Google - Who Do They Use For Transit? Bauer's Worldwide Transportation

Bauer's Worldwide Transportation , which helped me in my effort to bring the Super Bowl to Oakland, has only grown., offering Hybrid Cars and stretch Lincolns, taking over the "Pure Rush" party brand. The firm, ran by Founder and President Gary Bauer, is now responsible for shuttling Google's employees too and fro. Here's the NY Times article:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The perks of working at Google are the envy of Silicon Valley. Unlimited amounts of free chef-prepared food at all times of day. A climbing wall, a volleyball court and two lap pools. On-site car washes, oil changes and haircuts, not to mention free doctor checkups.

Stephen Weis, a software engineer for Google, uses the company’s shuttle bus service. Bicycles can be stored on exterior racks.

But the biggest perk may come with the morning commute.

In Silicon Valley, a region known for some of the worst traffic in the nation, Google, the Internet search engine giant and online advertising behemoth, has turned itself into Google, the mass transit operator. Its aim is to make commuting painless for its pampered workers — and keep attracting new recruits in a notoriously competitive market for top engineering talent.

And Google can get a couple of extra hours of work out of employees who would otherwise be behind the wheel of a car.

The company now ferries about 1,200 employees to and from Google daily — nearly one-fourth of its local work force — aboard 32 shuttle buses equipped with comfortable leather seats and wireless Internet access. Bicycles are allowed on exterior racks, and dogs on forward seats, or on their owners’ laps if the buses run full.

Riders can sign up to receive alerts on their computers and cellphones when buses run late. They also get to burnish their green credentials, not just for ditching their cars, but because all Google shuttles run on biodiesel. Oh, and the shuttles are free.

But if the specifics sound quintessentially Googley, as insiders call the company’s quirky corporate culture, it is the shuttle program’s sheer scale that befits Google’s oversize ambitions. This is, after all, a company whose stated goal is to organize the world’s information — and whose founders’ corporate jet is a Boeing 767.

“We are basically running a small municipal transit agency,” said Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety, who oversees the program.

Not that small, really. The shuttles, which carry up to 37 passengers each and display no sign suggesting they carry Googlers, have become a fixture of local freeways. They run 132 trips every day to some 40 pickup and drop-off locations in more than a dozen cities, crisscrossing six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and logging some 4,400 miles.

They pick up workers as far away as Concord, 54 miles northeast of the Googleplex, as the company’s sprawling Mountain View headquarters are known, and Santa Cruz, 38 miles to the south. The system’s routes cover in excess of 230 miles of freeways, more than twice the extent of the region’s BART commuter train system, which has 104 miles of tracks.

Morning service starts on some routes at 5:05 a.m. — sometimes carrying those Google chefs — and the last pickup is at 10:40 a.m. Evening service runs from 3:40 p.m. to 10:05 p.m. During peak times, pickups can be as frequent as every 15 minutes.

At Google headquarters, a small team of transportation specialists monitors regional traffic patterns, maps out the residences of new hires and plots new routes — sometimes as many as 10 in a three-month period — to keep up with ever surging demand.

Many employers run programs for commuters, including van pools, shuttles to and from transit hubs and subsidies for public transit and alternative modes of transportation, but several transportation experts say Google appears to have built an unparalleled transit network.

“I don’t know of any program in the Bay Area or in a metropolitan area nationwide larger than that,” said Tad Widby, the project manager for the 511 Regional Rideshare Program, who has studied transportation systems nationwide.

As much as it is a generous fringe benefit or an environmental gesture, the shuttle program is a competitive weapon in Silicon Valley’s recruiting wars.

One of the biggest challenges facing the Google juggernaut, with a staff that has been doubling every year, is to continue to attract the best. Many technology workers say that the potential benefit from stock options for new hires is limited, since the company’s shares have already surged more than fourfold since its 2004 public offering of $85.

The shuttles may not be able to lift Google’s stock price, but they have struck a chord with employees.

“It’s the most useful Google fringe benefit,” said Wiltse Carpenter, a 45-year-old software engineer. Mr. Carpenter has been with Google only a few months, but before that he had commuted from San Francisco to the same Highway 101 exit since 1992, having worked at Silicon Graphics and Microsoft, two Google neighbors. “It’s changed my quality of life,” he said.

That sentiment is not surprising. Even Googlers have to worry about the area’s high real estate prices, which have sent families to the outer confines of the region in search of cheaper housing. And the hopping cultural and social life of San Francisco remains a magnet for young workers, even though the commute to offices in Silicon Valley, some 35 miles to the south, can take well over an hour. A recent survey showed that traffic was the No. 1 concern for the area’s residents — for the 10th year in a row.

But on a rainy winter afternoon, as some 20 Google employees hopped onto the 4:40 p.m. back to the Mission and Noe Valley districts of San Francisco, those concerns seemed distant. The shuttle merged onto Highway 101, made its way across three lanes packed with slow-moving vehicles and into the carpool lane, where it began speeding past hundreds of commuters.

Inside, most riders appeared to abide by the shuttle’s etiquette rules. Cellphone conversations are allowed if they are work-related and sotto voce. But loud personal calls are definitely out. In fact, except for a couple snuggled together, no one sat on adjacent seats. Many took out iPods or laptops and worked, surfed the Web or watched videos.

“People tend to be quiet and respectful that this is people’s downtime,” said Diana Alberghini, a 33-year-old program manager.

Google will not discuss the cost of the program, which it operates through Bauer’s Limousine, a private transportation company in San Francisco. But the shuttles appear to be having the desired effect on recruiting. Michael Gaiman, a 23-year-old Web applications engineer who lives in San Francisco and was recently hired, said he turned down an offer from Apple before accepting the job at Google. “It definitely was a factor,” Mr. Gaiman said of the shuttle.

Colin Klingman, 38, who works at Google as an independent software contractor — and hence has to pay a small fee for the shuttle to comply with tax rules — said he waited to apply to Google until there was a stop near his San Francisco house.

Those types of decisions have been noticed around Silicon Valley. Yahoo, a leading competitor to Google, began a shuttle program in 2005 that could be described as the Pepsi to Google’s Coke. It shuttles about 350 employees on peak days to and from San Francisco as well as Berkeley, Oakland and other East Bay cities. Yahoo’s buses also run on biodiesel and are equipped with Internet access, but the company’s commute coordinator, Danielle Bricker, said the program was only “indirectly” inspired by Google’s.

Meanwhile eBay recently began a pilot shuttle to five pickup spots in San Francisco. And some high-tech employers are coming up with other approaches. Instead of making it easier for employees to live far from work, Facebook, the social networking site, makes it easier for them to live nearby: it offers a $600 monthly housing subsidy for those who live within a mile of the company’s Palo Alto headquarters.

There are signs that Google’s shuttles could be affecting — albeit in small ways — the region’s housing market.

When Adam Klein, a 24-year-old software engineer, moved to San Francisco in 2005 to take a job at Google, he looked for a rental apartment within a 15-minute walk of a shuttle stop. His walk to the Civic Center stop turned out to be a bit longer. “I didn’t take into account the hills,” Mr. Klein said. Many of his friends are moving close to other shuttle stops. “Those stops have attracted people,” he said.

The area surrounding one of the shuttle’s Pacific Heights stops had a dozen or so Googlers living nearby in 2005. That number has surged to more than 60.

For all their popularity, the shuttles have yet to earn Google the title of most commuter-friendly employer. The top spot in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Best Workplaces for Commuters went to Intel, which allows telecommuting, offers transit subsidies to employees and helps pay for shuttles that bring workers from transit stops, among other benefits. Google tied Oracle for third; Microsoft came in second.

But Googlers hooked on the convenience of the shuttles say nothing tops their commuting perk.

“They could either charge for the food or cut it altogether,” said Bent Hagemark, a 44-year-old software engineer who boarded a Google shuttle in Cow Hollow, an upscale neighborhood in the north end of San Francisco. “If they cut the shuttle, it would be a disaster.”

Delta Zeta At DePauw University Eliminates Women Who Are Overweight, Studious

Delta Zeta should be kicked off the campus. Period. They've just damaged the self-esteem of these young women.

Sorority Evictions Raise Issue of Looks and Bias

By SAM DILLON
Published: February 25, 2007

Andrew Hancock for The New York Times

GREENCASTLE, Ind. — When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”

Women at DePauw University in Indiana who were either asked to leave the Delta Zeta house or resigned in protest hold a sorority photo.

Andrew Hancock for The New York Times

Elizabeth Haneline, who was among those evicted, said, “The Greek system hasn’t changed at all, but instead of racism, it’s image now.”

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”

Ms. Holloway is not the only angry one. The reorganization has left a messy aftermath of recrimination and tears on this rural campus of 2,400 students, 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis.

The mass eviction battered the self-esteem of many of the former sorority members, and some withdrew from classes in depression. There have been student protests, outraged letters from alumni and parents, and a faculty petition calling the sorority’s action unethical.

DePauw’s president, Robert G. Bottoms, issued a two-page letter of reprimand to the sorority. In an interview in his office, Dr. Bottoms said he had been stunned by the sorority’s insensitivity.

“I had no hint they were going to disrupt the chapter with a membership reduction of this proportion in the middle of the year,” he said. “It’s been very upsetting.”

The president of Delta Zeta, which has its headquarters in Oxford, Ohio, and its other national officers declined to be interviewed. Responding by e-mail to questions, Cynthia Winslow Menges, the executive director, said the sorority had not evicted the 23 women, even though the national officers sent those women form letters that said: “The membership review team has recommended you for alumna status. Chapter members receiving alumnae status should plan to relocate from the chapter house no later than Jan. 29, 2007.”

Ms. Menges asserted that the women themselves had, in effect, made their own decisions to leave by demonstrating a lack of commitment to meet recruitment goals. The sorority paid each woman who left $300 to cover the difference between sorority and campus housing.

The sorority “is saddened that the isolated incident at DePauw has been mischaracterized,” Ms. Menges wrote. Asked for clarification, the sorority’s public relations representative e-mailed a statement saying its actions were aimed at the “enrichment of student life at DePauw.”

This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.

Earlier this month, an Alabama lawyer and several other DePauw alumni who graduated in 1970 described in a letter to The DePauw, the student newspaper, how Delta Zeta’s national leadership had tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.

Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.

Sorority Evictions Raise Issue of Looks and Bias
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Published: February 25, 2007
Correction Appended

(Page 2 of 2)

“I had a sister I could go to a bar with if I had boy problems,” said Erin Swisshelm, a junior biochemistry major who withdrew from the sorority in October. “I had a sister I could talk about religion with. I had a sister I could be nerdy about science with. That’s why I liked Delta Zeta, because I had all these amazing women around me.”

Enlarge This Image

Andrew Hancock for The New York Times
Rachel Pappas, former chapter secretary, discussing the events in class. At a rally, she said national leaders had misrepresented the truth.
But over the years DePauw students had attached a negative stereotype to the chapter, as evidenced by the survey that Pam Propsom, a psychology professor, conducts each year in her class. That image had hurt recruitment, and the national officers had repeatedly warned the chapter that unless its membership increased, the chapter could close.

At the start of the fall term the national office was especially determined to raise recruitment because 2009 is the 100th anniversary of the DePauw chapter’s founding. In September, Ms. Menges and Kathi Heatherly, a national vice president of the sorority, visited the chapter to announce a reorganization plan they said would include an interview with each woman about her commitment. The women were urged to look their best for the interviews.

The tone left four women so unsettled that they withdrew from the chapter almost immediately.

Robin Lamkin, a junior who is an editor at The DePauw and was one of the 23 women evicted, said many of her sisters bought new outfits and modeled them for each other before the interviews. Many women declared their willingness to recruit diligently, Ms. Lamkin said.

A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.

“They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” she said. “It was so fake, so completely dehumanized. I said, ‘This calls for a little joke.’ ”

Ms. Holloway put on a wig and some John Lennon rose-colored glasses, burst through the front door and skipped around singing, “Ooooh! Delta Zeta!” and other chants.

The face of one of the national representatives, she recalled, “was like I’d run over her puppy with my car.”

The national representatives announced their decisions in the form letters, delivered on Dec. 2, which said that Delta Zeta intended to increase membership to 95 by the 2009 anniversary, and that it would recruit using a “core group of women.”

Elizabeth Haneline, a senior computer science major who was among those evicted, returned to the house that afternoon and found some women in tears. Even the chapter’s president had been kicked out, Ms. Haneline said, while “other women who had done almost nothing for the chapter were asked to stay.”

Six of the 12 women who were asked to stay left the sorority, including Joanna Kieschnick, a sophomore majoring in English literature. “They said, ‘You’re not good enough’ to so many people who have put their heart and soul into this chapter that I can’t stay,” she said.

In the months since, Cynthia Babington, DePauw’s dean of students, has fielded angry calls from parents, she said. Robert Hershberger, chairman of the modern languages department, circulated the faculty petition; 55 professors signed it.

“We were especially troubled that the women they expelled were less about image and more about academic achievement and social service,” Dr. Hershberger said.

During rush activities this month, 11 first-year students accepted invitations to join Delta Zeta, but only three have sought membership.

On Feb. 2, Rachel Pappas, a junior who is the chapter’s former secretary, printed 200 posters calling on students to gather that afternoon at the student union. About 50 students showed up and heard Ms. Pappas say the sorority’s national leaders had misrepresented the truth when they asserted they had evicted women for lack of commitment.

“The injustice of the lies,” she said, “is contemptible.”

Big Apple Bullies Tiny Paul O'Brien, A Blogger Who Posted iPone GUI

Yep. Apple. Never happy with any aspect of its environment it can't control, took its giant foot and stepped on a small blogger this week. Paul O'Brien dared to -- well, he didn't know it was going to be a problem if he posted an image of Apple's iPhone in a converted version for Pocket PC users. All he did..well here's the story:

Apple legal throw their weight around...
Sat, 13/01/2007 - 08:58 — Paul
Can you believe it... yesterday, in this topic, I posted a link to a post on XDA-Developers, where an enterprising member had created a Pocket PC today screen to mimic the Apple iPhone.

It's worth pointing out I just posted a link and a screenshot... NOT the actual files required to DO the installation.

Well, this morning in my mailbox I find a letter from Apple's legal team (O’Melveny & Myers LLP, San Francisco) entitled 'Unauthorized Dissemination of Apple Computer Copyrighted Material by MoDaCo' demanding I remove the said link and the screenshot. Crazy or what? Unfortunately the mail was marked 'NOT FOR POSTING', exactly how bound I am by that i'm not sure.

A bit excessive IMHO... and although I can accept that they can get upset over the screenshot, can they really demand I remove the link too? :-S