A tribute to Turing, the father of modern computing

“The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there.” It’s a saying that rings particularly true in the world of technology. But while innovating requires us to focus on the future, there are times when it’s significant to look back. Today—the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth—is one such moment.

Turing’s life was one of astounding highs and overwhelming lows. While his wartime code breaking saved thousands of lives, his own life was shattered when he was convicted for homosexuality. But the disaster of his story should not overshadow his legacy. Turing’s insight laid the foundations of the computer age. It’s no overstatement to say he’s a founding father of every computer and Internet company today.

Turing’s breakthrough came in 1936 with the publication of his seminal paper “On Computable Numbers” (PDF). This introduced two key concepts, “algorithms” and “computing machines”—commonplace terms today, but truly innovative in the 1930’s:

* Algorithms are, in simplest terms, step-by-step instructions for carrying out a mathematical calculation. This is where it all started for programming since, at its core, all software is a gathering of algorithms.

* A computing machine—today better known as a Turing machine—was the hypothetical device that Turing dreamed up to run his algorithms. In the 1930’s, a “computer” was what you called a person who did calculations—it was a profession, not an object. Turing’s paper provided the blueprint for building a machine that could do any calculation that a person could, marking the first step towards the modern notion of a computer.

Considering the role computers now play in everyday life, it’s clear Turing’s inventions rank among the most significant intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century. In the development of computing, all paths trace back to Turing. That’s why Turing is a hero to so many Google engineers, and why we’re so proud to help commemorate and preserve his legacy.

In 2010, Google helped Bletchley Park raise funds to purchase Turing’s papers so they could be preserved for public display in their museum. More recently, we’ve been functioning closely with curators at London’s Science Museum to help put on a stunning new exhibition “Code breaker - Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy.” This tells the story of Turing’s vast achievements in a intensely moving and personal way, through an amazing collection of artifacts—including items loaned by GCHQ, the U.K. government intelligence agency, never before on public display. Topics addressed include Turing’s early years, his code-breaking at Bletchley Park, and his designs for the Pilot Ace computer, his later morphogenesis work, as well as his sexuality and death. The exhibition opened on June 21 and is well worth a visit if you’re passing through London in the next year.

And finally, we couldn’t let such an important occasion pass without a doodle. We thought the most fitting way of paying tribute to Turing’s unbelievable life and work would be to simulate the theoretical “Turing machine” he proposed in a mathematical paper. Visit the homepage today— we invite you to try your hand at programming it. If you get it the first time, try again... it gets harder!

Turing was born into a world that was very dissimilar, culturally and technologically, from ours—but his contribution has never been more significant. I hope you’ll join me today in paying compliment to Alan Turing, the forefather of modern computing.

Going worldwide in search of great art

South African rock designs. Brazilian street graffiti. Australian aboriginal art. Today we’re announcing a major development of the Google Art Project. From now on, with a few simple clicks of a finger, art lovers around the world will be able to find out not just paintings, but also sculpture, street art and photographs from 151 museums in 40 countries.

Since we introduced the Art Project last year, curators, artists and viewers from all over the globe have accessible exciting ideas about how to enhance the experience of collecting, sharing and discovering art. Institutions worldwide asked to join the project, urging us to augment the diversity of artworks displayed. We listened.

The original Art Project counted 17 museums in nine countries and 1,000 images, almost all paintings from Western masters. Today, the Art Project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student deficient to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.

The expanded Art Project embraces all sizes of institutions, specializing in art or in other types of civilization. For example, you can take a look at the White House in Washington, D.C., discover the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and continue the journey to the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. In the United States alone, some 29 partners in 16 cities are participating, ranging from exceptional regional museums like the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina to top notch university galleries such as the SCAD museum of art in Savannah, Georgia.

Here are a few other new things in the prolonged Art Project that you might enjoy:

* Using completely new tools, called Explore and Discover, you can find artworks by period, artist or type of artwork, displaying works from different museums around the world.

* Google+ and Hangouts are included on the site, enabling you to create even more engaging personal galleries.

* Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specifically designed Street View “trolley” took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also discover the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

* We now have 46 artworks obtainable with our “gigapixel” photo capturing technology, photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be not possible to see with the naked eye.

