Yahoo Japan Corp

Yahoo Japan Corp. has said it suspects up to 22 million user IDs may have been stolen during an unauthorised attempt to access the administrative system of its Yahoo! Japan portal.....

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/yahoo-japan-suspects-22-million-ids-stol/679236.html

Short blogging hiatus

In Europe for a week, won't be able to blog...

Live from Google I/O: Mo’ screens, mo’ goodness

This morning, we kicked off the 6th annual Google I/O developer conference with over 6,000 developers at Moscone Center in San Francisco, 460 I/O Extended sites in 90 countries, and millions of you around the world who tuned in via our livestream. Over the next three days, we’ll be hosting technical sessions, hands-on code labs, and demonstrations of Google's products and partners' technology.



We believe computing is going through one of the most exciting moments in its history: people are increasingly adopting phones, tablets and newer type of devices. And this spread of technology has the potential to make a positive impact in the lives of people around the world—whether it's simply helping you in your daily commute, or connecting you to information that was previously inaccessible.



This is why we focus so much on our two open platforms: Android and Chrome. They enable developers to innovate and reach as many people as possible with their apps and services across multiple devices. Android started as a simple idea to advance open standards on mobile; today it is the world’s leading mobile platform and growing rapidly. Similarly, Chrome launched less than five years ago from an open source project; today it’s the world’s most popular browser.



In line with that vision, we made several announcements today designed to give developers even more tools to build great apps on Android and Chrome. We also shared new innovations from across Google meant to help make life just a little easier for you, including improvements in search, communications, photos, and maps.



Here’s a quick look at some of the announcements we made at I/O:

• Android & Google Play: In addition to new developer tools, we unveiled Google Play Music All Access, a monthly music subscription service with access to millions of songs that joins our music store and locker; and the Google Play game services with real-time multiplayer and leaderboards. Also, coming next month to Google Play is a special Samsung Galaxy S4, which brings together cutting edge hardware from Samsung with Google’s latest software and services—including the user experience that ships with our popular Nexus devices.


• Chrome: With over 750 million active users on Chrome, we’re now focused on bringing to mobile the speed, simplicity and security improvements that we’ve seen on the desktop. To that end, today we previewed next-generation video codec VP9 for faster video-streaming performance; the requestAutocomplete API for faster payments; and Chrome Experiments such as "A Journey Through Middle Earth" and Racer to demonstrate the ability to create immersive mobile experiences not possible in years past.


• Google+: We unveiled the newly designed Google+, which helps you easily explore content as well dramatically improve your online photo experience to give you crisp, beautiful photos—without the work! We also upgraded Google+ Hangouts—our popular group video application—to help bring all of your real-life conversations online, across any device or platform, and with groups of up to 10 friends.


• Search: Search has evolved considerably in recent years: it can now have a real conversation with you, and even make your day a bit smoother by predicting information you might need. Today we added the ability to set reminders by voice and we previewed “spoken answers” on laptops and desktops in Chrome—meaning you can ask Google a question and it will speak the answer back to you.


• Maps: Today we previewed the next generation of Google Maps, which gets rid of any clutter in order to put your individual experience and exploration front and center. Each time you click or search, our technology draws you a tailored map that highlights the information you need. From design to directions, the new Google Maps is smarter and more useful.

Technology can have a profound, positive impact on the daily lives of billions of people. But we can’t do this alone—developers play a crucial role. I/O is our chance to come together and thank you for everything you do.



Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps

Why do people support austerity? A conjecture.

Paul Romer once said that "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." A crisis, it is widely believed, gives you the chance to change long-entrenched institutions and make long-needed reforms. It's hard to read that quote without thinking the uncomfortable thought: Doesn't that mean that provoking, or at least allowing, a crisis is the best way to improve your institutions for the long-term?

This thought has been running through my head as I have interacted with three groups of people: 1) Southern European economists, 2) Western "Japan hands", and 3) American opponents of monetary and fiscal stabilization policy.

