Saturday, February 28, 2009

Party of Rush

The Plum Line (Greg Sargent)

Top Democratic operatives are planning a stepped up campaign to promote Rush Limbaugh as the public face of the GOP — an effort that will include recruiting Dem governors to make this case on talk shows, getting elected officials to pen Op eds arguing it, and running more ads pushing it, a senior Democratic operative says.

Key leadership staff in the House and Senate, and in all the political committees, have been encouraged by senior Dem operatives to push this message wherever possible, the operative says.

“I’m encouraging everybody to go out and say this,” Paul Begala, the well-known Dem strategist, just told me by phone. “I’m hot for this. Let’s get this out every way we can.”

Begala is emerging as a major cheerleader and public face for this effort, though he says he’s not formally directing it. He described the effort as “organic” right now, though senior Democrats are discussing ways to formalize it.

Another sign that Dems will be amping up efforts to stamp Rush’s face on the GOP is the fact that Brad Woodhouse, a major proponent of this strategy, will soon take over as communications director at the Democratic National Committee. Woodhouse’s current group, Americans United for Change, just launched a new ad pressing the Rush-owns-the-GOP message.

“I’m encouraging every Democrat, every progressive, to be pointing out this powerful but painful truth: The party of Lincoln is now the Party of Limbaugh,” Begala continued. “We should make every Republican answer this: Why do they want our president to fail?”

Begala’s partner on CNN, James Carville, who first articulated the Rush message in early February, is also pushing Dems to blare this message, he confirms. “He is the embodiment of the Republican party, circa 2009,” Carville said.




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2009.03.03 TPM
"If GOPers are put on the spot and agree with Rush, they're taking an unpopular position about the direction of the country. If they disagree, they're immediately forced to grovel and look weak doing it. [I]t's sort of like the bitch-slap theory combined with jujitsu, because the Dems are actually getting Rush to administer the slaps. I'm about [40], and I'm not sure I've ever seen the Dems have the confidence to make Republicans look weak like this."

Monday, February 16, 2009

Official Google Blog: From the height of this place

Official Google Blog: From the height of this place

2/16/2009 07:52:00 PM
I originally wrote this email for internal consumption; Presidents' Day here in the US and President Obama's recent inaugural address got me thinking about the future of the Internet, Google, and the challenges that lie ahead. The note borrows from a host of US presidential inaugural addresses to illustrate some of its points (thanks to former President Clinton for the title). Quite a few Googlers suggested I share it externally, so here it is, with just a few minor edits. - Jonathan Rosenberg

Dear Googlers -

Today is Presidents' Day here in the United States, when we honor the birthdays of two of our country's greatest leaders, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. A few weeks ago many of us were lucky to witness, either in person or via TV or the web, a masterful inauguration speech by the newest President, Barack Obama. The speech was rife with poignant points and subtle historical allusions: "We the people" came directly from the US Constitution, while "all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness" echoes both the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. (Many of these nuances were only revealed to me upon reading the transcript.)

As expected, President Obama aptly captured the wary mood of the nation. After all, we are in the midst of what is likely the worst economic situation of our lifetimes. In the US alone, 2.6M people lost their jobs in 2008, followed by nearly 600,000 more last month, and on the Monday following the inauguration companies around the world, including Caterpillar, Pfizer, ING, and Phillips announced job cuts totaling over 75,000. Add to that our dependence on fossil fuels, the resulting (and accelerating) climate change, and national security concerns, and you can feel the gravity of this pivotal moment. Eric Schmidt has called these times 'uncharted waters': none of us has been here before.

President Obama asserted that we will face the moment with what he called new instruments and old values, values that have been "the quiet force of progress throughout history" and which must, once again, define our character. While this reference to the national character of the US was no doubt inspiring for Americans, the mention of "new instruments" was far more relevant to Google. In a way, I felt like he was talking about the Internet, which is the most powerful and comprehensive information system ever invented.