* An enhanced My Gallery feature lets you select any of the 30,000 artworks—along with your favorite details—to build your own personalized gallery. You can add comments to each painting and share the whole compilation with friends and family. (It’s an ideal tool for students.)

The Art Project is part of our hard work to bringing culture online and making it accessible the widest possible audience. Under the auspices of the Google Cultural Institute, we’re presenting high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of 18th century French cities.

For more in sequence and future developments, follow the Art Project on Google+. Together with the fantastic input from our partners from around the world, we’re pleased to have created a convenient, fun way to interrelate with art—a platform that we hope appeals to students, aspiring artists and connoisseurs alike.

Explore Mandela's archives online

Last year we announced a $1.25 million grant to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory to help conserve and digitize thousands of archival documents, photographs and videos about Nelson Mandela. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) is committed to documenting the life and times of one of the world's greatest statesmen and dispersion his story to promote social justice throughout the world.

Today, the Mandela archive has become a actuality. Along with historians, educationalists, researchers, activists and many others around the world, you can access a wealth of information and knowledge about the life and inheritance of this extraordinary African leader. The new online multimedia archive includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the discussions that ended apartheid in South Africa. The archive will also include the earliest-known photo of Mr. Mandela and never-before seen drafts of Mr. Mandela's manuscripts for the follow-up to his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.

We’ve worked closely with the NMCM to create an interactive online experience which we hope will motivate you as much as us. You can search and browse the archives to discover different parts of Mandela’s life and work in depth: Early Life, Prison Years, Presidential Years, and Retirement, Books for Mandela, Young People and My Moments with a Legend.

For example, you might be concerned in Nelson Mandela’s personal memories of the time he was incarcerated and click into the Prison Years exhibit. You can immediately see a curate set of materials threaded together into a broader narrative. These take in handwritten notes on his desk calendars, which show, for example, that he met President F.W. De Klerk for the first time on December 13, 1989 for two and a half hours in prison; the Warrants of Committal issued by the Supreme Court which sent him to prison; the earliest known photo of Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island circa 1971; and a personal letter written from prison in 1963 to his daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, after their mother was arrested, absolute with transcript.

From there, you might want to see all the letters held by the records, and click “See more” in the letters category, where you can find out all personal letters or use the time filter to explore his diaries and calendars written between 1988 and 1998, where you can see that in the last page of the last diary, he met with President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda to swap over ideas about the situation in northern Uganda. If you were a researcher, you can search through various fragments of Madiba’s memory that narrate to Ahmed Kathrada, his long-time comrade, politician and anti-apartheid activist, where you can find photos, videos, manuscripts and letters that relate to him.

Finally, by clicking into the exhibit, My Moments with a Legend, you can go beyond Madiba’s personal materials to get a diverse viewpoint through photos, videos and stories, via the memories of people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, F.W. De Klerk and Nomfundo Walaza, a community worker.

The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive project is a proposal by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and the Google Cultural Institute, which helps to protect and promote our diverse cultural and historical heritage. Some of our other initiatives include the Art Project, digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls and bringing the Yad Vashem Holocaust materials online.

You can start exploring the Nelson Mandela archive right now at archive.nelsonmandela.org. We hope you’ll be enthused by this influential leader—the face of South Africa’s transition to democracy.

Ideas worthy of space travel: The YouTube Space Lab worldwide winners

Can you teach old spider new tricks? Could better understanding alien superbugs cure diseases on Earth? These are the questions that will be asked by the two winning experiments of YouTube Space Lab, the science competition that challenged students from 14 to 18 years old to design a science experiment that might be performed in space. Your votes and our expert judges chose the winners from thousands of entries from approximately the world. Experiments submitted by Dorothy and Sara, from Troy, Mich., U.S. (winners in the 14-16-year-old age group) and Amr from Alexandria, Egypt (winner in the 17-18-year-old age group) will be performed aboard the International Space Station and live streamed to the world on YouTube.

Meet Amr from Alexandria, Egypt

Global Winner, 17-18-year-old age group:

Watch his entry: “Can you teach an old spider new tricks?”

Meet Dorothy and Sara from Troy, Mich., U.S.

