Same-Language Subtitling

<span style="font-style: italic;">The <a href="http://www.google.org/">Google Foundation</a> supports selected organizations whose work addresses the challenge of global poverty in ways that are effective, sustainable, and scalable. From time to time we will invite guest bloggers from grantee organizations to tell their story.<br /><br />Recently, the Google Foundation awarded PlanetRead a grant to increase the number of SLS programs available, and Google is also supporting PlanetRead with free advertising through the <a href="http://www.google.com/grants/">Google Grants</a> program and content hosting on Google Video.<br /><br />When a billion people are illiterate (two-thirds of them women), and nearly half of the world lives on less than $2 a day, we believe it is important to examine the link between literacy and poverty. We are excited by the prospect of helping not hundreds, but millions, of people gain access to regular reading practice and improve literacy where it is needed most by supporting organizations like PlanetRead. - Google.org team</span><br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Dr. Brij Kothari, President, PlanetRead</span><br /><br />My organization, <a href="http://www.planetread.org/">PlanetRead</a>, works in Mumbai and Pondicherry, India. We have developed a “Same-Language Subtitling” (SLS) methodology, which provides automatic reading practice to individuals who are excluded from the traditional educational system, or whose literacy needs are otherwise not being met. This is an educational program rooted in mass media that demonstrates how a specific literacy intervention can yield outstanding, measurable results, while complementing other formal and non-formal learning initiatives of the government, private sector, and civil society. We are fortunate to have just been selected as a Google Foundation grantee.<br /><br />More than 500 million people in India have access to TV and 40 percent of these viewers have low literacy skills and are poor. Through PlanetRead’s approach, over 200 million early-literates in India are getting weekly reading practice from Same Language Subtitling (SLS) using TV. The cost of SLS? Every U.S. dollar covers regular reading for 10,000 people – for a year.<br /><br />I hit upon this idea in 1996 through a most ordinary personal experience. While taking a break from dissertation writing at Cornell University, I was watching a Spanish film with friends to improve my Spanish. The Spanish movie had English subtitles, and I remember commenting that I wished it came with Spanish subtitles, if only to help us grasp the Spanish dialogue better. I then thought, ‘And if they just put Hindi subtitles on Bollywood songs in Hindi, India would become literate.’ That idea became an obsession. It was so simple, intuitively obvious, and scalable in its potential to help hundreds of millions of people read -- not just in India, but globally. So you can see how it works, we’ve uploaded some <a href="http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=telugu+folk+song">folk songs using SLS </a>into Google Video. And we've uploaded <a href="http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=PlanetRead">other examples</a> there as well. <br /><br />The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and its Center for Educational Innovation helped me pursue research on SLS. In the beginning we showed Bollywood songs with and without SLS to people in villages, slums and railway stations and video-recorded their reactions. We then piloted SLS in schools and on TV in Gujarat state while measuring reading improvement. This early work convinced us that we not only had an idea that would provide automatic reading practice, it was hugely popular (later, the ratings demonstrated this). After five challenging years of developing and strengthening the program, SLS went on national TV throughout India. On the <a href="http://www.planetread.org/">PlanetRead website</a>, there are some video clips of SLS featured in a Bollywood film. Click on the “Video” link on the upper right to see the reaction of Indian villagers to the SLS experience.<br /><br />There’s more on the effectiveness of this approach in <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/ITID-2-1_23_0.pdf">an article</a> in the MIT journal <span style="font-style: italic;">Information Technologies and International Development</span> (it's a PDF file).<br /><br />The idea of SLS tends to divide people into two camps – those who think it’s too simple to achieve anything, and those who understand that its simplicity and ability to integrate into popular culture can fundamentally alter the approach to the massive problem of low literacy. Now, a decade later, it is clear that the challenge of implementing SLS is changing minds used to resource-hungry approaches to literacy.<br /><br />Fortunately, in India, several senior policy-makers in broadcasting and education are championing SLS. We feel it could be a breakthrough in how we approach literacy: SLS is inclusive, accessible, and builds upon popular songs and Bollywood films to create an enjoyable and effective learning experience. With support from Google, we have the opportunity to reshape the literacy landscape in India, home to a third of the world’s non-literates and early-literates. If this experiment succeeds in India, SLS could even go global!

Same-Language Subtitling

The Google Foundation supports selected organizations whose work addresses the challenge of global poverty in ways that are effective, sust...

