Thursday, March 22, 2012

Googland

Googland

[G] Smart school: Cartoon program uses Google Apps

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 10:27 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Smart school: Cartoon program uses Google Apps

Editors note: Today's guest blogger is Michele Ollie, co-founder and President of The Center for Cartoon Studies, based in White River Junction, Vermont. The Center for Cartoon Studies is America's premiere cartooning school and studio.

I founded the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) in 2005 on a very simple belief: the medium of comics was as potent and deserving of serious exploration as painting, sculpture, and poetry. Most of our students see comics as a calling as much as a career, a vehicle for personal expression. Although there is a deep reverence for the printed page, it would be wrong to assume we don't embrace new technologies. In the school's production lab, the old school screen-printing shares the same space as wireless state-of-the-art color laser printers and digital tablets. Students still dip steel nibs into inkwells while laying out their comics in Adobe InDesign.



In only six years, CCS has become one of the premiere cartooning schools in the world. A lot of things came together to make this happen: the right people, the right place, the right timing and, of course, the right technology. To put it bluntly, Google tools help make CCS possible. Our school is built around collaboration, and Google Apps for Education makes it easy for our artists and students to work together. As an example, Google Sites help faculty manage core courses, keeping students on task and informed. It goes without saying Google Calendar is the glue to our school. With over 30 visiting artists on campus annually, a dozen exhibitions and events, Google Calendar is the 24 hour source for what's happening on campus and off.



We also rely heavily on Smartsheet, a cloud based project management application available in the Google Apps Marketplace, to keep our comics on track. Smartsheet lets us share key documents with many collaborators, track progress, facilitate online discussions, send automatic email updates and reminders, and generate Gantt charts (for those of us who work better with visuals timelines). Schools can spend a fortune on IT, but these free and low-cost cloud applications help our school thrive on a very modest budget.



With a growing network of alumni and visiting artists, CCS has a number of new and exciting projects under way: an expanded summer program, a community planning grant, and an online comics delivery system to bring comics to Vermont libraries and beyond, to mention a few. Whether it's creating elegant and powerful comic strips or growing a school, Google Apps and Smartsheet allow everyone in the CCS community to pursue a vision.



Illustrations from The Center for Cartoon Studies brochure by Kevin Huizenga. Download the brochure here.
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/03/smart-school-cartoon-program-uses.html

[G] Visit the Amazon on World Forest Day with Street View

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:41 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Visit the Amazon on World Forest Day with Street View

Last August, a few members of our Brazil and U.S. Street View and Google Earth Outreach teams were invited to the Amazon Basin to collect ground-level images of the rivers, forest and communities in the Rio Negro Reserve. Today, on World Forest Day, we're making those images available through the Street View feature on Google Maps. Now anyone can experience the beauty and diversity of the Amazon.

Tributary of the Rio Negro - View Larger Map

Take a virtual boat ride down the main section of the Rio Negro, and float up into the smaller tributaries where the forest is flooded. Stroll along the paths of Tumbira, the largest community in the Reserve, or visit some of the other communities who invited us to share their lives and cultures. Enjoy a hike along an Amazon forest trail and see where Brazil nuts are harvested. You can even see a forest critter if you look hard enough!

Amazon Rainforest - View Larger Map

This project was made possible in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), the local nonprofit conservation organization that invited us to the area. We used the Street View trike and a tripod camera with a fisheye lens—typically used to capture imagery of business interiors—to capture both the natural landscape and the local communities. In all, more than 50,000 still photos were stitched together to create these immersive, 360-degree panoramic views:


Many areas of the Amazon, including Rio Negro Reserve, are under the protection of the Brazilian government with restricted access to the public, so we hope that this Street View collection provides access to this special corner of the planet that many of us otherwise wouldn't have the chance to experience. Together with FAS, we're thrilled to help everyone from researchers and scientists to armchair explorers around the world learn more about the Amazon, and better understand how local communities there are working to preserve this unique environment for future generations.

To do this directly from maps you can go to Brazil map and drag Pegman to the Rio Negro River

Start exploring this portion of the Amazon and other collections around the world on the updated Street View site and gallery.

Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Project Lead for Google Street View in the Amazon

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/visit-amazon-on-world-forest-day-with.html

[G] Drupal Usability Test Conclusions: A Missing Conceptual Foundation

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 02:54 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Drupal Usability Test Conclusions: A Missing Conceptual Foundation





Earlier this year we announced that we would be conducting a Drupal usability study that we would live stream so viewers could watch as participants worked with Drupal 7. Becky Gessler and I are excited to announce our analysis of the results that we will also present at DrupalCon Denver to the Drupal community in a "core conversation" session with Jen Lampton called "User eXperience for Open Source: How to Galvanize a Community."



After the study concluded we posted a YouTube playlist with each participant's session. We went through each video and wrote down problems that each participant faced along with direct quotes, then consolidated and grouped these together by issue area. This document was posted on Drupal.org and members of the Drupal community have been filing issue reports to work on fixing specific problems.



While we learned about a lot of specific interface-level problems, we also saw broad trends that called for a higher-level analysis. We witnessed new users feeling confused, overwhelmed, uncertain and unaware of Drupal's capabilities. Becky and I set to work preparing a summary of our findings. Out of the data, four layers of usability issues emerged:


  • Conceptual: Most problems that new users encounter boil down to a missing understanding of how Drupal works, particularly the interaction between content, content types, and fields.

  • Flow: While trying to complete tasks, new users frequently felt lost inside Drupal because they couldn't tell what they were looking at, how they got there, or where they were supposed to go next.

  • Terminology: Drupal is filled with terminology that just doesn't make sense to new users.

  • Interface: New users don't trust Drupal because many interfaces are not intuitive.


We are excited for discussion in the Drupal community about how to best tackle the problems outlined in these layers. You can find our complete analysis in this report.







New users from our study did have some positive impressions of Drupal as well. Once they understood how it works, they were impressed by the power and extensibility that Drupal offers. This study also demonstrated that Drupal 7 brought significant usability improvements over Drupal 6, particularly with the ease of user interaction with administrative tools and the Views creation wizard.



We are excited by the success of this study. We look forward to engaging the Drupal community in discussion at DrupalCon Denver during our core conversation, and we are confident that by working together as a community, we can shape Drupal to be more supportive and helpful for new users.



By Garen Checkley, Google Search Quality Team


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleOpenSourceBlog/~3/KA1cJPhI650/drupal-usability-test-conclusions.html

[G] Improving video awesomeness with one click

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 02:54 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Improving video awesomeness with one click

Whether you're perfecting your double backflip at the park, capturing a flash mob on your phone, or enjoying singing in a subway, it's not easy to get your video quality perfect. Sometimes videos suffer from symptoms like "shaky-camera-itis" or "augmented-darkness-levels" that keep viewers from seeing just how awesome your video really is. We made a big step last year with the YouTube Video Editor, and now we're adding a feature that does the work of curing these symptoms for you.



If you upload a video that's shaky or dark, we'll automatically offer to fix it for you, creating an updated version of your video on YouTube.



When you upload a video that could use a fixup, you'll see a notification bar on the Upload page and in your Video Manager. Click the button to fix it, and you'll see a side by side preview to decide if you want to accept the edits.







Select "Okay" if you'd like us to update your video to the preview version (you can always undo this later). Even if you're uploading a video from your mobile device, the Video Manager on the desktop will give you a notice if this video can be cured as well. Here's an overview:







This breakthrough in video awesomeness is possible thanks to our research team who expanded on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button launched last year, automatically detecting if stabilization or color correction would be helpful for you. The result is a one-click option rolling out over the next few days that cures these two symptoms now, and more planned in the future.



So you keep capturing those awesome moments, and we'll keep on developing ways to help you make those videos even more awesome.



John Gregg, software engineer, recently watched "Panda," and then watched "Panda (stabilized)."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/HtykXd3HFXo/improving-video-awesomeness-with-one.html

[G] Imagery Update: Week of March 19th

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 11:58 AM PDT

Google Lat Long: Imagery Update: Week of March 19th


The Google Earth and Maps Imagery team recently published another batch of satellite imagery. In this post, we'll explore a few well-known locations from across the globe.

The azaleas are in full bloom, which means it's almost time for The Masters. If you're planning a trip to see the tournament in person, or even if you're just watching it on TV, check out the refreshed imagery of this world class golf course.

Augusta National Golf Club, Augusta, Georgia

Speaking of upcoming sporting events, we also have updates for Weymouth and Portland in the United Kingdom, where this summer's Olympic sailing events will take place. In the image below, you can see the newly constructed facilities on Osprey Quay.

Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy, Portland, United Kingdom

Making the transition from sporting maritime to commercial maritime, we're also bringing you fresh updates of the Yangshan Deep-Water Port. This massive port facility located off Shanghai continues to grow at an astounding scale. The below before and after images show the port in 2007 and then in 2011, during which time the port nearly doubled in size.

Yangshan Deep-Water Port in 2007 (left) and 2011 (right)

We end our journey with a much smaller and older aquatic destination. As amazing as it sounds, the ancient temple you see below is actually not in its original location. In the 1960's when the Philae Temple was threatened by the slowly rising waters of the Nile, a UNESCO project was started to physically de-construct the entire site and then re-assemble it on a nearby island. If you ever get the chance, don't hesitate to visit this remarkable complex.

Philae Temple Complex, Aswan, Egypt

To receive email notifications when the Google Earth and Maps Imagery team updates your favorite area(s), we encourage you to use the Follow Your World tool!

These are only a few examples of the sites that can be seen and discovered in our latest batch of published imagery. Happy exploring!

Countries/regions receiving high resolution satellite updates:
Canada, United States, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Greenland, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo, Angola, Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Madagascar, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovinia, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Cyprus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, The Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji, and Antarctica

These updates are now available in Google Earth and will be live in Google Maps in the coming days. For a complete picture of where we updated imagery, download this KML for viewing in Google Earth.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Google Earth Imagery team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/03/imagery-update-week-of-march-19th.html

[G] Spell checking powered by the web

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 11:58 AM PDT

Docs Blog: Spell checking powered by the web

One of my early projects at Google was to improve the suggestions that are made when a query is misspelled in Google Search. The neat thing about that system is that it's adaptive: our suggestions get smarter and smarter based on the words Googlebot sees as it explores the web.

But search isn't the only place where I make spelling mistakes! And that got me wondering: could we take this adaptive technology and use it to make spell checking better in other places?

The answer is yes. To prove it, today we're launching an update to spell checking in documents and presentations that grows and adapts with the web, instead of relying on a fixed dictionary. This update has a few big advantages over traditional spell checkers:

  1. Suggestions are contextual. For example, the spell checker is now smart enough to know what you mean if you type "Icland is an icland."

  2. Contextual suggestions are made even if the misspelled word is in the dictionary. If you write "Let's meat tomorrow morning for coffee" you'll see a suggestion to change "meat" to "meet."
  3. Suggestions are constantly evolving. As Google crawls the web, we see new words, and if those new words become popular enough they'll automatically be included in our spell checker—even pop culture terms, like Skrillex. 

This new spell checker is available for English documents and presentations, but we plan to bring it to more languages soon. We're really excited to give you a spelling system that continuously gets better. We hope it will make writing more efficient and enjoyable for you.

Posted by Yew Jin Lim, Software Engineer
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/03/spell-checking-powered-by-web.html

[G] Google at INFOCOM 2012

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 11:58 AM PDT

Research Blog: Google at INFOCOM 2012

Posted by Emilie Danna, Google Research & Michal Segalov,Networking Software

The computer networking community will get together in Orlando, Florida the week of March 25th for INFOCOM 2012, the Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

At the conference, we will discuss topics such as traffic engineering, traffic anomaly detection, and random walk algorithms for topology-aware networks. We serve so much internet traffic to Google users and exchange so much data between our data centers that computer networking is naturally something we care about. As traffic grows with richer content (photos, video, ...), new modes of engagement (cloud computing, social networking, ...) and an increasing number of users, engineering and research efforts are necessary to help networks scale.

The following papers were co-authored by Googlers from offices around the world:

  • Near-optimal random walk sampling in distributed networks by Atish Das Sarma, Anisur Molla, and Gopal Pandurangan
  • How to split a flow by Tzvika Hartman, Avinatan Hassidim, Haim Kaplan, Danny Raz, and Michal Segalov
  • Upward max-min fairness by Emilie Danna, Avinatan Hassidim, Haim Kaplan, Alok Kumar, Yishay Mansour, Danny Raz, and Michal Segalov (runner up for best paper)
  • A practical algorithm for balancing the max-min fairness and throughput objectives in traffic engineering by Emilie Danna, Subhasree Mandal, and Arjun Singh
  • Traffic anomaly detection based on the IP size distribution by Fabio Soldo and Ahmed Metwally

If you are attending, stop by and say hi!
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/google-at-infocom-2012.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)