Consider its predecessors. The famed Library at Alexandria (that's Egypt, not Virginia - some of you have GOT to get out more ;) ) was built circa 323 BC for an educated public, which actually meant very few people since the skills of literacy were deliberately withheld from the majority of the population. For several centuries monks were the keepers of the written word, painstakingly transcribing and indexing books as a means of interpreting the word of God. They were prized as much for their ability to write small, which saved on expensive paper, as for their piety.

The first universities came about in the 4th century AD, the first formal encyclopedias didn't appear until the 16th century, the first truly public libraries appeared in the 19th century and proliferated in the 20th. Then suddenly comes the Internet, where, from the most remote villages on the planet, you can reach as much information as is held in thousands of libraries. Access to information has completed its journey from privileged to ubiquitous. At Google we are all so immersed in daily introspective exercises like product reviews, our GPS [Google Product Strategy] meetings, and budget exercises that it's easy to forget this.

We shouldn't. In fact, since the challenges the world faces are, to a large degree, information problems, I believe the Internet is one of the "new instruments" that the President and the world can count on. And how do a great many people use the Internet? What is the first place many of them go when they conduct research, seek answers, do their work and communicate with their friends and family? Google. Ours is much more than a passing role in this next phase of history, rather we have the responsibility and duty to make the Internet as great as it can possibly be. Fortunately, that is pretty much what we all set out to do every day anyway, but now there's just a little extra pressure. Not your average 9-to-5 job.

At Google we are all technology optimists. We intrinsically believe that the wave upon which we surf, the secular shift of information, communications, and commerce to the Internet, is still in its early stages, and that its result will be a preponderance of good.

As we look toward the pivotal year ahead, here are a few observations on the future of the Internet for all of us to assess, consider, and carry as we do our work. (I have occasionally borrowed the inaugural words of previous presidents, sometimes cited, as with Bill Clinton's phrase which I appropriated for my title, and sometimes not.) To paraphrase President Obama, these things will not happen easily or in a short span of time, but know this my colleagues: they will happen.

All the world's information will be accessible from the palm of every person
Today, over 1.4 billion people, nearly a quarter of the world's population, use the Internet, with more than 200 million new people coming online every year. This is the fastest growing communications medium in history. How fast? When the Internet was first made available to the public, in 1983, there were 400 servers. Twenty five years later: well over 600 million.

In many parts of the world people access the Internet via their mobile phones, and the numbers there are even more impressive. More than three billion people have mobile phones, with 1.2 billion new phones expected to be sold this year. More Internet-enabled phones will be sold and activated in 2009 than personal computers. China is a prime example of where these trends are coming together. It has more Internet users than any other country, at nearly 300 million, and more than 600 million mobile users — 600 million! Twenty-five years ago, Apple launched the Mac as "the computer for the rest of us." Today, the computer for the rest of us is a phone.

This means that every fellow citizen of the world will have in his or her pocket the ability to access the world's information. As this happens, search will remain the killer application. For most people, it is the reason they access the Internet: to find answers and solve real problems.

Our ongoing challenge is to create the perfect search engine, and it's a really hard problem. To do a perfect job, you need to understand all the world's information, and the meaning of every query. With all that understanding, you then have to produce the perfect answer instantly. Today, many queries remain very difficult to answer properly. Too often, we force users to correct our mistakes, making them refine their searches, trying new queries until they get what they need. Meanwhile, our understanding of the interplay between high-quality content, search algorithms, and personal information is just beginning.

Why should a user have to ask us a question to get the information she needs? With her permission, why don't we surf the web on her behalf, and present interesting and relevant information to her as we come across it? This is a very hard thing to do well, as anyone who has been presented with a where-the-heck-did-that-come-from recommendation on Amazon or Netflix can attest to, but its potential is huge.

