Posts tagged Global
NASA Launches Global Hackathon Challenge
Mar 13th
NASA is inviting all citizens of planet Earth to take part in a two-day coding marathon next month. Called the International Space Apps Challenge, the idea is to develop software for various purposes to support NASA’s mission. It is open to just about anyone interested, including “engineers, technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, students, and entrepreneurs.” The challenge will take place in several cities on all continents around the globe, including San Francisco, Santo Domingo, Sao Paulo, Nairobi, Tokyo and even on Antarctica at McMurdo Station.
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There are several challenges being put forth on their website, including developing hand-held hardware for upcoming space missions, determining the size of the Earth itself, access to a variety of NASA datasets and observations, and design a consistent open data API for NASA. Other challenges will be added as we get closer to launch time. The event is being held as partly to demonstrate NASA’s efforts towards open government initiatives, as well as to capture the attention of people who may not have any prior interest in space exploration.
The Earth measurement app will accomplish several things, for example, including how to take a noontime solar location fix, share that observation with others, and demonstrate how far off the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes was in his measurement thousands of years ago.
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Google Encrypted Search Going Global
Mar 6th
Encrypted search is expanding internationally for signed in Google users, Google announced yesterday. That means you can expect to find less search query data thanks to the default secure socket layer (SSL) Google has enabled on searches.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
SPONSOR MESSAGE: Realize The Enormous Potential Of Global Keyword Modeling – eSolutions Spotlight
Mar 1st
Lifting your keyword performance by 25% to 200% is a reality. Search Engine Land’s eSolution Spotlight is now featuring: The Bottom-Line Benefits of Global Keyword Modeling. Learn the misconceptions and benefits of Global vs. Local Optimization. Understand how global keyword-level modeling is…
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Wikileaks Lets Loose “Global Intelligence Files” from Stratfor Emails
Feb 26th
Early Monday morning (GMT), Wikileaks started publishing the first of “more than five million emails” from Strafor. The company, a “subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis” by its own description, is (according to Wikileaks) also a provider of “confidential intelligence services” to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and several governmental agencies like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Wikileaks claims – and it’s important to note up-front that it’s not verified – that it has emails from Stratfor showing “privileged information about the US government’s attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor’s own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks,” among other less than savory practices:
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There are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The emails also expose the revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States. Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money. The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.
The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the “Yes Men”, for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.
So far, Wikileaks has only released 167 files. Some of the documents released already include what is supposedly a forwarded email from Fred Burton about “The Dems & Dirty Tricks” following the last presidential election, dated November 7th, 2008. The email, which wouldn’t win any awards for political correctness, claims “the black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly and Ohio as reported the night of the election and Sen. McCain chose not to fight” and goes on to speculate about “sleezy Russian money [funneled] into O-mans coffers. A smoking gun has already been found.”
Wikileaks also claims that the emails show that Stratfor was using its intelligence to “start up a captive strategic investment fund” of “questionable legality.”
CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS : “What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like”. The emails show that in 2011 Goldman Sach’s Morenz invested “substantially” more than $4million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors. Throughout 2011, a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But, confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff : “Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral… It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor… we are already working on mock portfolios and trades”. StratCap is due to launch in 2012.
The email in question is titled “Labor Day Review of Where We Are.”
Other emails released show monitoring of The Yes Men for Dow Chemical, among other monitoring of Bhopal activists.
There’s a lot to dig through already, and there is meant to be a lot more to follow. The group says that it is working with more than 25 media organizations to make the body of documents public. “The organisations were provided access to a sophisticated investigative database developed by WikiLeaks and together with WikiLeaks are conducting journalistic evaluations of these emails. Important revelations discovered using this system will appear in the media in the coming weeks, together with the gradual release of the source documents.”
Given that Wikileaks has released fewer than 200 documents out of what it says is more than 5 million, we’ll be covering a lot more in the near future.
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4 Localization Tips for Savvy Global Businesses
Feb 17th
international websites are a serious game and require serious thought and attention. Here are some top tips on how to tackle the localization of your product’s website and online presence, and land gracefully on a cushion of dollar bills.
