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The Google 2007 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

Posted by Meredith Carroll, Staffing Programs Coordinator <a href="http://www.anitaborg.org/about/history.php">Dr. Anita Borg</a> (1949-2003) devoted her life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. As part of our ongoing commitment to Anita’s vision, we're pleased to announce the <a href="http://www.google.com/jobs/scholarships">2007 Google Anita Borg Scholarship</a>. A group of women undergraduate and graduate students studying in the U.S. will each receive a $10,000 scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year. The selected scholars will also be invited to attend an all-expenses paid trip to our Mountain View headquarters. <a href="http://www.google.com/anitaborg/">Tell your friends or apply yourself </a>– the deadline for U.S. applications is Monday, January 15, 2007. And this year, we're also pleased to expand the scholarship program to women students in Europe. These recipients will each receive a €5,000 (or equivalent) scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year, and are invited to a retreat at the Google office in Zurich, Switzerland. Applications for the <a href="http://www.google.com/anitaborg-europe/">Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship</a> are due Friday, January 12, 2007. We hope this program will encourage students to excel in their studies, inspire them to become role models and leaders, and help remove the financial barriers for women wishing to pursue an engineering degree. Here's a bit of testimony from two Anita Borg Scholars who have since joined us:<blockquote>"I remember mailing in my application by FedEx overnight because I had decided to apply at the last minute and I really didn't think I had much of a chance. I'm glad I applied because through the scholarship, I met some amazing women who became good friends of mine. I got a chance to go to the Grace Hopper conference for Women in Computer Science and probably the most important thing I learned from the experience is nothing ventured, nothing gained." <div style="text-align: right;">-- Rose Yao, Associate Product Manager, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar</div> "One of the greatest things about the scholarship is the opportunity to meet other women and form a network -- I have kept in touch a lot of the other women that received the scholarship the same year and over the last 2 years this has been invaluable to me. These are women I can rely on and even though we don't see each other frequently, the bond we formed is strong." <div style="text-align: right;">-- Gaby Aguilera, Software Engineer-Testing, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar</div></blockquote>

The Google 2007 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

Posted by Meredith Carroll, Staffing Programs Coordinator Dr. Anita Borg (1949-2003) devoted her life to revolutionizing the way we think a...

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Thoughts on health care, continued

Posted by Adam Bosworth, VP As <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html">I indicated in my post last week</a>, I've been interested in the issue of health care and health information for a while. I just spoke at a conference about some of the challenges in the health care system that we at Google want to tackle. The conference, called <a href="http://www.phrconference.org/">Connecting Americans to Their Health Care</a>, is a gathering focused on how consumers are transforming health care through the use of personal health technologies. <a href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/bosworth_healthcare.pdf">This speech</a> will give you some insight into the problems that we believe need our attention. There are, of course, other challenges in health care that we plan to work on, and we'll share more information with you about the solutions we're trying to develop as this work advances.

Thoughts on health care, continued

Posted by Adam Bosworth, VP As I indicated in my post last week , I've been interested in the issue of health care and health informatio...

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Chatting with Lotus Sametime

Posted by Mary Himinkool, New Business Development When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief that real-time communication should be as open as possible. We hoped that people would have their choice of service provider, but still be able to chat with other networks using their preferred client. With our support for <a href="http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html">XMPP federation</a>, hundreds of services are connecting to Google Talk via this open standard. Today, we're excited that <a href="http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=192209">IBM is announcing support for XMPP with the release of Sametime 7.5</a>. This means that Google Talk and Lotus Sametime IM users can simply invite one another to chat, bringing together enterprise and personal IM users around the world. If you use Lotus Sametime at the office and have colleagues who use Google Talk, now you can chat with them. Similarly, if you're a Google Talk business user you can now add professional contacts who use Lotus Sametime to your Friends list -- just some of the benefits of interoperability. It's great to see such momentum around open communication. With so many networks supporting XMPP you can now chat with your buddies on <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/">LiveJournal</a>, various universities, at home, and, of course, at work. Welcome, IBM!

Chatting with Lotus Sametime

Posted by Mary Himinkool, New Business Development When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief th...

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Staying informed with Google News search

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed. In the information age, currency of information has high value. As someone who cannot see, I find having to skim many different news sites to stay caught up even more difficult than the average web user. As in most things, off-loading some of this work to the machine is the answer, and what better machine to offload the work to than <a href="http://news.google.com">Google News</a>. In addition, finding relevant news stories through Google News helps me navigate directly to the news story on the originating site. Even if the originating news site is itself visually complex, Google has done most of the hard work of surfing that site and getting me to the content I need to read. Combined with Google News finding and grouping related stories on a given topic, this is an especially effective way of staying informed. Here are some of the ways I use Google News: For topics I regularly search for, I create Atom feeds that search topics on Google News and subscribe to them via my blog reader (<a href="http://www.google.com/reader/">Google Reader</a>). Here is the Atom feed for locating news articles on <a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=tus&q=xforms&scoring=d&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=atom" title="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=tus&q=xforms&scoring=d&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=atom">XForms</a>. For topics on my watch list I create <a href="http://www.google.com/alerts">Google News alerts</a>. In addition, <a href="http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html">Google News provides feeds</a> (RSS or Atom) for popular groupings of articles. I subscribe to the feeds for Business and Technology using Google Reader. Together, all of the above provide an effective means for me to stay caught up -- I'm usually done with all my news reading during my 40-minute daily commute to work on the Google shuttle. In addition, note that <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/news/index.html">Google News also provides a Mobile version</a> that is very speech-friendly. For the most part I use the main Google News site, primarily because news stories of interest are mostly textual, but if some of the stories come from visually complex news sites, I often hand those off to the <a href="http://www.google.com/m">Google wireless transcoder</a> so that it can present me the story in a form that is more amenable to being spoken out aloud.