While we're working on improving the quality of search, the web is exploding. Our infrastructure has to keep up with this growth just to maintain our current level of quality, but to actually make search smarter, our index and infrastructure need to grow at a pace FASTER than the web. Only then will we be able to reject the idea that we have to choose between latency, comprehensiveness, and relevancy; we will have the ability to preserve all our ideals.

Solving search is a long-term quest for perfection, but the transition of information from scarce and expensive to ubiquitous and free will conclude far sooner. We will then bear witness to a true democratization of information, a time when almost everyone who wants to be online will be online, able to access virtually every bit of the world's information. This is great for our business, even greater for all the users. In fact, it's difficult to overestimate how important that moment will be. As Harry Truman said, "Democracy of information alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action." (OK, I added the "of information" part!)

Everyone can publish, and everyone will
One thing that we have learned in our industry is that people have a lot to say. They are using the Internet to publish things at an astonishing pace. 120K blogs are created daily — most of them with an audience of one. Over half of them are created by people under the age of nineteen. In the US, nearly 40 percent of Internet users upload videos, and globally over fifteen hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The web is very social too: about one of every six minutes that people spend online is spent in a social network of some type.

Publishing used to be constrained by physical limitations. You had to have a printing press and a distribution network, or a transmitter, to publish to any sort of critical mass, so broadcasting was the norm. No more. Today, most publishing is done by users for users, one-to-one or one-to-many (think of Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube). Free speech is no longer just a right granted by law, but one imbued by technology.

The era of information being more powerful when hoarded has also passed. As our economist Hal Varian has noted, in the early days of the Web every document had at the bottom, "Copyright 1997. Do not redistribute." Now those same documents have at the bottom, "Copyright 2009. Click here to send to your friends." Sharing, not guarding information, has become the golden standard on the web, so not only can anyone publish, but virtually everyone does. This is both good and bad news. No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless. The clamor of junk threatens to drown out voices of quality.

Meanwhile, those voices are struggling. The most obvious example is newspapers, which have historically been the backbone of quality original reporting, a post they have mostly maintained throughout the Internet explosion. But news isn't what it used to be: by the time a paper arrives in the morning it's already stale. As written communication has evolved from long letter to short text message, news has largely shifted from thoughtful to spontaneous. The old-fashioned static news article is now just a starting point, inciting back-and-forth debate that often results in a more balanced and detailed assessment. And the old-fashioned business model of bundled news, where the classifieds basically subsidized a lot of the high-quality reporting on the front page, has been thoroughly disrupted.

This is a problem, but since online journalism is still in its relative infancy it's one that can be solved (we're technology optimists, remember?). The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn't understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page. Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission). Browsing a newspaper is rewarding and serendipitous, and doing it online should be even better. This will not by itself solve the newspapers' business problems, but our heritage suggests that creating a superior user experience is the best place to start.

Of course, the greatest user experience is pretty useless if there's nothing good to read, a truism that applies not just to newspapers but to the web in general. Just like a newspaper needs great reporters, the web needs experts. When it comes to information, not all of it is created equal and the web's future depends on attracting the best of it. There are millions of people in the world who are truly experts in their fields — scientists, scholars, artists, engineers, architects — but a great majority of them are too busy being experts in their fields to become experts in ours. They have a lot to say but no time to say it.

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet's continued growth, because without them we will all sink in a cesspool of drivel. We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way. We need to make it easier for a user who sees one piece by an expert he likes to search through that expert's entire body of work. Then our users will be able to benefit from the best of both worlds: thoughtful and spontaneous, long form and short, of the ages and in the moment.

We won't (and shouldn't) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena. As Harry Truman said in 1949, "We are aided by all who want relief from the lies of propaganda — who desire truth and sincerity."

When data is abundant, intelligence will win
Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it at the start of his first term, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

The Internet allows for deeper and more informed participation and representation than has ever been possible. We see this happening frequently, particularly with our Geo products. The Surui tribe in the Amazon rain forest uses Google Earth to mark the boundaries of their land and work with authorities to stop illegal logging. Sokwanele, a civic action group in Zimbabwe, used the Google Maps API on their website to document reported cases of political violence and intimidation after the controversial Presidential election in March 2008. Armed with this map, the group can better convey and defend their argument that elections in Zimbabwe are neither free nor fair. The stakes couldn't be higher for these people. We can give them a fighting chance.

