“If you’re asking for a mission statement, here it is,” replied Chris Dibona, Director of Open Source Code at Google World Headquarters. “We want to harness the world’s information and make it useful.”

Such was the atmosphere among computer folk at last week’s Google Development Day (GDD), held at Airport City. There were seminars and talks on how to use the tools Google has developed (or acquired and made their own) for the organization, digestion, and presentation of that information.

The computing society is moving on-line, converging from three directions – print, television, and computer media. Print’s problems are well-known, with the long-term erosion of its audience (due to the internet and poor worldwide reading standards). As far as television is concerned, that. too is showing its first signs of cracking under the strain of competition with the Web: In last week’s election, pollsters found that more of the 18-31 set got their information about Barack Obama and John McCain from the internet than from TV. And media, such as disks, CDs, and even DVDs, have long been losing out to on-line storage, digital MP3 music and video files, etc.

So it’s not just information that Google is organizing: It’s online electronic information, which Google hopes will become the medium for storage and transfer of most forms of information, like books,
video, documents, databases, etc. Naturally, the company develops tools to allow developers and users to manipulate that information.

But Google can’t be everywhere all the time; it can’t provide all the information it would like to in all possible forms. But it can help developers do so – and in order to make things easier for them, Google provides numerous APIs which they can plug into the applications or services they are building, many with minimal programming required; much of the “heavy” programming work is done on the Google back end, so if you don’t need to modify the default API too much, you won’t have to dedicate too much effort to integrating it into your product. Thus does Google win hearts and minds in the developer community – by making available to them easy to use and integrate components that make their lives easier, all for free!

Google sponsors its Developer Days in 16 countries around the world – including Israel, which has, according to the Google folk at the fair, one of the larger GDDs, thanks to the large number of internet application and service companies here. The truth is, lots of these companies would probably use the Google API as components in their applications anyway, because they’re there, easy to use, and free. So, it’s awfully nice of Google to put on a nice party, complete with snacks and lunch – thus promoting good public relations, as the company realizes that the true way to the heart of internet programmers is through their stomachs.

And, according to the company execs who presented at a press conference during the program, Google is always innovating, looking for the new products to roll out to developers. “Seventy percent of Google’s work is in the search engine and applications, 20A% is in emerging products – where we come up with major new ideas that eventually go ‘mainstream,’ like Google Docs – and 10% is what we call the ‘crazy’ stuff, which may or may not ever get out of the lab,” Dibona said.

Google’s two newest projects – Chrome and Android – were much on the mind of Google staffers. Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome), of course, is the new browser the company has released, with Google hoping to garner market share from Internet Explorer and Firefox users. Why bother with a browser? According to Bill Hesse, who works on Chrome, the company wanted “a faster browser with fewer buttons and more space on the screen for display, as well as being more compatible with increasingly complex Google applications.” The browser is completely open source, and according to http://tinyurl.com/5zzz9q, Chrome doesn’t collect information about your online activity, and doesn’t even hardcode its own search engine into the browser (unlike IE, where, if you leave MSN as the default page, you can’t even touch the screen until the MSN site loads).

Android is an even more ambitious project – an operating system and software platform for mobile phones, also open source, free, and completely flexible for development purposes. The phones themselves are made and offered by cell phone manufacturers and service providers (especially T-Mobile in the U.S.), and cost roughly the same as other smart phone; the idea is to let developers run wild, taking advantage of all the features of both phones and Android code, letting them come up with the next “killer app.”

Naturally, the Google Israel people had what to say as well. Yossi Matias, head of Google’s Tel Aviv development center, and Yoelle Mark, head of the company’s Haifa development center, discussed the Israeli contribution to Google worldwide. Far from just rendering Gmail and Google Maps into Hebrew (and a fine job they did on both), Israel is also the main development center for several Google products, such as Trends (http://www.google.com/trends), Youtube annotations (http://www.youtube.com/t/annotations_about), and Youtube contests (http://www.youtube.com/contests_main). Thus Israel, too, pulls its weight in the Global Google Information Empire. And we couldn’t be happier!

That’s why I could never understand people who willingly gave up control of their circumstances to alcohol or drugs. In the movies (the more modern ones, at least), it looks like everyone taking “recreational drugs” is having a great time – at least until the morality aspect of the tale enters, and the happy substance abusers either get killed or carted off to jail.

