Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Googland

Googland

[G] Template spotlight: Gift shopping list

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 04:20 PM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: Template spotlight: Gift shopping list

Keeping track of gifts can be overwhelming, especially when you're buying and delivering gifts for people in a lot of different places. If you haven't done all of your holiday shopping or deliveries yet, check out the holiday gift shopping list template. You can reference the list on the go from your mobile phone and update it from any computer.



Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/12/template-spotlight-gift-shopping-list.html

[G] Merry Music: MusicBrainz's Latest Summit and 10th Anniversary

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 04:20 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Merry Music: MusicBrainz's Latest Summit and 10th Anniversary

The yearly MusicBrainz summit serves an important function in building our community: we talk about issues facing MusicBrainz and we plan the road map for MusicBrainz projects. The summits are usually scheduled to allow as many people to attend as possible and this year we chose Nürnberg, Germany as our location. MusicBrainz contributor Nikolai "Pronik" Prokoschenko lives in Nürnberg and was our local contract and ended up planning most of the summit.

Pronik found us a conference room that we rented for the entire day, complete with open WiFi, which is important if you plan to have a room full of geeks. He also found us a cheap Gasthof that provided lodgings slightly better than a Hostel for a mere 20€ per person per night — a really good deal for Europe. The evening before the summit we all sat in the Gasthof and were treated to some confusing German/Greek cuisine with some of the most rude service any of us have ever encountered. But, our group is used to dealing with the crude Internet public, so we managed to laugh off the horrible service and still have a great time.

To our luck there was a grocery store right next door to our Gasthof and we commenced another successful crowd sourced breakfast. Four people were each given 20€ with the instructions to buy food/drinks that they would like to eat/drink for breakfast/lunch. No collusion was allowed between people! Once the shopping was complete we walked to the conference room, settled in and dove into the masses of food we'd collected. Many tasty bread rolls with jam, nutella, cold cuts and cheese were consumed. Of course we had fun things like a case of Bionade, juices, tea, gummy bears and chocolate. Crowd sourcing breakfast takes a potentially frustrating chore and makes it fun for everyone.


Plus, Pronik and his mate Kira brought a MusicBrainz decorated cake to celebrate 10 years of MusicBrainz!


As people were eating, we started to collect an unconference-like agenda of what people wanted to talk about. We decided to have a detailed state of the project talk including recent developments from meeting our customers in Europe. We also talked about current development processes and some of the problems associated with these processes. Oliver Charles, a 2008 Google Summer of Code™ student, gave an introduction on how to hack on the MusicBrainz server, based on his work from the last year.

Most of the time was spent discussing new features for once we release our much anticipated Next Generation Schema. At times we managed to get into deep philosophical discussions about what MusicBrainz is and what it should be. At other times we discussed light hearted topics with lots of joking. These summits do wonders for building our community and getting people on the same page. We manage to explore many topics and reach consensus on many points in one day instead of spending weeks on the same discussions online.

Finally, in the evening we cleaned up our space and retired to a local beer hall where we continued the discussion in a less formal manner. If you're interested, we posted all the session notes from the summit on our wiki. All in all, this event was fun and not much effort to put on — thanks to Pronik! On another happy note, 1/3 of the people in attendance were women, which is much better than most tech summits I've attended.

In total we spent about $1500, including all the food, drinks, lodgings and one person's travel costs. For a summit with 12 people, I think we did rather well! I call that Google's support well spent — thanks again for supporting MusicBrainz, Google!

By Robert Kaye, Executive Director, Metabrainz Foundation
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/12/merry-music-musicbrainzs-latest-summit.html

[G] Announcing our Q4 Research Awards

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 03:10 PM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Announcing our Q4 Research Awards

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations and Jeff Walz, Head of University Relations

We do a significant amount of in-house research at Google, but we also maintain strong ties with academic institutions globally, pursuing innovative research in core areas relevant to our mission. One way in which we support academic institutions is the Google Research Awards program, aimed at identifying and supporting world-class, full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest.

Our University Relations team and core area committees just completed the latest round of research awards, and we're excited to announce them today. We had a record number of submissions, resulting in 76 awards across 17 different areas. Over $4 million was awarded — the most we have ever funded in a round.

