Friday, December 11, 2009

Googland

Googland

[G] Help improve transcription quality

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 09:01 PM PST

Google Voice Blog: Help improve transcription quality

Google Voice automatically transcribes voicemail messages so you can get a sense of what messages are about without needing to listen to them. The automated process sometimes works great, sometimes not so well. But we're committed to making it better. After all, my friends don't call me "ten cent" in real life!

There are many variables that influence the quality of transcripts, from background noise, to caller accent, to connection quality, and more. Having a pool of messages that can be used to gauge accuracy is very useful in that respect.

And this is where you can help by "donating" some of your voicemail messages. Until now, the only feedback you could give was to let us know if the quality of the transcript was good enough to be useful or not, by checking the corresponding box next to the message. You can now go one step further by letting us figure out why it was good or bad. When you rate a transcript, you will be asked whether you would like to donate the message. You have three options:


The messages you donate may be listened to, manually transcribed by us and/or used to gauge transcription improvements over time, but they will never be made public or used for any other purpose than improving the transcription quality.

And if you're feeling generous, you can go back to old messages you previously rated and donate those, too!

Thanks in advance for your help.

Posted by Vincent Paquet,
URL: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-improve-transcription-quality.html

[G] Mars in Google Earth imagery update

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 08:19 PM PST

Google LatLong: Mars in Google Earth imagery update

We just launched new imagery and terrain for Mars in Google Earth! If you have the Google Earth plugin installed, you can view the updated areas highlighted in red (imagery) and white (terrain) below. Alternatively, you can download this KML, for viewing while using Mars in Google Earth.

The updates are from the High Resolution Stereo Camera aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. With these updates, nearly half of the martian surface is covered by imagery having a nominal resolution of 25 meters per pixel. As such, there are many exciting, newly-visible surface features to see. We've indicated some of these sights with color-coded arrows on the globe below:

Red arrow: Layered deposits on the floor of Hebes Chasma.

White arrow: Voluminuous lava flow fields adjacent to, and associated with, the Tharsis volcanoes Ascraeus and Pavonis Mons.

Blue arrow: New imagery of Olympus Mons' Aureole and the huge glacier-like structures along its north-west flank.

Yellow arrow: New images of the Shalabanta Valles (a deep canyon) section north of Orson Welles Crater showing huge landslides that occurred with such force that the debris (having an area the size of Chicago) flowed half-way up the other side of the canyon.

Green arrow: Dust and ice layers that comprise one of the Mars' most active geologic features, the ice cap of the north polar plateau, Planum Boreum.


Imagery and terrain updates are noted with a red and white frame, respectively

As a reminder, you can view Mars in Google Earth by clicking the 'planets' button on the toolbar:


Click here to find out more about Mars (and Moon!) in Google Earth.

You can also share your cool new imagery finds with us using Twitter! After looking at the updates in the viewer above, tweet your cool finds and add the #GEarthIMG hashtag to your tweets.

Posted by Eric Kolb, Geo Data Strategist
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/mars-in-google-earth-imagery-update.html

[G] Open broadband data, brought to you by M-Lab

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 04:26 PM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Open broadband data, brought to you by M-Lab

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Analyst

How are the performance and quality of broadband networks changing over time? How does the service experienced by users on certain networks compare against others?

Today, Measurement Lab (M-Lab) took another step to help answer these types of questions. Two M-Lab researchers have publicly released the results from over 150,000 broadband connection speed and quality tests run by users all over the world. Anyone can use the datasets without restriction, under a "no rights reserved" Creative Commons Zero waiver.

As we've discussed here before, M-Lab is an open server platform for researchers to deploy broadband measurement tools. This project is a collaborative effort led by researchers, with Google and other partners around the world providing additional support.

Thousands of users are now running tests every day on M-Lab, and while only results from two tools – NDT and NPAD – are available right now, all data collected by M-Lab researchers will be released in the near future. Amazon Web Services is providing M-Lab with free data hosting through its Public Data Sets program, and M-Lab would welcome the participation of others who want to host the data and make it easier to access.

The raw data are not yet in a form that's easily intelligible to average users, but since re-use of the data is entirely unrestricted, anyone is free to analyze the information, mash it up with maps, or create other user-friendly reports. In addition, M-Lab requires that tools' source code be open, so that anyone can review, understand, and build upon the testing methodologies. We think this kind of openness is critical to developing robust, reliable broadband measurement.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/open-broadband-data-brought-to-you-by-m.html

[G] Research Areas of Interest - Multimedia

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 04:26 PM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Research Areas of Interest - Multimedia

Posted by Michele Covell, Vision Research Team

Recently, Google's research groups reviewed over 140 grant proposals across sixteen different research areas. During this process, we identified a number of strategic research topics. These topics represent critical areas of research for Google in collaboration with our university partners.

We'll be examining several of these topics in future posts but we'd like to begin by raising some of the research challenges we face in our multimedia endeavors:
  • Large scale annotation: How can we learn from large, noisy sets of image/video data to automatically get human-level accurate models for label annotation?
    The images and videos that are available on the web provide massive data sets. We have some very noisy labels on that set, in terms of possible content. We have labels based on popularity of an item when considered for a particular search, on anchor text and other context, and on labels given to other content that is often associated with each item. The challenge is to make use of the sheer volume of available data to improve our recognition models and to carry appearance models from one media type to another. Further, we must be able to handle the variability in appearance and in the labels themselves.
  • Image/Audio/Video Representation: How can we improve our understanding of low level representations of images that goes beyond bag of words modeling?
    Much of the current work in labeling and retrieval is based on fairly simple local descriptions of the content, putting the emphasis on classifier learning from combinations of simple models. While this classifier approach has been useful, we should also examine the basic features that we are using, to see if we can better characterize the content. Providing better inputs into our learning algorithms should reduce the size of the space over which we need to search. Possible examples include shape modeling in images, better texture/color models, and descriptions of soft segmentations of regions.
  • Localization of image-/video-level labels to spatial/temporal portions of the content: Can we automatically associate image and video labels with specific portions of the content?
    The most obvious examples in this area are labels like "dog" and "explosion". However, can we also localize more complex concepts like "waves" or "suspense"? Alternately, can we automatically distinguish between labels, based on how well we are able to localize them to a particular place or time within the content?
  • Large scale matching / Hashing: Can we identify matching techniques to deal with large datasets?
    We need image, video, and audio matching techniques that can effectively deal with large datasets, embedded in high-dimensional descriptor spaces, in sub-linear time. Of special interest are methods that can efficiently handle a wide range of recall/precision needs without massive increases in the data-structure sizes that are used.

We expect these questions to keep us busy for some time.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/12/research-areas-of-interest-multimedia.html

[G] Emily Dickinson, in her own words and in translation

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 04:26 PM PST

Inside Google Books: Emily Dickinson, in her own words and in translation

Posted by Agustina Dates, Google Books Online Team

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf poses a question that's had a major impact on discussions of writing and gender over the past and current century: Does writing have a "gender"? Does one's gender leave a trace in words? Could you tell the gender of a writer just by reading what they've written?

Emily Dickinson was born on this day in the year 1860. And while in most of Dickinson's poems it's very obvious to me that they came from the pen of a woman, in others she seems to make her gender imperceptible.



My first introduction to Emily Dickinson was when reading her work in Spanish, and the translator for the book was another woman: the great Argentinean writer Silvina Ocampo. Here things become more complicated... how do we translate? And if writing has a gender, does a translation have it too? What is the task of a translator? Grammar has its own agenda and changes according to the language, so the traces of gender that appear in the original version of a poem may disappear in its translation. At other times, I've read translations that have unearthed traces of gender that were not evident in the original version.

Google Books has scanned books in over 100 languages, and you can search for titles in a specific language by selecting it on our advanced search options. If you speak a language other than English, why don't you give it a try and look for versions of your favorite books in different languages? You will see it's a totally different experience!
URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/12/emily-dickinson-in-her-own-words-and-in.html

[G] A note about a messaging change in your AdSense account

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 02:28 PM PST

Inside AdSense: A note about a messaging change in your AdSense account

Today we're changing some messaging in the AdSense interface concerning your earnings, and we wanted to give you some more information on why we're making this change.

In order to be more transparent about how our system calculates earnings, we've added the words "Estimated" and "Finalized" next to "Earnings" throughout your account. Rest assured these terminology changes don't reflect a change to the way your finalized earnings are calculated. It's simply intended to give you a clearer idea of what's our estimation of your earnings and what's finalized.

As you may have noticed in the past, the earnings on the Overview and Advanced Reports pages may sometimes differ from the earnings listed on your Payment History page. This is because earnings on your Overview and Advanced Reports pages reflect initial estimations based on our records. We aren't able to provide finalized earnings on these pages because they still need to be verified for accuracy, a process that takes place a few days after the end of every month. The finalized sum is then posted on your Payment History page by the 10th of the next month.

While we can't say how much these amounts would differ for any one publisher, most publishers will not see a significant difference. Again, please keep in mind that this is only a display change, and that your finalized earnings will continue to be calculated and credited to you in the same way as before.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/12/note-about-messaging-change-in-your.html

[G] Panelists for CNN/YouTube Climate Debate Announced; CO2 Cube "Powered by YouTube" Unveiled

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 12:24 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Panelists for CNN/YouTube Climate Debate Announced; CO2 Cube "Powered by YouTube" Unveiled

Last week, we announced the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate in Copenhagen, an effort to make sure that your voice is included in the climate debate — and that your questions are posed to decision-makers on an international stage. Today, we want to inform you that panelists will include former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, journalist Thomas Friedman, U.N. Executive Secretary Yves de Boer and author Bjorn Lomberg.


