Opening Hours at Newton Library

This week's contribution to signs, signs features the opening hours at Newton Library.

Alas, as from October 12th, every day will be a Wednesday.

Why? See the view of the library on Hyde DP Xtra.

Band of Bridges: Celebrating the Golden Gate Anniversary

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest author is Greg Moore, President of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Google is excited to help support this celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge.

On May 27th, the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge celebrated its 75th anniversary. Our organization, the non-profit Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, is working with the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District; the National Park Service; the Presidio Trust; and the City of San Francisco to help commemorate this landmark event.

As president of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, I have the privilege of enjoying the majestic architecture of the bridge and its landscape on a regular basis. This iconic Bridge stands at the center of the Golden Gate National Parks.

However, we’re pleased to announce that now the American spirit and beauty of the bridge will be available to everyone. Our new interactive website, Band of Bridges, brings the celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary into everyone’s homes.

The website enables visitors to virtually connect bridges from around the world to the Golden Gate, making what we hope will be the longest bridge in history. Using the Google Maps API, users can navigate every corner of the Earth and search for bridges or enter a specific bridge they are already familiar with—maybe even one from their hometown. Each new bridge added will connect to preceding bridges, resulting in spans that stretch hundreds (or thousands) of digital miles.

With the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics approximating 600,000 bridges in the United States alone, we hope to connect thousands of bridges and people from across the globe.

Just as the Golden Gate blends together its surrounding nature, culture and people, Band of Bridges, conceived by San Francisco advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners and brought to life by the Google Maps team in Mountain View, is a culmination of the amazing creative and technological talent of the Bay Area in California.

The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy would like to thank Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Google for bringing such vision, beauty and authenticity to our efforts.

Please join us in celebrating the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary and be part of our Band of Bridges.

Posted by Greg Moore, President of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy

Rahul Nagvekar wins 2012 National Geographic Bee

Congratulations to 8th grader Rahul Nagvekar, who was just named the 2012 National Geographic Bee champion! Rahul is 14 years old and from Missouri City, Texas. It’s a good thing he has a passion for traveling, as this year’s winner receives a trip to the Galapagos Islands, in addition to a lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society and a $25,000 college scholarship. To get here today, Rahul has answered more than 300 geography-related questions since the Bee started at Quail Valley Middle School last fall.

This year, over four million students around the United States participated in the National Geographic Bee. Participants in the qualifying rounds were asked a variety of questions, ranging from locations of carnivorous plants, spider monkeys, natural disasters, soil types, language dialects, labor reforms, and glaciers. Participants must have a vast amount of knowledge in order to successfully answer questions on such diverse topics.

Physical, human, and cultural geography encompasses much of what takes place on our planet. These nine to fourteen year olds have a wealth of knowledge about the world that extends way beyond their years. The last question of this year’s final was: “Name the Bavarian City on the Danube River that was the legislative seat for the Holy Roman Empire from 1663-1806.” The winning answer is, of course, Regensburg, in Bavaria, Germany.

Google is once again proud to sponsor the National Geographic Bee. This contest highlights the importance of being geographically literate, a skill that is vital for all students. We are all explorers and must invest in understanding the world around us. Technology, like Google Earth, allows us to virtually visit any place on the planet so we can make those connections between people and their environment.

You can watch the 2012 National Geographic Bee tonight, Thursday, May 24th at 8 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo WILD. It will also air later on public broadcasting stations.

Congratulations to Rahul and all of the other state finalists!

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Earth and Maps

Save the date! Announcing Geo Teachers Institutes for Ireland and England

Educators all over the world have used Google's geo products to help students conceptualize, visualize, share and communicate information about the world around them.

This summer, we will host two Google Geo Teachers Institutes: June 13 and 14, 2012 in Dublin, Ireland and June 20 and 21, 2012 in London, England. Both events will be held at the local Google office.

This two-day event is a free professional development experience designed to help educators get the most from Google's geography-related products and technologies. Participants receive hands-on experience and learn best practices and tips for using Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google SketchUp, including a focus on features like Ocean, Mars, Moon and Sky in Google Earth.

