anoth­er exhib­it with images and inter­views.

The exhibits con­clude with the rapid accel­er­a­tion of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall itself.

Each exhib­it is rich and com­plete with anec­dotes, includ­ing a diary of life dur­ing Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion.

Speak­ing of col­lect­ing sounds while trav­el­ing, check out the Pink Floyd’s live per­for­mance we brought you of The Wall in east­ern Berlin, a mere eight months after the Wall had come down.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. You can con­tact her and find more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

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Where Your Web Searches, Emails, and Videos Live: A Tour Inside Google’s Data Centers

in Business, Google, Technology, Web/Tech | October 18th, 2012

So much of what we expe­ri­ence as dig­i­tal is intan­gi­ble. The col­or and tex­ture of the Inter­net exists only for the time we have that par­tic­u­lar site loaded. With just a click of the mouse, the lush­ness dis­ap­pears.

Except that it doesn’t, real­ly.

Back­stage, every email, pho­to, YouTube video and doc­u­ment we share lives in a very real place, which is weird when you think about it. These mas­sive data cen­ters are like vaults of ones and zeros, some of which could wreak hav­oc in the wrong hands but, hon­est­ly, most of which will nev­er mean any­thing again to any­body.

Every time any­one uses a Google prod­uct, for exam­ple, like con­duct­ing a search or look­ing up direc­tions, their com­put­er talks to one of the world’s most pow­er­ful serv­er net­works, which are housed in huge data cen­ters. Very few peo­ple actu­al­ly get to see where Google’s servers live. These data cen­ters are high secu­ri­ty, for good rea­son.

The com­pa­ny recent­ly launched Where the Inter­net Lives, part of a mini cam­paign to pull back the cur­tain on how the web works. They hired a pho­tog­ra­ph­er to cap­ture eight of their data cen­ters on, well, not real­ly film, but you get the pic­ture. Oh, and the data cen­ters aren’t brick and mor­tar either. More like glass and dry­wall and pipes. Lots and lots of pipes.

And like Willie Won­ka and his famous fac­to­ry, Google invit­ed Wired mag­a­zine reporter Stephen Levy to vis­it and write a sto­ry about the pre­vi­ous­ly off-lim­its facil­i­ties.

Take a street view tour of the North Car­oli­na data cen­ter (and see their “secu­ri­ty team” at work). Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Con­nie Zhou’s images are love­ly and the facil­i­ties are beau­ti­ful in an eerie, futur­is­tic way. See how water is used to keep the proces­sors cool, where data is backed up, failed dri­ves destroyed to keep data safe and how work­ers get around.

Google employ­ees get a fair amount of play, with shots of them work­ing to build, main­tain and repair the machines.

It’s a peek behind the scenes, but it’s also mar­ket­ing. And what’s inter­est­ing is that it’s a lot like the auto­mo­bile industry’s mar­ket­ing (think of Saturn’s ads in praise of the assem­bly-line work­er) and cam­paigns by the Big Three to attract auto work­ers in the 1940s. Some of the pho­to cap­tions recall the nos­tal­gic, Utopi­an mes­sag­ing of the post-War era, when effi­cient, mod­ern sub­ur­ban com­mu­ni­ties were sprout­ing up around indus­tri­al cen­ters. This lunch room looks pret­ty nice, and the sauna is right out­side.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal cul­ture and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her work online at kater­ixwriter

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Google Brings History to Life with 42 New Online Exhibitions

in Google | October 17th, 2012

Ear­li­er this year, Google expand­ed Art Project, a vast col­lec­tion of art­work curat­ed into exhibits by real muse­ums around the world and by reg­u­lar folks like you and me. (See our orig­i­nal post here.) Not much lat­er the Nel­son Man­dela Archive went online, fea­tur­ing rare pho­tos, man­u­scripts and videos relat­ed to the civ­il rights leader. And, more recent­ly we brought you news about Google’s World Won­ders Project, which includes amaz­ing panoram­ic shots of coral reefs pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with a major ocean­ic study.

Turns out that these projects were just a taste of what was to come. With 17 dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions as part­ners, Google has built a robust, umbrel­la Cul­tur­al Insti­tute to house 42 new online exhi­bi­tions. Each exhib­it fea­tures, in Google’s words, “a nar­ra­tive which links the archive mate­r­i­al togeth­er to unlock the dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, nuances and tales behind these events.” The exhibits also ben­e­fit from an abun­dance of poignant human sto­ries.

The Auschwitz-Birke­neau State Muse­um, for exam­ple, pro­vid­ed mate­ri­als for the exhib­it Trag­ic Love at Auschwitz, which fol­lows the rela­tion­ship between a Jew­ish woman and a Pol­ish man, both pris­on­ers of the Nazis. You can also watch the only exist­ing film images of Anne Frank, part of the thought­ful and touch­ing Anne Frank exhib­it. Or expe­ri­ence an entire­ly dif­fer­ent exhib­it, Years of Dolce Vita, which rev­els in the sen­su­al­i­ty of Ital­ian film from the mid-cen­tu­ry. Cre­at­ed in part­ner­ship with an Ital­ian gov­ern­ment film insti­tute, Google’s exhib­it is a sun­ny romp through the archi­tec­ture, fash­ion and food of post-Cold War Italy.

Oth­er exhibits focus on Steve Biko, The Coro­na­tion of Queen Eliz­a­beth II, and D‑Day. Enter the full col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal cul­ture, teach­ing and high­er edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her work online at .

 

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Reef View: Google Gives Us Stunning Underwater Shots of Great Coral Reefs

in Google, Photography, Technology, Video - Science | September 26th, 2012

Most of us have looked up our own address­es using Google Street View. But have you ever wished you could vir­tu­al­ly dive right into the ocean, lake or riv­er near your home?

