Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

One of the best innovations from Google...Awesome

 

Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

via Google Blogoscoped by Philipp Lenssen on 9/3/08

The Picasa desktop client has been released in version 3 with some changes, and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For instance, there's now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others.

An interesting new feature is Picasa's face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago, and now Picasa got some of that technology, too*. Get started by logging in to Picasa Web Albums and clicking the "Try it" button below the Name Tags headline to the right. This will trigger a job with a progress bar, and you can check back a while later. (At first, none of my test photos seemed to yield matches, but today I'm getting some results.)

Once faces are found, you can switch to the People tab and tag them with names. In my test photos I tagged Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin and others. I then uploaded more photos containing these persons. Google did not automatically tag them; what they do is find the rectangle within the photo containing a face, and then offer suggestions (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect), so you'll end up semi-manually identifying the remaining faces. All in all a useful feature as this lets you group and find your photos by the persons in them, but it would become even more useful if Google were able to automatically assign matches.

Another addition to Picasa Web Albums is a game called "Where in the World?". Here your job is to try to guess where a given snapshot was taken by clicking on a world map. You'll then see the distance to the actual location and get more points the closer your pick. The game looks neat but it would probably be more fun if they'd more often show you pictures for which there's a realistic chance to know the location (e.g. a picture of a famous monument versus a picture of a more general shore scenery). I wonder if Google has any intentions to get back some data for their AI to mine here, but considering the game already knows the location of each given picture, I'm not so sure.

[Thanks Hebbet!]

*Since some time, Google image results can also be restricted to show just faces.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map ... | Comments]

7 Really Awesome Things About Google Chrome

 

7 Really Awesome Things About Google Chrome

via Mashable! by Stan Schroeder on 9/3/08

I didn't expect this. I fired up Google's Web browser, Chrome, expecting very little except a stripped down early beta with a plethora of bugs. After playing with it for a while, it's too early to say that I'm blown away, but I must admit that I've stumbled onto some impressive feats which show that the team that built Chrome was intelligent, mature and forward-thinking. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Blazing fast

Chrome actually uses WebKit for rendering Web pages, the same rendering engine as Safari, which is known to be very fast. Put that in a simple, well optimized, stripped down shell and you get the fastest Web browser around. It loads fast, it displays pages fast, and we're talking noticeable differences here, which really makes it a joy to use. Don't just take my word for it, check out some early benchmarks.

2. Chews code like there's no tomorrow

This one goes hand in hand with being fast, but it's a little different. Today, it's not all that important for a browser to render a lot of HTML quickly; browsers are now platforms in which you run applications: two, three, perhaps even a dozen at a time. Therefore, a good browser can handle dynamic content without stuttering and crashing, and from what I've seen, Chrome passes the test with flying colors.

True, I haven't had enough time to test this thoroughly, but the folks over at scriptNode have put together some benchmarks and it seems that Chrome not only handles good code well, it also excels at handling errors.

3. Incognito mode

Click the control icon in the upper right corner of the browser and you'll get the option to open a new tab, a new window, or a new incognito window. Incognito window will fire up without appearing in browser or search history, and it won't leave cookies or any other traces of your activity, except files you've downloaded or bookmarks. Yes, Safari has it, too, but it's a nice jab at Firefox which skipped some similar privacy features in version 3.0.

4. Easy to switch

When you're entering a saturated market with a new product, you can't change everything. You must carefully balance the features you want to blatantly copy with the ones you want to innovate in. I was pleased to see that Google Chrome was built with this in mind; for example, it's easy to switch from Firefox, but it does bring enough novelties to make you stick around. Importing your bookmarks from Firefox is easy and works well; and other details, like keyboard shortcuts, are the same. Therefore, Chrome's learning curve is virtually non-existent; start it up and you'll be browsing as usual in no time.

5. Intelligent start page

Although not completely original (Opera has got a similar approach to quick bookmarking), Chrome's start page is a pleasant surprise. Besides the ubiquitous search bar, it gives you a list of most commonly visited Web pages to fire up quickly. Granted, I've always hated suggestions of that ilk (for example, I've never, ever used the commonly used programs feature in Windows), but here it just works, because the pages you frequently visit really are the ones you want to open first.

6. Has its own task manager

Chrome treats tabbed windows as separate processes. Nice, we've already seen that in IE8, right? But Chrome also has a nifty way to see what's going on: a task manager. Similar to the task manager in Windows, it lets you see which processes are active (inside Chrome), and how much memory, CPU, and network resources they use. Beautiful. You can access it by right clicking Chrome's title bar.