Attendees will also learn about innovative instructional strategies, theoretical foundations, and receive resources to share with colleagues. Speakers will share real life examples of how they are using these tools in their classrooms across all subjects. We hope this event will empower educators to bring the world's geographic information to students in a compelling, fresh, and fun way.

Educators at the 2011 Google Teachers Institute
If you are interested in joining us, please complete this application by April 30, 2012. We will send out invitations based on availability by May 11, 2012. Even if you can’t make it to this event, we have many online resources available on the Google Earth for Educators and SketchUp for Education websites. Check back often for updates!

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Geo Education Program Manager

A red pin to mark a dream: Competing in the National Geographic Bee

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest author is Luke Hellum. Luke is an 9th grader who has been studying geography since he was in kindergarten, making it to Arizona's state geographic bee three times, placing in the National Geographic Bee finals last year, and returning to the National Geographic Bee this year as a youth correspondent. Google is excited to sponsor this year’s event and we wish all participants the best of luck.

Today, thousands of grade-school and middle-school students will compete in state-level Geographic Bees, thanks in part to Google’s sponsorship of the competitions. State and U.S. territory bee winners will advance to the national bee prelims in Washington, D.C. on May 22, and ten will be part of the final broadcast on the National Geographic Channel. Like many of these young “mapheads,” starting at the age of five, I dreamed of participating in the bee and one day making it to the finals.

As a sixth grader, I reached the Arizona state competition for the first time, finishing fourth. The following year, I placed second, and although it was an improvement, I was disappointed and committed to ramping up my preparation efforts in 2011 for my final year of eligibility. I began studying rigorously again in the summer, averaging about 20 hours a week.

During the fall, my mom went to Washington D.C. for an Online News Association conference and met Jesse Friedman, a Product Marketing Manager from Google. She shared with Jesse her appreciation for Google’s sponsorship of the bee, and told him that I’d been heartened by the fact that former bee competitors were now Google employees, demonstrating through their work on Google Earth and other projects that geography can have a place in my future career. I realized that the value of my knowledge wouldn’t end with the bee. Jesse wished me luck and gave my mom two stickers of the Google Maps red pin to pass along to me and my brother (who will be competing for the first time in this year’s Arizona bee).

One of my study resources was a 12’ x 6’ map that covered the wall of our office. When I got the iconic pin, I decided to put it on Washington, D.C., representing my goal to reach the national bee. At times, eagerness, anxiety and restlessness would plague my study efforts. Glancing across the room at that pin would help me press on, remind me why I was working so hard, and ultimately pushed me to study harder. After many months of preparation, I won the state bee, achieved my goal of getting to Washington D.C. and placed 7th in the finals. I even got to meet Brian McClendon, Engineering VP of Google Earth and Maps.

The red pin has remained a fixture on the map. It’s still on Washington D.C., as I will be returning to the bee this year as National Geographic’s youth correspondent for the bee broadcast. After that, I plan to move it around on the map as my goals shift to places I want to go in the future: New York City, where I’m moving in June and Palo Alto, where I hope to attend Stanford University someday before founding my own startup.

Wherever the red pin may end up, it will continue to symbolize the confluence of my passions: geography, technology, and discovering the world.

Are you similarly looking to be inspired by what you can do with geography? Watch the video below to see how individuals from a variety of fields use their geography education to pursue their passions.



Posted by Luke Hellum, 2011 Arizona National Geographic state bee champion and finalist in the 2011 National Geographic Bee

ABC Wednesday: J is for Just Help

I photographed this shop on Market Street a few months ago but didn't know what it was.

It seems that the Just Help Foundation is a charity designed to help fight poverty and help the under-privileged children of the developing countries to become self-sufficient.

The Tameside-based charity has launched a supplementary school which plans to offer lessons in English and maths to local youngsters. It is expected that the school (which will operate on Saturday and Sunday mornings) will help to ensure more young people from across Tameside continue on to further and higher education.

A plague by the door celebrates the opening in September 2011 by local MP Jonathan Reynolds.

For more "J's visit ABC Wednesday.

English on the Buses!

Here is a new novel idea to learn English...on the local city buses! The idea is simple...two video screens show English words or simple English phrases with the Polish translation next to them. Passengers have nothing else to do but just read and learn.

