At least that’s the message the Internet giant is sending with its newest foray outside of its search beginnings. The company is tired of waiting on phone companies and other Internet service providers to catch up with the rest of the Web. It wants to crank the speed up a bit.

Or more like 1,000,000,000 bits.

The project goes like this: Google wants to increase the speed information travels from the cloud that is the Internet to your computer. Sure, so-called high-speed access from the average ISP is blazingly fast compared to the painstakingly slow dial-up access the world was shackled to for much of the Internet’s life, but today’s Web apps are making even the fastest connections wave a white flag of surrender.

The problem is today’s connections are built on yesterday’s technology, technology that was never really meant to deliver the mind-boggling amount of information that crosses telephone and cable lines today. They’re fine for watching TV, talking on the phone, searching the Web, sending e-mails, all that fun stuff, but as more and more of a person’s life jumps online, the pipes are getting a little clogged.

So Google has decided it’s time some new pipes were laid, and since nobody else is taking this project on, Google is ready to put its money where its mouth is. The company, based out of Mountain View, Calif., is asking cities and towns to offer to be Google’s guinea pig in its Google Fiber for Communities project. Google comes in, lays down some super-fast Internet and then steps back and sees what happens.

I am glad to see that the Topeka community has swallowed the Google Kool-Aid. Think Big Topeka sprouted up practically overnight to rally support for Topeka’s quest to become Mountain View 2. Facebook pages exploded with fans, county commissioners and city council threw their support behind the effort, local media offered to help citizens film nomination videos and Topeka was even unofficially renamed “Google” for the month of March. The groundswell of support for the project has been impressive, but it’s just beginning.

And that’s where you can get involved. Become a fan on Facebook, nominate Topeka on Google’s site, record a video, tell a friend, tweet, just do something. A network like this would not only make Topeka the envy of every Internet user in the world, but it would also make Washburn a perfect place to push tomorrow’s Internet to be greater than what it is today.

Internet speeds like Google hopes to achieve are for more than just geeks playing video games in the basement. The Internet touches everything. From research to medicine, communication to business, bringing Google’s Fiber project to Topeka could help make Topeka the hub at the center of all of those markets.

And yeah, downloading songs from iTunes would rock too.

washburnreview.org

A third of cell phone owners access stories on their mobiles, study says

An "overwhelming majority" of Americans — 92 percent — say they use multiple resources for news, from Web-based news sites, blogs and social networking programs like Twitter and Facebook, to more traditional fare including television, newspapers and radio, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

But, on a "typical day," six in 10 American adults get their news online, "placing it third among the six major news platforms asked about in the survey, behind local television news and national or cable television news," according to the report.

The study, which focused on trying to understand "the new news landscape" in the United States, comes at a time when many newspapers and TV stations around the country are struggling, as more Americans turn to other avenues to get their information.

‘Portable, personalized, participatory’
Pew noted the Internet's influence, along with mobile technology's, in shaping Americans' relationships to news as "becoming portable, personalized and participatory."

"The rise of social media like social networking sites and blogs has helped the news become a social experience for consumers," Pew said in a statement. "People use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess and react to news. They also use traditional e-mail and other tools to swap stories and comment on them."

Thirty-seven percent of cell phone owners use their phones to go online, the study says, with 33 percent of them looking for news, weather, sports and traffic information.

Pew also found that "cell users under age 50 are almost three times as likely as their older counterparts to get news on the go," be it via cell phone or other wireless devices like laptops or netbooks.

Thirty-seven percent of Internet users surveyed say they have contributed to the "creation" of news, commented on it online, and shared or posted news on sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to the study; 28 percent say they have "customized" their home pages to include news "from sources and on topics that particularly interest them."

The ‘Daily Me’
Call it, Pew said, the "Daily Me," with 40 percent of Internet users saying an important feature of news sites is the ability to customize the information they get. Thirty-six percent say they like the ability to "manipulate content themselves," including graphics, maps and quizzes.