Everyone should be able to defend arguments with data. To let them do so, we need tools like the Sitemaps protocol, which opens up large volumes of data previously trapped behind government firewalls. Most government websites can't be crawled, but with Sitemaps, thousands of pages have been unlocked. In the US, several states have opened up their public records through Sitemaps, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science & Technology Information made 2.3 million research findings available in just twelve hours.

Information transparency helps people decide who is right and who is wrong and to determine who is telling the truth. When then-Senator Clinton incorrectly stated during the 2008 Presidential campaign that she had come under sniper fire during her 1996 trip to Bosnia, the Internet set her straight. This is why President Obama's promise to "do our business in the light of day" is important, because transparency empowers the populace and demands accountability as its immediate offspring.

But as powerful as it can be in politics, data has the potential to be even more transformational in business. Oil fueled the Industrial Revolution, but data will fuel the next generation of growth. One of the largely unheralded by-products of the Internet era is how it has made the power of the most sophisticated analytical tools available to the smallest of businesses. Traditionally, business software packages have treated data reporting as a second class citizen. Here is my cool new feature, they say. Oh, you want to know how many people use it? You want the flexibility to organize and assess this data in ways that work best for you? Well, let us tell you about the analytics module! It's only tens of thousands of dollars more (not counting the 18% annual maintenance fee in perpetuity ... sucker!!)

Fortunately that's not Google, nor can it ever be. All of our products should reflect our bias toward giving our customers, users, and partners as much data as possible - and letting them do with it what they wish. Then they can run their business like we do, by making decisions based on facts, not opinions. Here at Google the words of every colleague, from associates to vice presidents, carry the same weight so long as they are backed by data. (If you don't think we live up to this standard then please feel free to correct me ... but you better have the facts to prove it!!!)

Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson stated, "... and yet, it will be no cool process of mere science ... with which we face this new age of right and opportunity." Perhaps, but from our perspective the cool process of mere science, fueled by ubiquitous data and intelligence, will be quite sufficient to power new generations to success.

The vast majority of computing will occur in the cloud
Within the next decade, people will use their computers completely differently than how they do today. All of their files, correspondence, contacts, pictures, and videos will be stored or backed-up in the network cloud and they will access them from wherever they happen to be on whatever device they happen to hold. Access to data, applications, and content will be seamless and device-agnostic. Convergence isn't something that occurs at the device level, which was the vision we all had in the 90s as we struggled to invent that perfect gadget that did it all (witness my own unfortunate progeny, the Apple Newton, which ended tragically). Rather, devices will proliferate in many directions, but all of them will converge on the cloud. That's where our stuff, not to mention civilization's knowledge, will live.

This doesn't mean that the access device simply becomes a juiced up version of an old 3270 terminal. To the contrary, smart programmers will figure out ways to use all that power in your hands to create great applications, and to let you run them whether or not you are connected. But it shouldn't take three minutes for the device to boot, and losing it shouldn't be a catastrophe. You'll just get a new one and it will sync instantly; all your contacts, pictures, music, files, and other stuff will automagically just be there, ready for you to log in and say "be mine".

Still, these examples simplify and understate the true impact of what is going on with the transition to cloud computing. As Hal has noted, we are in a period of "combinatorial innovation", when there is a great availability of different component parts that innovators can combine or recombine to create new inventions. In the 1800s, it was interchangeable parts. In the 1920s, it was electronics. In the 1970s, it was integrated circuits. Today, the components of innovation are found in cloud computing, with abundant APIs, open source software, and low-cost, pay-as-you-go application services like our own App Engine and Amazon's EC2. The components are abundant and available to anyone who can get online.

