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Saturday, May 22, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Google Special Award Winners @ Intel ISEF 2010
Last Thursday evening, we announced the winners of our Google Special Awards at the Intel ISEF 2010 Special Awards Ceremony. With applications from 17 project fields ranging from behavioral and social sciences to microbiology, judging these great projects was extremely difficult. Submissions like a bio-inspired photonic fuel cell and a new way to treat waste water using fungus showcased the ingenuity and imagination of the world’s next generation of scientists. In fact, we were so blown away by the caliber of the project submissions that hours before the award ceremony, we decided to give some additional awards. In addition to the three $10,000 category prizes, we awarded six runner-up prizes of $1,000 each. And since so many of our applications were in the Secret Change Agent category (an award for the project that has the most potential to positively impact society and make the world a better place), we selected two winners, who each received $10,000!
Please join us in congratulating the 10 finalists and finalist teams who were awarded the Google Special Awards. Their accomplishments represent the bright future of science and technology and we’re thrilled to be along for the ride.
Google Special Award Winners & Runner-ups
Category #1: CS Connect: applying computer science to further scientific inquiry in your field
Please join us in congratulating the 10 finalists and finalist teams who were awarded the Google Special Awards. Their accomplishments represent the bright future of science and technology and we’re thrilled to be along for the ride.
Google Special Award Winners & Runner-ups
Category #1: CS Connect: applying computer science to further scientific inquiry in your field
Runner-ups ($1,000 each)Category #2: The Future of Energy: contributing to a cleaner, brighter tomorrow
Ritik Malhotra and Tony Ho (Mechanical Engineering), ages 17, San Jose, CA
Engineering a Novel Genetics-Based Disease Detection Mechanism Designed Using an Ontology-Driven Semantically Annotated Microarray Repository with Thermal Gradient Focusing Mass Spectrometry
Christopher Nielsen (Electrical Engineering), age 16, Alberta, Canada
Robust Displacement Estimation Employing Inexpensive Webcam Based Optical Flow
Winner ($10,000)
Joon Suk Huh (Physics), age 17, South Korea
Finding the Minimum Energy Conformation of Protein-like Heteropolymers by Greedy Neighborhood Search
Runner-ups ($1,000 each)Category #3: Secret Change Agent: making our world a better place through innovative changeLyric Gilett (Energy and Transportation), 18, Texas
Novel Method: Detecting High Energies in Sonoluminescense
Max Keller (Energy and Transportation), Age 17, Minnesota
Decomposing Energy
Winner ($10,000)
Dheevesh Arulmani (Energy and Transportation), Age 14, Ontario, Canada
Bio-Inspired Photonic Fuel Cell
Runner-ups ($1,000 each)For a full listing of the Intel ISEF Grand Award and Special Award winners, visit the Intel ISEF 2010 homepage here.
Xiangbo Meng (Plant Sciences), age 17, Beijing, China
Aqueous Extract of Lemon Leaves as a Novel Powerful Insecticide Against Trialeurodes Vaporariorum (Whitefly)
Sonia Rao (Microbiology), age 17, Missouri
Bacterial Silencing: The Discovery of Quorum Quenching Soil Microbes for the Development of Antimicrobial Compounds
Winners ($10,000 each)
William Lopes (Microbiology), age 20, Brasil
Utilization of the Fungus Aspergillus Niger on Wastewater Treatment II
Karoline Elis Lopes Martins (Environmental Management), age 18, Brasil
Construction of a Continuous Flow SODIS system with PET Bottles Integrated to a Water and Waste-Water Treatment System
Keeping up-to-date on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill
(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)
April 25, 2010
April 29, 2010
May 9, 2010
May 17, 2010
The last image, taken earlier this week (on May 17), shows the coastal areas currently at risk from the spreading oil, and can help those working on the wide range of relief efforts.
You can view this and other MODIS imagery in Google Earth by downloading this KML. You can also view additional imagery and find other resources and news at our oil spill crisis response page.
Google Apps highlights – 5/21/2010
This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
It’s been an active and exciting week on the Google Apps team, including the release of several new features at Google I/O, our annual developers conference.
Google Calendar gets a new look
The Google Calendar team has been doing some spring cleaning. On Wednesday, we revealed Google Calendar’s new cleaner design. We streamlined text that appears in the interface, made the controls more compact and created more space on screen to display information from your calendar.
New themes for forms in Google Docs
We also spruced up forms in Google Docs with the addition of 24 new themes for online surveys that you create. As you’re editing your form, just click the “Theme” button to browse the gallery and change the look and feel of your form.
Drag images into Gmail messages
On Tuesday, we simplified a common action: inserting images in a Gmail message. If you use Google Chrome, now you can drag images files from your computer’s desktop or folders onto the body of a message you’re composing, and Gmail will add the image to your message. You can easily resize the image right in the Gmail compose window before hitting “Send.”
