Portugal - World-of-Newave.info World-of-Newave.info http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 2008-12-02T12:57:54Z Latest news and articles about Portugal Copyright (c)2004-2008. All rights reserved. {INTERNET > GOOGLE} - Our international approach to search In previous posts in this series, you have read about the challenges of building a world-class search engine. Our goal is to make Google?s search be relevant to all people, regardless of their language or country. As my colleague Amit Singhal described, we use statistical data as the basis for making sweeping algorithmic changes. Many of these changes can be rolled out across all languages we support, but in some cases the unique characteristics of each language require some algorithmic considerations and tuning. And to make things really interesting, there are cases where the same language is different across countries. Obvious examples are "color" in the U.S. vs. "colour" in the U.K., or "camião" in Portugal vs. "caminhão" in Brazil.My name is Daphne Dembo, and my focus is improving Google's international search. This is a tough challenge, since Google search is used in many countries and languages where our engineers have little personal knowledge. Initially, the international search improvements were done by Search Quality engineers who were passionate about their languages and countries: Lina from Sweden improved our parsing of compound words in German and Swedish; Dimitra from Greece introduced diacritical support; Ishai from Israel worked on transliteration corrections for Hebrew and Arabic; Trystan from Australia created methods for identifying local search results and ranking them together with foreign ones from the same language; Alex, a bilingual Ukrainian and Russian, introduced morphological understanding of these languages. As the importance of our international search grew, we solicited help from Googlers in all our offices. Finally, we are leveraging an international network of search specialists who help us understand search within the unique combination of their language and country.Our first step in providing search support for a language is to train our language model on a large collection of documents in that language. This ensures that our language model is more precise and comprehensive ? for example, it incorporates names, idioms, colloquial usage, and newly coined words not often found in static dictionaries. For instance, we recently started identifying Swahili, and used pages such as this one for the Parliament of Tanzania to train our system with the language's nuances. Having a trained language model helps to categorize documents during crawling and indexing of the web and to parse the user's query. Once this stage was complete, we launched Swahili search in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, enabling local searches for the "Dar es Salaam stock exchange" [Soko la hisa dar es salaam], and "cure for Malaria" [Tiba ya malaria]. (As always, we are using square brackets to denote a search query. For example, you can search for "soccer" in Hamburg, Germany by clicking on [fußball in hamburg]).We learn some things from our users, so as people start using our search engine, we can improve the way we rank in that language. Here are few examples:Spell corrections: We recently launched spell corrections in Estonian. If your Estonian is rusty, and you don't remember how to spell "smoke detector," we can suggest a spell correction for [suitsuantur], leading to better search results.Diacritical marks: Many languages have diacritical marks, which alter pronunciation. Our algorithms are built to support them, and even help users who mis-type or completely ignore them. For example, if you're a resident of Quebec, Canada and would like to know the weather forecast in Quebec City, we'll serve good results whether you type with diacritical signs [Météo à Québec] or without [meteo quebec]. Czech users can read the same excellent results for a popular kids' cartoon by searching for [krtecek] and [krte?ek]. On the other hand, sometimes diacriticals change the meaning of the word and we have to use them correctly. For example, in Thai, [????] is "rice," with completely different results than [????], which is "news"; or in Slovakia, results for "child" [die?a] are different than results for "diet" [diéta].Synonyms: A general case of diacritical support is the handling of synonyms in different languages. Korean searches showed that "samsung" can be viewed as a synonym of "??", so that when users search for [samsung], they find results which have the company's name in Korean. Compounding: Some languages allow compounding, which is the formation of new words by combining together existing words. You can see a nice example in Swedish, where we return documents about a Swedish credit card for both compounded [Visakort] and non-compounded [visa kort] queries. Stemming: Google has developed morphological models that can receive compound words as queries, and return pages which contain their stem, possibly as part of a different compound. For example, when searching for cars in Saudi Arabia, you can search for [?????] and [??????] because both are variants of the same stem, and both return many common results. A Polish user can search for "movie" [film], and get back results that contain other variants of the stem, such as "filmów," "filmu," "filmie," "filmy." A user from Belarus will find results for all word forms of the capital, Minsk [?????]: "??????," "??????," "????????." In addition to these semantic factors, Google does even more to parse documents and queries. Understanding the details of language usage in a country is important. Notation of acronyms is different across languages: In Hebrew it is double quotes before the last (left-most) character, as in "prime minister" [??"