Google TechTalks
August 8, 2006

B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970. He is currently seeking ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices and Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies ( http://sbinstitute.com ).

ABSTRACT
Galileo took a seminal role in launching the first revolution in the physical sciences, and a key element in this revolution was the rigorous, sophisticated observation of physical phenomena. Darwin likewise launched a revolution in the life sciences on the basis of decades of meticulous observation of biological phenomena. Although…

Google TechTalks
March 7, 2006

Will Noel
Roger L. Easton, Jr.
Michael B. Toth

ABSTRACT
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 10th Century medieval manuscript that is the subject of an ongoing technical, scientific and conservation effort at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 1999, the multidisciplinary team has been disbinding, conserving, imaging, analyzing, transcribing and studying the 174 parchment folios — yielding approximately 400Gb of data to date. The Palimpsest, which the team affectionately calls “Archie,” includes at least seven treatises by Archimedes: The only copies of two of his Treatises, /The Method/ and /Stomachion/; the only copy in Greek of /On Floating…

Google TechTalks
April 28, 2006

Stewart Smith
Stewart Smith works for MySQL AB as a software engineer working on MySQL Cluster. He is an active member of the free and open source software community, especially in Australia.

ABSTRACT
Part 1 – Introduction to MySQL Cluster The NDB storage engine (MySQL Cluster) is a high-availability storage engine for MySQL. It provides synchronous replication between storage nodes and many mysql servers having a consistent view of the database. In 4.1 and 5.0 it’s a main memory database, but in 5.1 non-indexed attributes can be stored on disk. NDB also provides a lot of determinism in system resource usage. I’ll talk a bit about that.

Part 2 – New features…

Google TechTalks
February 28, 2006

John Maceri

Abstract:
Every night there 84,00 people sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles. From this large number about 2,000 live here in our Santa Monica community. OPCC (formerly Ocean Park Community) is a network of shelters and services that provide assistance to men, women and children who are part of one of the largest homeless populations in Los Angeles County. This assistance comes in the form of housing, mental and medical health programs, food, counseling, peer support, and in-depth preparation for independent living. OPCC will be here on Tuesday, February 28th from 1-2 to give a general overview of the organization, which would also describe…

Google TechTalks
February 9, 2006

Danny O’Brien and Jason Schultz

Danny O’Brien
Danny O’Brien is the Activism Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help EFF’s membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public. Jason Schultz
Jason Schultz is a Staff Attorney specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. He currently leads EFF’s Patent Busting Project. Prior to joining EFF, Schultz worked at the law firm of Fish & Richardson P.C., where he spent most of his time invalidating software patents and defending open source developers in law suits. Jason maintains a personal blog at…

Google TechTalks
April 28, 2006

Brion Vibber
Brion Vibber has worked on MediaWiki and Wikipedia’s servers for four years, watching over its frightening growth from thousands to millions of pages, from dozens to thousands of hits per second.

ABSTRACT
Over four years, MediaWiki has evolved from a quick hack to run a little-known encyclopedia web site to the monster engine behind a heavily-used public site, while maintaining the simplicity needed for an entry-level intranet wiki. Brion reviews past and future directions for Wikipedia’s software and hardware, and how modern buzzword technologies could power and simplify the wiki world.

Google TechTalks
June 28,2006

Karen Appleton
Andrew Martinez-Fonts

ABSTRACT
Prosper is America’s first people-to-people lending marketplace, and was created to make consumer lending more financially and socially rewarding for everyone.

The way Prosper works is intuitive to people who have used eBay.

Instead of listing and bidding on items, people list and bid on loans using Prosper’s online auction platform.

People who want to lend set the minimum interest rate they are willing to earn and bid in increments of $50 to $25,000 on loan listings they select.

People who lend can easily diversify using “standing orders”, which automatically make many small loans to different borrowers….

Google TechTalks
May 31, 2006

Bill Jepson

ABSTRACT
The UCLA Urban Simulation Laboratory through many years of research has created a unique system and methodology for constructing real-time visual simulation models of large-scale urban environments. This system is both powerful, flexible and capable. The Urban Simulation Laboratory has utilized this system and methodologies to create models of various areas within the City of Los Angeles that are at the leading edge in their scope, veracity and quality. These models are completely malleable and are updated regularly with new and proposed projects.

Google TechTalks
February 9, 2006

Rick Mugridge

Rick Mugridge is the lead author of the first book on storytests: “Fit for Developing Software”. He has developed and is evolving FitLibrary to better support storytest driven development. He is a leading thinker and inventor in this area, and consults and coaches internationally in storytesting, executable specifications, and agile software development.

ABSTRACT
We raise four software development issues and show how Fit can be used to address them. The issues are as follows: (1) How can we improve test coverage on a legacy system without discouraging its evolution? (2) Now that we have a successful product with a great UI, how do we provide…