Shame that some of the slides have mistakes though. For example, it's trivial but why does 'to go to work' have a full stop after it? After all it's not a sentence. Apparently, there are also some spelling errors on some of the other slides. Though these remain to be seen by TDP!

Map your military service for Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., and we’re honoring this community by sharing relevant Google tools for veterans and families all over the world--you can learn more on the Google for Veterans and Families site. I specifically wanted to highlight a couple of these tools that enable people to map and tell their stories using Google Earth and Google Maps.

Explore veteran tours in Google Earth
For Veterans Day we’re featuring several stories created by veterans that show how Google Earth can be used to create a 3D virtual tour of their service history, complete with photos and videos. Fly back to the 1940's to hear about six siblings who served in WWII and an Army nurse who worked in post-war Japan. Then see where a Marine Lieutenant spent four years during the Vietnam War. Watching these tours requires the Google Earth plug-in, which you can download here. We hope to make this story-telling tool available to everyone soon.

Make a Custom Map of your service
Google Maps makes it easy (and fun!) to create a simple Custom Map and also share with others. With our mapping tools, veterans can map their service and then share the personalized map with their families and friends. Stories, photos and videos can be geo-located so the complete story is recorded and marked on a map.

We hope our mapping tools can be useful to the veteran community for sharing and recording life stories. For more other relevant Google products, we invite you to explore the Google for Veterans and Families site, www.googleforveterans.com.

Posted by Sean Askay, Developer Advocate

The View from the Summit: Celebrating Geo Users Across North America

Across the globe, a steadily growing community of passionate users are blazing new trails in the world of online geographic content. With the help of products like Google Map Maker, Google SketchUp and Building Maker, and Panoramio, Geo enthusiasts are harnessing the ability to add and edit various aspects of geography across 180 countries and regions in Google Maps and Google Earth.

To celebrate the valuable contributions of our users, particularly in light of Map Maker’s United States launch in April, we felt it was time to connect with our amazing U.S. Geo Community in person. From July 20th-22nd, the Google Geo team welcomed avid mappers, 3D modelers and Panoramio photo contributors from throughout North America to our Mountain View campus for the first ever United States Geo User Summit.

Brian McClendon addresses a rapt audience of Geo users

The summit was an opportunity for our most active contributing users to come together to learn, teach and share best practices with one another. A Map Maker workshop brought everyone up to speed on solid mapping practices and ways to add that next level of comprehensiveness to the map. Google reviewers also made the trip to Mountain View, CA to connect directly with users and give them the inside scoop on what goes into reviewing an incredible number of mapping edits each day, while offering insight to both new and experienced mappers. The user-generated unconference sessions also gave everyone a chance to troubleshoot, voice ideas, and brainstorm potential new product features with Googlers. There was also plenty of playtime, including an RC Car Scavenger Hunt, which had teams of summit attendees chasing remote controlled toy cars to points of interest across the Google campus. Ultimately, however, the event served as a forum for users to share their amazing and inspiring stories with fellow members of the Geo community.

Geo users mark their place on the map

Hearing their stories and perspectives was definitely the highlight of the summit. For example, Sophia Sallas-Brookwell, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, introduced her plan to implement Map Maker as a means of addressing the inequitable distribution of healthy food options in Chicago’s South Side. Educator Jon Walker described his extensive use of mapping and 3D modeling in his Gresham, Oregon classroom, and how he encourages his high school students to leave a thoughtful footprint in the world. Many other users also shared their tips, tricks, and motivations, igniting a noticeable enthusiasm among attendees.

Googlers and Geo users join forces on Google’s Mountain View Crittenden Campus

If you weren’t among the crowd at this summer’s U.S. Geo User Summit, feel free to visit the event website, where you can browse photos of featured speakers, brainstorming sessions, and RC toy cars escaping into the sunset. Extensive session notes and presentations are also available. If you’re interested in attending future events, please see the Map Maker Events Calendar, 3D Events Calendar and Panoramio Events Calendar. This summit was just the beginning of an ongoing celebration of the passionate mappers, modelers, and photo contributors around the world.