The power of innovation and the cloud are driving two trends. First, because the tools of innovation are so easy and inexpensive to access, and consumers are so numerous and easy to reach, the consumer market now gets the greatest innovations first. It's easy to forget that just twenty years ago the best technology was found in the workplace: computers, software, phone systems, etc. Thirty years ago all you software geniuses working on Search, Ads, and Apps would have been programmers at IBM; forty years ago, at NASA. Now, the best technology starts with consumers, where a Darwinian market drives innovation that far surpasses traditional enterprise tools, and migrates to the workplace only after thriving with consumers. Think of Google Video for Business, which started out as YouTube and then evolved to the enterprise. How many businesses out there have even conceived of how useful this can be to them? Not many, perhaps because only a year ago the costs of having such an internal service were prohibitive. No longer.

Second, it used to be that every growing business would at some point have to make a big investment in computers and software for accounting systems, customer management systems, email servers, maybe even phone or video conferencing systems. Today, all of those services are available via the network cloud, and you pay for it only as you use it. So small businesses can scale up without making those huge capital investments, which is especially important in a recession. Access to sophisticated computer systems, and all the value they can deliver, was previously the realm of larger companies. Cloud computing levels that playing field so that the small business has access to the same systems that large businesses do. Given that small businesses generate most of the jobs in the economy, this is no small trend.

We still have a long way to go in making web-based applications robust enough for businesses. Things like latency, data reliability, and security all have to be equal to or better than the currently available alternatives. The user experience needs to be fast, easy, and rich — "like reading a magazine," Larry has said. This is why we are building Chrome, Gears, V8 and more. Users now expect these apps to work perfectly for them all the time, and we need to meet that expectation.

The real potential of cloud computing lies not in taking stuff that used to live on PCs and putting it online, but in doing things online that were previously simply impossible. Combining open standards with cloud computing will enable businesses to conduct commerce in brand new ways. For example, there is a great opportunity to take advantage of (to quote Hal again) "computer-mediated transactions". Computers now mediate virtually every commercial transaction, recording it, collecting data, and monitoring it, which means that we can now write and enforce contracts that were previously impossible. When you rent a car, you could be offered a thirty percent discount for agreeing not to exceed the speed limit, a deal that they could actually enforce with GPS reporting! Would you take it?

Another example is machine language translation. As more people do more things online computer systems will have the opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. Translation will get a tiny bit smarter with each iteration. There are over 400,000 books in the modern version of the aforementioned Library of Alexandria, nearly half of them in Arabic. The culture and history that's in those books is not available to you unless you read Arabic, which of course most people don't. But soon, with the power of the cloud, they'll be able to read them anyway. This is why translation is important, because it gives us the ability, to quote John Adams from 1797, to "encourage schools, colleges, universities, academies, and every institution [to propagate] knowledge, virtue, and religion among all classes of the people."

Lit by lightning
Virtually every American president since George Washington has used his Inaugural Address to speak not just of the coming four years, but also of his vision for future generations. Similarly, we manage Google with a long-term focus. We live and run our business in these uncertain times, but our eyes are always on the future, on the better tomorrow that the Internet and all of its promise shall help bring to fruition. I hope that the four predictions that I have presented here will elicit your curiosity and illuminate the significance of the changes that lay ahead. They may inevitably come to pass, but their impact on us, our neighbors, our countries, and our world is not inevitably good. Hence, our challenge.

We are standing at a unique moment in history which will help define not just the Internet for the next few years, but the Internet that individuals and societies around the world will traverse for decades. As Googlers our responsibility is nothing less than to help support the future of information, the global transition in how it is created, shared, consumed, and used to solve big problems. Our challenge is to steer incessantly toward greatness, to never think small when we can think big, to strive on with the work Larry and Sergey began over ten years ago, and from this task we will not be moved. In a world that feels like it is lit by lightning, speed wins, and we have a responsibility to our users to not retreat, to not be content to stand still, to not be complacent or near-sighted. The Internet has had a profound and remarkable impact in the past decade. Now, from the height of this place, let's appreciate its implications and pursue its promise.

