Google’s distributed search model is at the foundation of the Internet giant’s current dominance in search. In the video below, one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, speaks at length about his company. You’ll need to turn the volume up on this one.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Google is rejecting claims of patent infringement made in a lawsuit brought by the Jarg Corporation, a Massachusetts-based technology company.

Heather Johnson is guest blogging at WhatIs.com this week. Heather is a freelance writer, as well as a monthly contributor for OEDb, a site that helps students select among accredited online schools. She invites comments and freelancing job inquiries at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

There has been a lot of talk about open source hardware lately and its potential effects on research and education. ETech 2008 showcased many examples of open hardware and offered an insightful presentation [PDF] to those who are new to the emerging technology. Likewise, popular sites like Slashdot and bloggers like Scobleizer have been discussing the growing movement.

The increasing popularity of open source software has already had a tremendous influence on education and the world as a whole. Not only are many schools now making the switch to open source programs, leading universities like UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon are involved with developing large open source software projects.

However, we have yet to see open hardware really take off. Ryan Singel of Wired feels that 2008 could be the year and I second that opinion. Leading the pack seems to be open source robotics, which has been embraced by several major universities.

Just last month, Willow Garage’s Steve Cousins gave a keynote speech at ETech 2008 about open source personal robots, which has brought more attention to the subject. Willow Garage is a privately funded lab that experiments with various robotics platforms.

This open source robotics movement can be felt on many college campuses as well. Carnegie Mellon, which I previously stated is involved with open source software, is also building OS personal robots. The university has recently formed a joint project called the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

The IPRE is a joint project between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College, with sponsorship provided by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to help advance robotics research and computer science education. The IPRE is currently selling open source robot kits, which are geared toward educators and can be integrated with computer education curricula.

Instructions can be found RobotEducation.org if you are interested in building your own educational robot.

[Image credit: RobotEducation.org]

Often the title of a video alone raises an eyebrow. Today’s video selection certainly does — it’s a presentation from two tele-immersion labs, one at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the other within the University of Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department. According to the IEEE Computer Society, tele-immersion is when “collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases, and gather results.” It might be a stretch but I see tele-immersion used in that was as an advanced version of presence technology, in which an application make it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.

As it’s a dance performance, both labs worked in close collaboration with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The video quality admittedly isn’t great — and you may want to skip ahead to 11:30, when the actual performance begins, or to 20:00, when the dancing starts — but the concept itself is noteworthy for its aspiration to bridge the gap between real and virtual environments.

From the show notes on YouTube:

The Resonance Project Dance Group performed for a very large crowd in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The performance was a blend of live, modern dance with live tele-immersed dancers from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Using a large network of cameras and computers the dancers were able to span the geographic distance and mingle in cyberspace. The computers merged three-dimensional video images of the dancers onto a single projection, which was broadcast alongside live dancers.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a “performance as research” model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The nature of the performance has a close conceptual relationship with CAVE, a tele-immersive environment used for learning in a wide variety of disciplines, and the CAVEman, the first 4-D human atlas.

You might remember this fellow — he invented the Web, after all. Sir Tim Berners-Lee offers some thoughts on the issue of Net neutrality in this video.

You can read Lee’s post on Net neutrality, which largely mirrors his statements on camera, over at his blog. You’ll note that the post and video date back to 2006, when the issue first entered a wider conversation online. These days, the U.S. presidential candidates have taken stances on it (Clinton and Obama are both for Net neutrality, McCain opposes it). Accusations of traffic shaping and the uglier-sounding “bandwidth throttling” are flying at ISPs like Comcast, sometimes justified and other times based upon mistaken conclusions.

We’ve asked you before — have you opinions changed? Private networks and corporations have good reason to restrict bandwidth to memory hogs like like IPTV. On-demand streaming of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament caused massive traffic spikes, for instance, resulted in massive traffic spikes. The security risks and bandwidth challenges presented by employee use of P2P networks like Bittorrent are an issue as well.

Once Internet use leaves the office, however, the question remains: Should ISPs be able to institute a two-tiered Internet for private citizens?

Let us know what you think in the comments or by writing in to editor@whatis.com.

Professor Merrick Furst, associate dean at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, explains how botmasters use zombie armies for financial gain. Furst estimates that about 7% of all Internet traffic is zombie. Kraken, today’s Word of the Day, is now reported to be the largest botnet in the world, with over 400,000 machines infected.

This lecture from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley describes how the manufacture design of integrated circuits (ICs) has evolved and improved over the years.

From the show notes on YouTube:

As IC’s routinely include more than a billion transistors, the interactions between the design and the manufacturing communities now must handle atomic-level variability, dozens of new materials, and patterning techniques operating at their theoretical limit.

