Cat's Hands-ome Tattoos

I met Cat earlier this week at Borders, which has been the go-to locale for inkspotting during a very sparse winter.

He has fifteen tattoos, but we discussed the two I noticed, on the tops of his hands:

The tattoos are variations on Celtic pagan designs that he modified to make his own.

The right hand represents the chalice of the goddess, who represents expressiveness and creativity. Wiccan principles acknowledge that the goddess is the source of all expression.

Cat's other hand is decorated with a Celtic triquetra. The three markings around the design are letters drawn in the Theban script, each corresponding to the first initials of his three children.

Cat says that these, as well as his other tattoos, were inked by Neo at Village Moon Tattoos in Jackson Heights, in the borough of Queens.

Readers interested in these tattoos may also be interested in checking out our old friend Livia Indica's site NeoPagan Ink.

Thanks kindly to Cat for sharing his tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

The three laws of display advertising physics

It’s not just the Android team that is exploring the outer reaches of our galaxy. In recent years, advertising technology has had its own “Big Bang": a rapid onset of incredible growth and expansion in the display advertising universe.

Display advertising is one of our big focus areas. Better display advertising helps to fund the websites and content we all use and read, provides useful and engaging commercial information, and helps large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses.

Just as the laws of physics have helped us make sense of our own expanding universe, we think that there are three “laws of display advertising physics” to help advertisers and agencies thrive. We’ve laid out these laws and what they mean for advertisers and agencies on our Agency Ad Solutions Blog:

1. The Theory of Relativity: The distinction between different advertising technologies (like ad networks and demand side platforms) is blurring. Each of these technologies provides similar ways to achieve your marketing goals, depending on how you want to manage your campaign.
   
   
2. Fusion Theory: There’s a few different ways to deliver ads to people. Each on their own is powerful, but combining these different ways unlocks the best results.
   
   
3. The Law of Perpetual Motion: New technology is driving rapid change in display advertising—which is constantly improving marketers’ creative palettes and the way that ads are bought and sold. Embracing new media and technology provides a key way for marketers to differentiate and grow their businesses in a new universe.

The expansion in the advertising industry is leading towards a future with a better advertising universe for everyone—where people see more relevant, useful ads, publishers get better returns to fund their content and marketers can run more effective campaigns.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Investing in news innovation in Europe

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

Journalism is changing fast. And as news businesses experiment with new ways of creating and delivering journalism in the digital age, Google is keen to play its part on the technology side. Over the last year, we’ve been partnering with publishers around the world to develop technological solutions—including, most recently, One Pass—to find new and engaging ways of presenting stories online and to generate greater revenues.

As well as our focus on technological experimentation, we’re also investing at the grassroots level. Last October we announced that we would be giving $5 million in grants to non-profit organisations working on developing new approaches to journalism. At that time, we allocated around 40% of the total fund to the Knight Foundation in the U.S.

Today, we awarded a $2.7 million grant to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest. The contest seeks to find and fund breakthrough ideas that will have a lasting impact on the future of digital news in communities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Grants will be awarded to both non-profit and for-profit organisations working on digital journalism initiatives, including open-source and mobile technology projects created by or for journalists and distributed in the public interest. From today until June 1, the IPI will invite proposals from around the region for projects devoted to online innovation in journalism, new economic models for news and training in digital reporting.

The IPI has a long tradition of working on innovation in journalism, freedom of expression and other important issues. We’re sure they’ll be able to find and advance some great digital journalism projects over the next couple of years—and we encourage anyone with innovative ideas, large or small, to apply for a grant from the IPI. In the meantime, we’ll continue to work with the news industry to help develop new projects, products and experiments that make it possible for journalism to thrive online.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations, Google EMEA

Frank's Laserbeak Tattoo Transforms His Flesh

I met Frank in the Penn Plaza Borders yesterday and stopped to ask him about his tattoos.

"How many do you have?" I asked and he responded vaguely "a lot". That generally means at least a dozen, if not more, and he offered up this two-part tattoo, from his right arm:

This is a Transformer. More specifically, "Laserbeak," a Transformer that does reconnaissance.

This is one of the first tattoos that Frank got and, as one would expect, he had this done because he likes Transformers.

He credited the tattoo to Cort Bengston at Cort's Royal Ink Tattoo Studio in Patchogue, New York.

Thanks to Frank for sharing these cool tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Real Simple Weddings - Spring 2011

I was sent a copy of Real Simple Weddings to review, in all honestly, they sent me this magazine for free, so that I could tell you my thoughts and opinions of it. Honest. Thoughts and opinions.