To submit your question for these leaders, upload a short video of yourself posing the question and submit it here: www.youtube.com/cop15. We've already seen some top-notch video questions like this one from Angela in Italy who wants to know about the consequences of climate change, and this question from Mo in Florida who is concerned about the cost of going green:



The top questions will be posed to leaders during the debate, and also projected onto the CO2 Cube, a 3-story art installation now residing in the center of Copenhagen, built to represent one metric ton of carbon and powered by YouTube videos related to the climate crisis. Here's an in-depth look at this stunning artistic display:



You can submit your video at www.youtube.com/cop15 and vote on questions for potential inclusion in the debate and on the Cube. The debate will be live-streamed in full on the COP 15 channel, and onto the Cube, on December 15 so make sure to watch and see if world leaders answer your question.

Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog

Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits & Activism, recently watched, "Day Three of the Climate Talks"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/SJ7eQOchsgs/panelists-for-cnnyoutube-climate-debate.html

[G] Panelists for CNN/YouTube Climate Debate announced; CO2 Cube "Powered by YouTube" unveiled

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 12:24 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Panelists for CNN/YouTube Climate Debate announced; CO2 Cube "Powered by YouTube" unveiled

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Last week, we announced the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate in Copenhagen, an effort to make sure that your voice is included in the climate debate — and that your questions are posed to decision-makers on an international stage. Today, we want to inform you that panelists will include former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, journalist Thomas Friedman, U.N. Executive Secretary Yves de Boer and author Bjorn Lomberg.

To submit your question for these leaders, upload a short video of yourself posing the question and submit it here: www.youtube.com/cop15. We've already seen some top-notch video questions like this one from Angela in Italy who wants to know about the consequences of climate change, and this question from Mo in Florida who is concerned about the cost of going green:



The top questions will be posed to leaders during the debate, and also projected onto the CO2 Cube, a 3-story art installation now residing in the center of Copenhagen, built to represent one metric ton of carbon and powered by YouTube videos related to the climate crisis. Here's an in-depth look at this stunning artistic display:



You can submit your video at www.youtube.com/cop15 and vote on questions for potential inclusion in the debate and on the Cube. The debate will be live-streamed in full on the COP 15 channel, and onto the Cube, on December 15 so make sure to watch and see if world leaders answer your question.

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits & Activism, YouTube
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/panelists-for-cnnyoutube-climate-debate.html

[G] Google Docs viewer Chrome extension

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 10:15 AM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: Google Docs viewer Chrome extension

The Google Chrome team launched beta support for extensions on Tuesday. We didn't want to miss the extension party, so we created a Google Docs extension. The Google Docs PDF/Powerpoint Viewer makes it easy to preview PDFs, Powerpoint presentations, and other documents you find across the web in the Google Docs viewer, instead of downloading them.

Let us know how you like the extension and what you like to see us add by posting a review on our extension's page.

Note that extensions are currently available only for the beta channel of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux.

Happy viewing!

Posted by: Wes Carr and Jesse Kinkead, Software Engineers, Google Docs
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-docs-viewer-chrome-extension.html

[G] Search Appliance gets real-time: Twitter feeds now available on the GSA

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 10:15 AM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Search Appliance gets real-time: Twitter feeds now available on the GSA

Real-time information is becoming an increasingly important part of searching online – both for business and consumer search users. Yesterday we announced the launch of real-time results on Google.com, and today we're announcing that the Google Search Appliance (GSA) can show users tweets from Twitter next to their internal Search Appliance results.



Social information is important for businesses: employees searching for information needed to do their jobs benefit from real-time news too. They might be developing a new breakfast cereal, or designing a marketing plan for a clothing line, or writing strategy report for a political campaign. In all of these cases, understanding what is being said just as Twitter users are saying it can be invaluable.



Google's focus is to provide the most relevant search results to users. In the case of the GSA, this means accessing information from multiple sources, aka universal search. To this end, we already offer a feature called Related Web Results, which allows employees to view results from Google.com alongside corporate search results.

Customers have told us that placing web results next to intranet ones often allows employees to think differently about a particular topic and approach it in new ways. By integrating enterprise search with more of the information that exists in the cloud, like tweets, employees can more easily leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

To turn the Twitter box on in GSA results, follow the instructions provided here. It should take no more than 15 minutes to get up and running. It can be enabled for only some users, all users, or set up so users can choose themselves whether they want to see the Twitter results by using a keyword trigger (like 'twitter'). Integration info and how-tos for this feature can be found here, and happy realtime reading.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search



URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/12/search-appliance-gets-real-time-twitter.html

[G] Local Experts share a few spots in Vancouver

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 10:15 AM PST

Google LatLong: Local Experts share a few spots in Vancouver


Voted the most livable city by The Economist, Vancouver fronts the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia, Canada. This February it will host the 2010 Winter Games, and beforehand we wanted to share the favorite (or "favourite", for Canadian readers) places of some notable Vancouverites.

Vancouver is the first Canadian city we're adding to the special local experts version of Favorite Places on Google Maps, our insider's guides to great cities around the world. For this edition, every expert has been given the same Maple Leaf pin as the city warms up for the Olympics. Take a look at their top Vancouver picks for eating, shopping, playing and more:

Gordon Campbell - Premier of British Columbia
Ross Rebagliati - Olympic Gold Medallist, snowboarding
Simon Whitfield - Olympic Gold & Silver Medallist, triathlon
Rob Feenie - Food Concept Architect for Cactus Restaurants, Iron Chef champion
Bif Naked - rock singer-songwriter, breast-cancer survivor
Kit Pearson - children's book writer, Governor General's Award winner
Monte Clark - owner of Monte Clark Gallery
Rebecca Bollwitt - Vancouver's Best Blogger & Top Twitter User for Miss604.com
David Eaves - public policy entrepreneur, open government specialist


View Ross Rebagliati's Favorite Places in a larger map

And if you need an expert travel writer, John Lee from Lonely Planet provided contributions this past October (see other Lonely Planet Contributions).

Further explore the city with Street View for Vancouver, where you can click on "Street View" for any of these favorite places to see how they really look. Recently, we also launched new aerial imagery of Vancouver, Squamish and Whistler in Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Maps for mobile and added thousands more 3D buildings in downtown Vancouver to Google Earth:



Posted by Tamara Micner, Google Canada & David Kim, Google Maps Marketing
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/local-experts-share-few-spots-in.html

[G] Seeing the forest through the cloud

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 09:07 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Seeing the forest through the cloud

Today, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, we demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests. We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide. According to the Stern Review, protecting the world's standing forests is a highly cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests, in an effort to make forests worth "more alive than dead." Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable. However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so we're working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this. Here's what we've done with this prototype to help nations monitor their forests:

Start with satellite imagery
Satellite imagery data can provide the foundation for measurement and monitoring of the world's forests. For example, in Google Earth today, you can fly to Rondonia, Brazil and easily observe the advancement of deforestation over time, from 1975 to 2001:

(Landsat images courtesy USGS)

This type of imagery data — past, present and future — is available all over the globe. Even so, while today you can view deforestation in Google Earth, until now there hasn't been a way to measure it.

Then add science
With this technology, it's now possible for scientists to analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract meaningful information about the world's forests, such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of a forest. In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.

Handle computation in the cloud
What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the "Google cloud"? And what if we could gather together all of the earth's raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform? We decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we've built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers.

Here are the results of running CLASlite on the satellite imagery sequence shown above:

CLASlite online: This shows deforestation and degradation in Rondonia, Brazil 
from 1986-2008, with the red indicating recent activity

Here's the result of running SAD in a region of recent deforestation pressure in Mato Grosso, Brazil:

SAD online: The red "hotspots" indicate deforestation 
that has happened within the last 30 days 

Combining science with massive data and technology resources in this way offers the following advantages:
  • Unprecedented speed: On a top-of-the-line desktop computer, it can take days or weeks to analyze deforestation over the Amazon. Using our cloud-based computing power, we can reduce that time to seconds. Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening.
  • Ease of use and lower costs: An online platform that offers easy access to data, scientific algorithms and computation horsepower from any web browser can dramatically lower the cost and complexity for tropical nations to monitor their forests.
  • Security, privacy and transparency: Governments and researchers don't want to share sensitive data and results before they are ready. Our cloud-based platform allows users to control access to their data and results. At the same time, because the data, analysis and results reside online, they can also be easily shared, made available for collaboration, presented to the public and independently verified — when appropriate.
  • Climate change impact: We think that a suitably scaled-up and enhanced version of this platform could be a promising as a tool for forest monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) in support of efforts such as REDD.
As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is currently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes — it's not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year. We are grateful to a host of individuals and organizations (find full list here) who have advised us on developing this technology. In particular, we would like to thank the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their close partnership since the initial inception of this project. We're also working with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a consortium of national government bodies, inter-governmental organizations, space agencies and research institutions through GEO's Forest Carbon Tracking (FCT) task force. Last month together we launched the GEO FCT portal and are now exploring how we can also together bring the power of this new technology to tropical nations.

We're excited to be able to share this early prototype and look forward to seeing what's possible.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google.org and Dr. Amy Luers, Environment Manager, Google.org
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/seeing-forest-through-cloud.html
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