?]; in Thai ? a dot at the end of the word, as in police station [??. ]; while in the U.S. ? dots after each character, as in [I.B.M.]. Chinese users quote works of art with a "?", as in: [??????], and denote dates with a "?", as in: [2006?1?13?].Beyond the linguistic elements of a language, we consider how people enter a query. For example, some languages that do not have Latin scripts require keyboards with dual alphanumeric keys. The user can switch between language input modes by typing special keystrokes. In case the user forgets to type this sequence, the queries end up being gibberish. You can see correct handling of these mistakes in Arabic ([hgsuv] corrected to [?????]) and ([???????????? ?????????? ] corrected to [presidential elections]), Hebrew ([vdrk, kuyu] corrected to [????? ????]), and Cyrillic ([rehc ljkffhf] corrected to [???? ???????]).Another way of avoiding the inconvenience of switching keyboard modes is by typing the phonetic sounds of the query in Latin characters. Recreating the correct query in the target language isn't trivial, since there might be many possibilities. We can see several such examples in which we suggest the same query in the intended language for Russian ([biskvitnyi rulet] to [?????????? ?????]), "movies" in Chinese ([dianying] to [??]), and "Bank of Attica" in Greek [trapeza attikhs] returns good results for "??????? ???????". Users of 8 Indic languages (such as Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu) can type the phonetic sound of the query, and choose the words in Hindi script:Ease of typing and reading is also influenced by the language used. Since every Chinese word requires several keystrokes on a standard keyboard, we provide category browsing by Images and related searches so that people don't need to type as much. Similarly, we are now launching Google Suggest, or real-time completion of queries, in many languages.So far I described how we improve the quality of search in a language. However, there is a strong effect of the location of the user, even if it is only approximated to the country, since in many cases local content is more relevant than global information. For example, searching for Spanish Yellow Pages [Páginas Amarillas] will result in several documents of global interest and several local results in Peru, Mexico, and Spain. Similar to that, searching for [Côte d'Or] in France will return results for that region, whereas searches in Belgium will return results about the chocolate maker.Note that the display of information should conform to the standards in that country, so we display "," as a decimal notation for Croatian users who want to know how many millimeters are in an inch [in? u milimetrima], or for Italian users who are interested in currency exchange rates [50 euro in dollari]. Similarly, temperatures in Norway [Været i Oslo] will be displayed in Celsius, while in the U.S. ? in Fahrenheit [weather Boston].If everything else fails, we provide cross-language translations based upon Google's translation technology described in this blog post. We will translate your query to English, search English documents on the web, and translate the returned results from English back into the original query language. For example, Japanese users who are interested in viewing Halloween illustrations (Halloween is a holiday which originated in Ireland) can search for [????? ????]. You can then request a Japanese translation of the English pages (at the bottom of the page), which will bring up the translation page in the screenshot below. Similarly, Korean users can search for the latest on Harry Potter [?? ??], and Arabic readers can search for the opening of the Sydney Opera house [?????? ??? ??????? ?? ?????]. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)All in all, Google Search is being actively developed for more than 100 languages, in 150+ countries, with dozens of improvements launched each month. So far I've covered the basics of how international search works, but this is just the surface of all the international work we do. There are many other interesting topics that impact international markets like usability, homepage and results page layout, and connectivity. An understanding of real cultural and human factors is essential to creating a search engine that resonates with the people who use it. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)(Update: Replaced example in the 4th bullet point.)Posted by Daphne Dembo, Engineering Director http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/internet/searching/search-engines/google/our-international-approach-to-search-2008122163.htm 2008-12-01T09:43:17Z 2008-12-01T09:43:17Z Blogger.Com http://www.blogger.com/feeds/10861780/posts/default/4362465617786888552?v=2 Our international approach to search {new window}   Www.Blogger.Com - In previous posts in this series, you have read about the challenges of building a world-class search engine. Our goal is to make Google?s search be relevant to all people, regardless of their language or country. As my colleague Amit Singhal described, we use statistical data as the basis for making sweeping algorithmic changes. Many of these changes can be rolled out across all languages we support, but in some cases the unique characteristics of each language require some algorithmic considerations and tuning. And to make things really interesting, there are cases where the same language is different across countries. Obvious examples are "color" in the U.S. vs. "colour" in the U.K., or "camião" in Portugal vs. "caminhão" in Brazil.My name is Daphne Dembo, and my focus is improving Google's international search. This is a tough challenge, since Google search is used in many countries and languages where our engineers have little personal knowledge. Initially, the international search