Sciorbis Blog

Google is investing in education and science, with 10 of 100 new channels dedicated to mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, physics – and spectacular demonstrations

Back in May I wrote a blog post about YouTube and the rise of the amateur in science communication. It's exciting to now see a kind of punk mentality in science communication, a sense that anyone can do it. This is something I do myself on YouTube and in that article I encouraged you to join me. Now, in a move away from its traditional user-generated content, YouTube has recently announced its first venture into original content. So let's take a look at what YouTube will be offering in the way of science communication.

Certainly, this is a major move on behalf of YouTube and its owners at Google. This is part of a rumoured $100m investment, beginning with the announcement of 100 new channels. These include some big names in entertainment such as Madonna, Ashton Kutcher and Jay-Z. There are also news channels from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, among others such as channels for WWE and Red Bull. And, further down this list, me.

Well, when I say me, I mean a channel called Numberphile, which will feature me and other mathematicians, with each video being about a different number. Numberphile is actually the brainchild of video journalist Brady Haran, who is already popular on YouTube – and with readers of the Guardian blogger GrrlScientist – for his Periodic Table of Videos, as well as Sixty Symbols (physics) and his Favourite Scientist channel. Numberphile launches on 11 November 2011, that's 11.11.11 – well it seemed appropriate, making it one of the first of the new YouTube 100 to launch.

The fact that 10 of the channels in this announcement are educational channels is encouraging. While the serious money may be in channels such as Red Bull and WWE, Google is investing in education, too. In fact, half of those educational channels on offer are science-related.

Brady's other new channel is on astronomy, Deep Sky Videos. The channel will start by looking at the Messier Objects, a list of approximately 100 astronomical objects. Here's a preview.

So, with my journalist hat on (it has a piece of card sticking out of the hat band with "Press" written on it), I asked Brady for the inside scoop. Although Brady says he's "mildly daunted" by the number of videos he will produce, he also told me how exciting it was. And I can see why: this is a huge endorsement from YouTube.

Also on offer will be two new channels from the vlogbrothers. The vlogbrothers consist of Hank and John Green, popular YouTube bloggers with a large nerd following. Hank is the one with the science background, so will be launching a science channel. John has a background in English, but is promising a channel on science and the humanities. There is no preview as yet, but maybe this will give us an idea of what to expect.

The channels mentioned so far are from some of the most successful YouTube users, but still come from the YouTube community. The remaining science-related channel will be run by Steve Spangler, best known to American audiences for his numerous television appearances and for further popularising the coke and mentos experiment. Steve is also the director of the National Hands-on Science Institute in Denver, Colorado and judging by his show reel of television appearances I expect nothing less than something spectacular!

It looks like each of these science channels will be very different in style and content, and I am thoroughly looking forward to seeing what they have to offer. Out of the remaining educational channels, one will be from TED, which I imagine will be on various subjects, but I'm sure many will have a science bent. The other channels have fairly vague descriptions at this point but seem to be in the TED vein.

With luck this initiative will increase the quality of content on YouTube. This is good business for Google, hopefully bringing with it more traffic and advertising revenue. But will it be good business for the users? If YouTube is now effectively acting as a commissioning editor, will that change the sort of content featured on the site?

Is YouTube setting itself up as a broadcaster? Well, not yet. It certainly isn't a broadcaster in the conventional sense. YouTube doesn't shut down at midnight with the national anthem followed by pages from Ceefax. Although that would be awesome. No, this is still the merest drop in the ocean. The overwhelming majority of content is still user-generated and will be for the foreseeable future.

Not only that, but YouTube would be mad to move away from the formula that has made it what it is – the homemade filmmakers, the people, their blogs, their videos of kittens.

James Grime is a mathematician and public speaker, and can mostly be found touring the country on behalf of the University of Cambridge Millennium Mathematics Project

Those account holders — Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp and Birgitta Jonsdottir — have addressed the situation on Twitter. Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen, used his feed to direct users to a blog post arguing that the decision is a blow to Internet privacy.

“The consequences of this decision for me are extremely limited: there’s not a whole lot you can learn from records that Twitter has on me that you can’t learn from reading my blog,” he wrote. “There are bigger principles at stake though, and this is not a good ruling for online privacy.”

Jonsdottir’s feed led readers to an Electronic Frontier Foundation article on the subject with her quote: “With this decision, the court is telling all users of online tools hosted in the U.S. that the U.S. government will have secret access to their data.”

Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen, stated: “Today is one of those ‘losing faith in the justice system’ kind of days.”