Posted by Lori Savageau, Community Manager, Google Map Maker

Congratulations Russia, the National Geographic World Champions

(Cross posted on the Official Google and Google Student blogs)

This island has a population of about 57,000 people, with the most settlements concentrated on the west coast. Very little of this island is suitable for agriculture.

After eight rounds of questions from none other than quiz king Alex Trebek himself, the team from Russia was crowned the National Geographic World Champions today at our Mountain View, Calif. headquarters after answering this final question correctly.

(By the way, the answer is Greenland.)

The National Geographic World Champions from Russia (photo courtesy of National Geographic)

Students from 17 regions around the world competed in the 2011 National Geographic World Championship. Today’s final round included answering a series of challenging questions like the one above. The students also interpreted maps and museum artifacts from the University of California Berkeley and fielded questions about live animals from the San Francisco Zoo during the earlier rounds of the competition.

Congratulations to the Russian team and to all of the students who participated. We look forward to seeing where your explorations and knowledge take you.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps and Earth

National Geographic World Championship comes to Google

(Cross posted on the Official Google and Google Student blogs)

It’s summer vacation for many kids, but 51 students from 17 different regions have been spending their time off polishing and fine-tuning their geographic skills to prepare for this year’s National Geographic World Championship, a biennial geography competition hosted by the National Geographic Society.

This year, Google is the proud sponsor and on Wednesday, July 27, we’ll host the three final teams from Canada, Chinese Taipei and Russia at our campus in Mountain View, California. The preliminary rounds included a written exam on Sunday and activities at the San Francisco Zoo on Monday morning. Teams ventured to various zoo exhibits and were asked to identify climate maps and geographic locations associated with 10 different animal habitats housed throughout the zoo.

Teams from Canada, Chinese Taipei and Russia will move on to the National Geographic World Championship

Since most of you can’t be here to witness the action in person, we’re going to live stream the finale, hosted by Alex Trebek of the game show JEOPARDY!. Tune into the National Geographic YouTube Channel Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. PDT to cheer on these young competitors from wherever you are in the world.

Through this competition, we aim to inspire the future generation of leaders and innovators to become more geographically literate and have a deeper understanding about the world they live in. We hope you are as excited as we are to see such enthusiasm and passion around geographic education.

Please join us in wishing all of these young geographic experts the best of luck!

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP, Google Earth and Maps

Let Historypin be your guide

Editor’s Note: Today's guest author is Nick Stanhope, co-founder and executive director of an awesome and inspiring website out of the UK called Historypin. We collaborated with the site for its launch as a beta last year, and Nick is writing a guest post to announce today's official launch of Historypin with a new mobile app and expanded global availability. His team’s labor of love illustrates the amazing ways individuals and organizations can use Google Maps and Street View to share new (or in this case, old) views of the world around us.

A few years ago, just before she passed away, my Gran and I spent a lot of time together looking through some of her old photos and family videos, sharing stories and learning a bit more about each other’s lives. This picture of my Gran and Great Auntie Jenny, working as land girls in the summer of 1943, was one of my favourites.

Everyone can identify with this sense of wistfulness and nostalgia that memories often evoke. Sometimes it’s triggered by talking to a grandparent about what they did at your age, by learning more about the guy in the photo who looks like a Victorian version of your Uncle Phil, or by chatting with an older neighbour about how different Main Street looked fifty years ago.

This is what Historypin is all about: conversations between different generations and neighbours, time spent around sights and sounds of the past, stories remembered and shared and comparisons made between then and now. And today, we’re thrilled to announce its graduation from last year’s beta phase with worldwide availability, the addition of a new mobile app, and a bunch of other exciting new developments.

Historypin is a website and smartphone app that uses Google technology in new and creative ways. You can explore old photos, videos and audio clips that have been “pinned” onto Google Maps (which you can search not only by location but also by date), compare these glimpses of the past with how they look in today by seeing them overlaid onto Street View, immerse yourself in local history using the Android app, journey through Tours and Collections of featured content and, best of all, “pin” your own history as photos, videos, audio clips and stories to the site.

And by continuing to work closely with Google, we’re excited about the improvements to come as well. Later this year, we’ll launch additional new features like embed tools that enable you to put Historypin on your own site, Historypin channels that will allow you to create your own distinct experiences, and pinning games that invite the community to pin content that we and our partners know little about.

But, really, it’s not about the tech. It’s about those conversations - little ones, across families and streets, and big ones, involving millions of citizen historians. Through all of these conversations, we can create a place to explore history in amazing ways and help families and neighbourhoods come together around what we all share: history.



Posted by Nick Stanhope, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Historypin

St James' Catholic Primary School

St. James’ on Cheriton Close is a voluntary aided Primary and Nursery school linked to the Parish of St. James the Great, Hattersley.

The school has its own website.

Brookbank Nursery

Brookbank Nursery on Mottram Road is based in a grade II listed house that was built in 1837 by the local Hibbert family.

Congratulations to Tine Valencic, the 2011 National Geographic Bee Champion

After preparing for months and working their way through a field of several million participating students, the top 10 geographic student masters, met in Washington D.C. today at National Geographic headquarters to compete in the National Geographic Bee. After 124 questions (including the championship round), Tine Valencic from Texas answered this one correctly to take the championship crown:

Question: Thousands of mountain climbers and trekkers rely on Sherpas to aid their ascent of Mount Everest. The southern part of Mount Everest is located in which Nepalese national park?
Answer: Sagarmatha National Park

Google is proud to support National Geographic Bee, for the 3rd year in a row. National Geographic and Google share the same passion for inspiring and encouraging our future generation of leaders and innovators to learn about and explore the world around them. Being geographically literate and understanding the world is a vital skill for students of all ages. Technology, like Google Earth, has helped make the world a more accessible place and students need geographic skills to be prepared for a global future.

Students who participate in the National Geographic Bee finals are fourth through eighth-graders from every state, the District of Columbia, Atlantic Territories, Pacific Territories, and Department of Defense Dependents Schools. They won their school Bees that were held in thousands of schools across the US. These school winners then took a written qualifying test, which was scored by the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. From the school winners, the top scorers in each state are eligible to participate in the State Bees. You can learn more about the students who won their State Bees using the interactive Google Maps gadget on the National Geographic YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/nationalgeographic.

The first-place winner, Tine Valencic, won a $25,000 college scholarship, a lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society, and a trip to the Galápagos Islands. The second-place winner and recipient of a $15,000 college scholarship was Georgia's Nilai Sarda and third place and a $10,000 college scholarship went to Kansas' Stefan Petrović. The seven other finalists, who won $500, were Andrew Hull, of Alaska: Luke Hellum, of Arizona; Tuvya Bergson-Michelson, of California; Kevin Mi, of Indiana; Karthik Karnik, of Massachusetts; Alex Kimn, of South Dakota; and Anthony Cheng, of Utah.

The top 10 national finalists from both 2011 and 2010 are eligible to be selected for the three-person U.S. team at the National Geographic World Championship to be held at various locales in the San Francisco area in July 2011, with the finals taking place at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

Congratulations to Tine Valencic and to all of the students who participated in this year’s National Geographic Bee. We look forward to following all of you as you continue to explore the world and we expect to see some of you at Google after you have earned your degrees.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps and Earth

Sign up for the Geo Teachers Institute

For years, Google's geo products have been identified as a powerful learning toolkit that can help students conceptualize, visualize, share, and communicate information about the world around them.

This fall, we will host two Google Geo Teachers Institutes: September 23 and 24, 2011 in Washington DC at National Geographic Headquarters and September 26 and 27, 2011 at the University of Southern Maine Lewiston-Auburn College in Lewiston, Maine.

This event is a free professional development experience designed to help educators get the most from Google's geo products and technologies. The Geo Teachers Institute is an intensive, two-day event where participants get hands-on experience using Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google SketchUp, including a focus on features like Ocean, Mars, Moon and Sky in Google Earth.

Attendees will learn about innovative instructional strategies and receive resources to share with colleagues. The Google Geo Education team hopes this event will empower educators to bring the world's geographic information to students in a compelling, fresh, and fun way.

If you are interested, please complete this application. You will be notified if you are selected by August 15, 2011. Even if you can’t make it to this event, we have many online resources available for Google Earth and SketchUp and encourage you to check them out.

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Geo Education Program Manager

Technical School and Library

Hyde Technical School and Free Library opened in 1897 replacing the former Mechanics Institute.

In recent years the building was shared between the library and Tameside College but the college has moved out and the library has been extensively refurbished.

The coloured version of this photograph can be seen on Geograph.

Information on the Mechanics Institute can be found on Old Hyde.

Live from space: You talk to Commander Mark Kelly and the Endeavour Crew

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

UPDATE 4/29: NASA has scrubbed the launch attempt today due to a technical problem. We'll provide an update here on the live streamed launch and live interview, and you can follow NASA updates here.

We’ve always jumped at the chance to bring the wonders of space a little closer to home. We’ve announced a Moon office, a Moon race and an expedition to Mars and brought many nooks and crannies of the universe to Google Earth—Sky, Moon, Mars, NASA images and a Hubble tour, to name a few.

On Friday, April 29, the crew of STS-134 will launch into space for the final mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour and we want to give you the chance to connect with them. On May 2, NASA Commander Mark Kelly and his crew will take your questions live from space on YouTube. PBS NewsHour will live stream the interview from its YouTube channel with veteran space reporter Miles O’Brien curating and asking your questions to the crew.

Starting today, you can visit www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour to submit a video or written question for the crew of STS-134 to be used in the live interview and vote for your favorite questions. You can also submit questions on Twitter with the hashtag #utalk2nasa. Don’t be shy—if you’re most curious about how to prepare for a spacewalk or wondering if the astronauts have a speech prepared for an extra-terrestrial encounter, this is your chance to find out. Here’s a video from PBS and Miles O’Brien to inspire you:



A few suggestions before submitting your questions:

• Video questions are preferred, and should be a max of 20 seconds long
• Speak clearly and film in a place with minimal background noise. Keep the camera as still as possible and ask the question directly to the camera
• Look through NASA videos on YouTube about STS-134 to learn more about the mission and crew

You have until Saturday April 30 at midnight ET to submit your questions. The top ranked questions will be used in the live interview on Monday, May 2 at 2:15pm ET / 11:15am PT.

To get the full experience of STS-134, you can also watch a live stream of the shuttle launch on Friday April 29 starting at 3:47pm ET at www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour. Both the launch and the interview will be available for archived viewing.

Houston, we’re ready for lift-off.

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Program Manager

Celebrating Earth Day

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day with an animated, interactive doodle on our homepage and events at Google offices around the world. At our headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., we’re holding an environmental fair for Googlers, complete with speakers and contests to strengthen Googlers’ green acumen, and a cookout using—what else—parabolic solar cookers (don’t worry, we’ll compost the leftovers).

Our campus garden in Mountain View

We’ve been carbon neutral since 2007 and—Earth Day or not—we’re always asking ourselves what we can do to make the world greener today than it was yesterday. This week, we launched a new website with many of the questions we’ve been asking over the years that have inspired our environmental initiatives. What can we do to make renewable energy cheaper than coal? How can we run a data center using 50 percent less energy? And what does it take to green our energy supply?

It’s questions like these that led us to install solar panels on our Mountain View campus in 2007—at the time, the largest corporate solar installation in the U.S. They’re also what made us decide to donate to Googlers’ favorite charities based on how often they self-power their commute, whether by bike or by pogo stick. We hope the new website helps you start asking bold questions that lead to innovative solutions to make the world a greener place.

In addition to our new site, we’ve had a busy few weeks continuing our green streak. We doubled down on greening our energy supply with our second power purchase agreement (PPA) in less than a year and made several new investments: at a solar photovoltaic plant in Germany (our first in Europe), and others in the largest wind farm and solar project in the world, bringing our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million. While the investments won’t supply our operations with energy, we believe they make business sense and will spur development and deployment of compelling clean energy technologies.

This Earth Day, we’ll continue to ask ourselves what else we can do to bring us closer to true sustainability. We hope that you, and companies across the world, will be doing the same.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Enegy Czar

Scientific sculptures

These 3 fine sculptures (can you spot the owl?) sit high above an impressive building which houses the Toruń Science Society.