Thanks to Street View, you might have already traversed the elegant plains of Botswana, or discovered the serene fjords of Norway. But now for something completely different.
One of our brave Street View drivers has been to a remote airfield in Surrey, England — filming location of the BBC’s automotive TV show, Top Gear. He went to take on the fearless petrolhead that reigns supreme on the iconic show — The Stig. While the Stig raced around in a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Black, we took a tour with our own vehicle. Take a look at the results in this behind the scenes video.
View Larger Map Crossing the chequered line. The track plays host to regular Top Gear features like the Power Lap and Star in a Reasonably Priced Car.
The Top Gear test track is the latest in a line of special Street View collects designed to delight motorsport fans. Previously, we’ve put online the Laguna Seca raceway in California and the Monza Formula 1 circuit, host to the Italian Grand Prix, among others. Get behind the “wheel” and enjoy!
Posted by Ulf Spitzer, Street View Program Manager, Google
On the new platform, anybody, anywhere can discover hundreds of digital displays, stories, pictures, videos, and historical documents about Italian craftsmanship. Many of Italy’s most famous culinary and handcraft products are represented, from Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and Prosciutto di San Daniele ham to Murano glass and Montappone Hats. Little-known gems also can be uncovered such as Vercelli accordions and Ascoli Piceno lace.
Many of the best Italian producers are small and medium sized, family-owned companies. They are homes to craftsmen who produce niche products. By bringing them online, we hope to help them export and reach global markets. Before, an American or Chinese buyer would have found it hard to obtain many of these Italian gems. With the new site, niche products no longer are forced into niche markets.
Online interest is growing in Italian “cultural” products. Google searches in these categories grew by 12 percent last year; fashion is the most searched category, followed by tourism and food. Even so, Made in Italy producers still lag with their digital activities: only 34 percent of Italian SMEs have their own website and only 13 percent use it to do e-commerce.
Media partner Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, excited about the economic potential of the internet, dedicated an entire section to the project, focusing on examples of successful Italian entrepreneurs going digital. Savor this new digital platform - and encourage more and more Italian purveyors of the sweet life to benefit from the Internet.
Posted by Luisella Mazza, Program Manager, Cultural Institute and Diego Ciulli, Public Policy Analyst, Rome
Developing computer science and STEM skills is something that should start at an early age. That’s why we’ve been supporting efforts like the RISE Awards and Raspberry Pi to help inspire a new generation of computer scientists who will build the apps and programs of the future. We are passionate about improving the way computer science is taught in schools and believe that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science.
We are pleased to announce that applications are now open for the 2014 Google CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) award program. The program funds universities to work with local high schools to give teachers the training and tools they need to bring computer science and computational thinking into the classroom. Apply before midnight GMT, February 17th, 2014 via www.cs4hs.com.
Throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa, many high schools have limited access to training and curriculum resources. Teachers often struggle to keep up with fast changing technology and they have difficulty demonstrating that computer science can be a rewarding and “cool” career choice. The Google CS4HS award helps teachers meet those challenges. In 2013, the CS4HS program funded 34 computer science education projects across 18 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
We’re excited to have the opportunity to help even more educators learn how to teach computer science and encourage students to take up computer science. Together, we can help inspire the next generation of computer scientists!
Posted by Posted by Michelle Finnegan, University Relations Specialist, UK
During World War I, about 50,000 Irish soldiers died fighting in the British army. Until now, these records were located only in a book released in 1923 and published in a mere 100 copies. Google has worked with the Irish genealogical history and heritage company Eneclann and the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium to build a new Irish memorial website, bringing a list of Irish war dead available online and making it searchable with this simple tool.
Today, Ireland’s Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Eamon Gilmore T.D., launched the new website with Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness at our Dublin headquarters. “While the digitisation and online access to this record will be a rich resource for genealogy, most significant is its value in facilitating the simple and important act of remembering the individuals, Irish men and women, who lost their lives in the First World War,” Tánaiste Gilmore said.
The two Northern Irish leaders spoke movingly about the project. “My presence is a clear indication of the maturity in confronting history on this island. For many years, this as something that people were not prepared to talk about, to face up to, to acknowledge,” said deputy First Minister McGuinness. First Minister Peter Robinson agreed, saying: “As we enter an important decade of commemorations in both our countries, it is my hope that what has been established here today will keep alive the history and the stories of those who did not return from war.”
