George Harrison & The Concert for Bangladesh (1971)

in Music, Video - Arts & Culture | January 2nd, 2008

In August 1971, George Har­ri­son and Ravi Shankar staged two ben­e­fit con­certs at Madi­son Square Gar­den in NYC to raise mon­ey for refugees in Bangladesh. (More on the con­cert here.) Also appear­ing on stage were Bob Dylan, Eric Clap­ton and Ringo Starr. Below, we’ve post­ed some footage from the show, and also includ­ed it in our YouTube playlist (feel free to sub­scribe to it). You can also watch oth­er songs from the con­cert here and here.

Just as an fyi, a record­ing of the con­cert was released as an album in 1971 and then as a film in 1972. Pro­ceeds from both still go to UNICEF.

Favorite Books of 2007

in Books | December 28th, 2007

Quick fyi: The book crit­ics of The New York Times have select­ed their favorite books of 2007. These are the books that they men­tion to friends, or rec­om­mend that you take on vaca­tion. You’ll find here 30 good reads in all.

Now how about your favorite book of ’07? Share them with oth­er Open Cul­ture read­ers and list them in the com­ments below. (If we get enough of them, we’ll list them in a spe­cial blog post.)

Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

in Books | December 22nd, 2007

Here are a few facts to know about the adven­tur­ous Patrick Hunt. He’s a Stan­ford archae­ol­o­gist who has spent more than a decade try­ing to unrav­el the mys­tery of how Han­ni­bal, the great ancient mil­i­tary leader, crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with 25,000 men and 37 ele­phants. (Lis­ten on iTunes to the course he gave on this adven­ture, and get more info below). He has bro­ken more than 20 bones while doing field­work, fought off kid­nap­pers, and twice sur­vived sun­stroke-induced blind­ness. And now he has just pub­lished an excit­ing new book called Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry. It’s pub­lished by Penguin/Plume and starts ship­ping tomor­row. I asked Patrick what makes these dis­cov­er­ies — rang­ing from the Roset­ta Stone to the Dead Sea Scrolls to Machu Pic­chu — so impor­tant. Below he gives us a brief glimpse into what makes each dis­cov­ery his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and fas­ci­nat­ing. Read on, and check out his cap­ti­vat­ing new book for the fuller pic­ture.

Patrick Hunt: “First I should say that not every archae­ol­o­gist would agree that these are the ten most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies of all time. On the oth­er hand, the ten sto­ries retold in this book are often regard­ed as among the most excit­ing archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies of the mod­ern era (since 1750). And no one would deny that these ten vital dis­cov­er­ies have for­ev­er changed the world of archae­ol­o­gy, trans­form­ing how and what we know about ancient his­to­ry. Let me tell you a lit­tle about them.

1) Roset­ta Stone: This excit­ing dis­cov­ery in 1799 was the key to deci­pher­ing Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs and unlock­ing the his­to­ry of the ancient world texts. It pro­vides a win­dow into the real his­to­ry of Egypt rather than an imag­i­nary one; all oth­er deci­pher­ings of ancient lan­guages since the Roset­ta Stone’s ini­tial decod­ing in 1822 are based on its prece­dents. (See pho­to here.)

2) Troy: Its dis­cov­ery and exca­va­tion begin­ning in 1870 proved once and for all that Troy was not just a myth based on Homer; Troy was a his­tor­i­cal site where real peo­ple lived and fought. Its ear­li­est exca­va­tor, the oft-maligned and often-uneth­i­cal Hein­rich Schlie­mann has been most­ly cred­it­ed — right or wrong — as being the “Father of Archae­ol­o­gy” and his tech­niques became the foun­da­tion of archae­o­log­i­cal research, how­ev­er great­ly improved, after­ward.

3) Nin­eveh and the Roy­al Assyr­i­an Library: This riv­et­ing find begin­ning in 1849 by Austen Hen­ry Layard, a sleuth of antiq­ui­ty, even­tu­al­ly unearthed a whole lost library of cuneiform texts, includ­ing ones not only from ancient Assyr­ia but also from far old­er Sumer, Akkad, Baby­lon and oth­er great civ­i­liza­tions. This had a very sig­nif­i­cant impact on world lit­er­a­ture, intro­duc­ing such sem­i­nal works as the Epic of Gil­gamesh.

