"Verbatim" - Erin McKean speaks at Google

Erin McKean, editor and lexicographer for the New Oxford American Dictionary, tells Google the ten things she wishes people knew about dictionaries, how people go about making new words, and how lexicographers use Google. Erin McKean has wanted to be a lexicographer since she was eight years old. She has a BA and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, where she wrote her master's thesis on the treatment of phrasal verbs in children's dictionaries. While at the University of Chicago, she worked as a volunteer at the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. Before OUP, Erin spent eight years at Scott Foresman, where she worked on the Thorndike Barnhart children's dictionaries. Erin is a member of the American Dialect Society, the American Names Society, and Euralex and is a member of the board of the Dictionary Society of North America. Her publications include two papers in Dictionaries, the journal of the DSNA. She is a computer enthusiast and has given several presentations on SGML and XML to Chicago Webgrrls. When not writing dictionaries or editing VERBATIM, she likes to sew completely impractical clothes from vintage patterns and haunt used bookstores for copies of Kathleen Norris and E. Phillips Oppenheim novels. This video is part of the Authors@Google series.

Google predicts future video trends

Aug. 30 - Google's Vice-President of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer shared her vision for the role the technology company will play in the new era of video distribution. For more technology stories and reports, go to http://TV.reuters.com

Toward the First Revolution in the Mind Sciences

Google TechTalks August 8, 2006 B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970. He is currently seeking ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices and Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies ( http://sbinstitute.com ). ABSTRACT Galileo took a seminal role in launching the first revolution in the physical sciences, and a key element in this revolution was the rigorous, sophisticated observation of physical phenomena. Darwin likewise launched a revolution in the life sciences on the basis of decades of meticulous observation of biological phenomena. Although scientists have been studying the mind for more than a century, no comparable revolution has taken place in the mind sciences, and the missing element that may account for this delayed revolution is the absence of rigorous, precise observations of mental phenomena. By integrating the third-person methodologies of the cognitive sciences with the first-person methods for examining the mind that have been developed in Buddhism and other contemplative traditions, our present generation may bring about the first revolution in the mind sciences.