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Halloween @ the Googleplex
October 31, 2008
At Google, we'll take advantage of any opportunity to get creative -- and costumes are no exception. Halloween is the perfect chance to bring some fun into the workplace since dressing up doesn't end with our
home page
. Here are some of the fun costumes of Google Halloween past:
And now it's your turn! Send us photos of your best costume to studentspeak@google.com and we’ll post our favorites on the blog. Wishing you a spooky Halloween.
Posted by Jessica Bagley, University Programs Team
Celebrities get out the vote with Google Maps
October 30, 2008
As you may have seen in one of our
previous posts
, we recently launched a site called
2008 US Voter Info on Google Maps
that shows users everything from their polling place to their custom registration information. It's been quite popular across the web, embedded in several websites and linked to from all types of news and blog sites. Additionally, there's one unique place where it has made an exceptional impact, and that's within a celebrity-infused PSA YouTube video titled "5 Friends."
The
first video
was launched in early October, around the time when registration deadlines were approaching. With the election only a few days away, the same cast has come back to record yet another video, encouraging citizens to get
five more friends
to vote. Celebrities featured in the video include:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Snoop Dogg, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Will Smith, Steven Spielberg, Justin Timberlake, “Borat”, Zach Braff, Colin Farrell, Neil Patrick Harris, Scarlett Johansson, Shia LeBeouf, Tobey Maguire, Ryan Reynolds, and Jason Segal.
We're excited to have collaborated in this process and hope that more citizens will be able to get the information they need on election day, thanks to the virality of such tremendous get-out-the-vote efforts. So what are you waiting for? Tell five more friends to vote! There's not much time left.
Posted by Brittany Bohnet, Google Elections Team
Reduce your carbon footprint in five simple steps
October 27, 2008
This is a guest post from the folks at
liveclimate.org
, an organization we worked with to offset the Google Apps bus tour's carbon footprint. Developing countries will be the hardest hit by effects of climate change, and hundreds of projects around the world are using the growing carbon market to fight poverty in the poorest parts of the world while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving the integrity of our climate. We think these issues are important and would love for you to help.
My name is Jit Bhattacharya, and I'm one of the founders of
Live Climate
. We are proud to be the carbon offset partner for Google's
"App to School" bus tour
. The "App to School" bus tour offset their emissions by donating to a small business bringing solar energy to the communities in Nicaragua that need it most.
Climate change and poverty will be the two defining challenges of this millennium. To win at both these challenges requires commitment from government, from business, and from everyday people like you and me. Google has obviously made that commitment. With their RechargeIT program and solar initiative, we are that much closer to driving 100mpg cars and building affordable solar energy.
Now it's time for us all to make the commitment. If you were wondering what you could do, here are 5 simple things you can do to go carbon neutral and stop climate change:
Change the Lights –
For how small it is, Compact Fluroescent light bulb makes a big difference. Each CFL installed saves you money and prevents 110 lbs of coal from being burned. If every college student in the U.S. changed just 2 light bulbs, we could prevent over 1 Million metric tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. If you need any more convincing, Wal-Mart and Costco are offering huge discounts.
Green Your Ride –
So maybe you can't afford a Toyota Prius yet. You can still reduce emissions from transportation. Walk or take public transportation whenever possible. If you do drive, fill up your tires to their limit. It makes a 5% difference! When driving play a game of seeing how many miles you can get out of each tank. With $4/gallon gas, it's a game worth playing.
Eat Less Beef –
The food we eat is a major source of carbon emissions. Visit
http://coolclimate.berkeley.
edu/
to see the carbon footprint of your diet. Eating less beef, eating organic, and buying from local farmer's markets reduces how much energy has gone into the production and transportation of your food.
Make Your Home Super-Efficient -
Seal up doors and windows. Switch to
EnergyStar
appliances. And when you've done all of that, contact your utility to make sure that the few kilowatt-hours of electricity that you do use is coming from renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Offset Your Footprint with Live Climate –
Through the simple changes above, we can reduce our individual carbon footprints by over 50%. To go fully carbon neutral, offset your footprint through a site like Live Climate. Offsetting lets you account for your own carbon footprint by contributing to a project elsewhere that is reducing emissions. With sites like Live Climate, you can pick exactly what project to contribute to and you are guaranteed that is helping to fight poverty as well.
The biggest thing you can do this year for climate change is
Get out and Vote!
This year's election is going to determine how we decide to address climate change in the coming decade, and
students like you should be part of the solution.
Greater access to voting information
October 22, 2008
Many of you students will soon have your first voting experience. And in this year's election, every vote counts. Here at Google, we've discovered data that proves
how people like you have increasingly been searching for voting information, like
how to register and where to vote
.
It's hard to believe that in 2008, information so important to U.S. citizens and the democratic process isn't well organized on the web.
To solve this problem, we've released our
US Voter Info site
, an effort to simplify and centralize registration information and voting locations.
We developed the site in the hope that it will increase voter participation. We were helped by a number of partners, including many state and local election officials,
the
League of Women Voters
, the
Pew Charitable Trusts
, and others involved in the
Voting Information Project
.