Regarding South European economists, my evidence is anecdotal, but every single Italian, Spanish, and Greek economist I've talked to has seemed very down on the notion of fiscal stimulus, and highly disdainful of Paul Krugman. Alberto Alesina seems to be an exemplar of their thinking. When discussing stimulus spending, they tend to predict that this spending will be captured by special interests and wasted. Monetary easing receives scarcely more respect. Inevitably, any discussion of the European crisis leads quickly to a discussion of broken institutions in the Southern European countries - poor tax collection systems, over-regulation, sclerotic labor markets, political corruption, and even a poor cultural work ethic.

Now, this could simply be selection bias; the U.S. is considered a bastion of laissez-faire, conservative macroeconomics, so it's possible that the conservative South Europeans are the ones who make it here. But interestingly, I see a very similar attitude among long-time Western observers of Japan (called "Japan hands"), who are mostly very skeptical of Abenomics, and very focused on structural issues. For example, here is Peter Drysdale:

The first two ‘arrows’ [in Abe's quiver] are crude Keynesianism and are controversial, not least because, if they work, they could bring unintended consequences for the currency and the Japanese government bond market... 

The ‘third arrow’ of revitalisation is therefore critical for the success of all these measures. If there is no effective reform program for promoting private sector investment-led growth, the chances of a bond market collapse and a fiscal mess multiply dramatically... 

A return to stable, relatively rapid growth, requires a more flexible and competitive Japanese economy. As Harner explains, ‘restrictions, anticompetitive and onerous laws and regulations, multi-tiered, bureaucratic interference and inflexibility, relatively high taxes — all these obstacles to free market exchange and competition have sapped profitability, international competitiveness, and growth from vast swaths of Japan’s economy’. 

Without getting rid of these burdens, Japan is not going to be able to grow its way out of stagnation and the risks would then be for deepening of the crisis.

As for American opponents of stabilization policy, these include John Cochrane, who pooh-poohs both fiscal and monetary stimulus, saying that we need to get rid of "sand in the gears" of our institutions in order to promote growth. They also include Tyler Cowen, who often disparages Keynesianism (though he sits on the fence in terms of monetary easing), and who often writes about the need to improve our political institutions.

What unites all these and other "austerians"? There are several possibilities. One is that austerity is a good idea, and that these smart people recognize that it is a good idea. Another is that these are political conservatives who are worried that countercyclical macroeconomic policy will redistribute income and regulatory privilege away from themselves or their favored social groups. A third is that the psychological impulse toward austerity - tighten your belt in bad times! - is simply very very strong among all humans. And a fourth possibility, favored by Paul Krugman, is the idea that austerity is perceived as morally virtuous.

I want to suggest a fifth possibility. I conjecture that "austerians" are concerned that anti-recessionary macro policy will allow a country to "muddle through" a crisis without improving its institutions. In other words, they fear that a successful stimulus would be wasting a good crisis.

Consider the perspective of someone who has long advocated institutional reforms. For example, imagine yourself as a Western "Japan hand". For decades, you have watched Japan stagnate. You have seen the revolving door of prime ministers come and go, come and go. You have watched the long-ruling LDP dish out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to pay politically connected construction firms to pour concrete over every riverbed in the country, even as women were forced into unproductive housewifery by a sexist and hidebound corporate culture and foreign imports were blocked by ever more creative non-tariff barriers.

And as you watched Japan's economy stagnate and its productivity fall behind, you waited. You waited and waited for the day when things would get too dire, and the old system would eventually collapse under its own weight, and Japan would be forced to undergo an economic and social revolution. "One day," you told yourself, "they're not going to be able to muddle through anymore."

In 2011, it seemed that that day had finally come. Japan's economy had taken powerful blows from the 2008 crisis and the 2011 earthquake. The Fukushima nuclear accident had exposed the depths of government corruption. The long-ruling LDP had been replaced by the DPJ, but it was clear that the new guys were cut from the same tattered cloth, and only a massive political "realignment" could restore efficacy to Japan's Diet. And most of all, the Japanese debt continued to skyrocket, until it seemed inevitable that deep cutbacks were coming.

And then came Shinzo Abe, a stalwart of the old LDP, swept into power on a promise to beat deflation and use monetary stimulus to get Japan back on its feet. And Abenomics seemed to be working: the yen fell, inflation expectations budged, and the stock market soared. Suddenly there seemed to be a real possibility that Japan would "muddle through" yet again. Sure, Abe has also promised structural reforms, but - you think to yourself - you've heard that song and dance before. If Japan manages to muddle through under Abe's aggressive recession-fighting policy, there will be no real incentive for the old system to change. The day of reckoning will be pushed back another decade.

I can only imagine that a similar thought process is running through the heads of many South Europeans as they watch the macroeconomic debate. If monetary stimulus (including a euro exit) and fiscal stimulus manage to just barely save Greece and Italy and Spain from their own days of reckoning, won't the euro-sclerosis just deepen before things finally collapse in ten years' time? And I imagine that something similar might be running through the minds of John Cochrane and Tyler Cowen (Update: And Richard Fisher!), as they decry "sand in the gears". Suppose a Krugman-style stimulus really did work! Wouldn't that allow the sand to stay in the gears, reducing our long-term growth rate just to produce a little short-term stability?

In other words, maybe people like the idea of austerity because they think an economic stagnation is our best chance to address what they perceive to be our long-term challenges. Allowing a crisis might be less terrible than wasting it.

Now, when stated that way, the idea sounds kind of silly - why don't we just periodically bomb our own cities, in the hope that governance will improve during the rebuilding? But I find it very difficult to state with any confidence that the idea is wrong. When economists discuss the costs of stabilization policy, they limit their discussion to distortionary taxation, unexpected inflation, and things like that. They almost never bring politics or institutions into the picture. The fact is, we just don't know how institutions really work. So I can't dismiss the idea that anti-recessionary macro policy might, in fact, rob us of our best chances to make needed reforms.

But what I think we should do is to discuss this idea explicitly. If people really do think that the danger of stimulus is not that it might fail, but that it might succeed, they need to say so. Only then, I believe, can we have an optimal public discussion about costs and benefits.

Update: Eerily, the very day after I wrote this post, Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post made exactly this argument for austerity. Tyler Cowen links approvingly, calling the argument "wisdom".

Science fiction novels for economists

Diane Coyle has a blog post called "Classics for economists," and someone on Twitter requested that I do a companion piece called "Science fiction for economists", so here it is.

Really, most science fiction is about economics. What makes most future visions interesting is not just the technical particulars of the cool new Stuff, but the social ramifications. Here are some of the sci-fi books that I thought dealt with important economic issues in the most insightful and interesting ways. I also chose only books that I think are well-written, with well-conceived characters, engaging plots, and skillful writing.


1. A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge



In addition to being quite possibly the best science fiction novel I've ever read, Deepness is also a great meditation on public economics. When Vernor Vinge became famous in the 80s, he was a hard-core libertarian - his novel The Peace War, and its sequel short story "The Ungoverned", are like a Real Business Cycle model come to life, with lone-wolf genius engineers teaming up with private police forces to bring down a fascist technocratic government made up of...university administrators. Ha. But by the 90s, Vinge's views on government and markets had become markedly more nuanced - in the swashbuckling space opera A Fire Upon the Deep, we see private security forces failing miserably when faced with a powerful external threat (in fact, that book made me think of the "Tamerlane Principle"). Security, Vinge realizes, is a public good.

In Deepness, Vinge adds another public good: Research. The narrative of Deepness is split between a race of spider-people with roughly 20th-century technology, and a spacefaring guild of human merchants called the Qeng Ho. On the spider world, the protagonist is a brilliant scientist named Sherkaner Underhill, who is basically a Von Neumann or Feynman type. Sherkaner is the ultimate lone genius, but he ends up needing the government to fund his research. In space, meanwhile, the heroic merchant entrepreneur Pham Nuwen (who is a recurring protagonist in Vinge novels) struggles to decide whether he should turn his merchant fleet into an interstellar government. Governments, he finds, are good at producing really new scientific breakthroughs, but eventually they become unwieldy and stifle the economy and society, then collapse under their own institutional weight. The very very end of the book is - or at least, seemed to me to be - a metaphor for the Great Stagnation and the death (and future rebirth) of Big Science.


2. Makers, by Cory Doctorow



Cory Doctorow is known both for his science fiction and for being the creator of the blog Boing Boing, one of the oldest and best blogs on the internet. In Makers, Doctorow dishes up a near future that is almost spooky in its prophetic vision. The book is all about economics, the death of corporations, the rise of freelance and temp economies, the death of old media and the rise of blogs, and the disruptive impact of technology on people's jobs. It envisions the rise of 3D printing, the startup craze (and the startup glut), and the use of intellectual property as corporations' weapon of choice to fight back against progress. It's incredibly well-written, but also extremely sad, just to warn you.


3. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin



It's incredibly hard to imagine a world without private property, but LeGuin pulls it off. Spoilers: A world without property is pretty boring and fairly poor. But LeGuin also shows us another world, much like our own, where the anti-property anarcho-syndicalist movement was suppressed and tamed, much like Marxism was suppressed and tamed here on Earth. What's interesting is that although anarcho-syndicalism doesn't work incredibly well on the world where it's implemented, the anarcho-syndicalist idea and movement serve as a sort of permanent opposition force on the capitalist world. When I read Robert M. Buckley writing that Marxism has fulfilled a similar role in the West here on Earth, I immediately thought of The Dispossessed.


4. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow



Doctorow again. In this book, he examines what a true post-scarcity society would look like. Spoiler: It looks a lot like a bunch of sarcastic bohemian Canadian people. But basically, I think that's probably what the future will look like, at least if we're lucky. Anyway, this book is notable for the concept of "whuffie", an online currency based on peer approval, which arguably inspired Facebook's "like" button.


5. Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge



Vinge again. Rainbows End is a sad, thoughtful novel about old age and obsolescence (notice that there is no apostrophe in the title). But it's also one of the most visionary novels about future labor markets. In an interconnected world in which skills never stay fresh for long and most value is created through entertainment, old engineers have to go back to high school, and new corporations are started by teenagers collaborating online with strangers halfway around the world. Rainbows End is also famous for envisioning the technology of Augmented Reality; this novel probably inspired Google Glass. Interestingly, Vinge continues his evolution toward a balanced view of public goods, adding education to the list of things that government needs to provide. (Update: In an email, Vinge points out that he never specified that the high school in Rainbows End was government-funded! Touche!)


6. Accelerando, by Charles Stross



Charles Stross, another noted blogger, loves to play with ideas, even if he doesn't believe in them. In Accelerando, he mainly plays with the idea of the Singularity, but he also plays with a bunch of far-out funky future economics. In one part, the main character, impresario and wandering entrepreneur Manfred Macx, uses advanced computer algorithms to successfully implement an optimal centrally planned economy, by predicting what humans will want before they even know they want it. Macx's various disruptive innovations inevitably draw the ire of the law, and he creates a protective cloud of AI lawyers to wage constant "lawfare" against governments and corporations alike. In another part of the book, the entire solar system is taken over by sentient High-Frequency Trading algorithms. But I haven't really spoiled the book for you, since these are only about 0.1% of the ideas contained within. Note: Stross has also written a series called the Merchant Princes series that deals even more with economics, but I haven't read it.


7. Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle



Lucifer's Hammer is a story about a comet hitting Earth, and the aftermath. It's notable for its quaint Reaganite conservative politics (it came out in 1977), and does make a couple of glaring economic mistakes (for example, a guy trying to build a nuclear power plant is an independent wildcatting entrepreneur instead of a giant government-backed corporation). But it makes up for that with its excellent portrayal of what the economy would be like in the immediate aftermath of an abrupt civilizational collapse. Hint: Farming, containment of contagious diseases, de-specialization of labor, and collective security become very very important.


8. The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi



Brutally dark and hopeless, The Windup Girl is a book about peak oil, global civilizational decline, and the (temporary) end of positive-sum economies. In a suddenly overpopulated world, humans are forced into a constant Hobbesian zero-sum game, and most moral norms go right out the window. Warning: This is very tough book to read. But it serves as an important reminder of the Malthusian menace that forever lurks just outside the circle of light provided by the flickering candle-flame of modern technology.


9. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein



Actually a mythic retelling of the American Revolution, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress contains some very interesting thoughts on colonialism and the Resource Curse. Unsurprisingly, terrorism is used as a way to make resource colonialism too expensive for the occupying power. Unfortunately, we don't get to see the political struggles and despotic regimes that probably arose in the aftermath of lunar independence. But Heinlein also does use the book to play with some interesting libertarian ideas, like a privatized court system.