Global Winners, 14-16-year-old age group:

Sunita Williams—the NASA astronaut who’ll fly to the International Space Station later this year and perform the winning experiments live on YouTube—announced the global winners at a special ceremony in Washington, D.C., where the six local winning teams were gathered. While in Washington, all the teams also took a ZERO-G weightless flight and a private tour of the the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum.

In addition to having their experiments performed in space, Amr, Dorothy and Sara get to choose connecting one of two awesome space adventures: a trip to Japan to watch their experiment blast off in a rocket bound for the ISS or, once they’re 18 years old, a week-long astronaut course in Star City, Russia, the training middle for Russian cosmonauts.

Subscribe to the YouTube Space Lab channel for all the best space playlists and to check out video of the winners on their ZERO-G flight. Stay tuned for the live stream from space, which will take position later this year.

Making our ads superior for everyone

We consider that ads are useful and applicable information that can help you find what you’re looking for online—whether you’re comparing digital cameras or researching new cars. We also wish for you to be able to use Google and click on any ads that interest you with self-assurance. Just as we work hard to make Gmail free of spam and the Google Play Store free of malware, we’re committed to enforce rigorous standards for the ads that appear on Google and on our partner sites.

Like all additional Internet companies, we’re fighting a war against a huge number of bad actors—from websites selling counterfeit goods and fraudulent tickets to underground international operations annoying to spread malware and spyware. We must remain vigilant because scammers will all time try to find new ways to abuse our systems. Given the number of searches on Google and the number of rightful businesses who rely on this system to reach users, our work to take away bad ads must be precise and at scale.

We lately made some improvements to help ensure the ads you see comply with our strict policies, so we required giving you an overview of both our principles and these new technologies.

Ads that harm users are not allowed on Google

We’ve always approached our ads system with trust and safety in mind. Our policies cover a wide range of issues across the sphere in every country in which we do business. For example, our ads policies don’t allow ads for prohibited products such as counterfeit goods or harmful products such as handguns or cigarettes. We also don’t permit ads with misleading claims (“lose weight guaranteed!”), fraudulent work-at-home scams (“get rich quick working from home!”) or unclear billing practices.

How it all works

With billions of ads submitted to Google every year, we use a mixture of sophisticated technology and manual review to detect and remove these sorts of ads. We spend millions of dollars building technical architecture and higher machine learning models to fight this battle. These systems are intended to detect and remove ads for malicious download sites that contain malware or a virus before these ads could appear on Google. Our automated systems also scan and review landing pages—the websites that people are taken to once they click—as well as advertiser accounts. When potentially offensive ads are flagged by our automated systems, our policy specialists review the ads, sites and accounts in detail and take action.

Improvements to uncovering systems

Here are some significant improvements that we’ve newly made to our systems:

* Improved “query watch” for counterfeit ads: While any person can report counterfeit ads, we’ve widened our proactive monitoring of sensitive keywords and queries related to counterfeit goods which allows us to catch more counterfeit ads before they ever appear on Google

* New “risk model” to detect violations: Our computer scanning depends on detailed risk models to decide whether a particular ad may violate our policies, and we recently upgraded our engineering system with a new “risk model” that is even more accurate in detecting advertisers who violate our policies

* Faster manual review process: Some ads need to be reviewed physically. To increase our response time in preventing ads from policy-violating advertisers, we sped up our interior processes and systems for manual reviews, enabling our specialists to be more accurate and fast

* Twenty-four hour response time: We aim to react within 24 hours upon receiving a reliable complaint about an ad to ensure that we’re reviewing ads in a timely fashion

We also regularly review and update the areas which our policies cover. For example, we recently rationalized our policy for ads related to short-term loans in order to protect people from misleading claims. For short-term loans, we necessitate advertisers to disclose fine-print details such as overall fees and annual percentage rate, as well as implications for late and non-payment.

Bad ads are declining

The numbers show we’re having success. In 2011, advertisers submitted billions of ads to Google, and of those, we disabled more than 130 million ads. And our systems carry on improving—in fact, in 2011 we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50% compared with 2010. That means that our methods are working. We’re also catching the vast mainstream of these scam ads before they ever appear on Google or on any of our partner networks. For example, in 2011, we shut down about 150,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, and more than 95% of these accounts were exposed through our own detection efforts and risk models.