4) King Tut’s Tomb: The dra­mat­ic open­ing of this roy­al tomb in 1922 — sought for years by a deter­mined Howard Carter — was the first time in mil­len­nia a pharao­h’s tomb had actu­al­ly been found intact; its trea­sure gave the world a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to actu­al­ly account for stag­ger­ing Egypt­ian roy­al wealth. [Dan’s note: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has a nice web site on this archae­o­log­i­cal find.]

5) Machu Pic­chu: The remark­able high jun­gle moun­tain dis­cov­ery in 1911 of the remote Lost City of the Inca by Hiram Bing­ham made it pos­si­ble for the world to final­ly see an undis­turbed Inca roy­al city mys­te­ri­ous­ly aban­doned on a moun­tain­top but nei­ther con­quered nor changed by the colo­nial world. (See pho­to here.)

6) Pom­peii: Pre­served by the erup­tion of Vesu­vius in AD 79 and not dug out for almost two mil­len­nia, Pom­peii (prob­a­bly acci­den­tal­ly found by a farmer dig­ging a well) is the sin­gle most impor­tant Roman site in the world; its arti­facts offer the largest and fullest record of life in a Roman city. Pom­pei­i’s mis­for­tune is our great for­tune. It pre­serves a city with thou­sands of objects vir­tu­al­ly unchanged. (See images here.)

(more…)

15 Most Viewed Posts in 2007

in Most Popular | December 14th, 2007

We dug back through the his­tor­i­cal data and iso­lat­ed the 15 most viewed posts of the year. If you’re look­ing for a trend, one will leap out. Peo­ple like num­bered lists. Hence anoth­er one:

1) 10 Unex­pect­ed Uses of the iPod
2) 25 UC Berke­ley Cours­es Avail­able via Free Video
3) 45 Free Cut­ting-Edge Books … Cour­tesy of Cre­ative Com­mons
4) The War of the Worlds on Pod­cast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riv­et­ed A Nation
5) Our Ances­tral Mind in the Mod­ern World: An Inter­view with Satoshi Kanaza­wa
6) Free Beethoven and Mozart Record­ings via Pod­cast
7) Life-Chang­ing Books: Your Picks
8) 10 Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es on iTunes
9) Pod­cast Primer
10) MP3 Music Blogs: For Your Lis­ten­ing Plea­sure
11) Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry
12) The Hottest Course on iTunes (and the Future of Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion)
13) Ten Pod­casts to Build Your Vocab­u­lary
14) YouTube Gets Smart: The Launch of New Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nels
15) The Decline and Fall of the Roman (and Amer­i­can?) Empire: A Free Audio­book

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Betting Against Google’s Answer to Wikipedia

in Google | December 12th, 2007

As many now know, Google announced Fri­day that it’s test­ing a new con­tent ini­tia­tive — dubbed “knol” — that it hopes will rival Wikipedia. Real­iz­ing that Wikipedia entries rank first on 27% of all Google search result pages, the folks at Google­plex could­n’t resist launch­ing a com­pet­i­tive prod­uct. In announc­ing “knol,” the com­pa­ny high­light­ed two prob­lems that this new con­tent prod­uct will address:

1) “There are mil­lions of peo­ple who pos­sess use­ful knowl­edge that they would love to share,” but they don’t share that knowl­edge “because it is not easy enough to do that.”

2) “The key idea behind the knol project is to high­light authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cov­er, news arti­cles have bylines, sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles always have authors — but some­how the web evolved with­out a strong stan­dard to keep authors names high­light­ed. We believe that know­ing who wrote what will sig­nif­i­cant­ly help users make bet­ter use of web con­tent.”

