"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.

Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance

Former independent White House counsel Kenneth Starr joins constitutional scholars Bruce Ackerman and Doug Kmiec for the National Constitution Center's Inaugural John M. Templeton, Jr. Lecture on Economic Liberties and the Constitution. Bruce Ackerman will present the lecture. Starr makes remarks following the lecture. Douglas Kmiec moderates the event, which will include a question and answer session with the audience. Ackerman says that his proposal for campaign finance reform uses the "virtues of the market system" to promote the economic liberty of all, permitting people to contribute to political campaigns without intrusive regulation. Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. has established the John M. Templeton, Jr. Lecture on Economic Liberties and the Constitution at the National Constitution Center to create a public forum to explore in detail the economic liberties provided by the Constitution. Located on Philadelphia's historic Independence Mall, the National Constitution Center is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing public understanding of the U.S. Constitution and its relevance to Americans' daily lives. For more information, call 215.409.6600 or visit www.constitutioncenter.org.

Sparse and large-scale learning with heterogeneous data

Google Tech Talks September 5, 2006 Gert Lanckriet is assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. He conducts research on machine learning, applied statistics and convex optimization with applications in computational biology, finance, music and vision. ABSTRACT An important challenge for the field of machine learning is to deal with the increasing amount of data that is available for learning and to leverage the (also increasing) diversity of information sources, describing these data. Beyond classical vectorial data formats, data in the format of graphs, trees, strings and beyond have become widely available for data mining, e.g., the linked structure of the world wide web, text, images and sounds on web pages, protein interaction networks, phylogenetic trees, etc. Moreover, for interpretability and economical reasons, decision rules that rely on a small subset of the information sources and/or a small subset of the features describing the data are highly desired: sparse learning algorithms are a must. This talk will outline two recent approaches that address sparse, large-scale learning with heterogeneous data, and show some applications.

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

Physics 10 - Lecture 02: Atoms and Heat II

Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents. Spring 2006. Professor Richard A. Muller. The most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events. Topics covered may vary and may include energy and conservation, radioactivity, nuclear physics, the Theory of Relativity, lasers, explosions, earthquakes, superconductors, and quantum physics. [courses] [physics10] [spring2006]

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Google TechTalks March 7, 2006 Ola Rosling Anna Rosling Rönnlund Johan Nystrand

Decision Making and Chance

Google Tech Talks September 17, 2006 Dr. Mike Orkin is a Managing Scientist at Exponent, a publicly traded scientific consulting company headquartered in Menlo Park. Mike has numerous research publications in game theory and probability theory and has written data mining and simulation software. He is a nationally known authority on odds and gambling games and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows to discuss gambling and odds, including CNN, NBC's Dateline and ABC's World News Tonight. ABSTRACT Certain gambling games, such as roulette and craps, are games of pure chance: In repeated play, luck disappears, and the persistent gambler will go broke. Other gambling activities, such as betting on sports or the stock market, may involve an element of skill. One way to measure this is to compare the results of a gambling strategy with chance: A skillful strategy should produce long-run results that are better than would be achieved by someone who is just guessing. One can also compare a gambler’s losses with chance to see if the gambler is doing worse than chance would allow. I will discuss two recent projects that illustrate these concepts: • Automated data mining software discovers that the Baltimore Ravens are 17-3 versus the point spread when they lost their previous game and their opponents played their previous game on the road. Do situations like this give clever gamblers an edge or are such strong win-loss records merely random flukes? • A gambler loses $30 million betting at an online casino. Is it possible to lose this much just by chance or is the gambler being cheated? Or maybe the gambler is part of a money laundering scheme.