Here’s David Baker, Engineering Director, who can explain more about how we detect and take away scam ads:

What you can do to help

If you’re an advertiser, we give confidence you to review our policies that aim to protect users, so you can help keep the web safe. For everyone else, our Good to Know site has lots of advice, including tips for avoiding scams anywhere on the Internet. You can also report ads you believe to be deceitful or in violation of our policies and, if needed, file a complaint with the suitable agency as listed in our Web Search Help Center.

Online advertising is the commercial lifeblood of the web, so it’s vital that people can trust the ads on Google and the Internet overall. We’ll keep posting more in sequence here about our efforts, and developments, in this area.

Ask your question in the 2012 Google Science Fair

Are human beings born curious, or can curiosity be nurtured through environment, competition or a good teacher? Everyone’s got a question—that’s ours. But we’re sure you’ve got tons of questions, too. Today, we’re inviting students around the world to pose their most pressing questions about the world around them and answer those questions through scientific inquiry.

Along with our partners CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, today we’re launching the second annual Google Science Fair, the largest online science competition in the world, open globally to students ages 13-18. Either individually or in teams of up to three people, students pose a question, develop a hypothesis and conduct science experiments to test it. The entire process is detailed and submitted online, via a website template participants fill out themselves, so all you need to participate is curiosity, an Internet connection and a browser.

Last year, we received entries that strove to solve a wide variety of needs, from “How can I cure cancer?” to “Can I teach a robot to learn English?” to “Can I build a faster sailboat?” The breadth and depth of these projects was incredibly impressive, and this year we hope to see even more entries from the next generation of brilliant young scientists.

This year’s fair will be even more global than the last: We’re now accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russia). We will also be recognizing 90 regional finalists (30 from the Americas, 30 from the Asia Pacific and 30 from Europe/Middle East/Africa). From these 90, to be announced in May, our judges will select the top 15 finalists, who will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. for our live Google Science Fair final event on July 23, 2012. At the finals, a panel of distinguished international judges (like Vint Cerf, Sylvia Earle and Nobel Laureates David Gross and Ada Yonath) will select top winners in each age category (13-14, 15-16, 17-18).

We’re also introducing a new category for this year’s competition—the Scientific American Science in Action award. We were so inspired by 2011 finalist Harine Ravichandran’s project, which attempted to solve energy surges in rural villages, that we decided to recognize an outstanding project that addresses a social, environmental or health need to make a difference in the lives of a group or community, as Harine’s project did for her grandparents’ village in India. The winner will also be flown to Mountain View for the finalist event in July.

The Google Science Fair opens today, January 12, worldwide, and we’ll accept submissions until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59pm GMT (or 6:59pm ET/3:59pm PT). In addition to satisfying your curious mind, your brilliant project can also help to win you some pretty cool prizes, like a $50,000 college scholarship from Google, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer or an internship at Google or any one of our partners. Our Scientific American Science in Action award winner will earn $50,000 and year-long mentorship to make their project goal a reality.

The winners of last year’s inaugural Google Science Fair became something like scientific rock stars. Shree Bose, Naomi Shah and Lauren Hodge met with President Obama, were invited to speak at big events like TEDx Women and were featured in Wired magazine. Shree, our grand prize winner, was named one of Glamour magazine’s 21 Amazing Young Women of the Year. White House visits and Glamour aside, every student in the Google Science Fair has the chance to do hands-on research that can truly change the world.

Visit google.com/sciencefair and ask your most burning questions at the top of your voice for the world to hear. Google itself was founded through experimentation and with the Google Science Fair, we hope to inspire scientific exploration among the next generation of scientists and engineers, celebrate scientific talent, create scientific role models and unite students around the world in the quest for learning.

source: google blog

Changing the User Agent, a New Google Chrome Feature

Changing the user agent of a browser is sometimes helpful if you're visiting a site that doesn't work well in your browser or if you're a developer and you want to test a site. Until lately, changing the user agent required installing an addition, opening about: config or adding a command-line parameter.

