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Posted by Ross Koningstein, Engineer, Google RE<C team

Cross-posted with the Open Source at Google Blog

Google’s RE<C renewable energy research project has recently open sourced a new tool and a significant amount of data to support future CSP (concentrating solar power) heliostat development.




HOpS Open Source Site

HOpS, heliostat optical simulation, is an open source software tool for accurately and efficiently performing optical simulations of fields of heliostats, the actuated mirror assemblies that direct sunlight onto a target in CSP applications.



Google used this tool to help evaluate heliostat field layouts and calculate heat input into a CSP receiver for power production. HOpS works by passing "packets" of light between optical elements (the sun, heliostats, and elements of the target surface), tracking shadowing and blocking masks along the way. For our analysis goals, this approach gave our researchers more flexibility and accuracy than analytic tools (such as DELSOL or HFLCAL), and it was easier to set up for thousands of runs than using ray tracers. Output from the simulation includes heliostat efficiency, target irradiance, and more, while an included shell script facilitates plotting heat maps of the output data using gnuplot.


REC-CSP Open Source Site

The REC_CSP open source project contains data sets and software useful for designing cheaper heliostats.


Available on the project site are:

1. Thirty days of three-dimensional wind measurement data taken with ultrasonic anemometers (sampled at ~7 Hz), recorded at several near surface elevations.  The data is presented in the RE<C wind data collection document and is available for download on the open source site here.





2. A collection of heliostat aerodynamic load data obtained in a NASA wind tunnel and graphically represented in the appendix.  This data is available for download on the open source site here.



3. Matlab software for high-precision, on-target heliostat control with built-in simulation for testing. This is essentially the same software used in the RE<C heliostat control demonstrations and described in the accelerometer sensing and control system design documents.  The source code is available for download here.

Our business at Google is rooted in STEM and CS, so we’re passionate about supporting organizations that are expanding access to these fields, especially for students who might not have the opportunity otherwise. The annual Google Roots in Science and Engineering (RISE) program supports organizations running innovative STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and CS (computer science) enrichment programs for K-12 and university students around the world.


This year, the Google in Education group received a record number of inspiring applications for RISE. We expanded the awards to include Sub-Saharan Africa, and in total, we’re awarding more than $340,000 in funding to 13 U.S., eight European and five African organizations.

Our recipients are diverse, ranging from girls robotics teams building high-tech machinery in Nairobi to after-school programs that have students configuring cluster computers in Salt Lake City. Below are just a few of the outstanding organizations receiving RISE awards this year for their efforts in advancing CS and STEM education:

United States

• Santa Clara Valley Society of Women Engineers, San Jose, California. GetSET is a program created for underrepresented ethnic minority girls in the San Francisco Bay Area to expose them to engineering while building self confidence through leadership workshops, tours of technology companies and participation in team-building exercises.
• Saturday Academy, Portland, Oregon. Saturday Academy serves 2nd-12th grade students from Oregon and SW Washington with high quality and creative learning opportunities taught by STEM experts, including hands-on, real world activities that create meaningful connections between academic content and practical application.

Europe

• Frauennetzwerk Informatik at Universität Passau, Passau, Germany. University students from Passau act as ambassadors for computer science, engineering and math by reaching out to juniors and seniors at their former high schools and running workshops on topics like robotics and mobile app development. Ambassadors go on to serve as mentors to the students throughout their high school and college careers.
• The Centre for Academic Achievement, Dublin, Ireland. This center runs free after school educational classes in a university setting for bright primary school students from disadvantaged areas. Each term, students from 32 local primary schools have the opportunity to study science, math and engineering subjects and are encouraged to pursue college degrees in the future.

Sub Saharan Africa

• Savana Signatures, Tamale, Ghana. Savana Signatures educates youth and women, building their capacity to access information for the benefit of Ghana’s social and economic development.
• Fundi Bots, Kampala, Uganda. Fundi Bots is a technology outreach program for students in high school and university that uses robotics to introduce young children to the endless possibilities of technology in both their day-to-day lives and potential careers.

Organizations interested in applying for 2013 funding can sign up for more information here. We look forward to hearing about all the great work being done in CS and STEM education.

Posted by Roxana Shirkhoda, K-12 Education Outreach

By Rania Hadi, MENA Outreach Manager

View this post in Arabic

Building on a year packed with g|days throughout the Middle East and North Africa, today we are announcing Google MENA’s first 2012 event to kick off the new year. On March 24-25, Google, in collaboration with Badir Technology Incubator, will be hosting our second event in the Kingdom: g|saudi arabia 2.0.

We’re coming to Jeddah with a host of fresh sessions on all things technology and business. Google engineers, product managers, and business leaders will be there to not only deliver trainings but will be available for any questions, ideas, or discussions you may want to have. We’re also planning some new formats: hands-on workshops, dedicated sessions for women in technology, and chances to showcase Saudi’s finest developer talent.

So if you are a developer, programmer, IT professional, entrepreneur, or small business/start-up, you won’t want to miss this event! If you need more convincing, have a look at the fun, enthusiasm and energy from last year.




Rania Hadi has been with Google since 2004 and now works on Outreach in MENA. She focuses on building relationships and promoting Google technologies with the developer and tech communities.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

We’re very pleased to announce the release of AdCatalog v1 for the iOS platform. AdCatalog is a sample project that demonstrates how to incorporate banner and interstitial ad units into your application. In particular, AdCatalog showcases implementations for two standard banner ad sizes—320x50 and 300x250—and several use cases for interstitial ad units: basic, app launch splash screen, in-between game levels, and before playing a stored video.

AdCatalog can be downloaded as a zip from our google-mobile-dev project. Additionally, feel free to clone the repository or examine the source from the checkout page. In version 2, we’ll be looking to add even more advanced layout options to our banner scenario, so be sure to stay tuned. As usual, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, or feature requests, we appreciate hearing the feedback on our developer forum.

 - Wes Goodman, AdMob Team

As Web sites transition more and more into Web applications, working with files in meaningful ways is becoming increasingly important. Starting with Platform Preview 2, IE10 includes support for the File API, enabling developers to read and slice files on the client. Platform Preview 4 adds support for BlobBuilder, a way for developers to create new files. IE10 also has two new methods that allow the user to save blobs to their computer, enabling great end-to-end experiences when working with client-resident data.

Over on the IE Test Drive, we have a fun piano demo showing off BlobBuilder and File API capabilities. When you press notes on the piano, the site constructs two files: an mp3 music file and an SVG file of the musical score. You can see how the size of both files change each time you press a note. Press the play button to listen to your song, or download either the music file or the SVG score file by pressing the links just above the piano keys. In the rest of this blog post I’ll go through how the demo works, focusing on the capabilities of BlobBuilder and File API.

BlobBuilder Capabilities

BlobBuilder, like the name implies, is a way to build blobs on the client. The main method to do this is append. The append function accepts three data types:

• Blob objects
• Plain text
• Array Buffers

The piano demo creates the mp3 file by appending blobs together, using one blob for each note. The demo creates the SVG file of the musical score by appending text that contains the SVG source.

getBlob is another method available on the BlobBuilder object which returns a blob object containing all the items previously appended. Here is a very simple example that uses BlobBuilder to create a text file:

// The BlobBuilder constructor is prefixed in all browsers.

// Use MSBlobBuilder in IE, MozBlobBuilder in Firefox, and WebKitBlobBuilder in WebKit-based browsers.

var bb = new MSBlobBuilder();

 

bb.append("Hello World!");

var blob1 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");

One thing to note about the getBlob method is that when you call getBlob in IE10 and Firefox, it will clear out the contents of the BlobBuilder object, so the next time you call append it will be as if you were appending into a new BlobBuilder object. WebKit does not currently clear out the contents of the BlobBuilder after calling getBlob. Consider this example:

var bb = new MSBlobBuilder();

bb.append("Hello World!");

var blob1 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");

bb.append("BlobBuilder is great");

var blob2 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");

In all browsers, blob1 will contain the text “Hello World!”. However, blob2 will be different. In IE10 and Firefox, blob2 will contain the text “BlobBuilder is great” while in WebKit-based browsers it will contain the text “Hello World!BlobBuilder is great”. This discrepancy is still under discussion in the Web Applications working group.