It may not be long until you can. Google has tak­en its Street View mod­el, com­plete with direc­tion­al arrows and swipe-con­trolled scal­ing, and plunged into the watery uni­verse.

In a col­lab­o­ra­tion with a major sci­en­tif­ic study of the ocean, Street View now includes panoram­ic views of six of the world’s liv­ing coral reefs. These images, shot using a spe­cial cam­era, allow us to zoom in and see schools of fish and sea tur­tles make their way over the sea floor off the coast of Australia’s Heron Island. Check out the shape and tex­ture of this ancient vol­canic rock near Apo Island in the Philip­pines.

Above the Moloki­ni Crater near Maui you might be sur­prised to stum­ble upon some oth­er snorklers.

Scoot­ing along is amaz­ing­ly fun and the pho­to­graph­ic clar­i­ty is incred­i­ble. Take a cool swim with a man­ta ray and an under­wa­ter pho­tog­ra­ph­er off the Great Bar­ri­er Reef. It real­ly does feel like you’re there—only you’re not (and the Google water­marks bring you back to real­i­ty ).


View Larg­er Map

Pho­tos come cour­tesy of the Catlin Seav­iew Sur­vey, an inter­na­tion­al study of the oceans. Researchers use a con­tin­u­al 360 degree panoram­ic cam­era to cap­ture under­wa­ter images. In deep­er trench­es, they send the cam­era down on robots.

Sci­en­tists with the study say that some 95 per­cent of the ocean still hasn’t been seen by the human eye. Short of trav­el­ing to all these spots our­selves, this may be our best chance to bring that num­ber down.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Tour the Ama­zon with Google Street View; No Pass­port Need­ed

Google Art Project Expands, Bring­ing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Muse­ums to the Web

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

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Heat Mapping the Rise of Bruce Springsteen: How the Boss Went Viral in a Pre-Internet Era

in Google, Music, Technology | September 17th, 2012

A friend of mine and for­mer musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tor was mar­ried this past week­end in Asbury Park, New Jer­sey, where Spring­steen got his start with his first album in 1973. This was deliberate—she’s  a die-hard Jer­sey girl and the biggest Spring­steen fan I’ve ever met. But while Spring­steen is firm­ly root­ed in his work­ing-class New Jer­sey, he is also a poet of Amer­i­cana writ large (Nebras­ka is my favorite record), and his songs are as much cel­e­bra­tions of his home state as they are eulo­gies of it, or rous­ing calls to hit the road and leave the Jerz behind. All that’s to say, Spring­steen is some­thing of a rock-and-roll geo­g­ra­ph­er, so he’s the per­fect sub­ject for the Map­brief project above which charts his career from folk trou­ba­dour to are­na-rock hit­mak­er and back again–from 1973 to the present–by show­ing the impact of each album’s tour on a map of the U.S. Here are some things to keep in mind as you watch the visu­al­iza­tion above:

    • each red dot is a per­for­mance (data cour­tesy of the Killing Floor data­base).
    • the inten­si­ty or “heat” gen­er­at­ed is a func­tion of the loca­tion of a show, the size of the venue, and inverse­ly cor­re­lat­ed with the over­all pop­u­la­tion with­in 40km of the con­cert loca­tion. So for instance, a sin­gle are­na show in New York City will gen­er­ate less heat than a sin­gle are­na show in Oma­ha, NE.
    • there is a taper­ing effect applied so return­ing to a par­tic­u­lar area with­in a few months will reflect a cumu­la­tive heat effect (**Click here for inter­ac­tive map ver­sion).

Using the geographer’s method­ol­o­gy of read­ing expan­sion dif­fu­sion and hier­ar­chi­cal dif­fu­sion, cre­ator Bri­an Tim­o­ny draws some inter­est­ing con­clu­sions about the nature of “going viral” in a pre-inter­net age, and about the con­tin­u­ing impor­tance of place, despite its osten­si­ble era­sure by the Inter­net. Tim­o­ny writes, “the Jer­sey Shore pro­vid­ed a unique, acces­si­ble sym­bol­ic res­o­nance to audi­ences that res­onates as a Place.  (In stark con­trast to the way a mil­lion bands from Brook­lyn today fail to con­vince the rest of us of the intrin­sic awe­some­ness of…Brooklyn.)”

It’s worth noth­ing that almost none of those “Brook­lyn” bands actu­al­ly come from Brook­lyn and can claim it in the way Spring­steen claims the Jer­sey Shore. That kind of anchor has always seemed to give him license to explore musi­cal forms and metaphors from the South and Mid­west in authen­tic and per­son­al ways. A coun­terex­am­ple, of course, is Bob Dylan, who seems to come from nowhere at all, but the wan­der­ing mys­tic min­strel also fig­ures into Timony’s scheme. He con­cludes by not­ing that the abil­i­ty of Spring­steen, Dylan, and Leonard Cohen to still com­mand the stage and defy the cult of youth in pop cul­ture exem­pli­fies “the wise-man/shaman/en­ter­tain­er who is best equipped to chan­nel both what the audi­ence wants to hear and what it needs to hear.” Not a strict­ly “geo­graph­i­cal” point, but it’s a hard one to argue with all the same.

via Metafil­ter

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Spring­steen Sin­gin’ in the Rain in Italy, and How He Cre­ates Pow­er­ful Imag­i­nary Worlds

Bruce Springsteen’s Per­son­al Jour­ney Through Rock ‘n’ Roll (Slight­ly NSFW But Sim­ply Great)

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