Now that browsers started to comprise powerful developer tools and even Internet Explorer has a built-in user agent editor, Chrome added a similar feature. It's only obtainable in Chrome 17 (Dev Channel / Canary) right now.

Here's how to alter the user agent:

1. Open the Developer Tools (Ctrl+Shift+I on Windows/Linux, Command - Option - I on Mac OS X)

2. Click the "settings" icon at the bottom of the window

3. Check "override user agent" and select one of the options (Internet Explorer 7/8/9, Firefox 4/7 for Windows/Mac, iPhone, iPad and Nexus S running Android 2.3). You can also choose "other" and enter a custom user agent.

More About YouTube's Latest Experimental border

A week ago, I reported that YouTube tests a new border based on Cosmic Panda. The most important attribute is the redesigned homepage that helps you find new channels and explore the videos from your subscriptions. YouTube started to post extra information about the new interface and it's now obvious that it will replace existing UI in the near future (the link only works after you've enabled the new interface).

"We've given YouTube a refresh. When you log in, you'll be greeted with fresh activity from your subscriptions. You can also browse and add new Channels to your homepage. Connect with Google+ and Face book to share your favorites with friends. There's plenty to discover, so login and give it a spin."

There's also an article about the new border for channels.

This new look and feel makes it easier for viewers to find and observe content. It also makes it easier for Channel creators to systematize and showcase exactly what they want. We incorporated your Feedback from the "Cosmic Panda" Channels and Watch experiment, and are eager to present:

* A more streamlined and consistent design

* An easier way to find and view videos

* New, more flexible layouts for featured content, and

* A way to keep your audience engaged even when you don't have new uploads

It's interesting to observe that the new homepage and the new channels are built around feed views and activity streaming to make YouTube even more social.

The new channels are less customizable: you can only choose an avatar, a background image, a background color and a template (creator, blogger, network, everything).

Update: The new interface is accessible for everyone.

Google's Broken Lists

Google has newly redesigned the advanced search page and removed two options that weren't used very frequently: finding pages that are similar to a page and pages that link to a page. You can use the similar: and link: operators and "similar pages" and still obtainable in the Instant Preview pane, so the features haven't been detached.

What's disconcerting is that Google made drop-down lists a lot more difficult to use in the new border. Until now, you could use the tab key to select a list, but this no longer works. After clicking a list, you could use the up/down arrows or Page Up / Page Down to move among the options, but you can no longer do that. It was much faster to type the first letters from the name of the language or the country to rapidly find an item, but this is another feature that no longer works. Basically, the only way to use the new lists is to scroll up or down waiting you find the item you were looking for.

You can check the old superior search page at the Way back Machine or the advanced image search page, which still uses the old interface.

Another service that makes drop-downs more hard to use is Blogger. If you have a long list of labels, you can no longer find a label by typing the first letters.

Google Reader's new interface lets you use arrows to move among the items from a list, but you can no longer type some letters from a subscription's name in the "All items" drop-down. This was a non-standard featured extra back in 2007, when Google Reader added a search engine.

Hopefully, Google will address these issues and will no longer take away basic features that are taken for granted by many users.

Table Snippets in Google Search

Google has enhanced the snippets for the pages that include big tables. They're just like the snippets for lists, but columns are evidently separated and snippets also comprise the table header.

Barry Schwartz says that "Google is trying to figure out the makeup of the older fashion HTML tables to show the snippet in a table format". Google also finds the most related columns from the table and frequently displays the first two rows.

Google X

New York Times has an interesting article concerning Google X, a secret lab where Sergey Brin and other Google employees undertake important projects that aren't yet ready for primetime.

In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined. It's a place where your refrigerator might be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot might go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

Google X is the place where Google works on the driver less car and New York Times reports that Google is allowing for manufacturing the cars in the US. Many projects are connected to Android @ Home, an initiative announced this year that tries to make everyday objects smarter. "We want to think of every application in your home as a potential I/O device," said Google's Joe Britt. Google tries to construct the "Web of things" by connecting home accessories, wearable objects to the Internet.

Most of the ideas tackled at Google X involve robots. "Fleets of robots could assist Google with collecting information, replacing the humans that photograph streets for Google Maps, say people with information of Google X. Robots born in the lab could be intended for homes and offices, where they could assist with mundane tasks or allow people to work remotely".

It's interesting to note that one of the Google X projects might be released by the end of the year, although it's not clear what it does. At the I/O conference, Google announced that it will introduce "a Web-connected light bulb that might communicate wire lessly with Android devices," so this might be the product that will be released.

Google has always tried to resolve big problems, even if many people think that it should focus on improving search results and ad quality. "Larry and Sergey founded Google because they required to help solve really big problems using technology," said Sebastian Thrun, a robotics expert who invented the first self-driving car and now works at Google.

Google X might be the next Xerox PARC or it could fail, but it's important to think big and take risks. "I just feel like people aren't working sufficient on impactful things. People are really afraid of failure on things, and so it's hard for them to do ambitious stuff. And also, they don't understand the power of technological solutions to things, especially computers," complained Larry Page in Steven Levy's "In the Plex".

Hopefully, MG Siegler is right when he says that "whatever is going on inside of Google X, I'm fairly certain it's filled to the brim with the type of stuff that made us all fall in love with Google in the first place".

Bringing the very best of what we do to the veteran community

We consider that technology can be a force for good; one that builds and binds community. As a Googler, my proudest moments are when we take that technology and put it in the hands of people who can use it to communicate, collaborate, build and explore.

Today, on Veterans Day, I am conceited to share a few Google tools and platforms for the military veteran community. They can be accessed on our website, Google for Veterans and Families, which was created by veterans and their family and friends, who work at Google. This single border brings together Google products and platforms for service members and their families. We believe it will be useful to all veterans, whether still in the service, transitioning out, or on a new path in their civilian lives. Here are some examples of what you’ll find on the site:

* Vet Connect - This tool helps service members connect, communicate and share their experiences with others who have served using the Google+ platform.

* Google Veterans Channel - A YouTube channel for discussion concerning military service for veterans, their families and the public. Veterans can share their experiences with each other as well as with civilians to help shed light on the significance and complexity of service. If you have not served, this is a great place to offer your thanks by uploading a compliment video.

* Resume Builder powered by Google Docs - We originate that Docs can be a particularly helpful tool to transitioning service members seeking employment. Resume Builder generates an auto-formatted resume that can be simply edited, saved and downloaded to share with potential employers.

* Tour Builder powered by Google Earth (coming soon). A new way to tell your military story, Today, you can view some sample “tours”— 3D maps of veterans’ service histories, complete with photos and videos. Stay tuned for more facts and updates on the Google Lat Long Blog.

It’s been a proud month for those of us here at Google who are veterans or family of veterans.

In October, 100 Googlers visited the Soldier and Family Assistance Center at West Point to conduct resume writing workshops for members of the Warrior Transition Unit. And, just two weeks ago, we traveled to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to teach wounded, ill and injured service members how to use Google tools to continue in touch with their loved ones while in recovery.

Finally, this week, we introduced the Veterans Job Bank in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Veterans Job Bank is a modified job search engine in the National Resource Directory (NRD), which is powered by Google Custom Search technology and crawls the web for Job Posting markup from Schema.org to recognize veteran-committed job openings.

Even playing a little part to serve those who have served has been an honor.

Raising awareness for breast cancer throughout the Pink Pin scheme in NYC and beyond

Every October marks Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a time when organizations and persons around the world come together to raise awareness to support the fight against breast cancer.

This year, Google joined in and partnered with Susan G. Komen for the Cure on the Pink Pin scheme, which challenged local businesses in New York City to rally their customers, friends and families about breast cancer awareness. Using Google’s products, including Maps, YouTube, Picasa and Google+, we made it easy for local businesses and New York residents to show their support for the cause. On an interactive website, pinkpin.com, people might register their businesses on the Pink Pin Map, share their experiences by uploading their own videos and photo stories, as well as donate to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

More than 300 businesses signed up to contribute in the first 24 hours, and we saw an outpouring of public support from both businesses and individuals, demonstrating how small, random acts of participation can interpret to larger scale impact. In fact, some businesses took it upon themselves to take Pink Pin a step further. One New York business offered $100 of free services for every $100 donated. A Brooklyn restaurant hosted a one-day “Dine-out” for Pink Pin, where a percentage of their earnings for that day went to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Pink Pin was a wonderful demonstration of what people will do if you give them the tools to use technology for good. We’re delighted that Pink Pin has been so positively established by New Yorkers and hope to carry on and expand our efforts next year.

