[Air-l] NSF, Science Communication, and Google

There has been a lot of media coverage about Google's recently announced IPO. One aspect that received little attention is that Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Google's founders, were supported as Stanford graduate students through the NSF's Digital Libraries Initiative. I can imagine that their experience in the program shaped the company's ethos, which emphasized technical expertise and de-emphasized immediate commercial returns, which has turned out to be a pretty profitable approach. Here's a link to some background. http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=71217 Regards, John Monberg