Are you registered to vote? What's the best way to obtain an absentee ballot? When people visit the site, answers to these questions appear. And anyone with a website can provide the same information. The
US Voter Info gadget
places a simple search box that expands to show a full set of voter information when someone enters an address.
We are also offering a simpler way to find out
where to vote
. By entering a home address, citizens across the country will be able to find their polling place for election day.
To further encourage voter participation, we've opened up this data to third-party sites and developers through an API developed by Dan Berlin, one of our open-source engineers. We're excited to share this information, and hope that others will find it useful in encouraging citizens to vote.
Organizing information is our mission. We do that every day with web content, and we want to do the same thing with information to inform and empower voters and to help them get to the polls this election season.
Posted by Brittany Bohnet, Google Elections Team
Congratulations to the gadget competition winners!
October 16, 2008
In February, we launched the
East Africa Gadget Competition
that saw students from 10 universities in 6 East African countries compete in creating and developing the "next big thing". Following several other such competitions around the world, the East Africa contest was the first of its kind for those of us on the African continent. It gave East African students in computer science and IT the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, creativity to develop gadgets with content, feeds, features, looks and languages that reflect the needs of online users of today and tomorrow. Those students who combine outstanding creativity and exceptional technical skills could win great prizes.
Throughout the six months of the competition, all participating students received support via a dedicated email contact as well as monthly emails taking them step by step through how to create a gadget. Regardless of the
technical difficulties
we experienced, students kept working hard and submitted 41 fully functioning gadgets. Everyone who submitted a gadget has put a lot of time, effort, creativity and care into developing outstanding web applications. We're certain that the high quality of the gadgets and their relevance for local as well as international users will attract a high number of users not only in Africa but around the world.
Our East Africa Gadget Team was impressed by the quality and level of creativity of the submissions, which did not make it easy for our panel to select the winners. Still, only six entries could win one of the great prizes, and the judges have chosen these:
Overall Winner
Igisoro Game
by Antoine Nzeyimana (KIST, Rwanda)
Best Gadget UI
Charty Wizard
by Murithi Borona (University of Nairobi, Kenya)
Best Local Content
Random African Proverb
by Peter Munene Karunyu (Moi University, Kenya)
Best Education-Specific
Deaf / Braille Alphabets
by Jean Claude Nzayisenga (National University of Rwanda, Rwanda)
Best Procrastinator
Sliding Puzzle
by Miano Njoka (JKUAT, Kenya)
Most Technically Sophisticated
Add Mad
by Hussein Lightwalla (Strathmore University, Kenya)
Here's a full list of winners
and links to their gadgets. And the prize? Antoine will receive a US
$600
stipend, and the five runners-up will receive a US
$350
stipend.
Thanks to everyone for their hard work. We look forward to seeing what students will come up with next time!
Posted by Maria Kubran and Louise Welch, University Programs Team
Stories by Googlers
October 13, 2008
I recently had the chance to interview several long-time Googlers about the early days. To commemorate our 10th birthday, we've been
revisiting our memories
by digging into company lore. As fun as it has been to look back, of course we've also got our sights firmly set on what lies ahead.
Vint Cerf
has some predictions about the
interplanetary Internet
, while
Kai-Fu Lee
talks about the growing ubiquity of cloud computing. Also featured are stories from early Googlers, like
Craig Silverstein
's memories of a certain
famous garage
, and
Marissa Mayer
's reflections on the spirit that has carried over from our formative years.
So take a few minutes to watch this blended tale of startup quirkiness and big dreams. And if you like, feel free to comment on YouTube.
Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog Team
Gmail Labs: helping students everywhere
October 9, 2008
A few months ago the Gmail team
introduced Gmail Labs
as a way to quickly launch experimental new features. Some of these might really help your productivity like Superstars, Quick Links, or the Forgotten Attachment Detector, while others -- like Old Snakey -- are just for fun. And then there's our newest addition called Mail Goggles...
While Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, the new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles may help.
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?
By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings.
To activate Mail Goggles (or any of the 24 Labs features currently available), just click the "Settings" link at the top of your Gmail inbox, then go to the "Labs" section.
Posted by John Perlow, Gmail engineer
New Technology Roundtable Series
October 6, 2008
We've just posted the first three videos in the
Google Technology Roundtable Series
. Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achievements. We use a talk show format, where I lead a discussion on the technology.
While the videos are intended for a reasonably technical audience, I think they may be interesting to many as an overview of the key challenges and ideas underlying Google's systems. And of course they offer a glimpse into the people behind Google.
The first one we made is "
Large-Scale Search System Infrastructure and Search Quality
." I interview Google Fellows
Jeff Dean
and
Amit Singhal
on their insights in how search works at Google.
The next title is "
Map Reduce
," a discussion of this key technology (first, at Google, and now having a great impact across the field) for harnessing parallelism provided by very large-scale clusters computers, while mitigating the component failures that inevitably occur in such big systems. My discussion is with four of our Map Reduce expert engineers: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean again, plus Software Engineers
Jerry Zhao
and
Matt Austern
who discuss the origin, evolution and future of Map Reduce. By the way, this type of infrastructure underlies the infrastructure concepts in our recent post on "
The Intelligent Cloud
."
The third video, "
Applications of Human Language Technology
," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts
Franz Josef Och
, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.
We hope to produce more of these, so please leave feedback at YouTube (in the comments field for each video), and we will incorporate your ideas into our future efforts.
[Cross-posted on the
Google Research Blog
.]
Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives
Science outreach returns
October 3, 2008
The Google Earth Education team is excited to announce two new science outreach initiatives. Both are part of our effort to increase educational outreach and expand upon the successful
workshop
we held in Boulder at the University of Colorado in the spring.
Google Earth Conference
In partnership with the
University of Michigan
, we are co-hosting a conference focused on exploring science data visualization in Google Earth, Google Maps, and KML. The
Scientific
Applications for Google Earth Conference
is scheduled for October 22nd and 23rd in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The two-day event will bring together researchers and students from all over the country to discuss the scientific uses of virtual globes and how that technology is enabling newer and richer data interaction experiences for both expert and novice users.
Keynote speakers include Tim Killeen,
Assistant Director for Geosciences at the National Science Foundation, and Dan Adkins, former Director of the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
Like the Boulder event, Google engineers will be on hand to work directly with students and scientists on ways to overcome technical problems and to provide training for those interested in advanced techniques with KML. Of course we'll be sure to wear maize and blue! Registration for the event is now open, details are available on the conference
website
. Spots are limited so be sure to check it out soon.
Google Earth Contest
The second initiative is a contest targeting scientific content in KML. The
KML in Research
contest is open to both students and professionals. We think this will be a fun way for people working with KML to get some exposure for their work and perhaps win some prizes!
So get out your best research ideas and bring your data to life with KML and Google Earth. In addition to prizes, winners will have their work showcased at the American Geophysical Union's annual
Fall meeting
on December 15th!
For great examples of the kind of entries we are hoping for, check out
John Bailey's Science Archive
and as always, the
Google Earth Gallery
.
Posted by Ryan Falor, Systems Engineer
Now's the time: Register to vote
October 2, 2008
Political participation is at an all-time high this election season, and a record number of voters have already started to cast ballots -- a few even camped out in Ohio to be the first in line for early voting yesterday.
But roughly 1 in 4 Americans still aren't registered to vote, according to the most recent
Census report
. Now is the time -- voter registration deadlines are less than a week away in most states.
We're trying to help increase participation by making sure you have easy access to voting information. Google's
Voter Info Map
currently puts registration, absentee and early voting information in one place. (If you're on a phone, you can check out our mobile version at
m.google.com/elections
.)
We're working closely with state and local election officials, the
Voting Information Project
and the
League of Women Voters
to centralize official voting information. Stay tuned for more posts on the project and details on how you can help confirm your local polling place address.
Leonardo DiCaprio, will.i.am, Tobey Maguire, Forrest Whitaker and a few of their friends put together the first in a series of public service announcements to encourage young Americans to register to vote -- and they include a link to our Voter Info Map.
As the Internet plays a greater role in helping people participate in elections, we're excited to help out. And you can, too. Help make sure everyone is ready for election day by reminding your friends and family to register and vote.
Posted by Brittany Bohnet, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Googlers Beta
October 1, 2008
Frontend web design and backend server programming are enough to make many people's heads spin. However, for Matt Pokrzywa, it was the essence of his highly technical work during his summer internship with Google and the Checkout team. Here is his story in our on-going series about our awesome interns, our Googlers Beta.
"On top of becoming a better programmer, working at Google has made me a better designer and problem solver."
Matt Pokrzywa, Software Engineering Intern
Name: Matt Pokrzywa
Hometown: Pleasantville, NY
Department: Software Engineer - Google Checkout
Education: Cornell University, B.S. in Computer Science 2009
My story:
My internship experience can be best described as "work hard, play hard." Spending this summer at Google has allowed me to work on some really tough challenges and work with some of the smartest people in the world. I was placed on a small team on
Google Checkout
and from the first day onward, I knew the work I was doing was real engineering work that otherwise would have been assigned to a full time engineer. I even joined my team for a week trip to Mountain View to do a technical deep dive with the Google Sites team. While having such responsibilities was difficult and often times stressful, working at Google offered so many ways to break the tension. Whether it was playing ping-pong or Guitar Hero with my coworkers, or getting out to explore Manhattan with my fellow interns, Google provided so many awesome ways to relax and just chill out.
Besides being so much fun, working at Google was a learning experience like no other. I can honestly say I learned more in my 14 weeks here than I did the entire previous school year. I was fortunate enough to be assigned projects that allowed me to explore so many areas of Google technology. I worked with frontend web design, backend server programming, and I actively took part in brainstorming and design sessions to define the future of our product. On top of becoming a better programmer, working at Google has made me a better designer and problem solver in general.
Having interned in other technology companies before, I have to say that the Google internship experience blew all the others away. The quality of the code and the documentation, the brilliance of everyone around you, and the incredibly fun and relaxed company culture is something you'll not experience anywhere else.
Posted by Ann Forbes-Cannon, Intern Program Team
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