Change your Mind Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness
Google engEDU
59 min – Mar 15, 2007

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 where he currently works on humanitarian projects. He is an active participant in the current scientific research on meditation and the brain. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobiles, The Digital Divide, And Google
Google EngEDU
1 hr 1 min – Jan 12, 2007

Google Tech Talks
January 17, 2007

ABSTRACT

If you’ve enjoyed Hal’s talks and emails on how economic theory can help make sense of various financial phenomenon around us from the US real estate bubble to zero-coupon bonds; come listen to Prof. Waverman from the London Business School talk about how mobile technology can impact economic growth in emerging markets. His work was recently profiled in The Economist. Prof. Waverman visits Google in Mountain View courtesy of efforts by Yonca Brunini and Dennis Woodside from our EMEA offices.

Professor Waverman’s research quantifiably demonstrates that communications networks form a key component of the infrastructure crucial to a nation’s economic growth, joining the ranks of roads and electricity. In Friday’s talk, we’ll see promising signs that the explosion of mobile telephony across the developing world is shrinking the digital divide and providing real opportunity for economic growth in the world’s poorest regions. Prepare to be impressed by research profiled in The Economist, wowed by ingenious and vital applications of mobile telephony, and challenged to make the world’s information accessible and useful to those whose lives it could benefit the most. Read the rest of this entry »

Some Python Integrated Development Environments
Google engEDU
1 hr 17 min – Jul 13, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 13, 2006

Bay Area Python Interest Group

http://baypiggies.net/

Topic: Emacs
Presenter: Marylin Davis

Marilyn Davis is the Python Instructor at UCSC-Extension. She is the lead developer at Maildance.com and Deliberate.com.

Topic: Vim
Presenter: Keith Dart

Keith Dart works in QA automation and is the primary developer of the PyNMS network application framework.

Topic: Xcode
Presenter: Mark Ivey

Mark Ivey is a senior engineer at R2 Technology. Although his job doesn’t involve a lot of Python, it is his preferred evenings and weekends language.

Topic: Wing IDE
Presenter: Mike Cheponis

Mike Cheponis is President of California Wireless, Inc., a Silicon Valley consulting firm that specializes in Wireless Communications Systems, designing RF, Analog, Digital, and software subsystems and products. He writes code in assembly languages, Lisp, and Python. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce Used on Large Data Sets
Google engEDU
30 min – Jun 23, 2007

Google Tech Talks
June 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

2007 Google Seattle Conference on Scalability:
Using MapReduce on Large Geographic Datasets
Speaker: Barry Brumitt, Google, Inc.

MapReduce is a programming model and library designed to
simplify distributed processing of huge datasets on large clusters of
computers. This is achieved by providing a general mechanism
which largely relieves the programmer from having to handle
challenging distributed computing problems such as data
distribution, process coordination, fault tolerance, and scaling. While
working on Google maps, I’ve used MapReduce extensively to
process and transform datasets which describe the earth’s
geography. In this talk, I’ll introduce MapReduce, demonstrating its
broad applicability through example problems ranging from basic
data transformation to complex graph processing, all the in the
context of geographic data. Read the rest of this entry »

When is a Googol Not Enough?
Google engEDU
55 min – May 24, 2006

Google TechTalks
May 24, 2006

Washington Taylor

ABSTRACT
Recent developments in string theory, combined with the experimental observation that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, have led theoretical physicists to a radical (and controversial) new picture of the universe. In this new picture, the universe is enormously larger than our parochial observable region of radius 13.7 light years.

In other patches of the universe, the laws of physics may be quite different, though in each patch the local physics is governed by a metastable solution of string theory. Since there may be something like $10^{1000}$ or more distinct solutions of string theory giving physics roughly like that we observe, to make physical predictions we need to classify enormous numbers of possible solutions.

In this talk this new theoretical picture of cosmology will be described, and related computational problems will be discussed. Read the rest of this entry »