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A cure for the common inbox

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Jared Jacobs, Gmail Engineer</span><br /><br />Ever get the feeling that your email experience is a little too predictable? I certainly have. Over the past few months, I've been working on Gmail Clips, a new feature that can help mix things up a bit. Starting this week, you can see headlines from your favorite blogs and news sites right above your Inbox. Gmail tips and relevant text ads appear from time to time as well.<br /><br />I had a lot of fun working on this feature, and biased as I may be, I have to say I really love Clips. No new mail? Great, then I have time to read <a href="http://ask.yahoo.com/20051007.html">why pasta is made in different shapes</a>. And even if I do have mail I should be getting to, maybe I'm in the mood to digress for a moment and investigate <a href="http://www.roadcycling.com/news/article1094.shtml">The Divine Secrets of the Cycle Commuter</a>.<br /><br />Clips are full of headlines like these. They can come from any website that publishes an RSS or Atom feed. We've included some popular feeds for you to choose from, but it's easy to tailor Clips to your interests (for example, I get <a href="http://www.coolrunning.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm_affiliate.cgi?s=1" target="_blank">running tips</a>). You can browse popular feeds, search for feeds using keywords, or add a specific feed—like, say, your friend's blog, or maybe the Google Blog — by pasting its URL in your Clips settings.<br /><br />Now if you're one of those task-oriented types with no time for diversions, you can always turn Clips off. But then you'd miss <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1858246,00.html">cow-tipping exposed as a near-impossibility.</a>

A cure for the common inbox

Posted by Jared Jacobs, Gmail Engineer Ever get the feeling that your email experience is a little too predictable? I certainly have. Over t...

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Public transit via Google

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Avichal Garg, Product Manager, Transit Team</span><br /><br />One of the best things about working at Google is a policy known as "20 percent time," which you can read about on our<a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=about.html"> jobs page</a> or in <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/12/ive-got-suggestion.html">this post</a>. Having the freedom to pursue projects during 20 percent of our work week means engineers can pursue a breadth of unique and interesting ideas without having to wait for anyone else.<br /><br />So not too long ago, a few engineers from San Francisco, New York, and Zurich -- all of whom regularly use public transportation -- decided that being able to plan local trips without having to go to multiple websites, and done in an easy, intuitive way would be a useful product. So they devoted their 20 percent time to building it. As it happens, a lot of people thought this was a great idea, and our small team quickly grew with "twenty-percenters" from across Google.<br /><br />Today, we are happy and proud to tell you that their efforts have resulted in a new <a href="http://labs.google.com/">Google Labs</a> experiment: <a href="http://www.google.com/transit">Google Transit Trip Planner</a>. With it, commuters will be able to easily access public transit schedules, routes, and plan trips using their local public transportation options. This first release covers only the Portland, Oregon metro area, but we are working to expand our coverage very soon. (If you're from a local transit agency interested in being included in Google Transit, we would love to speak with you. <a href="mailto:labs-transit_content@google.com">Just write to us</a>.)<br /><br />We chose to launch with the Portland metro area for a couple of reasons. TriMet, Portland's transit authority, is a technological leader in public transportation. The team at TriMet is a group of tremendously passionate people dedicated to serving their community. And TriMet has a wealth of data readily available that they were eager to share with us for this project. This combination of great people and great data made TriMet the ideal partner.<br /><br />Public transportation offers a unique type of data that people use in very different ways than most of the data Google has worked with before. We really want to understand how people use Google Transit and the challenges we'll face as we cover additional cities. To that end, we'd love to <a href="mailto:labs-transit_feedback@google.com">hear your feedback!</a><br /><br />Try some of the queries you can do in Portland on Google Transit:<br /><br />Leave now<br /><a href="http://www.google.com/transit?q=pdx+to+100+nw+couch+st,+portland,+oregon&hl=en">pdx to 100 ne couch st, portland, oregon</a><br /><a href="http://www.google.com/transit?q=4412+se+17th+ave+portland,+oregon+to+hillsboro,+oregon&hl=en">4412 se 17th ave portland, oregon to hillsboro, oregon</a><br /><br />Choose a specific time<br /><a href="http://www.google.com/transit?q=pdx+to+portland,+oregon+at+7pm&hl=en">pdx to portland, oregon at 7pm</a><br /><a href="http://www.google.com/transit?q=100+nw+couch+st,+portland+to+hillsboro,+oregon+by+8pm&hl=en">100 nw couch st, portland to hillsboro, oregon by 8pm</a><br /><a href="http://www.google.com/transit?q=portland+to+pdx+at+7pm+on+12%2F8&hl=en">portland to pdx at 7pm on 12/09/05</a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">[Updated with links to results]</span>

Public transit via Google

Posted by Avichal Garg, Product Manager, Transit Team One of the best things about working at Google is a policy known as "20 percent t...