Deputy First Minister McGuiness
Work on the archive dates back to July 2012 when the Irish ambassador to Belgium, Éamonn Mac Aodha approached Google and In Flanders Fields Museum. During the research, the museum discovered that the records for Irish casualties of the First World War were neither fully correct nor complete. More records simply list France as place of death. Many probably instead died in Flanders - in all some 11,060 out of the 49,000 have now been identified as being killed or commemorated or buried in Belgium.
More than 100 guests attended today’s launch. These included family members who had researched relatives who died in World War One; members of the diplomatic corps; political representatives and historians and academics, and members of commemorative organisations. Our idea is to engage the public and increase knowledge about these casualties. If you find an ancestor or locate a long-lost relative in the list send, documents, pictures, letters or any other relevant information, email [email protected]. The information will be verified and added to the website.
The new Irish World War I records search tool
This event marks the opening of the ceremonies for the 100th year of the outbreak of World War I. We’re proud to play a part in this project as a sign of our commitment to Ireland, our European headquarters, and to using technology to fill in holes left by history.
Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa
When eight technology companies presented a plan this month to reform government surveillance, a key request concerned transparency. At Google, we were the first company to publish a transparency report detailing the requests we receive from governments around the world to bring down content or hand over information on users.
But Google’s report represents only a narrow snapshot. It is limited to a single company. Imagine instead if all the requests for information on Internet users and for takedowns of web content in a country could be published. This would give a much more effective picture of the state of Internet freedom. As the year draws to a close, we’re happy to report that Panoptykon, a Polish NGO, published this month a preliminary Internet transparency report for Poland and Fores, a Stockholm-based think tank, issued a study in Sweden.
In Poland and Sweden, we helped initiate these transparency efforts and supported them financially. NGOs in six other European countries are working on national transparency reports. Our Estonian-supported transparency coalition already published a report last spring. In addition, university researchers in Hong Kong moved ahead over the summer with their own report. In Strasbourg, the Council of Europe recently held an important conference on the subject and hopefully will move ahead to present a series of recommendations on transparency for its 47 members.
Each transparency campaign takes a different approach - we hope this process of experimentation will help all of us learn. The Estonian effort, titled Project 451, focuses on content removals, not government surveillance, because the authors believe this is the most important issue in their country. The name of Project “451″ refers to HTTP Status Code 451, defined as “unavailable for legal reasons” and the report found that many web platforms were taking legal content down due to fears of legal liability.
The new Polish and Swedish reports attempt to shed light on government requests for information on users. Fores contacted 339 Swedish authorities and found that more than a third had requested data about users or takedowns of user-uploaded content. Panoptykon uncovered that Polish telcos received 1.76 million requests for user information in 2012, while Internet companies polled received approximately 7,500. In addition, Panoptykon discovered that many Polish government requests for information on users were based on a flawed or unclear legal basis.
Admittedly, both the Swedish and Polish reports remain incomplete. Not all Internet companies participated. Much relevant data must be missing. Like with our own Google report, we hope to continue filling in the holes in the future. Our aim is to see this campaign gather momentum because the bottom line is transparency is essential to a debate over government surveillance powers.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa
The “New Europe” countries that joined the European Union over the past decade are moving ahead fast to use the Internet to improve transparency and open government. We recently partnered with Techsoup Global to support online projects driving forward good governance in Romania, the Czech Republic, and most recently, in Slovakia.
Techsoup Global, in partnership with the Slovak Center for Philanthropy, recently held an exciting social-startups awards ceremony Restart Slovakia 2013 in Bratislava. Slovakia’s Deputy Minister of Finance and Digital Champion Peter Pellegrini delivered keynote promoting Internet and Open Data and announced the winners of this year contest. Ambassadors from U.S., Israel and Romania and several distinguished Slovak NGOs also attended the ceremony.
Winning projects included:
Vzdy a vsade - Always and Everywhere - a volunteer portal offering online and anonymous psychological advice to internet users via chat.
Nemlcme.sk - a portal providing counsel for victims of sexual assaults.
Co robim - an educational online library of job careers advising young people how to choose their career paths and dream jobs.
Mapa zlocinu - an online map displaying various rates of criminality in different neighbourhoods.
Demagog.sk - a platform focused on analyzing public statements of politicians and releasing information about politicians and truthfulness of their speeches in a user-friendly format.
An award ceremony highlight was a live concert by the Diplomatic Immunity Band. The combo (shown above at an earlier gig) includes US Ambassador Theodore Sedgwick on keyboard; Israeli ambassador Alexander Ben-Zvi on conga, Romanian Ambassador Florin Vodita on electric guitar, President of Institute of Public Affairs Grigorij Meseznikov on electro acoustic guitar, and the Banska Bystrica Mayor Peter Gogola on drums. We’re delighted they found the time to make sweet music in favor of open data and data-driven innovation.
