sex on the internet, the realities of porn, sexual privacy

http://googletechtalks.blogspot.com/

Speaker: Violet Blue
Violet Blue is the best-selling, award-winning author and
editor of twenty books on sex and sexuality, all currently in print, a
number of which have been translated into several languages; she has
contributed to a number of nonfiction anthologies. Violet is a sex
educator who lectures at UC's and community teaching institutions, and
writes about erotica, pornography, sexual pleasure and health for
major publications and blogs. She is a professional sex blogger and
femmebot; an author at Metroblogging San Francisco (Metblogs); a
correspondent for Geek Entertainment Television; she is on the Gawker
Media payroll as girl friday contibutor and editor at Fleshbot; in
January 2007, Violet was named a Forbes Web Celeb 25. She is a San
Francisco native and human blog. Violet is the sex columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle with a weekly column titled Open Source Sex,
and has a podcast of the same name that frequents iTunes' top ten

THIRST: How to Dig a Well

Google Tech Talks
October, 22 2007

ABSTRACT

Antonio Gutierrez presents an opportunity to hear firsthand accounts of the progress and hope in the lives of the native people in Benin and Togo, Western Africa. Antonio has spent 20 years bringing hope to this region through extensive human development projects that have had far-reaching benefits. He speaks Bariba and Mokolle, languages spoken in Benin, as well as French, Spanish, and English. He will
recount his experiences in Africa and explain the low-tech ways he and his community work to solve challenging socio-economical and infrastructural problems. His ability to overcome cultural and political obstacles has made his endeavors in improving living conditions there successful. He is a model worker whose efforts have caught the attention of people, here in California, who are establishing a partnership with Antonio in order to bolster the impact of his work.

More information about the projects Antonio is undertaking can be found at http://baobabhi.org. Baobab Humanity Initiative is a grassroots

California-based nonprofit organization, which supports the work of Antonio Gutierrez.

Speaker: Antonio Gutierrez

django: Web Development for Perfectionists with Deadlines

Kaplan-Moss ABSTRACT Django is one of the premier web frameworks for Python, and is often compared to Ruby-on-Rails. Jacob is one of the lead developers on Django.

Debugging Backwards in Time

Bil Lewis is a computer scientist who has worked on natural language understanding, expert systems, language design, and programming tools. He studied at Ripon College, the University of Indiana, and Penn. He has taught at Stanford and for numerous companies. He has worked at Stanford Research Institute, the FMC AI Center, and Sun Microsystems. He wrote "GNU Emacs Lisp", the "Threads Primer", "Multithreaded Programming with PThreads", and "Multithreaded Programming with Java".
ABSTRACT What if a debugger could allow you to simply step BACKWARDS? Instead of all that hassle with guessing where to put breakpoints and the fear of typing "continue" one too many times... What if you could simply go backwards to see what went wrong?
This is the essence of the "Omniscient Debugger" -- it remembers everything that happened during the run of a program, and allows the programmer to "step backwards in time" to see what happened at any point of the program. All variable values, all objects, all method calls, all exceptions are recorded and the programmer can now look at anything that happened at any time.

How To Break Web Software - A look at security vulnerabilities in web software

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mike Andrews
Mike Andrews is a senior consultant who specializes in software security and leads the web application security assessments and Ultimate Web Hacking classes for Foundstone.
ABSTRACT It all started out as a place to share physics documents, but has grown into potentially mankind's largest and most complex creation. The World Wide Web is a lot of things - a soapbox for everyone, a giant shopping mall, an application platform, and unfortunately a hacker's playground.
As more applications get "web-ified" moving from the desktop or legacy systems onto the web, attackers follow the vulnerabilities. Without sophisticated tools or "1337 5x1llz", web applications are now the most attacked technology, with the majority of attacks categorized as "easily exploitable".
So, before your application is placed out into one of the most hostile environments, how do you stop your software from being "0wn3d" by the 14 year old in their blacked-out bedroom, or being used by a Russian crime cartel?
In this TechTalk, Mike Andrews will look at how web applications are attacked, walk through a testing framework for evaluating the security of an application and take some deep-dives into a few interesting and common vulnerabilities and how they can be exploited.

An Inside Look at Google

I've represented Google at many events for women in engineering, and I'm always asked the same thing: "What's it like to work there?" I certainly don't mind discussing the subject, but I often think it would be great if more people could see it for themselves. Well, now you can. We invite you to take a sneak peek inside Google and hear straight from some of our female engineers what life here is really like.
Of course, our goal of recruiting as many gifted female engineers as we can also means encouraging young women who are still in school. So I'd like to issue a hearty congrats to the winners of this year's Anita Borg scholarships.
- Jen Fitzpatrick, Engineering Director, Google

Human Computation

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2005. Previously, Luis obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Fellowship.
ABSTRACT Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.
I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. I also explain a general approach for constructing games with a purpose.

Top 10 Google Tech Talks

1. Python and Python 3000. Two talks about the Python language given by its inventor Guido van Rossum. The first is about the language’s origins and the second is about its future.
2. How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). Really liked this talk. Really liked it! Given by the lead developers of SubVersion (and other large projects), this talk provides a guide to working as a team. Next time I lead a project, I am going to ask everyone to watch this before starting work.
3. Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge. The story of the robot race thru the mojave desert. Having been on a Grand Challenge team, I appreciate just how hard it was to win.
4. Scrum, et al. An excellent talk about the Scrum agile software development methodology.
5. Wikipedia and MediaWiki. A talk about the implementation of Wikipedia given by it original, and for a long time, only paid staff developer. Not a very dynamic talk, but the insider perspective is interesting.
6. Computers versus Common Sense. Doug Lenet gives a talk about the famous AI project Cyc. I thought this project was put to rest a long time ago. Guess I was wrong. Anyways, if you like symbolic Artifical Intelligence, its a really interesting talk.
7. Scholarly Data, Network Science, and (Google) Maps. A very good information visualization talk.
8. 15 Views of a Node Link Graph: An Information Visualization Portfolio. A bunch of visualization techniques. I think Tamara Munzner leads some of the most interesting visualization work anywhere.
9. Human Computation. A talk about harnessing human knowledge for tasks such as spam filtering and image recognition.
10. Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation at Google. A talk about the experience of using Scrum given by one of its inventors.