10. Schismatrix, by Bruce Sterling



Simply one of the most wide-ranging and visionary science fiction novels ever written. Bruce Sterling is like an eternally erupting quasar of creativity, and this is his finest book. None of the economics here makes any sense - or, more accurately, it all takes place in such a funky, crazy future world that it's impossible to know if it makes any sense.


11. Permutation City, by Greg Egan



If there's any sci-fi novel that beats Schismatrix for far-out blow-your-brain-out-the-back-of-your-skull vision, it's Permutation City. If I hadn't already had the idea for D-Mod, this book (written over a decade before I thought of the concept) would have given it to me fully formed. Permutation City is about the ultimate nature and purpose of human consciousness and experience, and yet it has implications for technologies that are being developed right now, as we speak.


12. Reamde, by Neal Stephenson



Most people would recommend Stephenson's Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon, but for economics I like Reamde the best. Although not technically sci-fi, it has that flavor. The hero is an aging tech entrepreneur who owns a game that's a combination of World of Warcraft and Bitcoin (yes, this book predicts Bitcoin). It also deals with the economic incentives of the Russian mob, the challenges facing smart young tech workers in China and Hungary, and lots of other cool features of today's global economy. It's not Stephenson's #1 awesomest book, though; that would be Anathem.


13. The Game of Thrones series, by George R.R. Martin



Actually, I lied earlier...the person who requested a "Sci-fi for economists" list also asked me to include fantasy. But the Game of Thrones books (actually called A Song of Ice and Fire, though few use that name anymore) are really the only fantasy novels I can think of that deal with economics in an interesting way. You get to see a lot of the messed-up economies of medieval times, including feudalism, slavery, anarchy, blood sport, and the difficulty of international trade with poor information and unreliable transportation.


Anyway, there's my list. I haven't read everything out there, obviously - I hear that Ken MacLeod's books have a lot of economics in them, for instance, as well as some of Heinlein's other works. But if you're in the econ field and you want to think big deep thoughts about economics under different technological and social conditions, these books are for you. They're also a lot of fun.

Update: Mark Palko looks at "Crime novels for economists". Diane, looks like you started a meme!

Update 2: Other sci-fi recommendations via Paul Krugman and Tim Worstall.

Of course "hedge funds" lose money

Matt O'Brien, one of my partners-in-crime over at the Atlantic, has a piece criticizing hedge fund managers who go on TV to advocate hard-money policies. (Joe Weisenthal has a similar piece.) I agree with the criticism. But Matt also calls hedge fund managers out for their poor investment performance. As this article from The Economist shows, super-expensive hedge funds have done terribly over the last decade, when compared with a simple low-cost diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. Matt says: "Hey hedge fund guys, if you can't even beat the market, why should we trust you on policy issues?"

I think this latter criticism is a bit misplaced, for two reasons. The first (and less important) reason is that to evaluate hedge funds - or any investment - you need to look not only at the return, but at the risk. If hedge funds have higher return-to-risk ratios (such as Sharpe ratios) than a passive stock-bond portfolio, then they are a better investment. Why? Because in that case you can borrow money and invest it in hedge funds, and your leverage will increase the returns (and the risk) of the hedge fund investment. If the hedge funds have a higher Sharpe ratio than the passive portfolio, you can leverage up until your risk is the same as the passive portfolio but your return is higher. In that case, you will have beaten the market, even if the hedge funds in which you invested did not beat the market. A number of top hedge funds have earned lower returns than the market since the financial crisis, but with much lower risk.

See?

Now, I said that this is the "less important" reason. This is because even after adjusting for risk, hedge funds as a class probably underperformed the market. And they can be expected to continue to underperform the market, as a class. But that's just because hedge funds as a class are not particularly special, interesting, valuable, or desirable.

What is a "hedge fund"? It's a legal category, like "mutual fund". The "hedge fund" category is basically a "none of the above" legal category, meaning that hedge funds, alone among money management companies, have essentially no restrictions on the kinds of assets they are allowed to trade. To start a hedge fund, all you have to do is be a "qualified investor" with $5 million in capital, or be a "sophisticated investor". That means that as a hedge fund you can be essentially any Tom, Dick, or Harry, and you can try essentially any strategy. You could have macaque monkeys pick stocks and call it a "hedge fund". The catch-all "hedge fund" category attracts many of the best ideas in the investing world, but also many of the worst. And there's a lot more bad ideas than good ones. And you can't just tell which is bad and which is good by looking at size and fame, because many of the bad ones get lucky and get some temporary good returns, which results in people handing them giant wads of cash (which they then proceed to lose, while taking a giant fee).