Staying informed with Google News search

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as ...

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Teach for America and Google join forces

Posted by Victoria Grand, Corporate Communications Manager Like many college seniors, I spent the fall of my senior year in somewhat of a tailspin trying to figure out what to do next. My friends and I considered the usual options: grad school, i-banking, gigs with tech companies and consulting firms. And then there was <a href="http://www.teachforamerica.org/">Teach for America</a> (TFA), an organization dedicated to eradicating educational inequity by enlisting thousands of elite college grads to teach in under-resourced schools. I joined TFA in 1995 and went from college student to inner-city first grade teacher (of 36 students!) practically overnight. Teaching was, without a doubt, the most challenging and the most rewarding job I have ever had. TFA continues to be a popular destination for college grads today. Since the mid-90s, its enrollment has more than tripled and its applicant pool has quadrupled. As a Googler and former TFA'er, I was thrilled to hear that Google is partnering with TFA to provide two-year deferrals for students who receive offers from both institutions. Now bright, idealistic college grads don't have to choose between two exciting and worthwhile career opportunities. Our partnership enables college grads to get real-world experience and to bring the insight and experience they gain in the classroom to bear in their work at Google. By joining forces, Google and TFA will be able to attract individuals who are capable of the hard work, commitment, and creativity it takes to teach and to be a Googler. Visit <a href="http://www.google.com/jobs/teachforamerica">www.google.com/jobs/teachforamerica</a> to find out more about this great program. Update: Corrected author attribution.

Teach for America and Google join forces

Posted by Victoria Grand, Corporate Communications Manager Like many college seniors, I spent the fall of my senior year in somewhat of a ta...

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Seeing RED

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP You might have noticed from our homepage that today is <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=World+AIDS+Day">World AIDS Day</a>. We want to remember all those who have suffered from HIV/AIDS in the 25 years since it was first identified, and we want to support everyone working to eradicate this scourge: Today, there are about 40 million people living with HIV worldwide, and it is increasing in every region in the world. In Africa, it is the leading cause of death -- 5,500 Africans die each day from this insidious disease. One effort that is making a difference is <a href="http://www.joinred.com/manifesto.asp">(RED)</a>, a company founded this year by Bono and Bobby Shriver. A percentage of the profits from each (RED) product sold is given to <a href="http://www.joinred.com/globalfund.asp">The Global Fund</a>. We are supporting the (RED) effort by offering promotional support to (RED) and <a href="http://www.joinred.com/products.asp">(RED) products</a> on Google properties throughout the holiday season. We hope you choose to support them with your purchases. Companies offering (RED) products have committed to contribute a portion of profits from the sales of that product into Global Fund-financed AIDS programmes in Africa. Together, let's make a big difference. Read more at <a href="http://www.joinred.com/facts.asp">JoinRED.com</a> or visit the <a href="http://joinred.blogspot.com/">(RED) blog</a>.

Seeing RED

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP You might have noticed from our homepage that today is World AIDS Day . We want to remember all those who have...

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Health care information matters

Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it. I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations. The system didn't fail completely, but struggled with these phases: <ul><li>What was wrong -- it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms</li><li>Who should treat her -- there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local physicians and caregivers, which ones were covered by her insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her</li><li>Once she was treated, she had a chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred</li></ul>Once she had a correct diagnosis and we'd found the right doctor, her treatment was excellent. But before and after treatment, most people with serious illnesses have to live through these other phases and suffer similar problems. She was trying to get help from her caregivers in the family and it was incredibly challenging to get the right information and help her make the right decisions. Often the health care system isn't well set up to address these issues. I believe our industry can help resolve some of these problems and ameliorate others. In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. If patients understand their diseases better -- the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care -- before, during, and after treatment. We have already launched some improvements to web search that help patients more easily find the health information they are looking for. Using the <a href="http://www.google.com/coop">Google Co-op</a> platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need. Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you'll see some choices for refining your query, such as "symptoms," "treatments," and so on. If you click on "treatment," your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is -– and thus how much they affect your search results -– is dependent both on Google's algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results. This is just the beginning of what our industry can do. People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission. Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient's needs. Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem. As the Internet increasingly helps link communities of people, we also think there is an opportunity to connect people with similar health interests, concerns and problems. Today, people too often don't know that others like them even exist, let alone how to find them. The industry should help there, too. These are some of the health-related problems we're thinking through at Google. We don't have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we'd share a bit about the problems we're interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. Your help is welcome and, of course, if you're an extraordinary engineer with a passion in this field, we'd love to hear from you. <a href="http://www.google.com/support/health">Read through our Help Center information and let us hear from you.</a> Update: New contact link.

Health care information matters

Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been inte...

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