It seems only fitting to conclude this Presidents' Day treatise, which began by quoting our 44th president, with a statement from our first. And so, having thus imparted to you my sentiments as they have been awakened by the occasion which brings us together, I shall take my present leave.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

KickLight.com - Video with a Kick

KickLight.com - Video with a Kick

Patrick Fitzgerald to Stay On

TPM

When a new president comes in, he usually replaces all 93 US attorneys with his own nominees. But, in what could be bad news for Rod Blagojevich, at least one high-profile US Attorney won't be asked to step down, it looks like.

NBC News reports that Patrick Fitzgerald, the no-nonsense U.S. attorney for Chicago, will stay on under President Obama, despite being a Bush appointee.

Fitzgerald is preparing an indictment against the former Illinois governor. He also served as the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak case, in which Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury.

The new administration has asked all the current Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys to stay on in the short term, while it decides which to retain. But it has already made a decision on Fitzgerald, it appears.

The suggestion to keep Fitz, who has been in the job since 2001, was made by Sen. Dick Durbin, who's close to Obama. Durbin's suggestion was "positively received," according to DOJ officials, as well as aides to Durbin. ...

YouTube - Mobile shopping on the iPhone by scanning barcodes with Snappr.net

YouTube - Mobile shopping on the iPhone by scanning barcodes with Snappr.net



I've purchased the Griffin 8245 Clarify case for the iPhone to use with Evernote as described here:

Monday, February 09, 2009

Official Google Blog: Power to the people

Official Google Blog: Power to the people

Power to the people

2/09/2009 08:39:00 PM

Imagine how hard it would be to stick to a budget in a store with no prices. Well, that's pretty much how we buy electricity today. Your utility company sends you a bill at the end of the month with very few details. Most people don't know how much electricity their appliances use, where in the house they are wasting electricity, or how much the bill might go up during different seasons. But in a world where everyone had a detailed understanding of their home energy use, we could find all sorts of ways to save energy and lower electricity bills. In fact, studies show that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America's households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.

Google’s mission is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," and we believe consumers have a right to detailed information about their home electricity use. We're tackling the challenge on several fronts, from policy advocacy to developing consumer tools, and even investing in smart grid companies. We've been participating in the dialogue in Washington, DC and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world to advocate for investment in the building of a "smart grid," to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age. Specifically, to provide both consumers and utilities with real-time energy information, homes must be equipped with advanced energy meters called "smart meters." There are currently about 40 million smart meters in use worldwide, with plans to add another 100 million in the next few years.

But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects, to spur innovation, drive competition, and bring more information to consumers as the smart grid evolves. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it. For more details on our policy suggestions, check out the comments we filed yesterday with the California Public Utility Commission.

In addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we're testing it out with Googlers first. But we're building partnerships with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we've had a chance to kick the tires, we'll make the tool more widely available.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing consumers with detailed energy information. And it will take the combined efforts of federal and state governments, utilities, device manufacturers, and software engineers to empower consumers to use electricity more wisely by giving them access to energy information.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Singularity University Officially Launches At NASA Ames


Singularity Hub » Blog Archive » Singularity University Officially Launches At NASA Ames

A shockwave passed through the singularity community today with the public launch of Singularity University at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley. Singularity University aims to assemble a world class community of thought leaders, academics, and entreprenuers across the many fields of exponentially advancing technologies (nanotechnology, genetics, medicine, artificial intelligence, etc.) in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.

With significant backing from Google and NASA, and with the participation of a renowned cast of faculty and advisors, Singularity University is poised to literally overnight become a world class institution for the innovation, collaboration, and leadership that will allow the world to capitalize on the great promise of technology to solve the world’s greatest problems

Renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil will officially announce the launch of Singularity University at the TED conference later today in Long Beach, CA. “We are now in the steep part of the exponential trajectory of information technologies in a broad variety of fields, including health, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence,” said Kurzweil. “It is only these accelerating technologies that have the scale to address the major challenges of humanity ranging from energy and the environment, to disease and poverty.