Posted by Posted by Ondrej Socuvka, Policy Manager, Bratislava
We launched the Transparency Report in 2010 to provide hard evidence of how laws and policies affect access to information online. Today, for the eighth time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services. From January to June 2013, we received 3,846 government requests to remove 24,737 pieces of content—a 68 percent increase over the second half of 2012.
Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content. Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes. These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services. In this particular reporting period, we received 93 requests to take down government criticism and removed content in response to less than one third of them. Four of the requests were submitted as copyright claims.
You can read more about these requests in the Notes section of the Transparency Report. In addition, we saw a significant increase in the number of requests we received from two countries in the first half of 2013:
There was a sharp increase in requests from Turkey. We received 1,673 requests from Turkish authorities to remove content from our platforms, nearly a tenfold increase over the second half of last year. About two-thirds of the total requests—1,126 to be exact—called for the removal of 1,345 pieces of content related to alleged violations of law 5651.
Another place where we saw an increase was Russia, where there has been an uptick in requests since a blacklist law took effect last fall. We received 257 removal requests during this reporting period, which is more than double the number of requests we received throughout 2012.
While the information we present in our Transparency Report is certainly not a comprehensive view of censorship online, it does demonstrate a worrying upward trend in the number of government requests, and underscores the importance of transparency around the processes governing such requests. As we continue to add data, we hope it will become increasingly useful and informative in policy debates and decisions around the world.
Behind every computing breakthrough, there’s a story of the people who made it happen. Earlier this month, the spotlight shone on Poland’s computer pioneers with the launch of the educational project “XYZ — The history of computing in Poland”.
Led by the Center for Citizenship Education in collaboration with Google, the project seeks to raise awareness of Poland’s computing heroes among young people, as well as use them to illustrate the value of virtues such as ingenuity, curiosity and cooperation.
The project was launched in fitting style at the University of Warsaw, where young innovators showcased their own work surrounded by posters of Polish computing heroes to dignitaries including Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers” of the Internet.
Students meet "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf
We’re proud to support this initiative and hope it helps inspire the next generation of Polish computer scientists to similarly great heights.
Posted by Marta Poslad, Senior Policy Analyst, Central and Eastern Europe
At first glance, it’s hard to think of two cultures more different than Belgium’s southern French speaking Wallonia and Finland’s southeastern lake region. Finland is rural, Nordic, and Lutheran, a place of big spaces, big forests, and big lakes. Belgium is urban, Latin and Roman Catholic, a place of crowded industrial landscapes, carefully cultivated fields and man-made canals.
Sunset at our data centre in Belgium
And yet, both are homes to Google data centres, and when our Finnish partners recently visited Belgium for two days of workshops, they found many things in common. Both regions built their economies on big traditional industries that are fast disappearing - paper and pulp in Finland, coal and steel in Belgium. Both have big neighbors - Russia and France. And both have a willpower to work with us to help jump, as our partners put it, “from the Industrial Heartland to the Internet age.”
It was a fruitful two day visit. The dozen-person Finnish team, lead by the regional development agency Cursor and Aalto University, told about their success in spawning video games startups and boosting online local tourism. The Belgian team, led by the local Mundaneum Museum spoke about plans to use the net for its upcoming 2015 celebration of the regional capital and hometown Mons as a European capital of culture.
We also compared common challenges - improving the two regions’ level of English and other skills needed to attract international business. Both regions aim to create web incubators and web startups, projects we are aim to support.
Over the past year, we have disbursed more than EUR1 million of grants to local organizations around the data centers. These fund a wide range of activities, from a Popmaton at Mons’ Andy Warhol exhibit to measuring water health in southeastern Finland’s rivers to supporting a computer science contest at the University of Mons, including exhibitions and talks on Internet issues and opportunities in both countries. It was gratifying to see our partners getting to know each other personally and pledging to work together to common goals. We have dug deep roots in these two different but similar regions and plan to continue planting deep roots in computer science, environment and empowering cultural institution.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Brussels
Europe’s ski season is moving into high gear, making it a perfect moment for us to help you explore some of the continent’s best resorts and runs. We’ve taken our Street View snowmobile to the slopes and have launched new imagery of some great pistes in Italy, France, Andorra and Spain.
Italy: From the western border between Italy and France in La Thuile to Siusi, Pusteria and Kronplatz in the eastern Dolomite Stations south of Austria, we are bringing online a total of eight Italian ski resorts. Take a look where the pros will head down the pistes at Bormio, which hosts a World Cup stop on December 29.
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