7. Dragging tabs out and back in again

It's a little thing, but it warms my heart. You can drag a tab out of Chrome into a separate window, and you can drag a separate window back into tab bar, where it'll be happily received by Chrome. Stuff like this turns geeks into converts, and Google's dev team knows that.

Feel free to let us know which are your favorite (or least favorite) features of Chrome in the comments!

[Image credit: Google]

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Google Chrome: The "GBrowser" Comes to Life
Google Chrome a Killer Browser Already (screencast)
Chrome is Not a Windows-Killer

 

 

 

 

Belief in the moon landing: An experiment

 

Belief in the moon landing: An experiment

via The Museum of Hoaxes on 6/6/08

A science teacher posting on the Bad Astronomy forum describes an experiment in which he polled his students to find out how many of them believed humans had walked on the surface of the moon -- before and after watching the Fox TV documentary "Did We Land on the Moon?"

I began by asking my students (9-12th graders taking earth/space honors) the simple question, "Do you believe that humans have walked on the surface of the Moon?". Initial results were 81.0% "Yes", 7.6% "No" and 11.4% "Not sure" (sample size 105 students).
Then I showed them a DVD I have made of the infamous FOX show (thanks to Jim Oberg who helped me land a copy of the video tape when my own was "mysteriously" partially taped over). I converted to DVD so I could knock out the 18 minutes (!) of advertisements and break the segments up into easily accessible chapters. I showed the video completely through without comment and asked the same question. This year, the "after video" results were 50.8% "Yes", 21.3% "No" and 27.9% "Not sure" (sample size 122 students).

So belief in the moon landing dropped by 30% after watching the Fox documentary. Thankfully, he didn't leave his students in a state of disbelief. The next day he showed them a powerpoint presentation rebutting every point made in the show:

I made sure to cover every single topic and then I asked the question a final time. The final results this year were 92.9% "Yes", 2.0% "No" and 5.1% "Not sure" (sample size 99).

It's no wonder so many people believe in bizarre conspiracy theories and the paranormal. They watch all these shows on TV and never hear a reasoned rebuttal from someone who knows what they're talking about.
(Comments)

India has fewer poor people: World Bank

 

 

India has fewer poor people: World Bank

via www.business-standard.com on 8/28/08

India has fewer poor people: World Bank

Bs Reporter / New Delhi August 27, 2008, 0:36 IST

India has brought down the number of people living below $1 a day by 2 percentage points to 24.3 per cent in three years up to 2005, as Asia's third-largest economy accelerated to 7 per cent plus growth in those years, latest data from the World Bank reveal.

In absolute numbers, 9.6 million people came out of poverty between 2002 and 2005, the largest reduction between two consecutive surveys released by the World Bank since 1981.

If $1.25 per day is taken as a benchmark for defining the poverty line, then 4.7 million came out of poverty in this period.

Since the data reported by the World Bank have a time lag of three years, the effect of increase in food and commodity prices — which disproportionately affect the poor — in the last two years is not known.

Also, the World Bank now says it has upwardly adjusted the cost of living in developing countries to $1.25 per day against $1 per day.

The poverty line of $1.25 is the average poverty line found in the poorest 10-20 countries, the World Bank said in a press statement.

The new study suggested the number of people below the poverty line would have increased by 400 million in three years to 1,399.8 million in 2005 (at $1.25 per day), against 1,090.2 million (at $1 per day) in 2002.

If similar comparison were adopted for India, the number of people in poverty would have increased by 179.1 million between 2002 and 2005. In percentage terms, it would be 41.6 per cent as on 2005 as against 26.3 per cent in 2002. The difference between India's own estimate of poverty and the World Bank's one is because of a difference in how the poverty line is calculated.

The World Bank's calculation is based on the average of the poorest countries, whereas India's estimate is based on how much money is required for an individual to have ideal intake of daily food and expenditure on shelter and other necessities.
 

GAINS IN POVERTY REDUCTION
(Figures in %)	1990	1993	1996	1999	2002	2005
BELOW $1 A DAY
India	33.3	31.1	28.6	27.0	26.3	24.3
World	29.9	26.9	23.5	22.8	20.8	16.1
BELOW $1.25 A DAY
India	51.3	49.4	46.6	44.8	43.9	41.6
World	41.7	39	34.7	33.7	31.1	25.7
BELOW $2 A DAY
India	82.6	81.7	79.8	78.4	77.5	75.6
World	63.1	61.4	58.3	57.0	53.6	47.6

If India's poverty line is translated in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, it is $ 1.02 per day.

"High GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth in India has reduced poverty. However, to achieve a higher rate of poverty reduction, India will also need to address inequalities in opportunities that impede the poor from participating in the growth process," the World Bank said.