Getting Blobs via XHR

The File API makes it easy to access files selected by the user, something I demonstrated in the Magnetic Poetry demo. This is great when you want to incorporate the users own data into your site. However, in the piano demo, I needed the note files to be built into the demo. When you want to work with blobs but you want to supply the data, you can use XHR.

New to IE10 is the XHR responseType property. The responseType property supports four values: blob, array buffer, text, and document. In the piano demo’s initialization method - getBlobs() - you’ll see the following:

var req = new XMLHttpRequest();

var url = 'PianoNotes/AllNotes2.mp3';

req.open('GET', url, false);

req.responseType = "blob";

req.onload = function () { /* ... */ };

req.send(null);

One thing you may notice is that the demo only makes a single XHR request. It only downloads one file which contains all the notes used in the demo. However, when you press a key in the demo, only a single note plays and the site appends only a single note to the mp3 file. To make that work, after downloading the file containing all the notes, the site slices the file using the File API slice method and extracts 24 individual notes. This is a great performance savings versus having to download 24 individual files.

Creating the Music File

Once I have a blob for each note in the demo, creating the mp3 file is easy. Each time you press a key I call:

musicBlobBuilder.append(noteBlob);

In order to update the file size, I get the blob and then get the file size.

var musicBlob = musicBlobBuilder.getBlob("audio/mp3");

// display musicBlob.size

Lastly because I know that the BlobBuilder object was cleared out when I called getBlob I just append the blob back in:

musicBlobBuilder.append(musicBlob);

Creating the SVG File

Each time you press a key in the demo, you see a note added to the musical score. The musical score is drawn by a single SVG element contained within a div with an id of “scoreContainer.” Each time you press a key, script runs which adds a note to the SVG element and then the SVG file is created by appending the source:

svgBlobBuilder.append(document.getElementById("scoreContainer").innerHTML);

var svgBlob = svgBlobBuilder.getBlob("image/svg+xml");

// display svgBlob.size

In this case, I don’t refill the svgBlobBuilder because I want to start with a clean slate the next time the user presses a key.

Saving Files to Disk

The last part of the demo is saving the files to disk. When you press the “Music File” and “Musical Score File” links on top of the piano keys you will be able to save the file though an experience that feels just like downloading a file:

Note that the notification bar is not available in the Platform Previews. Instead, a save dialog is presented.

Each link calls either saveSong() or saveSheetMusic(). Looking into each of these methods will reveal that they use the msSaveOrOpenBlob function:

window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(svgBlob, "MusicScore.svg");

msSaveOrOpenBlob and msSaveBlob are two methods available in IE10 which let sites ask the user to save a blob to their computer.

Calling msSaveOrOpenBlob will provide an option on the notification bar to open the file in addition to saving or canceling. Calling msSaveBlob only provides the option to save the file or cancel. Though these functions are not yet included in any standard, we believe they are extremely useful for writing end to end scenarios with blob data and hope that they might become a standard at some point.

Creating the Piano demo was a fun experience and I’m excited to see how you will use BlobBuilder. Let us know what you think!

—Sharon Newman, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Everybody likes a faster web, and that theme has been evident this week here on Google Code Blog. On Monday, Yuchung Cheng wrote about Google’s research into making TCP faster through various proposals and experiments. Yesterday, Roberto Peon and Will Chan blogged about SPDY (pronounced speedy), Google’s protocol for speeding up the web’s application layer historically handled by HTTP. In related news this week, the chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group announced support for SPDY in a public post.