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Acumen visits Google

<span style="font-style: italic;">The <a href="http://www.google.org/">Google Foundation</a> supports select organizations whose work addresses the challenge of global poverty in ways that are effective, sustainable, and scalable. From time to time we will invite guest bloggers from grantee organizations to tell their story. Here's the first of this occasional series.</span><br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO, Acumen Fund</span><br /><br />Arriving at Google, we somehow found a spot in the overflowing lot and emerged onto a sprawling campus reminiscent of my days at Stanford. At the front desk, our team commented on the simple yet impressive display we spotted on a monitor depicting the volume of searches originating from every point on the globe with colored dots. Interconnectedness: <a href="http://www.acumenfund.org/">Acumen Fund</a> is building a global community of like-minded individuals committed to solving problems of poverty through market-based approaches and enabling poor individuals to make their own choices.<br /><br />We followed the yellow brick road to Building 40, past the packed beach volleyball courts and an outdoor café. More than 100 people came to our talk. I was introduced by Sheryl Sandberg, who is Google’s VP of Global Online Sales and Operations and the current acting director of <a href="http://google.org/">Google.org</a>. Sheryl emphasized Google.org's aim: to work with ventures that are sustainable, collaborative, and able to achieve scale. (To that end, the Google Foundation already supports Acumen Fund; <a title="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/about-googleorg.html" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/about-googleorg.html">read more here</a>.)<br /><br />My <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8365776977948043743">talk</a> (it was taped) focused on Acumen Fund's mission: to build blueprints for delivering critical goods and services to people earning less than $4 a day. If we can determine better ways for making water, health, housing, and energy available to the poor – and make them affordable and accessible – I believe we'll go a long way toward ending poverty. I spoke about some of Acumen Fund’s key investments: For example, our <a title="http://www.acumenfund.org/Work/HealthTechnology/Investments.asp" href="http://www.acumenfund.org/Work/HealthTechnology/Investments.asp">malaria bednet investment</a> in Tanzania. It employs more than 2,000 women to produce more than 3 million long-lasting bednets per year, impregnated with insecticide to stop mosquitoes. We're hoping to manufacture 6 million of these by the end of 2006, which will mean another 12 million people protected from malaria. This is a good start in teaching us critical lessons about how sustainable enterprises can make an enduring contribution toward solving pressing social problems.<br /><br />Even more important, our work teaches us what the poor want as consumers. And this is where Acumen Fund will see the greatest returns: the more we understand who poor people are, the better solutions we can develop based on their choices and needs. Indeed, finding iterative – or possibly revolutionary – improvements to delivery systems is where the partnership between Google and Acumen Fund could have great impact. Larry and Sergey believe that scale is key, as is sustainability, and these are the core concepts driving all of Acumen Fund's work.<br /><br />As a first step, we hope to collaborate with interested Googlers to find better ways to learn what works around the world. Identifying powerful solutions to poverty that are useful to people in different settings, and that are market-driven, scalable, and sustainable, is our greatest challenge. Second, we're hoping to strengthen how the world measures both social and financial returns to investments in delivering critical goods and services to the poor. Like Google, we hold a deep belief in the power of <a title="http://www.acumenfund.org/Work/Metrics/" href="http://www.acumenfund.org/Work/Metrics/">measuring everything</a> we can.<br /><br />This unique partnership will enable us to do this work in a more powerful way, and to share lessons more broadly. At the end of the day, both Google and Acumen Fund are trying to bring solutions to the world that enable people to make their own choices, solve their own problems. This is the only way we will really be able to end poverty.

Acumen visits Google

The Google Foundation supports select organizations whose work addresses the challenge of global poverty in ways that are effective, sustai...

