Saturday, February 4, 2012

Googland

Googland

[G] Gertrude Stein puts the “there” back in Oakland

Posted: 04 Feb 2012 01:54 AM PST

Inside Google Books: Gertrude Stein puts the "there" back in Oakland

By Matt Werner, Technical Writer, Enterprise

Gertrude Stein. (Courtesy Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.)

What exactly did renowned U.S. writer and art collector Gertrude Stein mean when she said "there is no there there" about Oakland, California? In honor of Gertrude Stein's 138th birthday today, we explore the meaning of this oft-quoted phrase.

In fall 2011, I attended the SF Museum of Modern Art's exhibit of Stein's groundbreaking Paris art collection. At the exhibit, a small display about her childhood in Oakland, California, sparked my interest. I was born in Oakland, and I'm currently writing a book about Oakland. I wondered what it was like for Gertrude Stein growing up there in the 1880s. I purchased The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas from the Google eBookstore to read about Stein's experiences in Paris and San Francisco with her companion, Alice Toklas. The more I read by Stein and saw how she plays with language, the more I wondered about the meaning of her "no there there" quote.



There is a "There" in Oakland. (Photo by Joe Sciarrillo)

Searching Google Books, I found the "no there there" quote on page 298 of Everybody's Autobiography, published in 1937. The full quote is:

"...what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there."

Searching the Google News archive, I found that dozens of articles over the last several decades used her quote. Searching Google Scholar, I found over 1,000 scholarly articles referencing her quote. But still, I wanted to learn more. What was Oakland like in the 1880s? I went to the Oakland History Room at the Oakland Main Library to find out.

Newspaper clippings from Stein's file in the Oakland History Room referencing her "there" quote.

Stein's family moved to Oakland in 1880, when she was six, and lived at the Tubbs Hotel their first year. Author Robert Louis Stevenson also stayed at this hotel from March to April, 1880.

Tubbs Hotel, Oakland, California. (Courtesy Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room)

Her family then moved to a home near today's 13th Avenue and East 25th Avenue. She lived in Oakland until 1891, and left at age 17 for Baltimore, after her parents passed away. Oakland was a much smaller town then, with a population of just under 35,000 in 1880.

Downtown Oakland in 1889. (Courtesy Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room)

Children playing in a water hole near where Stein grew up in Oakland in this 1884 photo. (Courtesy Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room)

Nearly 45 years later, Stein returned to Oakland on a lecture tour in 1935. By that time, the city had grown nearly 10 times to over 300,000 residents. When she tried to find her childhood home, it was no longer there. When she published Everybody's Autobiography two years later, saying there was "no there there," it was an expression of "painful nostalgia" about her home being gone and the land around it being completely changed. The house where she grew up was on a sprawling 10-acre plot surrounded by orchards and farms. By 1935, it had been replaced by dozens of houses. Oakland held a special significance to her, and on her return, she found that Oakland had urbanized and changed from the pastoral place she remembered.

Gertrude Stein writes in her autobiographical novel, The Making of Americans, about her childhood in Oakland, where a child "could have all anybody could want of joyous sweating, of rain and wind, of hunting, of cows and dogs and horses, of chopping wood, of making hay, of dreaming, of lying in a hollow all warm with the sun shining while the wind was howling." She won her first literary award as a student at Franklin School in Oakland for a piece she wrote about the sun "setting in a cavern of clouds." Returning to her home decades later to find it gone and to find Oakland no longer a place "of chopping wood, of making hay" struck her, and she wrote her famous "no there there" quote in response.

Stein's house, two miles south of this 1889 photo, was in a sparsely-populated section of Oakland. (Courtesy Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room)

When researching Stein at the Oakland History Room, the literary portrait file had photos of Jack London, a contemporary of Stein's, who also grew up in Oakland. The file included other famous authors who visited Oakland in the late 1800s, including Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Muir. Despite the misinterpretation of Stein's quote, there has always been a "there" in Oakland. Oakland has been blessed with several waves of artistic movements, stretching back to these authors. And in interviewing innovative artists and writers in Oakland today for my forthcoming book Oakland in Popular Memory, I've seen first-hand that now more than ever, there is a "there" in Oakland.
URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/gertrude-stein-puts-there-back-in.html

[G] Unicode over 60 percent of the web

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 10:27 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Unicode over 60 percent of the web

Computers store every piece of text using a "character encoding," which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for 'a' and 62 stands for 'b' in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ', ", or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.

Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Arabic (العربية), and even emoji symbols like or
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, there wasn't even enough room for all the English punctuation (like curly quotes), while Unicode has room for over a million characters. Unicode was first published in 1991, coincidentally the year the World Wide Web debuted—little did anyone realize at the time they would be so important for each other. Today, people can easily share documents on the web, no matter what their language.

Every January, we look at the percentage of the webpages in our index that are in different encodings. Here's what our data looks like with the latest figures*:

*Your mileage may vary: these figures may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. The graph lumps together encodings by script. We detect the encoding for each webpage; the ASCII pages just contain ASCII characters, for example. Thanks again to Erik van der Poel for collecting the data.

As you can see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase in "market share" since 2006. Note that we separate out ASCII (~16 percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you include ASCII, nearly 80 percent of web documents are in Unicode (UTF-8). The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you're surfing the web.

We've long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text Google searches and process: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 just released with over 110,000 characters; soon we'll be updating to that version and to Unicode's locale data from CLDR 21 (both via ICU). The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover. Without it, our unified index it would be nearly impossible—it'd be a bit like not being able to convert between the hundreds of currencies in the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to help people find information in almost any language.

Posted by Mark Davis, International Software Architect
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/unicode-over-60-percent-of-web.html

[G] This week's top news stories on YouTube

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 10:27 PM PST

YouTube Blog: This week's top news stories on YouTube

To help you learn about the big stories of the week, we're kicking off a new series from CitizenTube, a YouTube channel focusing on global news and politics.

Everyday on the CitizenTube channel (and @CitizenTube on Twitter), along with our curation partners @storyful, we look at how the top news stories are covered on YouTube. Each week, starting today, we'll post a weekly recap of the top news stories of the week, as seen through the lens of both citizen-reported footage and professional news coverage.


Olivia Ma, YouTube News & Politics Manager, recently watched "Inside Syria: Escalating violence pushes country toward full-blown war".


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/-sWwEuppJ88/this-weeks-top-news-stories-on-youtube.html

[G] Android and Security

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 03:09 PM PST

Google Online Security Blog: Android and Security

Posted by Adrian Ludwig, Android Security Engineer

We frequently get asked about how we defend Android users from malware and other threats. As the Android platform continues its tremendous growth, people wonder how we can maintain a trustworthy experience with Android Market while preserving the openness that remains a hallmark of our overall approach. We've been working on lots of defenses, and they have already made a real and measurable difference for our users' security. Read more about how we defend against malware in Android Market on the Google Mobile Blog here.
URL: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2012/02/android-and-security.html

[G] Madonna premieres “Give Me All Your Luvin” on YouTube

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 03:08 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Madonna premieres "Give Me All Your Luvin" on YouTube

Game day can't come soon enough? Get in the spirit today with the official premiere of Madonna's "Give Me All Your Luvin" featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. on YouTube. You can find the video on the Madonna YouTube Channel, along with teasers for her halftime show performance.







We'll also have her video up on the YouTube Ad Blitz Channel pre-game on Sunday, where you'll be able to view and vote for your favorite commercials.



Love the song and can't wait for the album? You can pre-order it now, and stay tuned to her Google+ profile for her latest news and behind-the-scenes photos leading up to the big game.



Craig McFadden, YouTube Partner Development, recently watched "'W.E.' - Official Trailer."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/Qq_I8NkMOy4/madonna-premieres-give-me-all-your.html

[G] A clearer view of the seafloor in Google Earth

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 03:08 PM PST

Google Lat Long: A clearer view of the seafloor in Google Earth


More than two-thirds of Earth is covered by oceans. If you drained all of that water away, you'd see huge basins that have never been explored, an undiscovered planet in our own backyard.

Today is the three year anniversary of an explorable ocean seafloor in Google Earth. We just released a major update to our global underwater terrain dataset, called bathymetry, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in partnership with NOAA, the US Navy, NGA, and GEBCO (with major contributions from JAMSTEC, IFREMER and IBCAO).

The update covers ocean topography from all over the globe and reveals our most accurate view of the seafloor to date. This new detail comes from spacecraft measurements of bumps and dips in the ocean surface as well as shipboard soundings from surveys carried out by over 40 countries. With this update to ocean terrain data in Google Earth, 15 percent of the seafloor is now available at 1 km resolution.

You may remember a Sun article reporting the discovery of a street grid where it's believed the lost city of Atlantis would have been located off the West Coast of Africa. The discovery turned out to be a data artifact related to the way data was collected from a ship sailing back and forth to survey an unknown area. This recent seafloor update has been improved to blend better, and "Atlantis" has again disappeared into legend.

Previous terrain data showed what appeared to be a city grid on the ocean floor (left), which was confused for the lost city of Atlantis. Updated data more accurately reflects the seafloor terrain (right).
(Click on image to enlarge)

Another place you'll notice an improvement in the ocean terrain data is the Mediterranean Sea, particularly south of Cyprus, where the boundary between the Eurasian and Arabian plates is now more clearly defined.

The Mediterranean Sea: before (left) and after (right)
(Click on image to enlarge)

Our last example shows improvements to the land-sea mask along the coastline of Guam. You'll notice a dramatic improvement in the resolution of both the coastline and neighboring Mariana's Trench, the deepest trench in the world.

Guam and Mariana's Trench before (left) and after (right)
(Click on image to enlarge)

In order to make this update possible, our partners at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD have curated 30 years of data from more than 8,000 ship cruises and 135 different institutions. If you'd like to get a closer look at these changes, watch our video tour of this new terrain.

We hope you enjoy diving deeper than ever in Google Earth!

Posted by Jamie Adams, Ocean Team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/02/clearer-view-of-seafloor-in-google.html
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