At Google, these projects are part of our Make the Web Faster initiative, although TCP improvements and SPDY are efforts of the whole community. Even if you’re not working on TCP or SPDY, you can find lots of useful resources at our Make the Web Faster site. For example, there are articles on compression, caching, metrics, and more, a set of tools for measuring and optimizing pages, and several discussion forums for communicating with other interested folks.

Sometimes stronger is more important than faster. Scientists looking to improve the durability of machinery have been studying the yellow fattail scorpion, which uses bumps on its back to resist damage from sandstorms. Researchers hope to use the scorpion’s design to create erosion-resistant surfaces for blades, pipes, and similar parts. Or maybe they’ll make machines that look like giant yellow scorpions.

Finally, take a step back from everything on Earth and have a look at NASA’s latest "Blue Marble" images of our planet. We have a beautiful home.


Let’s say this fast: Fridaygram posts are just for fun. Fridaygrams are designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds. That definitely includes speed, space, and scorpions.

by Claudine Zap

Two teens from Toronto successfully launched a Lego figure into near space -- and launched a storm of interest on the Web.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, 17-year-old classmates at Agincourt Collegiate Institute, took four months, many Saturdays, and $400 to carry a Lego figurine and four cameras miles above the earth, a project that the two did for fun, not for class.

"We didn't really believe we could do it until we did," Ho told the Toronto Star. You can see the video they made, using the stunning photos of the Lego man 78,000 feet off the ground, here.

The video of the Lego man in near space has gone viral, with 570,000 views and counting. Searches on Yahoo! for "lego man in space" have soared 325% in just one day.

The high school students, both seniors, were inspired by a video of a similar project undertaken by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The DIY contraption included a GPS locator so the students could track the weather balloon (a professional-grade one they purchased online) once it landed. Using a website that calculates a weather balloon's landing position based on coordinates and variables like wind speed, the two waited to launch the object until the timing was right for a Canadian landing.

The video shows the two-inch high LEGO man holding a Canadian flag flying high above Earth and the clouds, until the tilt of the earth's axis can be seen. And then the balloon pops, sending the Lego guy back to the ground in a mere 32 minutes.

Ho and Muhammad may still be walking on air with all the accolades they've received for their successful project. The teens have been offered cameras from Canon and asked to speak at an engineering competitions, and they've been given funds to cover the cost of the project. Even Lego sent its congratulations.

Not bad for two kids who haven't even found out yet where they're going to college.

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Posted by Patrick Ryan, Policy Counsel, Open Internet

Last year, we were excited about the effort initiated by the U.S. government to promote cloud adoption through the Cloud First initiative. Through this initiative, the federal government declared that taxpayers' money should be used in a more productive way, and having the government run its own data centers (more than 2,000 of them) didn't make sense. They’ve targeted the shutdown of more than 1,000 in what they call their “year of change in federal IT,” saving more than $2 billion in taxpayer money. Through leading by example, the federal government went Google with several large agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Government Services Agency (GSA). They join other public entities like the states of Wyoming, and Utah, Washington DC, and the cities of Orlando and Pittsburgh. Also, quasi-public entities have embraced Google Apps, including more than 61 of the top 100 U.S. universities.

In 2012, we hope to see the same movement in Europe. On January 26th, the European Commission's Vice President Neelie Kroes announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos the European Cloud Partnership, and they're backing it with an investment of 10 million EUR to create "a strong common basis for cloud procurement by public authorities." Commissioner Kroes also addressed many of the concerns about local clouds in a decisive way:

“There is one thing that does not make sense and I want to be clear about it: The Cloud Partnership, and indeed our overall Cloud Computing strategy, is not about building a European super-cloud, neither outright nor by forcing the integration of existing public cloud infrastructures. Cloud business models, and the set-up of cloud suppliers' and publicly-run data centres, should be determined by efficiency considerations on the market.”

We believe that the European Cloud Partnership will be a positive thing for public authorities, not just in Europe, but around the world. According to recent studies, the Internet already accounts on average for 3.4% of GDP in a group of 13 emerging and developed economies, helps to spur economic growth and initiatives like this will help to promote its positive economic impact further.