improvements were done by Search Quality engineers who were passionate about their languages and countries: Lina from Sweden improved our parsing of compound words in German and Swedish; Dimitra from Greece introduced diacritical support; Ishai from Israel worked on transliteration corrections for Hebrew and Arabic; Trystan from Australia created methods for identifying local search results and ranking them together with foreign ones from the same language; Alex, a bilingual Ukrainian and Russian, introduced morphological understanding of these languages. As the importance of our international search grew, we solicited help from Googlers in all our offices. Finally, we are leveraging an international network of search specialists who help us understand search within the unique combination of their language and country.Our first step in providing search support for a language is to train our language model on a large collection of documents in that language. This ensures that our language model is more precise and comprehensive ? for example, it incorporates names, idioms, colloquial usage, and newly coined words not often found in static dictionaries. For instance, we recently started identifying Swahili, and used pages such as this one for the Parliament of Tanzania to train our system with the language's nuances. Having a trained language model helps to categorize documents during crawling and indexing of the web and to parse the user's query. Once this stage was complete, we launched Swahili search in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, enabling local searches for the "Dar es Salaam stock exchange" [Soko la hisa dar es salaam], and "cure for Malaria" [Tiba ya malaria]. (As always, we are using square brackets to denote a search query. For example, you can search for "soccer" in Hamburg, Germany by clicking on [fußball in hamburg]).We learn some things from our users, so as people start using our search engine, we can improve the way we rank in that language. Here are few examples:Spell corrections: We recently launched spell corrections in Estonian. If your Estonian is rusty, and you don't remember how to spell "smoke detector," we can suggest a spell correction for [suitsuantur], leading to better search results.Diacritical marks: Many languages have diacritical marks, which alter pronunciation. Our algorithms are built to support them, and even help users who mis-type or completely ignore them. For example, if you're a resident of Quebec, Canada and would like to know the weather forecast in Quebec City, we'll serve good results whether you type with diacritical signs [Météo à Québec] or without [meteo quebec]. Czech users can read the same excellent results for a popular kids' cartoon by searching for [krtecek] and [krte?ek]. On the other hand, sometimes diacriticals change the meaning of the word and we have to use them correctly. For example, in Thai, [????] is "rice," with completely different results than [????], which is "news"; or in Slovakia, results for "child" [die?a] are different than results for "diet" [diéta].Synonyms: A general case of diacritical support is the handling of synonyms in different languages. Korean searches showed that "samsung" can be viewed as a synonym of "??", so that when users search for [samsung], they find results which have the company's name in Korean. Compounding: Some languages allow compounding, which is the formation of new words by combining together existing words. You can see a nice example in Swedish, where we return documents about a Swedish credit card for both compounded [Visakort] and non-compounded [visa kort] queries. Stemming: Google has developed morphological models that can receive compound words as queries, and return pages which contain their stem, possibly as part of a different compound. For example, when searching for cars in Saudi Arabia, you can search for [?????] and [??????] because both are variants of the same stem, and both return many common results. A Polish user can search for "movie" [film], and get back results that contain other variants of the stem, such as "filmów," "filmu," "filmie," "filmy." A user from Belarus will find results for all word forms of the capital, Minsk [?????]: "??????," "??????," "????????." In addition to these semantic factors, Google does even more to parse documents and queries. Understanding the details of language usage in a country is important. Notation of acronyms is different across languages: In Hebrew it is double quotes before the last (left-most) character, as in "prime minister" [??"?]; in Thai ? a dot at the end of the word, as in police station [??. ]; while in the U.S. ? dots after each character, as in [I.B.M.]. Chinese users quote works of art with a "?", as in: [??????], and denote dates with a "?", as in: [2006?1?13?].Beyond the linguistic elements of a language, we consider how people enter a query. For example, some languages that do not have Latin scripts require keyboards with dual alphanumeric keys. The user can switch between language input modes by typing special keystrokes. In case the user forgets to type this sequence, the queries end up being gibberish. You can see correct handling of these mistakes in Arabic ([hgsuv] corrected to [?????]) and ([???????????? ?????????? ] corrected to [presidential elections]), Hebrew ([vdrk, kuyu] corrected to [????? ????]), and Cyrillic ([rehc ljkffhf] corrected to [???? ???????]).Another way of avoiding the inconvenience of switching keyboard modes is by typing the phonetic sounds of the query in Latin characters. Recreating the correct query in the target language isn't trivial, since there might be many possibilities. We can see several such examples in which we suggest the same query in the intended language for Russian ([biskvitnyi rulet] to [?????????? ?????]), "movies" in Chinese ([dianying] to [??]), and "Bank of Attica" in Greek [trapeza attikhs] returns good results for "??????? ???????". Users of 8 Indic languages (such as Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu) can type the phonetic sound of the query, and choose the words in Hindi script:Ease of typing and reading is also influenced by the language used. Since every Chinese word requires several keystrokes on a standard keyboard, we provide category browsing by Images and related searches so that people don't need to type as much. Similarly, we are now launching Google Suggest, or real-time completion of queries, in many languages.So far I described how we improve the quality of search in a language. However, there is a strong effect of the location of the user, even if it is only approximated to the country, since in many cases local content is more relevant than global information. For example, searching for Spanish Yellow Pages [Páginas Amarillas] will result in several documents of global interest and several local results in Peru, Mexico, and Spain. Similar to that, searching for [Côte d'Or] in France will return results for that region, whereas searches in Belgium will return results about the chocolate maker.Note that the display of information should conform to the standards in that country, so we display "," as a decimal notation for Croatian users who want to know how many millimeters are in an inch [in? u milimetrima], or for Italian users who are interested in currency exchange rates [50 euro in dollari]. Similarly, temperatures in Norway [Været i Oslo] will be displayed in Celsius, while in the U.S. ? in Fahrenheit [weather Boston].If everything else fails, we provide cross-language translations based upon Google's translation technology described in this blog post. We will translate your query to English, search English documents on the web, and translate the returned results from English back into the original query language. For example, Japanese users who are interested in viewing Halloween illustrations (Halloween is a holiday which originated in Ireland) can search for [????? ????]. You can then request a Japanese translation of the English pages (at the bottom of the page), which will bring up the translation page in the screenshot below. Similarly, Korean users can search for the latest on Harry Potter [?? ??], and Arabic readers can search for the opening of the Sydney Opera house [?????? ??? ??????? ?? ?????]. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)All in all, Google Search is being actively developed for more than 100 languages, in 150+ countries, with dozens of improvements launched each month. So far I've covered the basics of how international search works, but this is just the surface of all the international work we do. There are many other interesting topics that impact international markets like usability, homepage and results page layout, and connectivity. An understanding of real cultural and human factors is essential to creating a search engine that resonates with the people who use it. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)(Update: Replaced example in the 4th bullet point.)Posted by Daphne Dembo, Engineering Director
Indexed: December 1, 2008, 9:43 am - Page Size: 20KB
Category: Computers > Internet > Searching > Search Engines > Google

]]> {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Down's swimmer sets golden target A teenager hopes to bring back a medal from the Down's Syndrome world swimming championships in Portugal. http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/scotland/news-and-media/down-s-swimmer-sets-golden-target-20081196637.htm 2008-11-26T13:11:11Z 2008-11-26T13:11:11Z News.Bbc.Co.Uk http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/7750311.stm Down's swimmer sets golden target {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - A teenager hopes to bring back a medal from the Down's Syndrome world swimming championships in Portugal.
BBC NEWS | Scotland | South of Scotland | Down's swimmer sets golden target {...} A teenager from south west Scotland hopes to bring back a medal from the Down's Syndrome world swimming championships in Portugal. {...}
Published: November 26, 2008, 1:11 pm - Indexed: November 27, 2008, 10:27 am - Page Size: 46KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > Scotland > News and Media

]]> {INTERNET > GOOGLE} - Our international approach to search In previous posts in this series, you have read about the challenges of building a world-class search engine. Our goal is to make Google?s search be relevant to all people, regardless of their language or country. As my colleague Amit Singhal described, we use statistical data as the basis for making sweeping algorithmic changes. Many of these changes can be rolled out across all languages we support, but in some cases the unique characteristics of each language require some algorithmic considerations and tuning. And to make things really interesting, there are cases where the same language is different across countries. Obvious examples are "color" in the U.S. vs. "colour" in the U.K., or "camião" in Portugal vs. "caminhão" in Brazil.My name is Daphne Dembo, and my focus is improving Google's international search. This is a tough challenge, since Google search is used in many countries and languages where our engineers have little personal knowledge. Initially, the international search improvements were done by Search Quality engineers who were passionate about their languages and countries: Lina from Sweden improved our parsing of compound words in German and Swedish; Dimitra from Greece introduced diacritical support; Ishai from Israel worked on transliteration corrections for Hebrew and Arabic; Trystan from Australia created methods for identifying local search results and ranking