How “knol” attempts to solve these prob­lems is fair­ly straight­for­ward. It will pro­vide experts with user-friend­ly tem­plates for writ­ing and pub­lish­ing ency­clo­pe­dia entries (or “knols”) on the web. And since a pic­ture is appar­ent­ly worth a thou­sand words, I rec­om­mend that you take a look at a sam­ple screen­shot here. Depart­ing from Wikipedia, Google’s project will cater to the indi­vid­ual author, not com­mu­ni­ties of authors. And it will encour­age many ency­clo­pe­dia entries on the same top­ic, as opposed to one uni­fied text. Google then assumes that the cream will rise to the top. If 20 peo­ple craft “knols” on “string the­o­ry,” then the best one — pre­sum­ably the one that gets the most links from qual­i­ty sites — will rise high­est in the search rank­ings.

Google’s con­cept is not alto­geth­er bad. But it’s also one of the more ordi­nary ideas to come out of Moun­tain View, and I’m guess­ing that the results will fall short of cor­po­rate expec­ta­tions. Here’s why:

Most fun­da­men­tal­ly, the infor­ma­tion gen­er­at­ed by these “knols” will be sub­stan­dard com­pared to what you’ll find on Wikipedia. Although the screen­shot pro­vid­ed by Google nice­ly fea­tured a Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar writ­ing on “Insom­nia,” the real­i­ty is that few experts of this stature will take the time to con­tribute. Take my word for it. I’ve spent the past five years try­ing to get schol­ars from elite uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, to bring their ideas to the out­side world, and it’s often not their first pri­or­i­ty. They just have too many oth­er things com­pet­ing for their time. More often than not, Google’s knols will be writ­ten by authors with less­er, if not dubi­ous, cre­den­tials. The mediocre entries will be many; the great ones, few. And this will leave Google’s con­tent in a weak­er posi­tion rel­a­tive to Wikipedia.

To be clear, Wikipedi­a’s over­all tal­ent pool may not be much bet­ter. But Wikipedi­a’s mod­el has an impor­tant built-in advan­tage. A com­mu­ni­ty of writ­ers focus­ing on the same text will cor­rect one anoth­er and improve the over­all prod­uct over time. The final text becomes greater than the sum of its authors. Mean­while, Google’s mod­el, which will pro­duce a pro­lif­er­a­tion of lack­lus­ter entries on the same sub­ject, does­n’t include any kind of strong self-cor­rect­ing mech­a­nism that will improve the entries. The com­pa­ny seems to think that user feed­back, name recog­ni­tion, and a share of ad rev­enue (which prob­a­bly won’t amount to much) will do the trick. But that seems like wish­ful think­ing, and I’m bas­ing that on sev­er­al years of work­ing at About.com, which inte­grat­ed many of the same ele­ments into its mod­el. Strike one against Google.

If you’re look­ing for Strikes 2 and 3, let me out­line them briefly.

Strike 2 comes down to false premis­es: When you step back and exam­ine Google’s rea­sons for cre­at­ing project “knol,” they don’t hold up to scruti­ny. These days, pub­lish­ing on the web is fair­ly dum­my proof. Free blog­ging soft­ware, Google Page Cre­ator, Yahoo’s Geoc­i­ties and Wikipedia — these tools have made it incred­i­bly easy to pub­lish to the web. (Some­how, writ­ers have fig­ured out how to post 2,125,453 arti­cles to Wikipedia.) The argu­ment that tech­nol­o­gy is hold­ing back would-be ency­clo­pe­dia writ­ers just does­n’t fly. Nor does the notion that we’d get bet­ter qual­i­ty ency­clo­pe­dia entries if only authors could attach their names to what they write. On the one hand, anonymi­ty has­n’t slowed down Wikipedia at all. On the oth­er, many legit­i­mate experts will see writ­ing “knols” as being a slight step above “van­i­ty” pub­lish­ing, but not much more. In short, not a good use of their time.