In this talk, we will present several facets of this problem and discuss emerging innovations at the IC design-manufacturing interface.

There’s no question that living in Cambridge and writing about technology has its benefits. The city is swimming in startups, geeky events and plugged-in discussions.

Last month, I was lucky enough to score an invitation to a Q&A session with two distinguished MIT physicists focused upon the theoretical underpinnings of teleportation , followed by a roundtable discussion that brought in with “Jumper” director Doug Liman and Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christiansen. The movie will be in wide release tomorrow, so I thought it would be timely to offer a comment or two concerning this confluence of fact and fiction.

You know you’re in a special place when professors receive enthusiastic applause comparable to the reception given to a Hollywood director and bonafide heart throb movie star. That being said, Hayden was clearly the focus of considerable adoration, expressed at his entrance and in more than one invitation to dates and afterparties.

Serious students of quantum physics are going have to employ the classic “willing suspension of disbelief” to fully embrace this picture. In other words, when questioned, both Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark kindly but firmly ruled out the possibility of human teleportation any time in the near future. The current state of this branch of science is exciting, however, given that experiments have successfully teleported the properties of photons over a distance. This sort of quantum teleportation relies on “quantum entanglement“, whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart, a phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

I managed to capture the presentations of Professor Tegmark and Farhi on the physics of teleportation on my webcam and stream it on uStream. My apologies: The quality of both the audio and video is regrettably poor. Still, I’m happy to share. Jumper’s plot relies on a staple of science fiction, however, not fact: genetic mutation. In other words, some evolved version of CERN’s large hadron collider or a hitherto undiscovered means of stabilizing worm holes powered by cold fusion is not at at the heart of the film. Some people are born with the ability to teleport from one place to another. Off to the races.

Mr. Liman’s direction of Swingers, Go and the Bourne Identity , however, recommends taking a chance on his vision of the moral and ethical challenges presented to someone with the power to teleport at will. I found his willingness to research what the event would actually look and sound like was impressive, particularly the collapse of air into the vacuum left by the removal of a body. He said he fell in love with the script when he read that the first action of the character upon discovering his power was to rob a bank.

For more coverage of the event, check out:

• Doug Overbye’s “Quantum Teleporting, Yes; The Rest is Movie Magic” in the New York Times
• Jess K’s hilarious blog post, Hayden Christensen Comes to MIT, Looks Pretty, for some perspective from a current MIT student
• Sharon Gaudin’s “Teleportation: The leap from fact to fiction in new movie Jumper“
• Jim Rapoza’s “Hollywood Jumps to MIT” at Emerging Tech

Following is the trailer, if you’ve somehow missed it theaters, on TV or elsewhere on the Web.

If you’re looking for some geeky fun on Valentine’s Day, just google “movie: jumper [your zipcode]” and enjoy.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten some anecdotal feedback that “Jumper” isn’t exactly Citizen Kane. RottenTomatoes.com has delivered a dire rating of 15% while imdb.com users are being considerably kinder with a rating of 6.4/10.  That being said, the film raking in $27.2 million at the box office this past weekend, so tastes may be for forgiving out and about.

As reported by the AFP, the University of California at Berkeley has created a dedicated channel on YouTube for more than 300 hours of classes and events. Videos include peace and conflicts studies, bioengineering and “Physics for Future Presidents,” though I wonder how much that last is a dig at former or current POTUSes. Given that Berkeley s a famously liberal institution, you can draw your own conclusions. You can find the courses at http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Tech fans may find gems like “SIMS 141 - Search, Google, and Life,” with Google’s Sergey Brin, to be of particular interest:

If that doesn’t meet your bar for online video goodness, you might try BoingBoing TV, a new IPTV feature hosted by cybergoddess Xeni Jardin and BoingBoing’s co-creator, Mark Frauenfelder.
The 3-5 minute segments will also feature cyberpunk author and digital copyright maven Cory Doctorow and gadgets editor Joel Johnson. The debut episodes featurethe usual mix of pop ephemera and geeky art, including a piece on Listography.com, an remix of an industrial movie from the 1960s and a robot covering Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

All Things Weird and Wonderful, here I come.

Sometime this past summer, future CalTech grad student (and self-styled”disruptive technologist”) Virgil Griffith decided that he wanted to see if he could elevate his personal home page to the top of search results for “Virgil.”

While that dream may or may not come true, there’s no doubt that the “quotes” should now be removed from disruptive technologist, (along with my self-styling). Virgil hasn’t written an epic quite yet but he’s clearly provided a useful tool to journalists and inquisitive netizens alike. Meet WikiScanner.

In two weeks, Griffith created a Web site that matches the IP addresses attached to edits of Wikipedia pages with the IP addresses listed in the publicly accessible whois database for companies and media organizations worldwide.