And I hope you know, by now, that you come to our blog for real, honest, and heart felt advice and opinions on all things weddings.



And frankly, I love Real Simple, I buy (like pay for, with real money) their cookbooks, magazines, love their website and tips, follow them on twitter...but I was left a little, well, underwhelmed with this issue.



The cover is gorgeous, and the shoes are frankly, amazing. I want a pair in all colors. But inside is a lot of the same as last year. In fact, a lot of the same images, and articles. I would think that a new season would bring, new ideas, new cakes, new bouquets and new gowns, but this was just a lot of the same as the issue before. I mean the exact same images. Strange, right.



It was also filled with a ton of new information and new ideas, which I love. But I was left a little sad that they couldn't feature a new cake, or a new table number idea. If you are going to roll an idea over from another season, my feeling is to wait at least a few seasons.



I know there are new brides everyday, people get engaged by the dozens hourly... so this magazine may not look like a re-run to a lot of brides, but some may feel the same way I do.



What do you think?

Elisângela Zanza, Golfinhos 207

"Minha 1ª tatto foi muito bem pensada, porque em minha casa sempre houve um pouco de regras(e talvez preconceitos também), por parte de meus pais. Quando decidi fazer, já estava com a idéia fixa que seria "Golfinhos", por serem considerados anjos do mar, pela inteligência, e a ligação forte com os seres humanos...

Não esperava que a reação deles fossem ser tão boa, elogiaram muito e foi uma surpresa prá mim! Enfim, tirei o preconceito deles e acabei com as 'determinada' REGRAS ashuashua... adquirindo o respeito deles pela arte!

Além dos meus 'Golfinhos' tenho uma 'Estrela' no pulso também e já penso em mais. " A arte é um instante de eternidade e perfeição "
Um beijo á todos.

Tatto feita em 05/03/2010 por MV Tatto Piercing
Rua: Nilo Peçanha, 643 Centro Birigui SP"

Elisângela Zanza

Speech technology at Google: teaching machines to talk and listen

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how one Googler built an entire R&D team around voice technology that has gone on to power products like YouTube transcriptions and Voice Search. - Ed.

When I first interviewed at Google during the summer of 2004, mobile was just making its way onto the company’s radar. My passion was speech technology, the field in which I’d already worked for 20 years. After 10 years of speech research at SRI, followed by 10 years helping build Nuance Communications, the company I co-founded in 1994, I was ready for a new challenge. I felt that mobile was an area ripe for innovation, with a need for speech technology, and destined to be a key platform for delivery of services.

During my interview, I shared my desire to pursue the mobile space and mentioned that if Google didn’t have any big plans for mobile, then I probably wouldn’t be a good fit for the company. Well, I got the job, and I started soon after, without a team or even a defined role. In classic Google fashion, I was encouraged to explore the company, learn about what various teams were working on and figure out what was needed.

After a few months, I presented an idea to senior management to build a telephone-based spoken interface to local search. Although there was a diversity of opinion at the meeting about what applications made the most sense for Google, all agreed that I should start to build a team focused on speech technology. With help from a couple of Google colleagues who also had speech backgrounds, I began recruiting, and within a few months people were busily building our own speech recognition system.

Six years later, I’m excited by how far we’ve come and, in turn, how our long-term goals have expanded. When I started, I had to sell other teams on the value of speech technology to Google's mission. Now, I’m constantly approached by other teams with ideas and needs for speech. The biggest challenge is scaling our effort to meet the opportunities. We've advanced from GOOG-411, our first speech-driven service, to Voice Search, Voice Input, Voice Actions, a Voice API for Android developers, automatic captioning of YouTube videos, automatic transcription of voicemail for Google Voice and speech-to-speech translation, amongst others. In the past year alone, we’ve ported our technology to more than 20 languages.



Speech technology requires an enormous amount of data to feed our statistical models and lots of computing power to train our systems—and Google is the ideal place to pursue such technical approaches. With large amounts of data, computing power and an infrastructure focused on supporting large-scale services, we’re encouraged to launch quickly and iterate based on real-time feedback.

I’ve been exploring speech technology for nearly three decades, yet I see huge potential for further innovation. We envision a comprehensive interface for voice and text communication that defies all barriers of modality and language and makes information truly universally accessible. And it’s here at Google that I think we have the best chance to make this future a reality.

Update 9:39 PM: Changed title of post to clarify that speech technology is not only used on mobile phones but also for transcription tasks like YouTube captioning and voicemail transcription. -Ed.

Posted by Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology