Google Tech Talks
March 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

Nuclear explosives are a mature technology with well-characterized effects. Proposed utilizations include a near asteroid burst to ablate surface material and nudge the body to a safer orbit, or a direct sub-surface burst to fragment the body. For this latter method, previous estimates suggest that for times as short as 1000 days, over 99.999% of the material is diverted, and no longer impacts the Earth, a huge mitigation factor. To better understand these possibilities, we have used a multidimensional radiation/hydrodynamics code to simulate sub-surface and above surface bursts on an inhomogeneous, 1 km diameter body with an average density of 2 g/cc….

Google Tech Talks
May 24, 2006

ABSTRACT

If you happen to be lucky (or unlucky) enough to live in Washington, D.C., and are appropriately credentialed or won the right lottery, you can choose from a couple of dozen places to go watch the workings of government in action. Congressional hearings and the White House briefing rooms are the best known of these official hotspots, but most agencies have their own hearing rooms for official actions, press conferences, and other public proceedings.

Sometimes these official proceedings make themselves visible to the rest of us, usually through low-resolution streaming video using a proprietary format. A few hearings get archived, though the archives are…

Google Tech Talks
April 9, 2007

ABSTRACT

While investigating the genetic workings of the microscopic worm, C. elegans, Mello and colleague Andrew Fire, PhD, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, discovered RNAi, a natural but previously unrecognized process by which a certain form of RNA can be manipulated to silence—or interfere with—the expression of a selected gene. The discovery, published in the journal Nature in 1998, has had two extraordinary impacts on biological science. One is as a research tool: RNAi is now the state-of-the-art method by which scientists can knock out the expression of specific genes in cells, to thus define the biological functions of those genes. But just as…

Google Tech Talks
January 25, 2007

ABSTRACT

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems”) are only performed at the end of the project — too late to help. In organizations where teams develop using iterative, incremental methods, Agile retrospectives at the end of each iteration or increment stimulate continuous improvement throughout the project. Exceptional software process and project improvement grows out of solid data and good planning.

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, authors of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, will introduce you to a framework for effective…

Google Tech Talks
January 18, 2007

ABSTRACT

We’ll cover:
-approapriate attire for wilderness activities (“cotton kills”)
-how not to get lost 🙂

Once lost:
-signaling for assistance (both day and night)
-building land markers to indicate direction
-choosing a location for shelter
-building shelters
-finding and purifying water
-basic medical kit and its use
-basic land navigation (and direction determination) without a compass
-also, well cover “child SAR”, so parents are encouraged to attend Credits: Speaker:Robert Nielsen

Google Tech Talks
March 27, 2007

ABSTRACT

The relation between Google and the free software movement is one of the most important diplomatic relationships in the 21st century. But it is largely invisible, even to the principals. In this talk I will try and make some of what we have taken for granted less implicit, so we can progress with mutual confidence and collective security.

Speaker: Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Center

Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School, and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. In addition to FSF, Professor Moglen has represented many of the world’s leading free software…

Google Tech Talks
March 14, 2007

ABSTRACT

Murray Gell-Mann is one of the largest living legends in physics. He’s also been described as The Man With Five Brains, and it’s no puzzle why: He was admitted to Yale at 15, got his PhD from MIT at 21, and is an international advisor on the environment. He speaks 13 languages fluently (at last count), and has expertise in such far-ranging fields as natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, bird-watching, depth psychology, and the theory of complex adaptive systems.

Oh yeah… he also coined the term “quark,” after developing key aspects of the modern theory of quantum physics… for which he earned an unshared Nobel prize in physics in…

Google Tech Talks
April 6, 2007

ABSTRACT

The set of routers, end hosts, and links located in a metropolitan area form a city-net. City-nets are large, comprising thousands of routers, end hosts, and links, hundreds of autonomous systems, and several ISPs. They represent a diverse set of end users—home customers, businesses, government, educational institutions, etc. We study the topological structure of city-nets in order to understand how the Internet has evolved in centers of human activity (namely, cities) and to understand the structural robustness/vulnerability of the Internet, a critical infrastructure.

This talk will describe our methodology for constructing and analyzing realistic…

Google Tech Talks
March 15, 2007

ABSTRACT

If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Ricard will examine the inner and outer factors that increase or diminish our sense of well-being, dissect the underlying mechanisms of happiness, and lead us to a way of looking at the mind itself based on his book, Happiness: A Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill and from the research in neuroscience on the effect of mind-training on the brain.

Speaker Bio: Matthieu Ricard, a gifted scientist turned Buddhist monk, is a best selling author, translator, and photographer. He has lived and studied in the Himalayas for the last 35 years…