Strike 3 turns on momen­tum and the lack of game-chang­ing func­tion­al­i­ty: Not long after YouTube launched and proved the via­bil­i­ty of video shar­ing, Google cre­at­ed its own com­pet­i­tive unit, Google Video. By the next year, Google real­ized it would nev­er catch up and bought YouTube for $1.65 bil­lion. Wikipedia, in com­par­i­son, has had a much longer head start. For six years, it has been refin­ing its mod­el, grow­ing traf­fic, and gain­ing user loy­al­ty. That’s a sub­stan­tial and most like­ly insur­mount­able lead. True, once upon a time a young Google came out of nowhere and knocked an estab­lished Yahoo out of its lead­er­ship role. But that hap­pened when Google brought its game-chang­ing search tech­nol­o­gy to mar­ket. With “knol,” how­ev­er, there’s no such game-chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy on dis­play — noth­ing that sub­stan­tial­ly changes how knowl­edge gets cre­at­ed. Google and its engi­neers cer­tain­ly excel at man­ag­ing knowl­edge and pro­duce many great prod­ucts (for which I’m per­son­al­ly thank­ful). But get­ting into the knowl­edge cre­ation busi­ness may pose new chal­lenges, ones that will require the Google staff to go beyond algo­rithms and think­ing in terms of 0s and 1s.

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Even Ahmadinejad Blogs

in Uncategorized | December 11th, 2007

Here it is in Eng­lish. His Christ­mas wish is charm­ing.

Rumor is that Mah­moud is busy set­ting up a Face­book page. Stay tuned for it, and be sure to give him a nice lit­tle poke.

Full Sto­ry here.

Al Gore’s Nobel Presentation

in Current Affairs | December 10th, 2007

Al Gore accept­ed his Nobel Prize ear­li­er today in Oslo and deliv­ered an accom­pa­ny­ing speech that issued a stark warn­ing (read text here, watch video here):

[W]ithout real­iz­ing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth­’s cli­mate are locked in a rela­tion­ship famil­iar to war plan­ners: “Mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion.”

More than two decades ago,scientists cal­cu­lat­ed that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giv­ing sun­light from our atmos­phere, caus­ing a “nuclear win­ter.” Their elo­quent warn­ings here in Oslo helped gal­va­nize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now sci­ence is warn­ing us that if we do not quick­ly reduce the glob­al warm­ing pol­lu­tion that is trap­ping so much of the heat our plan­et nor­mal­ly radi­ates back out of the atmos­phere, we are in dan­ger of cre­at­ing a per­ma­nent “car­bon sum­mer.”

As the Amer­i­can poet Robert Frost wrote, ” Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either, he notes, “would suf­fice.”

But nei­ther need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the plan­et.

Raising Sand

in Music | December 10th, 2007

I just picked up a copy of the new Robert Plant & Ali­son Krauss album (CD — MP3), and I’m frankly hooked. As Ama­zon put it, only “King Kong and Bam­bi could be a more bizarre pair­ing,” but the results are bril­liant. More on the new col­lab­o­ra­tion below.

Coppola is Back

in Film | December 9th, 2007

Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, the direc­tor who brought us The God­fa­ther and Apoc­a­lypse Now, has released his first film in a decade. Based on a novel­la by Mircea Eli­ade, a Roman­ian thinker prin­ci­pal­ly known for his work on the his­to­ry of reli­gion, “Youth With­out Youth” fea­tures Tim Roth play­ing the role of Dominic Matei, an elder­ly lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor, who gets struck by light­ning and finds his youth strange­ly restored. To pub­li­cize the film, Cop­po­la has been doing a fair amount of press in New York. (The film is pre­mier­ing there.) Here, you can lis­ten to the inter­view he gave on WNY­C’s Leonard Lopate Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). We’ve also post­ed below a video out­take from the inter­view. Final­ly, this Q&A ses­sion in The New York Post may also be of inter­est.

Relat­ed Posts:

• The God­fa­ther With­out Bran­do?: It Almost Hap­pened
• Land­mark Moments in Film: Apoc­a­lypse Now

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The 53 Places to Go in 2008

in Uncategorized | December 9th, 2007

Cour­tesy of The New York Times.

Know of any pod­casts or videos that we should fea­ture on Open Cul­ture? Email us your tips.

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