The areas that received the highest level of funding for this round were systems and infrastructure, machine learning, multimedia, human computer interaction, and security. These five areas represent important areas of collaboration with university researchers. We're also excited to be developing more connections internationally. In this round, over 20 percent of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Some exciting examples from this round of awards:

Ondrej Chum, Czech Technical University, Large Scale Visual Link Discovery. This project addresses automatic discovery of visual links between image parts in huge image collections. Visual links associate parts of images that share even a relatively small, but distinctive, visual information.

Bernd Gartner, ETH Zurich, Linear Time Kernel Methods and Matrix Factorizations. This project aims to derive faster approximation algorithms for kernel methods as well as matrix approximation problems and leverage these two promising paradigms for better performance on large scale data.

Dawson Engler, Stanford University, High Coverage, Deep Checking of Linux Device Drivers using KLEE + Under-constrained Execution Symbolic execution. This project extends the recently built KLEE, a tool that automatically generates test cases that execute most statements in real programs, so that it allows automatic, deep checking of Linux device drivers.

Jeffrey G. Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Improving the Education and Career Opportunities of the Physically Disabled through Speech-Aware Development Environments. This project will investigate the science and engineering of tool construction to allow those with restricted limb mobility to access integrated development environments (IDEs), which will support programming by voice.

Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, North Carolina State University, Predictive Elastic Load Management for Cloud Computing Infrastructures. This project proposes to use fine-grained resource signatures with signal processing techniques to improve resource utilization by reducing the number of physical hosts required to run all applications.

Jason Hong and John Zimmerman, Carnegie Mellon University, Context-Aware Mobile Mash-ups. This project seeks to build tools for non-programmers to create location and context-aware mashups of data for mobile devices that can present time- and place-approriate information.

S V N Vishwanathan, Purdue University, Training Binary Classifiers using the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm. The goal of this project is to harness the power of quantum algorithms in machine learning. The advantage of the new quantum methods will materialize even more once new adiabatic quantum processors become available.

Emmett Witchel and Vitaly Shmatikov, University of Texas at Austin, Private and Secure MapReduce. This project proposes to build a practical system for large-scale distributed computation that provides rigorous privacy and security guarantees to the individual data owners whose information has been used in the computation.

Click here to see a full list of this round's award recipients. More information on our research award program can be found on our website.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/12/announcing-our-q4-research-awards.html

[G] The Royal Botanic Gardens' discoveries now in Google Earth

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 03:10 PM PST

Google LatLong: The Royal Botanic Gardens' discoveries now in Google Earth


At the UK's Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Gardens, you'll find more than 250 plant and fungi species discovered by their botanists, including: giant rainforest trees, gorgeous rare orchids, spectacular palms, minute fungi, wild coffee species, and even an ancient aquatic plant. To celebrate the botanical organisation's 250th year, they're making information about these new species available for nature-lovers and curious web explorers via Google Maps and Google Earth. Kew has mapped all 250 of the newly discovered species on this special Google Earth layer:www.kew.org/science/new-discoveries/250-species.kml.

The new species come from a wide-range of fascinating locations, including botanical frontiers such as Ecuador, Madagascar, the Amazon, Cameroon, New Guinea, Mozambique, Amazon, and the heart of Borneo. Nearly a third are believed to be in danger of extinction.

Following in the footsteps of their famous botanical predecessors such as Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Charles Darwin, taxonomic botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens continue to explore and study the world's plant and fungal diversity, making astonishing discoveries every year. Their work involves a combination of fieldwork in remote and exotic parts of the world, and research in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's Herbarium, a vast scientific collection of over seven million dried plants specimens, perhaps the largest of its kind in the world. This work has never been more relevant and pressing than in the current era of global climate change and unprecedented loss of biodiversity – especially as we count down to the UN's International Year of Biodiversity in 2010.


We spoke to the team at Kew (whose stunning grounds you can also explore on Street View by the way!), and they told us that there is so much of the plant world yet to be discovered and documented – and that by using Google Earth they can highlight this to the public. Steve Bachman, a Plant Conservation Analyst, says he believes Google Earth and Google Maps have revolutionised the way Kew presents this important plant and conservation data to decision makers, scientists and the general public. After all, in order to promote conservation, you need to know what's out there and where it's found.


We're thrilled to see the folks at Kew sharing their intricate and important work of plant and species identification via our mapping technology and look forward to hearing about more new discoveries we're sure they'll be making in the coming year!


Posted by Laura Scott, Google London
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/royal-botanic-gardens-discoveries-now.html

[G] Webinars - out with the old, in with the new

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 11:21 AM PST

Inside AdSense: Webinars - out with the old, in with the new

This year, the AdSense team has brought you a series of live webinars covering a range of topics, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who attended. We hope that you're already profiting from implementing the tips featured in our webinars.

Your feedback to date has been very helpful, and we'll spend the coming weeks developing brand new, interesting content for 2010. If you haven't already done so, we invite you to share with us the topics you'd like to see covered in future webinars.

We've received great reviews from publishers who've attended our webinars, so if you haven't seen one as yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it's convenient for you.

Wishing you a happy holiday season and a healthy new year.

Posted by Siobhan McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/12/webinars-out-with-old-in-with-new.html

[G] Unofficial tech support returns home for the holidays

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 10:25 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Unofficial tech support returns home for the holidays

Whenever I go home to visit my parents, I always assume a handful of new roles — I become the after-dinner dishwasher, the family chauffeur, and appropriately, my parents' personal tech support. As I go home for the holidays this week, I'll likely be asked to help fix the webcam that "used to be there" or make the font size "so I can see it again." I'll also perform a few regular maintenance tasks that my parents don't even know to ask about, such as running a virus scan, uninstalling unused applications and upgrading their software to the latest versions.

I know this phenomenon isn't unique to just my family. If you're unofficial tech support for family this holiday season like I am, one of the things you'll want to consider is checking that your family is using the latest version of their browser. Why? For me, an up-to-date browser makes a huge difference: not only so that my parents can get to what they need when they're on the web, quickly and easily — whether they're writing email, viewing photo albums online, reading cross-stitching blogs or checking the weather in Chicago — but also so that I can rest assured that they'll be browsing the web more safely and securely with the latest version of the browser with security updates. (More selfishly, a new or up-to-date browser would also make their computer notably faster when I'm visiting home and using their machine!)

Most browsers have released major updates over the past year, and to ensure your family is getting the most speed and security out of their web experience, you can help your family upgrade to the latest version of Google Chrome, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, Safari 4, or Internet Explorer 8 — just to name a few modern browsers. Moreover, teaching your family what a web browser is and how to update it can help your family keep themselves up-to-date throughout the year. The browser is perhaps the most important piece of software on our computers, as we depend on it to get to the websites and web applications we use every day.

You can also check out Google Pack, a collection of free Google and third-party software that's ready to use in just a few clicks. From anti-virus software to keep a computer more secure and voice applications like Skype to help you keep in touch once you leave, to Google applications like Google Earth (where you can track Santa over Christmas), Google Pack's applications help your family get the most out of their computer.

Happy holidays, one and all — and happy trails on the web!

Posted by Jeffrey Chang, Associate Product Manager, Google Chrome Team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/unofficial-tech-support-returns-home.html

[G] More to see in 3D

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 07:31 AM PST

Google LatLong: More to see in 3D

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A few weeks ago we released new 3D models with more detailed facades for 5 California cities. Even though we're based in California, we know there are a lot of beautiful cities with amazing architecture elsewhere around the country, so we're adding 4 new cities scattered from coast to coast. Now you can fly through Portland, Austin, Chicago, and Philadelphia and see vivid, detailed 3D models throughout the cities.

While the list is quickly growing, some of our favorite spots are Portland's Pearl District, South Street in Philadelphia, Austin's 6th Street, and the restaurants along Rush Street in Chicago:

Portland, OR

Austin, TX

Chicago, IL

Philadelphia, PA

For the full effect, you should explore these cities for yourself in Google Earth. As you browse through these cities you'll also see a number of great buildings creating by users using tools like Sketch-up and Building Maker. Here's a video preview of the interactive experience:

Posted by Manish Patel, 3D Modeling Team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-to-see-in-3d.html
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