Do you like exotic places? Are you interested in science? Or are you concerned about global warming? If the answer to any one of these is a “Yes”, NASA has got something for you – The Operation Ice Bridge.
According to NASA, “this new NASA mission is the largest airborne survey of polar ice ever flown. It is also the most sophisticated, using the latest scientific instruments to give an unprecedented three-dimensional view of the ice sheets, floating ice shelves, and sea ice of both the Arctic and Antarctic…..the mission begins its new expedition: flying over western Antarctica in NASA’s DC-8 starting in October. The base of operations is Punta Arenas, Chile, at the very southern end of South America”. The introduction video can be found here.
The part I liked most are the tweets from aboard the DC-8 flight. Here is a sample -“Over Pine Island Bay … See icebergs in the dark blue water below, and milky-looking “grease ice.” They have also been posting some amazing pictures like this- http://twitpic.com/m31ru. With these tweets, blogs and YouTube videos, NASA is doing a good job of conveying its work to the outside world.
In a span of one week, Steve Jobs caught my attention twice. First, it was through a link of a YouTube video of Jobs’ speech at Stanford and the second, through a recent Businessweek article.
In the first case, one of my friends tweeted about Steve Jobs’ commencement address in 2005. The first time I came across this speech was 2 years back and at that time, I read the transcript but hadn’t seen the video. Here is beginning of the transcript
“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.” You can continue to read here.
The speech had simple language, was engaging and had some of Jobs’ powerful personal stories. Needless to say, I felt very inspired after reading it and had a great “feel good” experience.
A few weeks later, I got the chance to watch the video of the speech. Here it is.(I suggest you read the full text before watching the video).
The first thing I felt after watching the video was a sense of disappointment. The content was the same but the style of presentation was nothing extraordinary. For most part, it looked like Jobs was just reading the text without really looking engaged. The high expectations, derived from the text of the speech and also Jobs’ reputation as one of the best presenters in the world, obviously led to this disappointment. It showed that great prose does not necessarily make great speech. I was left wondering, why did this happen? At that time,I could not analyse deeper . But now, I got the answers from the Businessweek article that I had mentioned earlier.
The article is about a book, “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs” and it highlights the reasons why Jobs is such a great presenter. Watch the slideshow here to see what the author has to say. The author also has a video on the subject.
If you have watched this video, you will see why Jobs’ speech at Stanford was a letdown. He was just reading the text, he was not able to use his body effectively because of the gown, he had no visual aids and he was speaking outdoors on a sunny(hot?) day. It was also not a product launch but a commencement address, but most importantly, he was just recovering after a cancer surgery. That explains the relatively low stage presence and the energy level. If anything, it shows some of things that one should try to avoid while making a speech.
If you haven’t seen how the presentation of the real Steve Jobs’ look like, here are a few videos for you.I am sure each of us can learn something from it. Enjoy the videos.
Over the past few weeks, I started to notice something unusual. I haven’t been getting much emails in my inbox(gmail and yahoo) from my friends. Most of the emails I got were newsletters or alerts related to some payments.Soon I realised that this has been the case for quite a long time. Did it mean that, in this era of constant connectivity, I was rarely communicating with anyone? That didn’t sound right.
As I pondered over this, I realised that my friends and I rarely use emails anymore, but communicate through other means – google talk, Yahoo and Facebook chat, Orkut scraps and Facebook wall posts, Linkedin and Facebook messaging, not to forget Twitter. Does it all mean that the dominiant era of personal emails is over? Is the email, which was such a novelty only 10 years back, already facing obsolescence?
Wall Street Journal(WSJ) thinks so. In a recent article, WSJ declares that ” Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. ” The article talks about the easier and faster means of communication and how these are impacting email. It also compares the communication by “emails” and that by Google “Wave“. The article asks the question whether the faster means of communication is saving us time. It ends like this –
” You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.” How true!!!
So, will we soon see the death of personal emails? Will we one day say “Email, the dinosaur”? Quite possible.
PS: I came across this media count that shows the dynamism of the social web.
As I opened YouTube today, it’s logo caught my attention. It said – “YouTube 1BN – 1 billion views per day”. Clearly, YouTube has learned something from it’s parent, Google – the art of doodling.
Google has been using doodles since 2000 for a variety of occasions like Valentines day, Cricket World Cup 2007, Fifa World Cup, among others. This definitely adds to the fun-quotient of google search. Google takes doodling seriously, and as I learned today, it even organises a competition for K-12 students to come up with new Google Doodles. And these smart kids come up with impressive doodles(You can see some of them by clicking here).
One of Google’s recent doodles was the face of Gandhi to celebrate his 140th birth anniversary. And the latest doodle was that of a Barcode to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the barcode. Both these doodles got widespread media attention and helped make Google page look fresh. What will be next doodle from Google? Have to wait and wait.
Coming back to YouTube, it will be interesting to see how it goes about doodling in the future. Again, have to wait and see.
PS: Some older interesting Google doodles can be found here.
It all started with a casual conversation with one of my senior colleagues from Sweden. While having coffee together, he mentioned that people from Finland drink the most coffee in the world(on a per capita basis) – about 12 kg per year in 2007 (the similar figures for USA is 4.2 kg). He added that the other Scandinavian countries are at the top of this list. I found this very amazing and started to dig a bit deeper. Here is what I found.
The other top coffee consuming nations are Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden. It is quite easy to see the reason behind this. All these countries have extended winters and drinking coffee is one of ways to keep the people refreshed. It is perhaps not a coincidence then that Seattle, where people have to stay indoors for a big part of the year due to rain, is the Coffee-capital of USA. Starbucks was born in Seattle and so was Seattle’s Best Coffee. Another popular US coffee brand, Caribou Coffee was born in another cold state – Minnesota.
This might seem ironic because coffee is grown in tropical climate and was consumed extensively by people in the Arabian deserts, before spreading to Europe. And another interesting twist here is that, Starbucks and other coffee majors are putting so much of effort to convert a tea drinking nation like China to a coffee drinking one.
Speaking of coffee, one of the most unforgettable scenes in a movie comes from the Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson starrer ” The Bucket List” (Warning : spoilers ahead). Freeman(a mechanic) and Nicholson(a billionaire) are cancer patients and they become friends while sharing a hospital room. Nicholson has the habit of drinking only the costliest coffee in the world, Kupi Luwak(costing about 50 GBP per cup of espresso), and invites Freeman to try the coffee. Freeman politely refuses the coffee with a strange smile.
Later on, they create a “Bucket list” of activities that they want to do before dying. One of the items in Freeman’s list is to “laugh until I cry“. Together, they do most of the things in the list before they are discharged from the hospital. Sometime later, Freeman gets hospitalised again and Nicholson visits him. At that point, Freeman hands over a paper to Nicholson and asks him to read it. As he starts reading, Nicholson’s face turns red with embarassment, which prompts Freeman to “laugh till he cries”. Wonder why? Watch the video and find out for youself 🙂