Google Voice open to students
We’ve heard from many students how Google Voice makes it easier to deal with the process of getting a new dorm phone number and moving back and forth between school and home each year. Voicemail transcriptions that students can glance at while in class are also useful. To help more students take advantage of these tools, last Friday we opened up Google Voice for students with .edu email addresses. Try it out!
Google Wave (Labs) open to all
Google Wave is a new team collaboration application that brings discussion and debate right into the context of content people are working on together. For the last year, Google Wave has been available to a limited set of testers and early users, but on Wednesday we moved Wave to Google Labs and now anyone can sign up. If you use Google Apps at your business, school or organization, your IT manager can enable Wave from the Google Apps control panel now, too.
More Google applications coming for Google Apps customers
Speaking of new applications for businesses, schools and organizations, we also just announced that starting this summer, Google Apps customers will be able to sign into Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, AdWords and many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts. If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, read more about how this change will work and sign up to start testing. We welcome your feedback.
Contextual gadgets in Gmail
Gmail can already display previews of documents, videos and photo albums so you don’t have to switch back and forth between windows, and now Google Apps customers can add other contextual gadgets from the Google Apps Marketplace. There are already gadgets for project management, social networking, rich contact profiles and much more, and we hope developers will build their own contextual gadgets with the new Gmail API.
Apps Script
Google Apps Script lets customers automate business processes ranging from expense approvals to time-sheet tracking to ticket management and order fulfillment. On Tuesday we launched Google Apps Script improvements, including Java database connectivity, custom user interfaces for scripts, the ability to invoke scripts from any web page and integrations with more Google services, like Google Maps. To help you get started with scripts, we also released a new set of script templates with pre-built functionality.
Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes®
Many companies still using old legacy technologies are looking to make a seamless switch to the cloud, and now Lotus Notes customers can move to Google Apps in phases, at their own pace. Last week we launched the Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes®, which allows businesses to switch to Google Apps department by department. Google Apps users in your organization can look up free/busy info for coworkers still on Lotus Notes and vice versa.
Who’s gone Google?
Thousands more businesses and schools have “gone Google” since our last update, including Arista Networks (where Andy Bechtolsheim serves as Chairman) and Smart Furniture. Both of these companies had a common motivation for moving to Google Apps: being able to focus their precious resources on core business challenges by letting technology experts at Google handle the day-to-day operations of running an email system.
It’s been an active and exciting week on the Google Apps team, including the release of several new features at Google I/O, our annual developers conference.
Google Calendar gets a new look
The Google Calendar team has been doing some spring cleaning. On Wednesday, we revealed Google Calendar’s new cleaner design. We streamlined text that appears in the interface, made the controls more compact and created more space on screen to display information from your calendar.
New themes for forms in Google Docs
We also spruced up forms in Google Docs with the addition of 24 new themes for online surveys that you create. As you’re editing your form, just click the “Theme” button to browse the gallery and change the look and feel of your form.
Drag images into Gmail messages
On Tuesday, we simplified a common action: inserting images in a Gmail message. If you use Google Chrome, now you can drag images files from your computer’s desktop or folders onto the body of a message you’re composing, and Gmail will add the image to your message. You can easily resize the image right in the Gmail compose window before hitting “Send.”
Google Voice open to students
We’ve heard from many students how Google Voice makes it easier to deal with the process of getting a new dorm phone number and moving back and forth between school and home each year. Voicemail transcriptions that students can glance at while in class are also useful. To help more students take advantage of these tools, last Friday we opened up Google Voice for students with .edu email addresses. Try it out!
Google Wave (Labs) open to all
Google Wave is a new team collaboration application that brings discussion and debate right into the context of content people are working on together. For the last year, Google Wave has been available to a limited set of testers and early users, but on Wednesday we moved Wave to Google Labs and now anyone can sign up. If you use Google Apps at your business, school or organization, your IT manager can enable Wave from the Google Apps control panel now, too.
More Google applications coming for Google Apps customers
Speaking of new applications for businesses, schools and organizations, we also just announced that starting this summer, Google Apps customers will be able to sign into Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, AdWords and many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts. If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, read more about how this change will work and sign up to start testing. We welcome your feedback.
Contextual gadgets in Gmail
Gmail can already display previews of documents, videos and photo albums so you don’t have to switch back and forth between windows, and now Google Apps customers can add other contextual gadgets from the Google Apps Marketplace. There are already gadgets for project management, social networking, rich contact profiles and much more, and we hope developers will build their own contextual gadgets with the new Gmail API.
Apps Script
Google Apps Script lets customers automate business processes ranging from expense approvals to time-sheet tracking to ticket management and order fulfillment. On Tuesday we launched Google Apps Script improvements, including Java database connectivity, custom user interfaces for scripts, the ability to invoke scripts from any web page and integrations with more Google services, like Google Maps. To help you get started with scripts, we also released a new set of script templates with pre-built functionality.
Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes®
Many companies still using old legacy technologies are looking to make a seamless switch to the cloud, and now Lotus Notes customers can move to Google Apps in phases, at their own pace. Last week we launched the Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes®, which allows businesses to switch to Google Apps department by department. Google Apps users in your organization can look up free/busy info for coworkers still on Lotus Notes and vice versa.
Who’s gone Google?
Thousands more businesses and schools have “gone Google” since our last update, including Arista Networks (where Andy Bechtolsheim serves as Chairman) and Smart Furniture. Both of these companies had a common motivation for moving to Google Apps: being able to focus their precious resources on core business challenges by letting technology experts at Google handle the day-to-day operations of running an email system.
Search more securely with encrypted Google web search
Update June 25, 2010: Since we introduced our encrypted search option last month, we’ve been listening closely to user feedback. Many users appreciate the capability to perform searches with better protection against snooping from third parties. We’ve also heard about some challenges faced by various school districts, and today, we want to inform you that we’ve moved encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com. The site functions in the same way. For more information on this change, please read on here.
As people spend more time on the Internet, they want greater control over who has access to their online communications. Many Internet services use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt information that travels between your computer and their service. Usually recognized by a web address starting with “https” or a browser lock icon, this technology is regularly used by online banking sites and e-commerce websites. Other sites may also implement SSL in a more limited fashion, for example, to help protect your passwords when you enter your login information.
Years ago Google added SSL encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs and others, and we continue to enable encryption on more services. Like banking and e-commerce sites, Google’s encryption extends beyond login passwords to the entire service. This session-wide encryption is a significant privacy advantage over systems that only encrypt login pages and credit card information. Early this year, we took an important step forward by making SSL the default setting for all Gmail users. And today we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely at https://www.google.com.
When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators:
Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.
A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.
We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings. To learn more about using the feature, refer to our help article on search over SSL.
As people spend more time on the Internet, they want greater control over who has access to their online communications. Many Internet services use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt information that travels between your computer and their service. Usually recognized by a web address starting with “https” or a browser lock icon, this technology is regularly used by online banking sites and e-commerce websites. Other sites may also implement SSL in a more limited fashion, for example, to help protect your passwords when you enter your login information.
Years ago Google added SSL encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs and others, and we continue to enable encryption on more services. Like banking and e-commerce sites, Google’s encryption extends beyond login passwords to the entire service. This session-wide encryption is a significant privacy advantage over systems that only encrypt login pages and credit card information. Early this year, we took an important step forward by making SSL the default setting for all Gmail users. And today we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely at https://www.google.com.
When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators:
Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.
We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings. To learn more about using the feature, refer to our help article on search over SSL.
Working with AdMob to move mobile advertising forward
Today, the Federal Trade Commission cleared our acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising start up. We’re excited to work with Omar Hamoui and his talented team at AdMob to develop new mobile advertising solutions for marketers, mobile app developers and mobile publishers.
The decision is great news for the mobile advertising ecosystem as a whole. This was reflected in the widespread industry support for our acquisition.
Throughout the FTC’s review process, it’s been clear that mobile advertising is growing rapidly.
As mobile phone usage increases, growth in mobile advertising is only going to accelerate. This benefits mobile developers and publishers who will get better advertising solutions, marketers who will find new ways to reach consumers, and users who will get better ads and more free content.
We’re very excited about the possibilities in this field. As an immediate matter, we’re now moving to close this acquisition in coming weeks. We’ll then start work right away on bringing AdMob’s and Google’s teams and products together. This industry is moving fast, and we’re excited to be part of the race!
The decision is great news for the mobile advertising ecosystem as a whole. This was reflected in the widespread industry support for our acquisition.
Throughout the FTC’s review process, it’s been clear that mobile advertising is growing rapidly.
As mobile phone usage increases, growth in mobile advertising is only going to accelerate. This benefits mobile developers and publishers who will get better advertising solutions, marketers who will find new ways to reach consumers, and users who will get better ads and more free content.
We’re very excited about the possibilities in this field. As an immediate matter, we’re now moving to close this acquisition in coming weeks. We’ll then start work right away on bringing AdMob’s and Google’s teams and products together. This industry is moving fast, and we’re excited to be part of the race!
Celebrating PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday
When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors; peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets; and—of course—free games!
One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun.
Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories—or meet PAC-MAN for the first time—through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds.
Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys).
PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. You know, without actually needing any quarters.
One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun.
Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories—or meet PAC-MAN for the first time—through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds.
Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys).
PAC-MAN™ & ©1980 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.
PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. You know, without actually needing any quarters.
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