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How was information used before the age of Google? Cookbooks showed people how to make new dishes; instructions packed with disassembled toys carried the terror-filled message “some assembly required” and ensured hours of labor on Christmas Eve for millions of parents. Today, people “Google”, but this kind of information gathering has occurred since the seventeenth century.

The post How Americans found information before the Internet appeared first on OUPblog.

We look at some of the latest high-profile vr animation projects, and offer some thoughts on this new animation frontier.

The post Observations from the VR Front: ‘Pearl,’ Invasion!’ and ‘Allumette’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Everyone wants a piece of the feature animation pie, including Google.

The post Google Enters Feature Animation Distribution With ‘Bling’ Deal appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The film is directed by Shannon Tindle, who also came up with the idea for Laika's "Kubo and the Two Strings."

The post Google’s Spotlight Stories Unveils Trailer For Interactive ‘On Ice’ Short appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

On 7 January, 2016, I asked Google, “what religion is Barack Obama”? After considering the problem for .42 seconds, Google offered more than 34 million “results.” The most obvious answer was at the top, accentuated by a rectangular border, with the large word “Muslim.” Beneath that one word read the line, “Though Obama is a practicing Christian and he was chiefly raised by his mother and her Christian parents…” Thank you, Google.

The post What religion is Barack Obama? appeared first on OUPblog.

"Special Delivery" is the most widely available short from Google's Spotlight Stories initiative thanks to a move to the YouTube 360 platform.

The post Aardman’s Interactive Short ‘Special Delivery’ Is Now Available on YouTube 360 appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

What were the most popular books at the Google Play store this year? The data team crunched the numbers and announced that E.L. James claimed the number one spot.

In total, James captured five slots on this year’s list. Some of the other titles on the list include Paper Towns by John Green, Allegiant by Veronica Roth, and The Giver by Lois Lowry.

James, Green, and Roth were all featured on the 2014 list. Below, we’ve collected free samples of all the books from the 2015 top ten for your reading pleasure.

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

2. Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian by E.L. James

3. Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James

4. Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James

5. American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, and Jim DeFelice

6. The Girl on the Train: A Novel by by Paula Hawkins

7. Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn

8. The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir

9. Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle by E.L. James

10. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Google Play Books will introduce a new feature to make it easier to read comics on digital devices. Henceforth, users will be able to view a comic in “landscape mode” and vertically scroll as they read.

Here’s more from the blog post announcement: “Reading a comic book is all about following the story and enjoying the art, dialogue and pace the way you want. But navigating a comic can be tricky on a small phone or tablet screen…Flip your device on its side and you can easily scroll through the story with quick vertical swipes.”

For the time being, this upgrade will only be available to Android phone users. The Google team is celebrating by offering a selection of issues from a variety of popular comic series free of charge for the next week. The free comics will come from The X-Files, Lazarus, and Jem and the Holograms.

It is hard to quantify the impact of ‘role-model’ celebrities on the acceptance and uptake of genetic testing and bio-literacy, but it is surely significant. Angelina Jolie is an Oscar-winning actress, Brad Pitt’s other half, mother, humanitarian, and now a “DNA celebrity”. She propelled the topic of familial breast cancer, female prophylactic surgery, and DNA testing to the fore.

The post The Angelina Jolie effect appeared first on OUPblog.

Recently Google Inc. was ordered to remove nine search results after the Information Commissioner’s office (ICO) ruled that they linked to information about a person that was no longer relevant. Almost ten years ago, that individual had committed a minor criminal offence and he recently put on a request to Google that related search results be removed, in compliance with the decision of the European Court of Justice in Google Spain.

The post The power of the algorithm appeared first on OUPblog.

Title: Cardboard
Platform: Android and iOS
Cost: Free

It's more than a high-tech Viewmaster. Google Cardboard that takes advantage of the gyroscope in your phone to replicate 365 degree, stereoscopic viewing. Cardboard itself is an app which helps you get started, calibrate your device, and learn to manipulate the navigation and controls. A whole stable of apps and games build upon the Cardboard concept, but the populist VR trend is so new that the content is very uneven. Even in Google's demo, the international capitals captured through Street View pale next to the underwater landscape of the Great Barrier Reef.

Google Cardboard is truly low-barrier. It works as well with Android as with iOS, so more students can use it, manufactured Cardboard cases are inexpensive and you can download a kit to create your own headset.

Some of the apps viewed through the Cardboard headset offer the most generational kinesthetic gaming improvement since the Wii. I use Cardboard to play Debris Defrag, what is essentially an immersive version of Asteroids that makes having a space gun seem absolutely fantastic. The virtual reality experience itself is leaps and bounds beyond holding your phone at arm's length to view a HistoryPin photo screen or an Aurasma layer.

All those online video watchers can use Cardboard as another wrinkle to their experience. I spent a lot of time looking at standard video through Cardboard Viewers, but it was kind of like watching 2D television on a 3D television set, the effect was minimal. It seems to work more as a way to experience high concept video and games that others have created. I had a much better experience exploring the products posted by savvy marketers capitalizing on the nature of the medium. The North Face has a fun video. For teens waiting on the Oculus Rift, Cardboard is a fun stopgap.

Our App of the Week Archive features more great apps. Got a suggestion for App of the Week? Let us know.

Cut through the clutter with our handy guide to the must-see animation events happening in San Diego this year.

Google's interactive film division has announced four new animation projects, and introduced a developer's kit that allows anyone to produce interactive animation.

Do neighbourhoods matter to outcomes? Which classroom interventions improve educational attainment? How should we raise money to provide important and valued public goods? Do energy prices affect energy demand? How can we motivate people to become healthier, greener, and more cooperative? These are some of the most challenging questions policy-makers face. Academics have been trying to understand and uncover these important relationships for decades.

The post Field experimenting in economics: Lessons learned for public policy appeared first on OUPblog.

Where would old literature professors be without energetic postgraduates? A recent human acquisition, working on the literary sociology of pulp science fiction, has introduced me to the intellectual equivalent of catnip: Google Ngrams. Anyone reading this blog must be tech-savvy by definition; you probably contrive Ngrams over your muesli. But for a woefully challenged person like myself they are the easiest way to waste an entire morning since God invented snooker.

The post Literary fates (according to Google) appeared first on OUPblog.

Title: Google Handwriting

Cost: Free

Platform: Android (4.0.3 or later)

Google Handwriting is an app that works as an alternate keyboard to give Android users access to data wells through your scribbles.

Apps like Penultimate and Evernote have long enable handwriting input for searching content, but Google is a more "full-featured" handwriting-to-digital-text tool.

The really exceptional thing about Google Handwriting is how exponentially more accurate the writing-to-text translations manage to be, however sketchy the writing, as demonstrated below:

Part of the reason for the prediction quality: Google's optical text recognition has fine-tuned through Google Book project. Predictably, you can add your feedback on the accuracy of the handwriting translation to their database, but the default leaves this in-app reporting off.

You can double-tap any datawell to activate the handwriting input. As you write, your words are translated dynamically into a field just above, with three predictions to choose between, in a continuous ribbon. A green arrow serves to "enter" your input, or your can touch to toggle between fields. The handwriting input option works especially well when paired with Google Keep, which provides an ample space to jot.

And Google Handwriting perhaps most intriguingly, allows you to draw emojis, predicated on your familiarity with emojis.

I can see Google Handwriting being of real utility for those with Samsung Note phablets as well as for those who never learned their QWERTY keys. But even for touch typists, it's good to experience the web through another input and, like playing around with voice control, provides a way to experience web searching and navigation from a different perspective.

Check out more great Apps in our App of the Week archive. Have an idea for an App you'd like us to spotlight? Let us know.

According to Bloomberg Business, Twitter has reached a deal with Google to have its Tweets appear in Google’s search results. This is huge news for businesses that use Twitter as part of their social media marketing. As of February 4th, the deal wasn’t made public. Some of the technicalities were being worked out. But, the author, Sarah Frier, said, “In the first half of this year, tweets

Google has analyzed the searches that took place during 2014. The company has unveiled the ten books that were trending throughout this year.

Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird claimed the top spot on this list. The other nine titles come from a variety of different genres; almost all of them have become hit bestsellers and award winners.

We’ve collected free samples of all the books on the list for your reading pleasure after the jump. What do you think?
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Google Play has published “The Year in Entertainment,” a list of the most popular content downloaded from its store in 2014.

The top 9 News Sources of the Year were:

1. The New York Times

2. TMZ

3. Forbes Now

4. The Verge

5. The Huffington Post

6. The Daily Beast

7. The Wall Street Journal

8. Gizmodo

9. Android Central

You can read the complete list of the top content downloaded in 2014 at this link.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What were the most popular books at the Google Play store? According to a post on the Official Android Blog, these bibliophiles “loved reading stories — real and imagined — of love, adventure, and, OK, sometimes lust.” John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars was named number one on the “Books of the Year” list.

Veronica Roth captured two spots; Divergent landed at number three and Insurgent landed at number five. E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey came in second and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave came in fourth. Below, we’ve collected free samples of all the books for your reading pleasure.
(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Google's ATAP group has released a mini-featurette about the making of Glen Keane's short "Duet," which was released earlier this week in its intended interactive version.

"Duet," the directorial debut of animation legend Glen Keane, has already appeared online and is a strong contender in this year's Oscar field, but it hasn't been available in its interactive format until today.

Today we look at the work of Matt Cruickshank, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

Walter Isaacson appeared at Google to share his thoughts on the digital revolution and to discuss his new book The Innovators. We’ve embedded the Isaacson’s full talk above—what do you think?

During the Q&A session, Isaacson declared that “journalism is not in demise at all. This is the best era ever for journalism.”

Issacson acknowledges that the business model the industry relies on is not sustainable. He feels that “there is no way advertising will support great journalism alone.” The question now becomes, how will the business evolve to respond to this modern age?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

OH, BOY. I’ve been hit by Google’s Penguin 3.0. I haven’t received a formal notification, but my Global and U.S. Alexa rankings are rising. The lower these number the better. As an ethical writer and marketer, I work hard to maintain my online presence and build a strong and reliable platform – a platform that helps others through high quality information. Well, what worked yesterday,