"People feel more and more pressed about the volume of information flowing into their lives. So, they customize the information flow in order to manage their lives well and in order to get the material that they feel is most relevant to them," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

msnbc.msn.com

Last night was a remarkable night for Kathryn Bigelow as she was named Best Director for her film The Hurt Locker. She was the first woman in the Oscar’s 82-year history to take that prize home.

Clutching her award, she said: “There is no other way to describe it — it's the moment of a lifetime.”

In a kind of plot that would have made a fine movie - and it may yet. The 58-year-old director had been up against her ex-husband, Avatar man James Cameron, in all the categories that mattered.

And fittingly, in the eyes of some some commentators, she took home her Academy Award on International Women’s Day.

Bigelow – whose only marriage was to Cameron (1989 to 1991) and who has no children – has tackled traditionally macho subjects head-on. Her 1991 movie Point Break tackled bank-robbing surfers and in 2002 K-19: The Widowmaker she dealt with the trials of life on a beleaguered Russian nuclear submarine. The Hurt Locker is an unflinching observation of life with a team of Army bomb disposal experts in post-invasion Iraq.

New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis said: "Something like a woman winning best director for directing an action movie and not a romantic comedy is symbolically important.

”Whether it then leads to a lot of women doing things outside of the pathetic comfort zone of romantic comedy – and I say that as someone who loves romantic comedy – we'll see.

"We know that because women are allowed to make romantic comedies that they can make romantic comedies. That's in everyone's comfort zone. The idea that a woman can be a great action director is not is everyone's comfort zone."

Previous female nominees for Academy Award best director were Lina Wertmüller for 1976's Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for 1993's The Piano and Sofia Coppola for 2003's Lost in Translation.

But the talented newly-crowned Queen of Hollywood doesn’t set herself up as a trailblazer for her gender. In fact, she’s too busy making films and would really like her sex to stop being the issue.

In a previous interview she said: “I’d love to just think of myself as a film-maker, and I long for the day when a modifier can be a moot point.

"But I'm ever grateful if I can inspire some young, intrepid, tenacious male or female film-maker and have them feel that the impossible is possible and to never give up on your dream."

You get the feeling she would just like the world’s media to stop talking about her breaking the mold or how remarkably well she scrubbed up for one of her age and just applaud her hard-won achievement.

Director of The Secret Life of Bees, Gina Prince-Bythewood said: “Kathryn’s stunning film and deserved DGA win and Oscar nomination puts an exclamation point on a mantra that should be carved onto every studio executive’s desk. ‘Talent has no gender!’ She inspires by doing, and doing it well.”

entertainment.stv.tv

Driving by a certain decrepit five-story apartment building in the Russian city of Perm in the late 1990s, you would never have imagined you were passing a locus of magic and transcendence. There had been no heat or working toilets in the building for months, and no running water; most of the tenants had stopped receiving their salaries and pensions. Feral, abandoned children hovered in packs around uncollected refuse heaped outside the building. But Gina Ochsner, traveling there at least imaginatively, has paused at the address, peered into the courtyard and come away from it with a novel of startling, redemptive beauty.

The author of two collections of short stories, Ochsner is an American who has spent limited time in Russia, none of it in Perm. Yet her first novel, “The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight,” is (despite the kitschy title) soaked in baleful authenticity, with laundry boiling on the stove and perfume doubling as an intoxicant. As she links the grim anomie of post-Soviet Russia to the delirium of magic realism, Ochsner elevates the tenants’ struggles and makes sense of their confounding times.

Azade, a Muslim woman whose family was deported from North Ossetia, maintains the courtyard latrines, reading in their emerging odors the unfulfilled dreams and about-to-be-realized anxieties of her patrons while she rations out the toilet paper. Her Jewish neighbor Olga works for the Perm edition of the military newspaper Red Star, translating into reassuring euphemism the horrific news from Chechnya. Olga’s son, Yuri, a shell-shocked army vet who dreams of being a fish, leads desultory interpretive tours at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, Geology and Anthropology, where the exhibits are entirely fake.In one way or another, these Russians engage in heroic acts of translation — not from one language to another but from the absurd gibber of everyday life to the salvation of meaning. Another neighbor, an even greater manipulator of the prosaic, is a woman named Tanya, who also works at the museum. In addition to checking coats, she manufactures crude icons out of popsicle sticks and cheap fabric, using the gold foil from candy wrappers for the saints’ halos. She concedes that the icons are also made from cardboard, but points out that it’s “cardboard of the highest quality.” And sometimes, when “the long lines of her serene sorrow guide her hand,” she’s touched by a true religious and artistic spirit noticed by no one. “Outwardly stout, inwardly anorexic,” Tanya carries a battered blue notebook in which she records bittersweet memories, the details of her crush on Yuri and her observations of cloud formations and the colors of the sky. “Always the girl dreamt a translation of her days into the language of clouds, believing that by describing every skyscape she would make her life a beautiful knowable thing.”