Using a simple, minimally designed interface consisting of a form, text, dropdowns and hyperlinks, Griffith’s site allows users to first determine what the IP address of an organization is and then plug it into to discover what edits have been made from that IP range.

By providing the means to cross reference who is editing what, Virgil’s code nearly approaches poetry, at least judging by Jimmy Wales, who told the AP that “It is fabulous and I strongly support it.”

It’s not quite fair to say that the effort is all about the Virgil Google bomb, either. According to this Wired article, Griffiths was inspired by the discovery that many Congressional offices were editing their own entries. Wondering what corporations were doing the same thing, he created WikiScanner.

As Griffiths notes wryly in his WikiScanner FAQ, the reaction to the tool’s discoveries has been more or less as expected. The CIA and FBI, Disney, Diebold, Exxon and a rapidly expanding universe of other entitities, large and small, have been editing away. Take a look at Wired’s “list of salacious edits” to see how far the count of “minor public relations disasters” that WikiScanner has enabled — and be aware that any edits that you make to Wikipedia may not be as anonymous as you might think.

Merlin Mann, author of the brilliant organization and productivity blog 43 folders, recently resurfaced an “old” post from 2004.

It’s amazing how quickly Internet time moves!

Personally, I love when I unearth digital miscellania from my archives, though it’s rare to find an item as useful and interesting as Merlin’s resdiscovery.

Here’s what he found (again):

Jon Udell created the Library Lookup Project in 2002 to allow users to look up books in their local library’s online catalog systems using a Web browser bookmarklet.

I tried it, surfing Amazon’s recommended picks for me and tying it into the Boston Public Library. Success! Now, I just have to wait for Send to arrive sometime in 2013.

I’ve been doing this manually for some time, noting books there or on goodreads.com (a recent happy discovery, made through a high school friend), but this is huge improvement.

For those interested, Jon created a bookmarklet generator for the project, along with these tips for troubleshooting.

Happy summer reading!

Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to meet one of our readers in person, outside of comment sections, forums, email, IM or other virtual interactions.

It’s always a pleasure to get such direct feedback. When I asked what she liked (and didn’t like) about this blog, she mentioned that she appreciated past posts about free online education resources. (Just click on our learning tag to see them all to date.)

A simple search for other similar resources turns up many other hits, of course, notably for OER. OER stands for “Open Education Resources,” an effort to create a free, globally accessible commons for educational materials. In a spirit much like that of Professor Lessig’s Creative Commons, UNESCO’s 2002 initiative encourages educators to publish learning content and the tools to create that content online, free of intellectual property considerations. You can learn more at the Open Education Conference’s Web site, if you’re interested in the movement.

As Wendy Boswell details in Technophilia, her typically brilliant column on Lifehacker, such free resources easily available online — if you know where to look. Wendy ends with where I’d begin, however, by suggesting using Google to uncover different kinds of learning content.

As Wendy points out, simply by using the right keywords, you can unearth course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts and online books , all through the magic of the Google search field.

When you’re done Googling, the Feds may be able to provide some help: Check out free.ed.gov for an index of different subject areas. The National Education Association also has a page full of free course materials for teachers and students.

Still want more?

FreebiesList.com has a long list of free educational resources.

Finally, in the spirit of the OER, the OpenCourseWare Consortium provides, according to their Web site, “free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.”

Did we miss any of your favorite resources? Let us know in the comments!

What new thing did you learn today?

[Image credit: MasterNewMedia.org]

Can you imagine a comprehensive, illustrated encyclopedia that documented and described every living species known to humankind?

If scientists succeed in a new, boldly conceived project, such a dream might become reality. Meet the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). [Press release]

A steering committee of senior officers from Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, Field Museum, Marine Biological Laboratory, Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations has proposed that “an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it.”

The EOL project has its roots in the writing of biologists Dan Jenzen and E.O. Wilson. Wilson’s 2003 essay on the topic and then a speech 2007 speech (read his wish on TED.com) at the influential TED Conference have brought the concept to wider attention.

Essentially, the EOL hopes to combine collaborative editing using wikis and mashups of a number of other sources of scientific materials. Crucially, entries will edited and approved by scientists to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the information.

Draft species pages that demonstrate some of the possibilities of a fully implemented system are already available at http://www.eol.org.

The project’s creators hope to have actual, authenticated species pages available by mid 2008. You can learn more by reading the EOL FAQ or watching this video on YouTube.

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing has also posted about EOL , noting that while the project has received a $50 million dollar funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, the EOL “reminds [him] a lot of Kevin Kelly’s All Species Foundation, which ran out of funding around 2003. It was a TED-borne idea.”