The University has been founded by a group of leaders including renowned author and futurist, Dr. Ray Kurzweil, space entrepreneur and chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, Dr. Peter Diamandis, and Director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Pete Worden. The list of faculty and advisors includes several distinguished individuals, including nobel laureates and key players from major universities.

Kurzweil will act as chancellor and trustee of the University. He’ll be joined by Diamandis, who will act as vice chancellor and trustee, and Salim Ismail, a former Yahoo executive, who will work as executive director.

“The exponentially increasing power of computers and optical networks, when combined with developments in AI, nanotechnology, and other technologies, will create extraordinary opportunities,” said Dr. Larry Smarr, Harry E. Gruber Professor, Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD, and Director at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. “Singularity University is uniquely positioned to prepare students for these coming innovations.”

Singularity University will offer the world a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary curriculum and institution.

“We are reaching out across the globe to gather the smartest and most passionate future leaders and arm them with the tools and network they need to wrestle with the grand challenges of our day,” said Diamandis. “There is no existing program that will offer the breadth and intensity that SU will offer.”

The first Corporate Founder is Google, and several more will soon be named. Speaking on behalf of Google, Mr. Chris DiBona said, “Google is proud to be a founding Corporate Sponsor for the Singularity University. By focusing on exponentially growing technologies and their ability to address the world’s grand challenges, this interdisciplinary institution will fill a critical need.”

The University will offer several academic programs, serve as a networking hub for interdisciplinary study, and ultimately become an incubator for tomorrow’s world-altering companies.

Singularity University (SU) (www.singularityu.org) will open its doors in June 2009 on the NASA Research Park campus with a nine-week graduate level interdisciplinary curriculum designed to facilitate understanding, collaboration, and innovation across a broad range of carefully chosen scientific and technological disciplines. The curriculum will be broken out into 10 tracks as follows:

  • future studies and forecasting
  • networks and computing systems
  • biotechnology and bioinformatics
  • nanotechnology
  • medicine, neuroscience and human enhancement
  • AI, robotics, and cognitive computing
  • energy and ecological systems
  • space and physical sciences
  • policy, law and ethics
  • finance and entrepreneurship.

Those who successfully navigate the curriculum will receive certificates of completion. The school also hopes to arrange for students to receive class credits that can be transferred to fully accredited universities.

Applications will be accepted through the school’s Web site beginning Tuesday.

In addition to the nine-week graduate level summer session, the University will offer several 10-day and 3-day executive level programs throughout the year. These programs will educate and prepare today’s leaders to build and adapt their businesses to the major technological changes that will are on the horizon.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Who Should Know

By Matthew Yglesias

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Asked by TNR to offer some advice to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, former Press Secretary Scott McClellan makes the provocative suggestion that the whole briefing ritual is passe:

My view is that the press-briefing model that is used now is kind of outdated. It ought to be more along the lines of the Pentagon briefing model, where you’re bringing in on a regular basis–maybe even two to three times a week–key officials from the White House or Cabinet secretaries to participate in these briefings and help educate the press and the public.

I agree with that. In terms of the basic briefing material, this could just as easily be emailed out to everyone on the press list. Meanwhile, the Q&A sessions that exist now are useless as a source of actual information. Reporters ask questions that they know perfectly well won’t be answered, and then the press secretary does his best to dodge him. Nine days out of ten, the result is a not-very-amusing spectacle for mid-day C-SPAN viewers. If the world is lucky, the Press Secretary commits some kind of gaffe. But nothing real is ever learned. McClellan’s idea, by contrast, holds some promise. The White House could bring out whoever they wanted. But the expectation would be clear—you brought these people out to talk about something in particular, and they’re really expected to talk about it.