The case began in January when the U.S. government subpoenaed Twitter to hand over private messages between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others within the organization. The EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union and attorneys representing WikiLeaks fought the subpoena, but in March, a federal judge granted the U.S. government access to the accounts.

That led to another round of appeals, which Judge Liam O’Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., rejected on Thursday. O’Grady’s 60-page opinion stated that Twitter users “voluntarily” hand over their IP addresses when they sign up for an account and agree to Twitter’s terms and conditions. Twitter’s privacy policy states that it “may disclose information about an account if Twitter believes it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request.”

Representatives from Twitter could not be reached for comment on the decision.

Image courtesy of Flickr, shawncampbell

After Q3 2011 brought a 13 percent increase in e-commerce sales, Forrester is estimating that U.S. online holiday sales will grow 15 percent this year to nearly $60 billion. The study reports that this increase will take place because of the increase in consumer-use of tablet computers for shopping combined with a growth in online holiday deals.

Of course, it’s surprising that there would be a significant growth in holiday retail spending considering the economy and market volatility. But Forrester says that retailers are taking advantage of the ‘price-savvy’ shopper and presenting more lucrative deals for online shopping and free shipping offers, especially on high-volume shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The report shows that 58 percent of Americans say they are more price-conscious today than they were a year ago and nearly half believe they find better values online. And 50 percent of Americans who own a tablet use the device to research products for purchase with 30 percent of smartphone owners using their mobile device to research products for purchase at least monthly (which is a 30 percent increase in just the past year). And more and more online retailers will be offering better shopping experiences on mobile and tablet devices t take advantage of these trends.

Forrester also says that 12 percent of the total growth in sales will result from an increase in spending per buyer as opposed to more buyers entering the market. In January, comScore reported that 2010 online holiday spending reached a record $33 billion, which was up 12 percent from 2009. Forrester estimates last year’s spending at just over $50 billion.

With Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday only weeks away, we’ll see soon if shoppers flock online and to mobile platforms for deals and savings, as is predicted. While the current technology trends and proliferation of deals could boost e-spending, even weather could be a factor in pushing holiday sales to record levels.

In about two weeks, we will see the formal launch of PaperShare, a social content and information network for technology professionals, although you can access the site now if you wish (word about the venture actually got out a few months ago).

PaperShare was started by David Greschler (co-founder of Softricity App-V, and until recently, director of virtualization and cloud strategy at Microsoft) and Doug Brown (founder of popular virtualization site DABCC).

The idea behind PaperShare is to promote the sharing of enterprise-focused content, including technical white papers, videos, case studies and whatnot. More than merely a marketing channel, PaperShare wants to be a place where industry professionals can connect through information.

I’m told Citrix, Microsoft and VMware are among the first corporate members to sign up for the PaperShare community.

Already, 26,600 items around the topics of cloud and virtualization have been published and share on the network, which will expand into security, database, finance and healthcare in the near future.

More information about PaperShare can be found here.

Coming up with new gestures that can be performed with one, two, or three fingers is a surprisingly difficult job. Many are proposed; few actually make it into daily use. Here’s one from Apple entitled “hold and swipe,” in a recent-ish patent application. But is it really new?

I’m leaving out the part where patenting a gesture is an absurdity, because that’s an entirely separate issue.

The gesture has to do with navigating visual information on a small screen (like the new Nano). Zooming in on a face or object within a picture, or selecting an aspect of it, can be difficult both for the user, who can’t see where they’re touching, and the touchscreen, which can’t accurately determine where the user intends to touch. The hold and swipe method would rely heavily on image metadata like facial recognition, and allow users to go between points of interest without repeating a single inexact gesture multiple times.

The idea is that you’d touch down on the display, on or off an object of interest, and after a short delay, move your finger in whatever direction. Contextual actions are done based on a few things: if you put your finger on someone’s face, then move off to the right, it could either go to other people’s faces in the picture, or switch to other pictures with the same face. The rate could be modified by the distance your finger is from the original point, or by tilting the device itself.

Unfortunately, as I said, coming up with new gestures is quite difficult, and this one is likely to end up totally unused. For one thing, it doesn’t solve the problem it sets out to solve: not only is the user’s finger still obscuring much of the display, but they can’t remove it while navigating the content. It’s also overcomplicated: tilting the display while holding your finger down at a certain distance from the original point? It’s all most people can do to master two-finger scrolling. And the UI elements are also nontrivial additions. How do you tell the user it’s time to move their finger? How do you indicate, on this small screen of theirs, which face or element of the picture they’ve landed on?