These four souls stuck in Perm, a city whose name all but promises immobility, are stirred into motion by two events. In the first, which conclusively shelves the novel as Magic Realism, Russian Division, Azade’s husband, Mircha, throws himself off the tenement’s roof — only to reappear, weeks later, in the courtyard to taunt his neighbors, who take his resurrection in stride, along with everything else that has befallen them. The second catalyst is mostly comic, as Tanya’s boss assigns her to complete the museum’s application for an American arts grant. The loopy questionnaire captures the imagination of the museum’s indigent staffers, who have visions of using the money to buy toaster ovens and other personal items. But the application’s questions thwart their best efforts at translation: “Describe what ‘positive work ethic’ means to you.” Looking over Tanya’s shoulder, Yuri asks: “What is ‘positive work ethic’? Do such words even belong together?”

It’s typical of Ochsner’s characters to step back from language like this, in the postmodern fashion, and consider words and language as physical things, with their individual textures and secret affinities. Azade can “curse in Ossetian and bless in Kumyk, those fibrous languages of mud and straw.” As a girl, Olga “collected languages the same way people collected keys or buttons. At night she dreamt in other languages and she woke in the morning with spoonfuls of those foreign sounds still on her tongue.” When Yuri receives a beating, it’s as if by ­typography: “A pounding punctuated with sharp interjections. A dash, dash. Boxer’s blows to the face. Oh Mother. A comma, a semicolon, a reprieve and then ellipses. All the pieces of punctuation brilliantly effected by the closed fist, the knee to the groin. Yes, he was getting the message.”

Yet the message isn’t all bad, since it soon translates into an act of tenderness. Olga notes that a secondary “definition of the word ‘translate’ was to convey to heaven without death.” And when the building’s tenants are granted a vision of a muddy apocalypse, they can still manage to see what comes next.

For writers of the present moment, Russian and non-Russian, the Yeltsin years have become a caldron for a wildly imaginative, surreal literature grounded in post-Soviet exigency, a chilly Macondo stretching over 11 time zones. Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya and Olga Slavnikova have emerged with distinctive, revelatory fantasies. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s fine new collection of terrifying stories, “There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby,” employs gothic sorcery to populate these years with zombies and demons and ghosts. Gina Ochsner, an Oregon native, sticks her ladle into the same overheated pot and, with luminous writing, affection for her characters and, especially, faith in language’s humanizing power, manages to find a portion of hopefulness.

Jennifer and David, the singer’s lawyer turned WWE wrestler fiancé, are ready to tie the knot, he tells Life & Style in an exclusive interview.

“We’ve picked a date,” David, who is currently an NXT Rookie on the show WWE NXT on Syfy, tells Life & Style. “And Jennifer has chosen her dress, but she won’t tell me much about that, obviously.” The couple, who got engaged in fall 2008, are the proud parents of David Jr., who was born in August.

As for the rings, the couple have their mind made up already. “We know who we want to design them — Neil Lane, he made our engagement rings,” says David. “And he’s a personal friend as well.”

And David, whose love of flashy clothes extends beyond the wrestling ring, already has a plan in mind for his suit: “I want my son and I to wear matching custom tuxedos!”

Is it possible that we’ll see some former American Idols at the reception? “It would be great if any of the former American Idols sang at the wedding. And it would be wonderful to have Jennifer sing — I’d love that.” But don’t expect David to belt out anything at the microphone, “I don’t sing!” he says, laughing.

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