Googlers also celebrated Breast Cancer Awareness month in 23 of our offices about the globe. In addition to health talks encouraging Googlers to learn more about breast cancer prevention, we heard a panel of survivors speak in Mountain View, held walk/runs in California, New York and Washington, and participated in flash mobs to raise awareness in Dublin and London. On Wednesday, October 19, we renowned a global “Wear Pink, Think Pink Day.” We also encouraged donations (and gift matching!) to organizations like Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. You can see a photo album of all our activities below:

Read Your Shared Items in Google Reader

The latest Google Reader update detached all the social features, including the section that allowed you to read the items you've joint. Fortunately, the shared items page is still obtainable at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/username (replace username with your Gmail username) and you can pledge to this page in Google Reader. Click "subscribe" and paste the URL of the shared items page. If you don't have a Gmail account, load the shared items feed in Reader, right-click "Your shared items" and copy the URL.

You can now use Google Reader's search box to find a post you've joint. Click the "All items" drop-down next to the search box, scroll down to the end of the list (or just press "End") and you'll discover the shared items feed.

To unsubscribe from this feed, you require to go to the settings page, click "Subscriptions", type "shared items" in the search box and click the "unsubscribe button".

Google+ for Google Apps

As promised, Google+ is now obtainable for Google Apps users. Administrators can allow the new service from the control panel, as explained here. Google+ requires that Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk are enabled and that the organization uses the new accounts infrastructure. If the two services are enabled and the choice to automatically add new services is selected, Google+ is routinely enabled.

After the enabling the service, you require to wait a few minutes until you can use it. Obviously, users have to physically join Google+ by visiting plus.google.com. "Google Apps users will have access to the same set of features that are obtainable to every Google+ user, and more. In addition to sharing publicly or with your circles, you'll also have the alternative to share with everyone in your organization, even if you haven't additional all of those people to a circle," explains Google.

It's interesting that Google+ is obtainable for higher education institutions, but not for other education institutions because users have to be at least 18 years old to use Google+.

You almost certainly noticed that Google+ evolves incredibly fast, faster than any other Google service. The support for Google Apps is not the only new quality: there's Hot on Google+ (a section that highlights popular posts), Ripples (a visualization tool for public shares and comments) and a Creative Kit for photo editing powered by Picnik.

Google Reader Will incorporate With Google+

A lot of people anticipate a redesigned Google Reader and the good news is that they won't be disappointed: a new interface will be obtainable next week. Google Reader is not dead, but the new interface couldn't be released faster because the sharing feature had to be included with Google+.

My favorite feature of Google Buzz was that it routinely imported all the shared items from Google Reader and permissible your followers to discuss them. Now that Google Buzz will be discontinued, this feature will be obtainable in Google+. Unfortunately, Google Reader will no longer have a standalone sharing feature, a divide list of followers and people you follow, a feed and a page for shared items. This is great if you are a Google+ user, since it simplifies sharing and makes Google Reader more reliable. If you don't want to use Google+, you'll still be capable to share posts by email or using the "send to" feature, but these workarounds aren't very helpful for sharing a large number of posts.

The takeaway is that Google+ is not a separate social service you can easily ignore, it's a service that will be used for sharing photo albums, documents, videos, for posting blog comments and it will be very hard to use Google without joining Google+ since, at some point, Google+ will be... Google itself.

"Many of Reader's social features will soon be obtainable via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader. We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We differentiate, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you," mentions Google's Alan Green. That's the reason why you'll be able to export your shared items, your starred and liked items, your list of friends from Reader's settings page.

Google Reader's sharing feature has forever been difficult to use and the addition with Google+ will finally give Reader the opportunity to shine and show why it's still a useful service. I'm sure that a lot of users will complain that they can't use the old sharing feature, just like many YouTube users complained when Google migrated YouTube to Google Accounts. There's a group of value in having separate services with their own accounts, sharing features and friends lists, but switching to unified accounts, unified profiles, consistent sharing features makes Google's services more helpful because they work together, they unite their strengths and become easier to use.

