This Sunday, October 25th @ 8:30 p.m. (PDT) tune in to see the world's biggest band performing on the world's largest stage. YouTube and U2 have joined forces to live stream U2's performance this Sunday at The Rose Bowl Stadium.
Available internationally in the following countries: US, UK, France, Canada, Italy, Spain, Japan, Brazil, Australia, NZ, Ireland, Mexico, India, Israel, South Korea, and Netherlands. It's happening "With or Without You" and it's an experience you wont want to miss.
Freshmen could easily study what all the campus buildings look like, and your family could get a better sense of your new home. Think back to when you were applying to schools - wouldn't it have been handy to be able to virtually tour college campuses? Or better yet, picture how nice a Street View walk down memory lane will be after you graduate and start to feels pangs of nostalgia for college life.
Good news: you can now nominate your campus to be photographed for Street View on Google Maps. We've created the Street View trike, a mechanical masterpiece made of 3 bicycle wheels and a mounted Street View camera, to take pictures of places like university campuses that cannot be reached by car. Visit www.google.com/triketo nominate your school for a visit from the Street View trike.
To get an idea of what Street View pictures taken by the trike look like, you can check out San Diego State University, the first university included in Google Maps:
So far we've taken the trike to a few other campuses, including the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, but all of you have a chance to nominate your school to be included next. Of course, we'll make sure to work directly with the administration at your school to get the necessary permissions and approvals before coming on campus - and, as with all Street View imagery, we'll blur identifiable faces.
We're also accepting nominations in 5 other categories for where to send the Street View trike next:
Sports Venues (e.g., golf courses, racing tracks, stadium grounds)
Head to www.google.com/trike by October 28 to submit your nomination. After we comb through the submissions and pick out the finalists, you will have the opportunity to vote on a winner from each category for the Street View trike to visit. May the best campus win!
Today – October 15 – is known as Blog Action Day, an annual event that unites bloggers across the globe by posting about the same topic on the same day to help bring awareness to a certain issue. This year, the discussion is about Climate Change and we hope you'll check out the Official Google Blog to learn more about some of the steps we take as a company to address this important issue.
If you have blogs of your own, we also encourage you to post your own thoughts about the climate crisis and maybe some of the steps you're taking to contribute to change.
For now, you can choose to make buildings in any of about 50 cities. We'll keep adding more cities, but don't feel left out if we don't have your hometown yet — modeling in a place you've never been is a fantastic way to discover more about it.
Simply, make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer. If you're on a Mac, you will need to download the Google Earth plug-in directly.
Building Maker is free and available in 14 languages. Go to www.google.com/buildingmaker to join the worldwide mapping community. Have fun!
Posted by Mark Limber, Product Manager and Matt Simpson, User Experience Designer
For years, astronauts and rocket scientists at NASA and JPL have had all the fun. Billions of people on Earth have seen pictures of Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt driving their "dune buggy" on the Moon. Billions more have seen pictures of NASA's Mars landers, Spirit and Opportunity. We've all wished we could be the ones to take these incredible toys out for a spin on the Red Planet or the Moon.
Now, thanks to Google, you can do the next best thing -- you can drive a virtual rover model on Google's Mars or Moon (or a skateboard on Earth), and experience the real topography of these places. We at ASU developed a "Drive the Solar System" website where you can explore how the power of Google Mars, Google Moon and Google Earth has been brought to the web. You can put your rover or skateboard down anyplace on Mars, the Moon or Earth and drive it anywhere you want to go. Explore the Apollo landing sites or Olympus Mons, the largest volcanic cone in the solar system. Drive down the Valles Marinaris, the canyon on Mars that dwarfs Arizona's Grand Canyon, or kick-flip your skateboard down the Amazon. And that's not all. You can visit all the other planets and the largest moons in the Solar System too.
But you can do more than drive or look at these strange new worlds -- you can also look at these places in depth with detailed information about each place you can visit included.
Posted by Stephen Savage, Geo-Archaeological Information Applications Lab IT Manager, Archaeological Research Institute, School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University
Michael McGahey, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute
Google AISES scholars will each receive a USD $10,000 academic scholarship for the 2009-2010 academic year and are invited to attend the annual Google Scholars' Retreat at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California in 2010. The retreat is a time for Google to recognize the students’hard work and achievements, and to provide the scholars with an opportunity to meet computingprofessionals and network with other scholars. We hope this program will encourage students to continue to achieve great things in their studies and inspire them to become role models and leaders in science and technology.
Think about the 100+ tools that Google has launched, the billions who query our search engine everyday, and the 10,000+ crazy (in a good way) software engineers working at Google; there is a plethora of jobs that our server platform machines must serve each day. Our machines serve a diverse set of workloads, and managing and making sense of these workloads is a big challenge. But learning the behavior of these workloads can help us, among many other things, to make better scheduling decisions, to better project our machine growth, and to customize our cells to handle thejobs better. During my internship, I worked on a very interesting, and in my opinion, high-impact project where I modeled the workload of Google's machines.
I used a variety of tools, including time-series modeling, clustering and statistical methods to capture the workload signatures. After months of brainstorming with my mentor (Joseph Hellerstein) and the cluster management team, I was at a point where I could categorize the workloads into smaller groups. This gave us an opportunity to investigate the workload behavior at a macro-level and makes the analysis simpler.
Aside from the free food, massages and the rock-band set-up, I found the "Google-culture" to be really amazing. It is not very different from the culture one would see at a university or research lab. The openness and the helping attitude of Googlers, here, helped me a lot in my work. Between the numerous brainstorming sessions with my mentor and the cluster management team and the two trips down to Mountain View to dig-deep into our findings, these experiences have gone a long way in shaping the outcome of my project and enhancing my overall understanding of Computer Science. For me, it's been one of the most productive and enriching experiences within a 3-month span.
I had never seen terabytes worth of data before coming here! Once, my mentor told me that here at Google people don't worry about storing megabytes or gigabytes of data; if it's terabytes it a slight concern and if it's petabytes - that's where you actually start thinking.
A note from Joseph Hellerstein, Asit's host: We had great fun with Asit during the summer, and it was very productive. Asit's work is impacting how Google does cluster scheduling and capacity planning. Also, we submitted a paper to ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review. Oh, and we got some really cool jackets for our work with the Google Cluster Management Team.
A popular K-12 activity guides students through the process of modeling a local building (such as their school building) using Google Earth and Google SketchUp. With the release of 7.1, the activity gets even more compelling because students can immediately access Street View imagery to apply to their model. Students can also access and edit existing buildings in the Google 3D Warehouse using the new "Nearby Buildings" feature.
For industrial design, mechanical design and architecture/landscape courses, LayOut 2.1 is bundled with the release. LayOut 2.1 improves on its rich 2D presentation features by adding Dimensioning. Now any of models can be annotated or dimensioned directly in LayOut without having to go back to the original model. Scaled printing, simple construction documentation, woodworking and even site planning is a snap. That's right, you heard the pun, the new dimensioning allows you to snap and measure from points in the embedded model!
All users will see faster performance when it comes to large, complex or heavily textured models. Google SketchUp Pro 7.1 continues the tradition of SketchUp's rich feature set, intuitive interface and our commitment to offering great pricing for Educators and Students. Learn more on our SketchUp website for Education.