It’s also not original. The idea of placing an “anchor” by holding a finger or stylus down, and then scrolling in the direction indicated by the next movement is quite old. Apple’s addition of moving between points of interest or photos with the same face or tag is just a veneer on a gesture that’s been around in games and apps for years. If this patent were legitimate you could also patent using this gesture to move between cells in a spreadsheet, or brush sizes in photoshop, or tabs in a browser.

It just goes to show the amount of chaff that’s produced while you’re trying to get some wheat. Most of these ideas die early on in focus groups (we produced and killed a dozen in a couple hours at a recent Microsoft event), but this one, perhaps, they felt was on the border line. I wouldn’t expect Apple to include something this inelegant in devices like the Nano. Limiting the user’s UI vocabulary has been a big part of Apple’s success, and part of that has been binning ideas like this one as quick as possible.

Patently Apple has more information, but for some reason I couldn’t bring up the patent itself. I’ll update with a link as soon as I get it.

Actor and comedian Billy Crystal announced via Twitter that he is taking over the hosting duties for the 2012 Oscars.

The move comes a day after Eddy Murphy quit as host of the 84th Academy Awards. Murphy left a day after show producer Brett Ratner stepped down after using a homophobic slur while promoting Tower Heist, which also stars Murphy.

“Am doing the Oscars so the young woman in the pharmacy will stop asking my name when I pick up my prescriptions,” Crystal says in his tweet. “Looking forward to the show.”

The Twitterverse was quick to pounce on Murphy’s departure with suggestions of its own for a replacement host. In fact, “Billy Crystal” started trending not long after Murphy announced his departure. It seems the fans will be getting what they asked for.

This will by Crystal’s ninth time hosting the Academy Awards. He last hosted the popular awards show in 2004.

Check out some of the Twitter reactions to Murphy’s departure in the gallery below. Clearly Billy Crystal didn’t listen to Jason Kaplan’s suggestion.

Zach Braff

Click here to view this gallery.

We spoke to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky after his talk onstage at the GigaOM Roadmap conference — during the talk Chesky spoke about many possible avenues for the company’s expansion but didn’t commit himself to any one path.

Instead Chesky held that what users want is one of the most important factors in deciding where the company focused their efforts. For example, two months ago a critical mass people wanted to stay in Airbnbs for longer than a week, according to Chesky, so the company launched ‘Sublets.‘ Right now the company has about 300 boats, and Chesky says he’s looking into that as a space. “We look to our community and try to figure out what’s already popular there for cues as to where to go next,” he said.

Chesky also revealed that a majority of the company’s business is outside the United States, and that Hong Kong is currently one of the highest demand, highest occupancy cities — Thus Chesky plans on using Hong Kong as a base for the company’s Asian expansion.

“The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can’t just stay in the lab. And it’s not just asking users what they want, it’s about seeing what they’re doing … When you bought an iPod, Steve Jobs didn’t come over and sleep on your couch. But I did,” Chesky said, presumably meaning that he actually uses Airbnb.

The official Twitter app has quickly climbed to the top. According to Skylines, a social image search site, 36.1% of photos shared on Twitter come through the official image uploader. TwitPic is in second place with 30.3% and Yfrog is in third with 21.1%. Instagram is in fourth place with just 12.5%. Its low ranking is both surprising and impressive. Instagram has quickly shot up in popularity as a premiere photo app for iOS devices. This means that while 12.5% may seem low, it’s coming only from people using iPhones or iPads. Not bad considering the three leaders work with web images and most major mobile carriers.

The stats are bad news for TwitPic, which previously held 45.7% of the picture-sharing market just five months previous. While some sites are already ringing the death knell for third-party photo apps, the stats shows that TwitPic and Yfrog are hanging in there. It is clear, however, that these apps will need to do something to differentiate their services from Twitter’s uploader if they want to survive.

Twitter’s photo-sharing win brings up the question of whether official apps and services risk killing competition and third-party innovation. This is becoming ever-more clear as Twitter ramps up its features such as URL shortening.

BONUS: Meet the Top 15 Photographers on Instagram

@mikekus: Photographer's Choice

Who: Mike Kus. A graphic designer, web designer and illustrator living in Bath.

Followers: 82,085

Photos: 451

Favorite Filter: Earlybird

How he's using Instagram: "I try to use Instagram to document my daily life and to photograph what surrounds me. I live in Bath, U.K.; so most of my pictures [are] places and people around Bath."

Inspired by: "I carry my iPhone everywhere and when I see something that interests me I take a shot. There's nothing I particularly set out to do. I like photographing architecture and people, mainly."

Click here to view this gallery.

Image courtesy of Flickr,