Extra Google Wallet merchants are live. Now you can pay AND save in a single tap.

We’re hearing from people at check-out counters throughout the country that paying with your phone is a little like magic. Just look at the ecstatic response on the faces of our friends who made their first Google Wallet purchases last Thursday.

Today, our partners American Eagle Outfitters, The Container Store, Foot Locker, Guess, Jamba Juice, Macy’s, OfficeMax and Toys“R”Us are rolling out an even improved Google Wallet experience. For the first time ever in the U.S., at these select stores, you can not only pay but also exchange coupons and/or earn rewards points—all with a single tap of your phone. This is what we call the Google Wallet Single Tap experience.

With Google Wallet in hand, you be able to walk into a Jamba Juice, American Eagle Outfitters or any other partner store. Once you’ve prearranged that Razzmatazz smoothie or found the right color Slim Jean, head straight to the cashier and tap your phone to pay and save—that’s it. You don’t have to shuffle about to find the right coupon to scan or rewards card to stamp because it all happens in the blink of an eye.

The Offers tab in Google Wallet has been rationalized to include a new "Featured Offers" section with discounts that are limited to Google Wallet. Today, these comprise 15% off at American Eagle Outfitters, 10% off at The Container Store, 15% off at Macy’s and an all-fruit smoothie for $2 at Jamba Juice. There are a lot of more Google Wallet exclusive discounts to come, and you can save your favorites in Google Wallet so they’ll be routinely applied to your bill when you check out.

Organizing loyalty cards in your wallet is getting easier too. Today, Foot Locker, Guess, OfficeMax and American Eagle Outfitters are provided that loyalty cards for Google Wallet so you can rack up reward points automatically as you shop. More of these are on the way.

One more thing—in reply to user feedback, we’ve enhanced transaction details for the Google Prepaid Card with real-time transaction information including merchant name, location, dollar value and time of each transaction. Here’s what it looks like:

Lastly, a special thanks to Chevron, D’Agostino, Faber News Now, Gristedes Supermarkets and Pinkberry who are now also working to equip their stores to recognize Google Wallet.

It’s still premature days for Google Wallet, but this is an significant step in expanding the ecosystem of participating merchants to make shopping faster and easier in more places. If you’re a merchant and want to work with us to make shopping easier for your customers and attach with them in new ways, please sign up on the Google Wallet site. And if you’re a shopper and want to purchase a Nexus S 4G phone from Sprint with Google Wallet, visit this page.

Chrome Remote Desktop

Chrome Remote Desktop is a new Chrome addition that lets you remotely control a computer from your browser. It's the first software that uses a technology code-named "chromoting" and it's particularly useful if you have a Chrome book.

The goal of this beta release is to show the core Chrome Remoting technology and get feedback from users. This edition enables users to share with or get access to one more computer by providing a one-time verification code. Access is given only to the exact person the user identifies for one time only, and the sharing session is totally secured.

One potential use of this description is the remote IT helpdesk case. The helpdesk can use the Chrome Remote Desktop BETA to help another user, while equally a user can receive help by setting up a sharing session without leaving their desk. Additional use cases such as being able to way in your own computer remotely are coming soon.

Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is fully cross-platform, so you can connect any two computers that have a Chrome browser, together with Windows, Linux, Mac and Chrome books.

I've installed the addition on a Dell laptop that runs Windows 7 and on a Samsung Chrome book. The extension has more than 17 MB, so you have to wait a little bit until it's downloaded and installed. After installing the extension on my Dell laptop, I clicked the innovative icon from the new tab page and Chrome Remote Desktop asked me to "grant extended access permissions" to my computer.

Chrome Remote Desktop is a special extension since it can be used to control your computer. It's interesting that the addition uses Google Talk's technology to send messages.

When you choose to share your computer, Remote Desktop generates a code you need to enter on a second computer.

Here's what happens after installing the addition on my Chrome book:

The presentation is pretty good, but it depends on your Internet connection and the computers you're using. The extension is particularly useful for businesses and it will make Chrome books even more attractive for companies.