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How I Got to Google, Ch. 2: Tale of a T-shirt

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/trishagoogletee-754815.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/trishagoogletee-752599.jpg" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Trisha Weir, Hardware Operations </span><br /><br />On Wednesday, April 30th, 2003, I was swimming towards the shore as fast as I could paddle my surfboard. I was in the ocean near <a href="http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=todo+santos%2C+mexico+&btnG=Search">Todos Santos, Mexico</a>; a storm had come up, the waves were crashing huge, the wind was blowing like crazy, and I realized I'd gotten in rather over my head.<br /><br />On Wednesday, May 7th, 2003, I was standing in a room filled floor-to-ceiling with more computers than I'd ever seen in my life. My fingers were shaking as I played surgeon to a webserver, pushing tiny jumpers onto pins on the motherboard, cold blasts of air conditioning whipping my hair into my face like some tense scene from an Arctic action movie, and once again it occurred to me that I had quite possibly gotten in over my head.<br /><br />How I went from being a recent college grad on a travel kick to a Google datacenter technician in one week is a whirlwind (and windblown) story. I'd seen the <a href="http://google.com/jobs">job posting</a> a few days before I left for Mexico, but I figured it was a long shot; I had the skills, but didn't have much work experience.<br /><br />So I sent Google a love letter. I told them that yes, I could fix computers, and yes, I'd been running Linux at home for two years. And I told them the truth: they'd get a hundred job seekers with those skills, but I had something those applicants didn't: a <a href="http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=%22google+t-shirt%22&btnG=Search">Google T-shirt</a>.<br /><br />I talked about how I didn't normally wear the logos of companies I had no affiliation with, but that I wore my Google shirt with pride, because I admired Google so much -- they were smart, they treated people well (users and employees alike), and they made good products. But beyond that, I could tell Google was special, that all that innovation was going to lead to something extraordinary. And I wanted to be part of it. Also, I wanted another T-shirt.<br /><br />I got both. After I staggered up onto the beach that first Wednesday, I went into town in search of Internet access and, in a net cafe with a thatched roof and a 56k modem connection, found waiting for me an email from a Google recruiter who had plucked my application from a pool of dozens because of my T-shirt-themed cover letter. On Thursday I flew back to the U.S. On Friday I had a phone screen. On Monday I endured three hours of onsite interviews. And on Tuesday, the recruiter called back and said, "Welcome to Google. Can you start tomorrow?"<br /><br />I survived the surf at Todos Santos, and I managed to get through my first day in the Googleplex without crashing that datacenter. And the message I have for all my recent college grad peers is simple: Don't underestimate the power of your favorite T-shirt, and don't neglect your email while on vacation. Either one may hold the key to your future.

How I Got to Google, Ch. 2: Tale of a T-shirt

Posted by Trisha Weir, Hardware Operations On Wednesday, April 30th, 2003, I was swimming towards the shore as fast as I could paddle my sur...

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Lots to Talk about!

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk Product Manager</span><br /><br />The rainy season and short days are back in full swing in the Pacific Northwest and the Google Talk team, based here in Kirkland, Washington, has been making the best use of all this time indoors. Thanks to their hard work, there are a lot of exciting things in store for <a href="http://www.google.com/talk">Google Talk</a> in the coming months, and we thought the best way to tell you about them was to create <a href="http://googletalk.blogspot.com/">a blog</a> (powered by <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a>, of course!). We'll keep you posted on new features, happenings in the community, and progress toward our goal of <a href="http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html">enabling customer choice</a> in Internet communications through open standards and interoperability. From time to time we might even tell you about some of our favorite Seattle hangouts and traditions, too.

Lots to Talk about!

Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk Product Manager The rainy season and short days are back in full swing in the Pacific Northwest and th...

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Thanks Victoria doodlers!

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Dennis Hwang, Webmaster and <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/06/oodles-of-doodles.html">Google Doodler</a>.</span><br /><br />Last week Google opened our new office in the Victoria area of London, and to mark the occasion we invited students from nearby schools to create their own Google Doodles from our logo. My fellow judges and I were basically considering three qualities: the originality of the doodle idea or topic; integration of the design with the Google logo; and sheer creativity. We received hundreds of entries with all sorts of themes, ranging from serious topics like the Asian tsunami and the Battle of Trafalgar to an entire logo transformed into a bunch of eyes staring at each other. In the end, we chose <a href="http://www.google.com/events/doodle4google.html">these five finalists</a>. And our winner, which graced our <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/">U.K. home page</a> for a full day, was this charming doodle from 11-year-old Lisa Waiwaina:<br /><br /><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/uk_doodle4google-772374.gif" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left;" /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In the end, I was simply blown away by the amazing quality of the work, especially from younger artists up to around age 11 (the bunnies drawn by 5-year-olds were simply awesome). It was a good reminder that staying in touch with one’s inner child can be a key to creativity. Now, back to my secret agenda of searching for a young apprentice...

Thanks Victoria doodlers!

Posted by Dennis Hwang, Webmaster and Google Doodler . Last week Google opened our new office in the Victoria area of London, and to mark th...

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