What does all this have to do with computers? Well, it seems that someone has come up with a way to simulate the effects of mind-bending drugs – using a century and a half old technology that uses sound waves to mess with your brain! According to many of its users, binaural beats, as the sound waves are known, are very effective – and they can be used to wake you up, put you to sleep, unleash your creativity, or even send you on the equivalent of a drug-induced mental trip!

Basically, binuaral beats consist of pulses of two different frequencies being played in each ear at the same time. The pulses, in the 1,000 to 1,500 hertz range, have slight differences between them – less than 30 hertz. Depending on the differences in the pulses, the brain can be “entrained” (i.e. manipulated) to generate specific moods. The technology has been around since the 1830s, but has really come into its own in the past decade, as CD quality recordings and noise-canceling headphones allow users around the world to check out what some say could be an alternative to drugs – giving you the same effects (or close to it) with none of the dependence and legal problems “real” drug use entails.

One site, called i-Doser, has really capitalized on the potential association between binaural beats and mood drugs. For about $5, you can buy a “fix” of binaural cocaine, marijuana, crack, heroin, ecstasy, and all sorts of other chemicals “real” drug users take to get themselves in a mood. For example, check out the i-Doser description of its “Alchohol” dose: “Our alcohol dose is like shot gunning five glasses of gin, in force. The effects come on strong, but mellow fast, and ease into a condition of relaxation flightiness and overexcitement. Some have even experienced pure drunkenness from a single dose. Best of all, no hangover.”

The first question that comes to mind is, “can this be legal?” At least, that’s the first question that came to my uptight, in-control mind, and after an exhaustive internet search, I couldn’t find any law enforcement issues with i-Doser. So, it appears to be on safe legal ground.

The second question is, of course, “does this work?” It’s one thing to use binaural beats in a university lab for research, administered by people who know what they are doing, and another altogether to slap together an “aural drug” for use by thrill-seekers! And since most of the i-Doser doses cost real money, I wasn’t about to plunk down cash to find out. Opinions in the blogosphere appear to be mixed, with some praising i-Doser for changing their lives, and others calling it an outright “fraud and rip-off.”

But for the curious (don’t forget what killed the cat, though!) there are a couple of free alternatives to i-Doser. The closed-source commercial i-Doser program (required to play the tracks you download from the site) is actually based on an open-source program, available for Windows, OS X (PPC), and Linux, called SbaGen (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sbagen). SbaGen comes with several presets (as the binaural beat tracks are called), and there are many free sites where you can download more free tracks. In fact, there are tracks that are apparently very similar – and have similar names – to the ones offered by i-Doser. I don’t know if these are a ripoff of the i-Doser files, but the i-Doser FAQ says that “I-Doser uses a linked DLL based on SBaGen as its binaural beat engine,” and that “until June 2007, I-Doser was distributed in violation of SBaGen’s license,” when an agreement was worked out with the owner of the open-source code. So, maybe those files’ release are part of the settlement with SbaGen.

There is also an on-line site (run by an Israeli fellow) called i-Dose – no relation to i-Doser – that has tracks more in-line with the therapeutic credo of most binaural beat researchers (the SbaGen site says that despite the author’s settlement with i-Doser, this does not mean that he “approves of I-Doser’s use of high amplitude binaural beats to attempt to emulate the effects of recreational drugs — not in any way. There are very many positive benefits that can be gained through subtle use of binaural beats.”) The i-Doser site has on-line tracks with names like Relaxation, Super-Brain, Focus, Mirage (“Helps with art & creative activities”), Coffee Break, and others.

But does it work? Well, of course I tried a few of them. First, some guidelines: You need a good pair of stereo headphones to get any effect at all; the venue should be calm, and you should be ‘open’ to the experience (although I tried a couple of tracks while working); and you need a block of time, like a half hour for the average track, to get the full effect (although a mood shift is possible much sooner). Wanting to maintain control as I do, I decided that the safest tracks to try were the ones relating to extra energy. So, I tried the streaming Coffee Break track on the i-Dose site, and a file in SbaGen equivalent to one on i-Doser called “5HTP,” which “is an amino acid that is used in the brain to make the hormone Serotonin, which is your HAPPY Hormone.”

And – much to my shock – they worked! Yesterday I felt more energetic after a 15 minute Coffee Break, and today, I’m still “happy”- in the sense that I’m feeling “balanced” – an hour after listening to 5HTP. Now, of course, that could just mean I’m really a sucker, ready to feel what any old web site says I should feel after taking the high-tech equivalent of snake oil. Only one way to find out – I guess I’m going to have to so some “experimenting” (is this the first step on what they call the “slippery slope?”).