On August 8, 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout the company which argued that bias and "Google's ideological echo chamber" clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors, not discrimination alone, that cause the average woman to be less interested than men in technical positions. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore in violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day. New York Times columnist David Brooks argued Pichai had mishandled the case, and called for his resignation.
From August 26 to 29, Dorian produced damaging winds and heavy rain across the eastern Caribbean. In Barbados, winds reached 55 mph (89 km/h), downing trees and power lines. Isolated interruptions to power occurred on St. Lucia; no damage occurred otherwise in the nation. In Martinique, heavy rains—peaking at 102 mm (4.0 in) in Rivière-Pilote—and winds up to 61 mph (98 km/h) caused some damage, though overall damage was negligible. Heavy showers in Dominica left multiple communities without power and water. Rainfall extended north to Guadeloupe were accumulations reached 121 mm (4.8 in) in Matouba. Striking the Virgin Islands as an intensifying hurricane, Dorian brought strong winds and heavy rains to the region. Buck Island, just south of Saint Thomas, experienced sustained winds of 82 mph (132 km/h) and a peak gust of 111 mph (179 km/h). Wind gusts on Saint Thomas reached 75 mph (121 km/h). Island-wide blackouts occurred on Saint Thomas and Saint John, while 25,000 customers lost power on Saint Croix. The high winds downed trees across the islands. Along the coast, multiple boats broke from their moorings and washed ashore. Some flooding occurred on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Downed trees knocked out power to some residences on Virgin Gorda. Because the hurricane moved farther northeast than initially anticipated, its effects in Puerto Rico were relatively limited. A man in Bayamón died when he fell off his roof trying to clean drains in advance of the storm.
More InfoIn March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.
More InfoOn September 6, NOAA published an unsigned statement which supported Trump's initial claim that Alabama was a target of the storm and criticized the Birmingham NWS office for denying it. It was later revealed that NOAA had been ordered to issue such a statement by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and that he had been told by Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to get NOAA to support Trump's original statement that Alabama was threatened. This direct White House involvement raised questions about political influence over NOAA, and is under investigation by multiple agencies including NOAA's acting chief scientist, the inspector general of the Commerce Department, and the House of Representatives committee which oversees NOAA.
More InfoThe company's rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers services designed for work and productivity (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), email (Gmail), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), instant messaging and video chat (Duo, Hangouts, and Meet), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, and Street View), podcast hosting (Google Podcasts), video sharing (YouTube), blog publishing (Blogger), note-taking (Google Keep, and Google Jamboard), and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos). The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser. Google has moved increasingly into hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its Nexus devices, and it released multiple hardware products in October 2016, including the Google Pixel smartphone, Google Home smart speaker, Google Wifi mesh wireless router, and Google Daydream virtual reality headset. Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier (Google Fiber, Google Fi, and Google Station).
More InfoPage and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Hassan as well as Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Larry Page's PageRank patent including a citation to Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.
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