Google Apps highlights – 10/22/2011

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

In the spirit of helping people work better together, over the last few weeks we made big improvements to Google presentations, introduced a version of Google Docs optimized for Android tablets, and enabled more dynamic content in Google Sites. We also celebrated the fact that Silicon Valley has gone Google!

Google presentations reloaded
On Tuesday we launched a completely rebuilt version of our web-based presentations application, so you can build more beautiful presentations together with colleagues and classmates. Google presentations now lets you make great-looking slides with animated builds, advanced slide transitions and better support for drawings, tables and themes. Plus, we made it easier to create presentations with others, without the hassles of attachments. Your whole team can work together in the same version of a presentation at the same time, and you can see who’s doing what, chat with others, and see a full revision history at any moment in time.

Google Docs on Android tablets
We’ve made it faster and easier to work with Google Docs on Android tablets with a new version of the Android application that takes full advantage of larger screen real estate. The three-panel view lets you browse filters and collections, see your document list and view file thumbnails and details simultaneously. You can get the Google Docs Android app for free from the Android Market.

Charts in Google Sites
Charts are often created in spreadsheets, but sometimes you want charts to appear in other places, like your team or project sites. In Google Sites, now you can select “Chart” from the “Insert” menu, and navigate to the Google Spreadsheet where your chart or data is located. You can also choose to have your site’s chart update in real-time when someone updates the underlying spreadsheet.

New look for Google Docs and Sites
We started rolling out a new look in Google Docs a couple months ago, and now this new design is available throughout all our collaboration tools. In addition to a cleaner, simpler design, we’ve made it more clear when your files are being auto-saved and added new icons to help you see at-a-glance who your docs are shared with. You can also customize the overall “density” of screen information, a great feature if you want to fit more onto a smaller display.

Who’s gone Google?
Successful small businesses tend to stay laser-focused on improving their core businesses, without getting distracted by peripheral activities that don’t make them more competitive. For example, most small businesses don’t want to spend time or money developing in-house expertise to run email and other IT systems. Case in point: 97 percent of Business Insider’s “Silicon Valley Startups to Watch” use Google Apps.

More than 5,000 businesses and thousands of other organizations start using Google Apps every single day, and more of our customers have shared their stories recently so you can hear why. A warm welcome goes out to Philz Coffee, Mid-Atlantic Door Group, Bradford & Barthel, LLP and the City of Mesquite, Nevada.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Some deeper thoughts........about MORAL !

this one comes from the ASIA TIMES ONLINE - please read carefully:
SUN WUKONG
Little Yueyue and China's moral road
By Wu Zhong, China Editor
HONG KONG - "What has happened to our morality?" "Where are our hearts of sympathy?" "How come we could ever become even more cruel and hard-hearted than cold-blooded animals?" These were questions being asked by outraged Chinese media and bloggers over a recent incident hit-and-run incident which saw bystanders indifferently walk past a toddler who was struck by a van, only for the child to be hit by a second vehicle.
The incident happened on October 13 in Foshan city in southern Guangdong, the richest province in China, and was captured by a surveillance camera. The footage was aired by the province's Southern Television Guangdong (TVS) and posted last Saturday on the Chinese video site Youku, drawing around 2 million views and thousands of comments on that site alone.

The footage shows a two-and-a-half-year-old girl hit and run over by a large white van while walking down a street in a market district of Foshan. About six minutes later, another passing van runs her over again. During the interval, at least 18 people walk by without helping her. Finally last an elderly trash collector comes to her aid, moving her to a side of the street and calling her mother.
According to Xinhua, doctors say the girl, Yueyue, from a rural migrant workers' family, is brain dead and surviving on life support in a deep coma. Police said the drivers of both vehicles have been arrested. [1]

"I was picking up trash in the hardware market when I saw a child lying in the road. I walked up in a hurry to the girl and heard her groan, " said trash collector Chen Xianmei. "I lifted her up and saw that one of her eyes was closed, that she had tears in her eyes, and she was bleeding from her mouth, nose and the back of her head.

"I wanted to carry her but she was soft and collapsed immediately. I was scared to try again and so I dragged her to the side of the road and shouted for help. But nobody showed up," Chen was quoted in Yangcheng Evening News as saying. Chen asked a few nearby shopkeepers who the girl was and only heard "I don't know" in reply. [2]
The apathy of the bystanders and people in the neighborhood has shocked the public, with media commentators and netizens seething over an incident that raises questions about the morality and conscience of today's China.
"[Ancient Chinese thinker] Mencius said, 'The heart of sympathy is essential to man.' What has made us so apathetic?... Lack of sympathy is a moral disaster facing us all … Let us all ask ourselves if we had passed by the scene, how many of us would have stopped to help the girl?" wrote a commentary on Chongqing Times.

It went on to blame the system for a lack of mechanisms that support good deeds. "Our current system is obviously in an embarrassing status: corruption continues to run wild and evil people enjoy privileges, scandals with charity organizations such as the Red Cross stop people from donating to help the needy. [3] All this certainly shakes up the beliefs of kind-hearted people."

Others have linked the absence of good Samaritans to a previous court ruling in Tianjin. There, a man who said he'd helped an elderly woman who had fell on the street was accused by the old lady and her family of knocking her down. The court ordered the man to pay a huge compensation and his appeal is now awaiting a higher court's ruling.
 
However, a commentary on Guangzhou-based Information Times says it is unfair to blame the law. "Everyone saw clearly that the girl was run over by vans. No passers-by could possibly be wronged by her parents. Despite the circumstances, still no one would even just make an emergency call. We believe all viewers of the footage have passed down their judgment on those passers-by."
"The trash-collecting lady has given us a most vivid lesson. How have our people have become so apathetic? It is evident that we must strengthen our morals."
A signed article in the China Youth Daily wrote that fears of liability are not an adequate excuse for not helping, and that this case exposes a decline of humanity in Chinese society.

The Foshan incident is by no means an isolated case of moral decline.

On September 2, an 88-year-old man collapsed in Hubei in central China, his face striking the pavement. No one came to his aid though he law on a crowded street for about 90 minutes, and he ended up choking to death on the blood from his nose. [4]
 
Several days ago at a high school in Changchun in northeast China, basketball-playing students began fight. One of them phoned his parents for help. Their parents, local rich business people, rushed to the scene with dozens of men armed with big knives. The mother shouted: "Let's hit them. Afterwards I'll pay for their medical treatment." One of the students was stabbed more than a dozen times and later died in hospital.
"What great hatred had the parents towards that student? Why did they want his death? What happened to the traditional Chinese virtue of 'extend my love of my children to others' children'?" said a commentary on Chongqing Times.

Netizens are now calling for a good Samaritan law that would protect people who intervene in such incidents from legal repercussions. But legislation may not be enough. For instance, it offers no solution cases such as Changchun stabbing.
For more meaningful results, society has to take a hard look at the spread of money worship in the past three decade. It is money that has eaten away at people's sympathy and caused moral decline in Chinese society.
Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, now trying to restore Mao-style ideological education in his jurisdiction, earlier said, "Our younger generations seem to know only about making money. This will put our country in jeopardy."

But what can the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) do now Pandora's box has been opened? Whether the blood of little Yueyue is the last shed to awaken the conscience of Chinese society is a question to be answered by the CCP, its government and the whole of Chinese society.
Notes
1. Apathy toward injured child sparks public outcry in China, Xinhua, Oct 17, 2011. click here
2. Mother testifies to good character of rescuer, China Daily, Oct 18, 2011. click here
3. China's state-run NGOs in graft spotlight, Asia times Online, Aug 3, 2011.click here
4. Death in Hubei sparks debate on ethics, China Daily, September 5. click here

Toge Desa

Tunisia Talks on YouTube

The Arab Spring started in Tunisia, and it’s appropriate that Tunisia is now leading the way to a full democracy with their landmark free elections scheduled to take place on October 23. To help in this process, we recently partnered with startup news portal Tunisia Live to offer a training workshop in Tunis on Google tools and social media for politicians.

The turnout was fantastic; members from more than 40 parties and independent coalitions attended. The same day, Tunisia Live launched the Tunisia Talks channel on YouTube, channeling the enthusiasm of politicians to leverage social media and engage with voters. In this project, Tunisians are encouraged to submit and vote for top questions to the candidates, and many did so—for a flavor, see this example or this one. So far, more than 400 questions have been submitted.



This outreach is all the more exciting because YouTube was blocked for so many years in Tunisia. But when the regime collapsed last January, the site was unbanned and quickly became popular. Many Tunisian media outlets have set up channels to organize their video libraries on YouTube.

In this weekend’s elections, Tunisians will choose a constitutional council to write a new constitution for the country. Voters will select from lists of party members and independents. The Tunisian electoral committee has set up an official site www.isie.tn and is actively using social media to encourage voter registration—check their channel YouTube.com/isietn.

This is an exciting time in Tunisia. The media landscape—once limited and government-controlled—is now opening up to online platforms. Tunisians finally have access to a free Internet—and it’s playing a key role in building an encompassing political environment.

Posted by Samir ElBahaie, Regional Policy and Government Affairs Manager, Middle East and Northern Africa

(Cross-posted on the European Public Policy Blog)

RIP YUE YUE - 21.10.2011

please read the below - Yue Yue has passed away in the early morning hours of Friday 21.10.2011:
quote
A toddler who was twice run over by vans and then ignored by passers-by on a busy market street in southern China has died a week after the accident and after days of bitter soul-searching in the country.
Surveillance camera footage of people walking past two-year-old girl Wang Yue, nicknamed Yue Yue, as she lay bleeding and unconscious sparked a wave of condemnation and soul-searching on China's hugely popular social networking sites.
A rubbish collector who finally moved the girl to the side of the street in the southern Chinese city of Foshan was hailed as a national hero, but the incident also led many online commentators to question the state of Chinese morality.
A nurse in the intensive care unit of the Guangzhou Military District General Hospital confirmed that the two-year-old girl, Wang Yue, died early today.
"Yue Yue died of systemic organ failure," a spokesman from the hospital treating her told AFP, adding that no expense had been spared to try to save the girl, whose parents are migrant workers.
Doctors had earlier said Yue Yue, who had been in a coma since the October 13 incident, was unlikely to survive.
The death of Yue Yue was one of the most popular topics on China's weibos -- microblogging sites similar to Twitter -- today as people expressed sorrow and anger over the incident.
"Farewell to little Yue Yue. There are no cars in heaven," wrote one microblogger on Sina's weibo.
"Yue Yue was consumed for a week by the fake kindness of netizens... All the wishes are fake and only the 18 passers-by are real. Farewell, and do not be born in China in your next life," another weibo user wrote.

Police have detained the drivers of both vehicles involved in the incident.

The plight of Yueyue came to symbolise what many Chinese see as a decay in public morals after decades of headlong pursuit of economic growth.
AP/AFP
unquote

CHILD KIDNAPPINGS IN ANHUI - LIVING WITH DEAD HEARTS

HERE WE GO ABOUT SOME MORE DIRT FROM CHINA & IT SEEMS NOBODY CARES !
This comes from chinaSMACK - I will put a link to that blog on the sidebar asap..
quote
by C. Custer on Monday, October 17, 2011
In February of 2011, news spread across Chinese websites and BBS forums about cases of child kidnapping in Anhui province. These cases were a bit more brutal than what’s often reported in the Chinese media — in some cases, kidnapped children had been splashed with acid or otherwise disfigured to make them look more sympathetic as beggars — but the kidnapping of children is in no way uncommon in China, nor is it limited to Anhui.
In fact, tens of thousands of children — estimates vary — are kidnapped in China each year. Some, like the children in February’s Anhui case, are sold into lives on the street. Many are lucky enough to be sold to “adoptive” families who raise them as regular children. Still others, mostly older children, are sold into marriage, prostitution, or slave labor.
unquote
Now please take a look at this - some documentary under preperation called LIVING WITH DEAD HEARTS - they need some money / sponsorship - anybody out there to help they would be very happy.
Here is the trailer:

Interview with the driver No. 1

Believe it or not: Before the driver who hit & overrun little Yue Yue in Foshan, turned himself into police he had an interview with a local radio station - here the translation - a translation of the "mind-set"of this guy, everybody with at least some common sense can do by themselves:
quote

·         Reporter(R): Are you the one who ran over Yueyue?

·         Accident driver (A): I didn’t want that happen either. I’m just a driver.

·         R: Why did you call her father?

·         A: When the accident happened, I was on the phone.

·         R: Why didn’t you stop after running into something? Did you know you had hit somebody?

·         A: I knew I’ve run into a person. I was scared. If you hit somebody, you would ran away too.

·         R: Don’t you have any conscience? Why didn’t you save her?

·         A: I was too scared. I am just a driver.

·         R: How many years have you been driving? Don’t you know hit-and-run is a very severe crime?

·         A: I’ve been driving for 2 years. Who never makes a mistake? As you can see, that kid walked and looked around. If she walked more carefully, how would I run into her?

·         R: Was there any heavy goods on the truck?

·         A: Yes, that’s why I stepped on the gas.

·         R: Now how do you like to deal with this accident?

·         A: I want to offer them some money. But I don’t want to show up.

·  

·         Later reporter called the accident driver again:

·         R: Do you want to turn yourself in now?

·         A: No. I’ve asked my friend to send my wife and kids over here from Guangxi. I’ll find a job in the construction site where no one knows me.

·         R: You want to hide yourself for the rest of your life?

·         A: I’m scared. I didn’t mean to (run over the girl.) Everybody makes mistake. I have a wife and a 14 year-old kid. Without me, they can’t survive.

·         R: One should be responsible for his own fault. You have kid too, don’t you know how Yueyue’s parent feel?

·         A: so what?

·

·         R: How is your feeling now?

·         A: sad..haha

·         R : At this point, you still laugh?

·         A: It’s a bitter smile. You have no idea how much pressure I’m under now. One word-’scared’. I would hide until I couldn’t anymore. I know sometime it take more than a few decades to catch a murder. I’m over 30 year-old now. In 30 years, I might have died. This whole thing would have been forgotten. I know how to deal with the cops. I would shy away from the big cities, just stay in the suburbs and don’t make big money.

·         R: Seeing your kid, wouldn’t that remind you of the little girl you ran over?

·         A: Why should I? She wasn’t even my kid.

·         …

·         R : How would you like to compensate the losses of Yueyue’s family?

A: I also have losses myself. I didn’t get my salary. I told my boss there was some emergency in my family and just quit the job
unquote

He said he has some losses himself because he didnt get his salary: His salary maybe RMB 1,500 - approx USD 240 !
Actually the excuse to quit a job "some emergency in the family" is a very popular excuse in China.
Not only if you are a driver just killed a 2 year old girl.