Introducing the New Google eBookstore (with Free Classics)

in Books, e-books, Google | December 6th, 2010

This morn­ing, Google offi­cial­ly opened up the new Google eBook­store, which gives con­sumers access to three mil­lion ebooks, includ­ing many free clas­sics. Tak­ing a page out of Ama­zon’s play­book, Google now lets you pur­chase books at com­pet­i­tive ebook prices and read them across mul­ti­ple plat­forms – mean­ing you can start read­ing a nov­el on your com­put­er’s web brows­er, then seam­less­ly switch to the iPad, Kin­dle, or smart­phone. And the con­tent will stay in sync, all in the cloud. (Get instruc­tions and apps here.) Anoth­er plus: you’re not forced to buy books from just Google. The new book­store is open to inde­pen­dent book­sellers and retail part­ners, which gives these small­er play­ers a chance to play (and per­haps even thrive) in the ebook mar­ket. You can get more infor­ma­tion on the new book­store on the Google Books blog, and don’t miss our Free eBooks col­lec­tion, which comes packed with many clas­sics.

Note: the Google eBook­store is cur­rent­ly lim­it­ed to the US mar­ket.

Jazz Legend Dave Brubeck Celebrates His 90th Today

in Music | December 5th, 2010

Last year, Dave Brubeck­’s jazz stan­dard, Take Five, turned 50 years old. (Watch his 1961 per­for­mance above.) And, today, the artist cel­e­brates his 90th birth­day. Through­out his 80s, Brubeck con­tin­ued to per­form across the US  (we have him play­ing Take Five at the Mon­tre­al Jazz Fes­ti­val just last year) and onward he plans to go — although his tour­ing was recent­ly halt­ed by pace­mak­er surgery. To com­mem­o­rate his birth­day, Turn­er Clas­sic Movies will pre­miere tonight In His Own Sweet Way, a doc­u­men­tary revis­it­ing Brubeck­’s life and music. And NPR’s Fresh Air has re-aired a 1999 inter­view where (in addi­tion to his music) Brubeck talks about his ear­ly days on a Cal­i­for­nia cat­tle ranch, and his first love: rodeo rop­ing. The con­ver­sa­tion runs 34 min­utes. You can lis­ten right here.

200 Countries & 200 Years in 4 Minutes, Presented by Hans Rosling

in History, Math | December 3rd, 2010

Hans Rosling, a pro­fes­sor of glob­al health at Swe­den’s Karolin­s­ka Insti­tute, focus­es on ‘dis­pelling com­mon myths about the so-called devel­op­ing world’ (as his TED bio well notes). And he has estab­lished a rep­u­ta­tion for pre­sent­ing data in extreme­ly imag­i­na­tive ways. Just watch the video above, an out­take from the BBC show “The Joy of Stats”). In four min­utes, Rosling visu­al­ly traces the health of 200 coun­tries over 200 years, using 120,000 data points, and we end up with a lit­tle rea­son for opti­mism. Great stuff… Thanks to @Sheerly for flag­ging this.

3D Rome Was Built in a Day

in Uncategorized | December 2nd, 2010

Com­put­er sci­en­tists at UNC-Chapel Hill and col­leagues at the Swiss uni­ver­si­ty, ETH-Zurich, have cre­at­ed an algo­rithm that search­es through mil­lions of pho­tos on Flickr, then uses them to build a 3D mod­el of land­marks and geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions. Case in point, the video above. Accord­ing to The Dai­ly Tar Heel, “researchers demon­strat­ed the tech­nique by using 3 mil­lion images of Rome to recon­struct the city’s pri­ma­ry land­marks. A sin­gle PC processed the images in less than 24 hours. Land­marks in Berlin were recon­struct­ed in the same man­ner.” Not bad for a day’s work…

via Read­WriteWeb

Who is Julian Assange? Three Profiles of the WikiLeaks Founder

in Current Affairs | December 2nd, 2010

Try­ing to make heads or tails of Wik­iLeaks, which just released 250,000 US diplo­mat­ic cables this week? Then you may want to spend some time with one arti­cle and one video. First, The New York­er pub­lished this sum­mer an exten­sive pro­file of Julian Assange, the dri­ving force behind Wik­iLeaks. A key pas­sage explain­ing Assange’s world view appears below, and you can get the full pro­file right here. Next up, we have Chris Ander­son, the head of TED, in con­ver­sa­tion Assange. The inter­view, run­ning 20 min­utes, tells you essen­tial­ly “Why the World Needs Wik­iLeaks.” And then why not add to the list Forbes’ lengthy inter­view with Assange, pub­lished ear­li­er this week. (Thanks Avi for that.)

He had come to under­stand the defin­ing human strug­gle not as left ver­sus right, or faith ver­sus rea­son, but as indi­vid­ual ver­sus insti­tu­tion. As a stu­dent of Kaf­ka, Koestler, and Solzhen­it­syn, he believed that truth, cre­ativ­i­ty, love, and com­pas­sion are cor­rupt­ed by insti­tu­tion­al hier­ar­chies, and by “patron­age networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that con­tort the human spir­it. He sketched out a man­i­festo of sorts, titled “Con­spir­a­cy as Gov­er­nance,” which sought to apply graph the­o­ry to pol­i­tics. Assange wrote that ille­git­i­mate gov­er­nance was by def­i­n­i­tion conspiratorial—the prod­uct of func­tionar­ies in “col­lab­o­ra­tive secre­cy, work­ing to the detri­ment of a pop­u­la­tion.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion are dis­rupt­ed, the infor­ma­tion flow among con­spir­a­tors must dwin­dle, and that, as the flow approach­es zero, the con­spir­a­cy dis­solves. Leaks were an instru­ment of infor­ma­tion war­fare.

Dear Monsieur Picasso: A Free eBook

in Art, e-books, Life | December 1st, 2010

In the sum­mer of 1955, Fred­er­ick Bald­win, a col­lege stu­dent at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, set out on a pil­grim­age of sorts, hop­ing to meet Pablo Picas­so. Bald­win trav­eled first to Le Havre (pre­sum­ably by boat), then head­ed south, down to Val­lau­ris and Cannes, until he even­tu­al­ly reached Picas­so’s home on the Riv­iera, known as Vil­la la Cal­i­fornie. It took a lit­tle crafti­ness and mox­ie, but the young Amer­i­can gained entrance into Picas­so’s stu­dio. And there he was, the great painter him­self, wear­ing shorts, san­dals and not much else.

More than five decades lat­er, Bald­win has pro­duced an ele­gant e‑book (avail­able for free right here) that uses pho­tographs and text to pre­serve the mem­o­ry of this defin­ing moment. After meet­ing Picas­so, Bald­win became a pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­ph­er, work­ing for Audubon, LIFE, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine, and The New York Times, among oth­er mag­a­zines. And, lat­er, he looked to “repli­cate the Picas­so expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sion­al­ly,” always con­trol­ling his own agen­da, nev­er tak­ing a job where he was­n’t mak­ing his own deci­sions. You can down­load the 22 page e‑book, Dear Mon­sieur Picas­so, right here. Find more great texts in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

The World in a Satirical Nutshell

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Economics | November 30th, 2010

Greece and Ire­land are down. Por­tu­gal is tee­ter­ing. And Spain may soon be the biggest domi­no to fall. All of this makes this satir­i­cal clip a lit­tle time­ly – per­haps a bit too painful­ly time­ly. Fea­tured here are two Aus­tralian satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe…

A Darwinian Theory of Beauty, or TED Does Its Best RSA

in TED Talks | November 29th, 2010

You have undoubt­ed­ly seen one, if not many, of RSA’s catchy videos dur­ing the past year. They fea­ture the words of thought lead­ers accom­pa­nied by the fast-mov­ing ani­ma­tion of Andrew Park. Along the way, we have fea­tured RSA talks by Daniel Pink, Sir Ken Robin­son, and Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich, among oth­ers.

The RSA videos have always struck me as a good alter­na­tive, or per­haps com­ple­ment, to the more well-known TED videos. TED devel­oped its style of pre­sen­ta­tion – speak­ers pre­sent­ing on a live stage in a crisp 18 min­utes (or less). Then RSA rolled out its dis­tinc­tive ani­mat­ed videos. And now this: TED has Andrew Park ani­mate Denis Dut­ton’s talk – A Dar­win­ian The­o­ry of Beau­ty – in RSA style. Intrigu­ing talk. But a strange move on TED’s part. Hope­ful­ly, it’s just a one-off, and not a jump-the-shark moment…

Developing Apps for iPhone & iPad: A Free Stanford Course

in Apple, iPad, iPhone, Stanford | November 26th, 2010

Look­ing to design apps for the iPhone or iPad? Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty now has a course online that will help you do just that.

Sim­ply called Devel­op­ing Apps for iOS, the course fea­tures 20 video lec­tures (the last install­ment was uploaded just this week) and, some­what fit­ting­ly, they’re all avail­able on Apple’s iTune­sU.

Paul Hegar­ty teach­es the course, and he assumes that you have expe­ri­ence pro­gram­ming in C, and some famil­iar­i­ty with UNIX, object-ori­ent­ed pro­gram­ming and graph­i­cal toolk­its.

You can find Devel­op­ing Apps for iOS in the Com­put­er Sci­ence sec­tion of our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es, along with two pre­vi­ous Stan­ford app devel­op­ment cours­es, both called iPhone Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­ment.

Donald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Taxes (1943)

in Film, History | November 25th, 2010

Dur­ing World War II, some of the great­est liv­ing film­mak­ers put aside their com­mer­cial aspi­ra­tions and direct­ed pro­pa­gan­da films for the Allies. Frank Capra, Alfred Hitch­cock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Hus­ton – they all made a cin­e­mat­ic con­tri­bu­tion to the war effort. (More on that here.) And so did Walt Dis­ney, big time. 90% of Dis­ney employ­ees pro­duced pro­pa­gan­da films for the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment, cre­at­ing 68 hours of con­tin­u­ous film, includ­ing this short film for the Trea­sury Depart­ment. The Spir­it of ’43 puts Don­ald Duck in the always unen­vi­able posi­tion of ask­ing Amer­i­cans to pay high tax­es to fund their wars. (Imag­ine doing that today!) Some 26 mil­lion Amer­i­cans viewed the short film, and appar­ent­ly 37% of those inter­viewed in a Gallup poll lat­er admit­ted that the film affect­ed their will­ing­ness to pay Uncle Sam. You can find this Dis­ney film and oth­er wartime pro­pa­gan­da films (among oth­er good­ies) in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Don­ald Duck Dis­cov­ers Glenn Beck: A Remix

Mick­ey Mouse Dis­cov­ers Con­spir­a­cy Against Glenn Beck