Discover Stories with New Microsoft Local Impact Map

Every day hundreds of nonprofit organizations are hard at work improving education, facilitating research, and giving people the skills to find work or start a business.  When a nonprofit really connects with its community it becomes more effective and it leads to thousands of incredible stories from every corner of the world – stories that help inspire even greater achievements.

At Microsoft, we want to help these nonprofits succeed. One way we can do that is to make it easier for them to tell their stories. So with that goal in mind, our Corporate Citizenship team has used Bing Maps to build theMicrosoft Local Impact Map, a new tool that allows you to discover the stories of the communities you care about most, stories about how people and technology are having a real impact.

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One of our favorite stories comes from our team in India that worked with local teachers to train them under thePartners in Learning program. In the community of DharwadProject Shiksha was created by a group of trained instructors to establish a residential school for students with hearing impairments. One trainer in particular used an incredibly unique approach to help the students learn to use computers. Find out what she did by reading the story here.

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Of course, this story is only one among thousands. The Local Impact Map provides a living record of how technology is having a positive impact in communities around the world. We invite you to take a look and read examples of people working together for a common good.

Google Science Fair seeks budding Einsteins and Curies

Are you a student who loves science? Do you have a good idea for an experiment that you’d like to share with the world? In 1996, two young computer science students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a hypothesis that there was a better way to find information on the web. They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online. Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But how many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered? We believe that science can change the world—and one way to encourage that is to celebrate and champion young scientific talent as we do athletes and pop idols.

To help make today’s young scientists the rock stars of tomorrow, in partnership with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, we’re introducing the first global online science competition: the Google Science Fair. It’s open to students around the world who are between the ages of 13-18. All you need is access to a computer, the Internet and a web browser.

You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world. You build and submit your project—either by yourself or in a team of up to three—entirely online. Students in India (or Israel or Ireland) will be able to compete with students in Canada (or Cambodia or Costa Rica) for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences (like a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer), scholarships and real-life work opportunities (like a five-day trip to CERN in Switzerland). And if you’re entering a science fair locally, please feel free to post that project online with Google Science Fair, too!

To enter, register online and create your project as a Google Site. Registration is open through April 4, 2011. Please note: you must get parental or guardian consent in order to compete. You can check out the complete rules here. After April 4, we’ll begin judging and will announce our semi-finalists in early May.

The semi-finalist projects will be posted on our online gallery, where we’ll encourage the public to vote for a “people’s choice” winner. From our list of semi-finalists, we’ll select 15 finalists to bring their projects to Google headquarters on July 11 to compete in our final, live event, where world-renowned science judges will select a winner in each age category, as well as a grand-prize winner.

Here’s an example of a great science fair project site to inspire you. We asked Tesca, a U.S. high school senior from Oregon, to create it for us based on an award-winning project she’s been working on for years. Tesca’s objective is to make hospitals more efficient using artificial intelligence—a world-changing goal, to be sure.

So if you think you’re the next Albert Einstein, Marie Curie—or Larry Page or Sergey Brin—sign up today for the Google Science Fair. Prove once again how science can change the world!

Google Earth continues to reveal strange sights from above

Over the years, we’ve seen a variety of interesting items revealed as result of Google Earth.

One of the most popular was the Swastika-shaped Navy Barracks that Frank first told you about in 2007. For years it was a simple building, but it gained fame once viewed from above, as it was clearly (though certainly unintentionally) shaped like a Nazi swastika.

Another great example was the huge scale model of China that was discovered. It represented an area that was occupied by China but claimed by India and was in dispute, and the model itself was nearly a square kilometer in size.

The latest example is the Star of David being discovered on the roof of the Iran Air headquarters. The building was constructed in 1979, and it seems that no one noticed the symbol until now. Unlike the Navy swastika building, this symbol was clearly intentional, though it’s unclear who placed it there.

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Iranian government officials are quite upset by this, and plan to have it removed quickly. However, it may stay in Google Earth for a few years, or at least until the imagery in that area is updated again. If you’d like to see it for yourself, you can fly there using this KML file.

If you enjoy seeing strange items like this, there are a few categories full of fun items like this over at Google Earth Hacks: Crop Circles, Huge Man-Made Structures and Huge Symbols. You can also check out the great “20 Awesome Images Found in Google Maps” post by Search Engine Land,

For some Street View fun, try the Giant Items/Oddities category at GEH, or the Strange Things category at StreetViewFun.

Of all of the strange things you’ve seen in Google Earth, which is your favorite?