Thus, just throwing your money at anything that is called a "hedge fund", just because you have heard that some "hedge funds" have managed to earn spectacular returns, is an extraordinarily bad idea.To put it another way: Anthony Scaramucci, organizer of the SALT hedge fund conference in Las Vegas, writes: "Mutual funds are the propeller planes, while hedge funds are the fighter jets." But that's not true. Some of them really are fighter jets. And some of them are beat-up old pickup trucks covered in papier-mache to make them look like fighter jets from a distance. And you aren't allowed to get anywhere near the planes to touch them and see which is which. And you forgot your glasses.

Anyway, I'm sure many rich people do invest in anything called a "hedge fund", but they're just throwing their money away (fortunately they have plenty to spare). But if America's pension funds, mutual funds, and insurance companies are doing this, then we have a problem.

In any case, we shouldn't be surprised that hedge funds as a class have been getting crappy returns of late. In fact, we've seen this sort of pattern before. In the 1990s, "venture capital" firms earned amazing returns, and a bunch of people heard about it and started throwing their money at anything that called itself a "venture capital" fund. New funds flooded the field to take advantage of this inflow of dumb money. Returns subsequently collapsed and have not recovered, though the old established firms continued making outsized returns (but stopped taking new investments, because when you get big it's harder to grow fast). The same thing happened with "private equity" (leveraged buyout) firms, who made a killing in the 00s but have not been doing so well since. And the same thing probably happened with mutual funds, back in the 60s when they became prominent and earned a lot of money.

So there is a very interesting behavioral story going on here. Why do people hurl their money blindly at the flavor-of-the-week money-management company category? Why do they fail to understand that there are good and bad hedge funds, just like there are good and bad architects or doctors or web designers? I don't know, but it's a fertile topic for behavioral finance research.

(And as a final note, the big worry when investing in hedge funds should probably be fees, not past performance. Even the best hedge funds may charge you such high fees that the extra returns they earn you get eaten up. So watch out.)

Back to the original subject, though. Matt shouldn't castigate "hedge funds" as a whole for making crappy returns, because it's just a legal category, not a hive mind. But his basic point stands anyway. You shouldn't trust hedge fund guys on policy issues. In fact, he even understates his case. Even if a hedge fund guy makes more money than God, year in and year out, you shouldn't trust him on policy issues any more than a highly successful physicist or heart surgeon or poker player. A money management company is not a nation-state.


Update: On Twitter, Giorgio Vitale brought to my attention the fact that the graph Matt shows is not actually hedge fund returns (those are often undisclosed), but the returns on an index that tries to track broad hedge-fund performance. That's good to know, though my points all still apply...

A picture of Earth through time

Today, we're making it possible for you to go back in time and get a stunning historical perspective on the changes to the Earth’s surface over time. Working with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and TIME, we're releasing more than a quarter-century of images of Earth taken from space, compiled for the first time into an interactive time-lapse experience. We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public.



Built from millions of satellite images and trillions of pixels, you can explore this global, zoomable time-lapse map as part of TIME's new Timelapse project. View stunning phenomena such as the sprouting of Dubai’s artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon and urban growth in Las Vegas from 1984 to 2012:

Feel free to share these GIFs! More examples can be found on Google+.

The images were collected as part of an ongoing joint mission between the USGS and NASA called Landsat. Their satellites have been observing earth from space since the 1970s—with all of the images sent back to Earth and archived on USGS tape drives that look something like this example (courtesy of the USGS).



We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.



As the final step, we worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, recipients of a Google Focused Research Award, to convert these annual Earth images into a seamless, browsable HTML5 animation. Check it out on Google’s Timelapse website.



Much like the iconic image of Earth from the Apollo 17 mission—which had a profound effect on many of us—this time-lapse map is not only fascinating to explore, but we also hope it can inform the global community’s thinking about how we live on our planet and the policies that will guide us in the future. A special thanks to all our partners who helped us to make this happen.



Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach