Sree's Tech Blog: June 2011

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Google's new network sharing project : Google+

Redesigned network sharing site from Google.

Sharing is a huge part of the web, a part that we think could be a lot simpler. That's why Google've been working on adding a few new things: To make connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world.

We hope that you like what Google've cooked up so far. And stay tuned, because there's more to come.

Circles

You share different things with different people. But sharing the right things with the right people shouldn't be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another and your boss in a circle all on his own – just like in real life.

Sparks

Remember when your Grandpa used to cut articles out of the paper and send them to you? That was nice. That's kind of what Sparks does: It looks for videos and articles that it thinks you'll like, so that when you're free there's always something to watch, read and share. Grandpa would approve.

Hangouts

Bumping into friends while you're out and about is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let your mates know that you're hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until we perfect teleportation, it's the next best thing.

Mobile

Instant Upload

Taking photos is fun. Sharing photos is fun. Getting photos off your phone and on to the web is pretty much the opposite of fun. That's why Google have created Instant Upload: So that from now on, your photos upload themselves. You don't even have to say 'cheese'.

Huddle

Texting is great, but not when you're trying to get six different people to decide on a movie. Huddle takes care of it by turning all those different conversations into one simple group chat, so that everyone gets on the same page long before thumbs get sore.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Baby falls from 8th floor, gets stucked behind AC Unit in 7th floor, rescued

A child was saved from death after falling from an eighth-floor window and becoming jammed between an air conditioning unit and the wall. A passerby heard the toddler’s screams and looked up to see his legs dangling from behind the air conditioning unit on a building in Beijing, China.

The witness said: “I heard screaming and looked up to see a kid stuck behind an air conditioner while his legs were dangling in the air.” Neighbours called for police but then realised that the boy was starting to slip.

"Several men appeared at the balcony on the 7th floor. One of them climbed over and caught the boy's wrist,” said an onlooker.

The three-year-old was saved after several attempts by two Grocery shop workers named

Wang and Zhou, who risked their lives leaning off a balcony.

Google Translate now supports 5 Indian languages: Tamil Telugu Kannada Bengali Gujarati

Beginning today, we can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, Google have launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63.

Indic languages differ from English in many ways, presenting several exciting challenges when developing their respective translation systems. Indian languages often use the Subject Object Verb (SOV) ordering to form sentences, unlike English, which uses Subject Verb Object (SVO) ordering. This difference in sentence structure makes it harder to produce fluent translations; the more words that need to be reordered, the more chance there is to make mistakes when moving them. Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are also highly agglutinative, meaning a single word often includes affixes that represent additional meaning, like tense or number. Fortunately, Google's research to improve Japanese (an SOV language) translation helped them with the word order challenge, while their work translating languages like German, Turkish and Russian provided insight into the agglutination problem.

You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of the more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more of the web content that powers our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, Google release alpha languages when they believe that they help people better access the multilingual web. If you notice incorrect or missing translations for any of the languages, please correct them; Google enjoys learning from mistakes and your feedback helps them graduate new languages from alpha status. If you’re a translator, you’ll also be able to take advantage of their machine translated output when using the Google Translator Toolkit.

Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we’ve enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards. For example, if you type in the word “nandri,” it will generate the Tamil word நன்றி (see what it means). To see all these beautiful scripts in action, you’ll need to install fonts* for each language.

I hope that the launch of these new alpha languages will help you better understand the Indic web and encourage the publication of new content in Indic languages, taking five alpha steps closer to a web without language barriers.

*Download the fonts for each language: Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada.

Reposted the blog of Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist, Google.