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Developing A Global SEO Diagnostics Plan – Search Engine Land
Feb 14th
 Search Engine Land |
Developing A Global SEO Diagnostics Plan
Search Engine Land A positive trend I have seen over the past few months is companies adopting a dedicated SEO diagnostics person or integrating SEO diagnostics into existing web diagnostics protocols. I have seen a huge missed opportunity, especially with global … Basic SEO Troubleshooting With XML Sitemaps |
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Developing A Global SEO Diagnostics Plan
Feb 14th
A positive trend I have seen over the past few months is companies adopting a dedicated SEO diagnostics person or integrating SEO diagnostics into existing web diagnostics protocols. I have seen a huge missed opportunity, especially with global companies, that don’t take the action to monitor page…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Global SEO: Giving Visitors a Passport to Your Content – ClickZ
Feb 8th
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Global SEO: Giving Visitors a Passport to Your Content
ClickZ Many large organizations that operate on a global scale struggle with organizing SEO strategies across content owners within each country. Oftentimes, businesses will opt for what's easier and host their country-specific content on one main domain … |
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Global Keyword Bid Optimization With OptiMine
Feb 6th
OptiMine is Bid Optimization Software that claims it “improves paid search results by 25 percent or more and backs up the results with the industry’s only performance-based price guarantee.” OptiMine is focused on maximizing the performance of paid search campaigns to achieve financial goals. Their strategy is to analyze the individual click, cost, conversion and [...]
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How YouTube is Part of a Global Economic Transformation
Feb 2nd
The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it’s a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site’s total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences.
Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throws of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That’s a recipe for good times.
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YouTube now hosts more than 500,000 educational videos, on a wide variety of topics. The new mobile-friendly iTunes U also offers 500,000 educational resources and says that 60% of its viewership comes from outside the United States. This global consuption of US-created online educational content may be the newest chapter in a radical transformation of global education over the past 50 years. Life in this world is not like it used to be just a few decades ago, and the availability of world-class education on-demand, at almost no cost, is likely to help things change all the more as this century unfolds.
Global Transformation
“During the past 50 years, the expansion of education has contributed to a fundamental transformation of societies in OECD countries,” wrote the authors of this year’s lengthy report Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. (500 page PDF, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)
“In 1961, higher education was the privilege of the few, and even upper secondary education was denied to the majority of young people in many countries. Today, the great majority of the population completes secondary education, one in three young adults has a tertiary degree [Colleges, universities and polytechnics] and, in some countries, half of the population could soon hold a tertiary degree.”
In other words, it’s not an uneducated world gaining its first access to the information available in these free online education repositories. What’s happening is augmentation of already historic global education levels.
Below: The United States used to be the most educated society in the world. That’s no longer true. Click to view full size. From the OECD.
“Half a century ago, employers in the United States and Canada recruited their workforce from a pool of young adults, most of whom had high school diplomas and one in four of whom had degrees – far more than in most European and Asian countries,” reports the OECD. “Today, while North American graduation rates have increased, those of some other countries have done so much faster, to the extent that the United States now shows just over the average proportion of tertiary-level graduates at age 25-34.”
“It has become increasingly evident that to realise human potential in today’s societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling.” – OECD
The OECD recognizes that formal education has a meaningful connection to economic development, but that the two are not equivelant. “The level of education that an adult has completed may be a proxy for the competencies that contribute to economic success, but it is a highly imperfect measure,” the report says.
“First, each country has its own different processes and standards for accrediting completion of secondary or tertiary education. Second, the knowledge and skills acquired in education are by no means identical to those that enhance economic potential. And third, it has become increasingly evident that to realise human potential in today’s societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling.” (emphasis added)
That lifelong learning no doubt contributes to the global audience that amasses around this educational content online. For a high school teacher to be able to give their lectures not to 30 students at a time, but to 100,000 viewers around the world on YouTube has got to be a powerful opportunity. If many of those viewers are adults, so be it.
What’s hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills. Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve.
Learning new information that helps inform our understanding of the world is, in fact, growing more important for economic well-being than the development of routine skills.
According to a presentation (10 page PDF) by Francesc Pedró, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Research and Information, OECD, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic change in the types of skills in demand in the workforce. A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for “routine manual skills” has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What’s hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills.
Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.
Disruption
“A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it,” writes radical Canadian educator Joe Bower in a summary of last month’s 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden.
A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading…
“The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise.”
Good luck, teachers of the world, keeping up with the Internet. It’s great to hear that so many are embracing change, surely caused by technology, as an opportunity and not a threat.
That’s the kind of life-long learning that professional development has always required but that will go on in a global context for perpetual learning with increasing access to high-quality educational content online.
That’s a recipe for a very different world than the one we lived in last century.
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