them together with foreign ones from the same language; Alex, a bilingual Ukrainian and Russian, introduced morphological understanding of these languages. As the importance of our international search grew, we solicited help from Googlers in all our offices. Finally, we are leveraging an international network of search specialists who help us understand search within the unique combination of their language and country.Our first step in providing search support for a language is to train our language model on a large collection of documents in that language. This ensures that our language model is more precise and comprehensive ? for example, it incorporates names, idioms, colloquial usage, and newly coined words not often found in static dictionaries. For instance, we recently started identifying Swahili, and used pages such as this one for the Parliament of Tanzania to train our system with the language's nuances. Having a trained language model helps to categorize documents during crawling and indexing of the web and to parse the user's query. Once this stage was complete, we launched Swahili search in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, enabling local searches for the "Dar es Salaam stock exchange" [Soko la hisa dar es salaam], and "cure for Malaria" [Tiba ya malaria]. (As always, we are using square brackets to denote a search query. For example, you can search for "soccer" in Hamburg, Germany by clicking on [fußball in hamburg]).We learn some things from our users, so as people start using our search engine, we can improve the way we rank in that language. Here are few examples:Spell corrections: We recently launched spell corrections in Estonian. If your Estonian is rusty, and you don't remember how to spell "smoke detector," we can suggest a spell correction for [suitsuantur], leading to better search results.Diacritical marks: Many languages have diacritical marks, which alter pronunciation. Our algorithms are built to support them, and even help users who mis-type or completely ignore them. For example, if you're a resident of Quebec, Canada and would like to know the weather forecast in Quebec City, we'll serve good results whether you type with diacritical signs [Météo à Québec] or without [meteo quebec]. Czech users can read the same excellent results for a popular kids' cartoon by searching for [krtecek] and [krte?ek]. On the other hand, sometimes diacriticals change the meaning of the word and we have to use them correctly. For example, in Thai, [????] is "rice," with completely different results than [????], which is "news"; or in Slovakia, results for "child" [die?a] are different than results for "diet" [diéta].Synonyms: A general case of diacritical support is the handling of synonyms in different languages. Korean searches showed that "samsung" can be viewed as a synonym of "??", so that when users search for [samsung], they find results which have the company's name in Korean. Compounding: Some languages allow compounding, which is the formation of new words by combining together existing words. You can see a nice example in Swedish, where we return documents about a Swedish credit card for both compounded [Visakort] and non-compounded [visa kort] queries. Stemming: Google has developed morphological models that can receive compound words as queries, and return pages which contain their stem, possibly as part of a different compound. For example, when searching for cars in Saudi Arabia, you can search for [?????] and [??????] because both are variants of the same stem, and both return many common results. A Polish user can search for "movie" [film], and get back results that contain other variants of the stem, such as "filmów," "filmu," "filmie," "filmy." A user from Belarus will find results for all word forms of the capital, Minsk [?????]: "??????," "??????," "????????." In addition to these semantic factors, Google does even more to parse documents and queries. Understanding the details of language usage in a country is important. Notation of acronyms is different across languages: In Hebrew it is double quotes before the last (left-most) character, as in "prime minister" [??"?]; in Thai ? a dot at the end of the word, as in police station [??. ]; while in the U.S. ? dots after each character, as in [I.B.M.]. Chinese users quote works of art with a "?", as in: [??????], and denote dates with a "?", as in: [2006?1?13?].Beyond the linguistic elements of a language, we consider how people enter a query. For example, some languages that do not have Latin scripts require keyboards with dual alphanumeric keys. The user can switch between language input modes by typing special keystrokes. In case the user forgets to type this sequence, the queries end up being gibberish. You can see correct handling of these mistakes in Arabic ([hgsuv] corrected to [?????]) and ([???????????? ?????????? ] corrected to [presidential elections]), Hebrew ([vdrk, kuyu] corrected to [????? ????]), and Cyrillic ([rehc ljkffhf] corrected to [???? ???????]).Another way of avoiding the inconvenience of switching keyboard modes is by typing the phonetic sounds of the query in Latin characters. Recreating the correct query in the target language isn't trivial, since there might be many possibilities. We can see several such examples in which we suggest the same query in the intended language for Russian ([biskvitnyi rulet] to [?????????? ?????]), "movies" in Chinese ([dianying] to [??]), and "Bank of Attica" in Greek [trapeza attikhs] returns good results for "??????? ???????". Users of 8 Indic languages (such as Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu) can type the phonetic sound of the query, and choose the words in Hindi script:Ease of typing and reading is also influenced by the language used. Since every Chinese word requires several keystrokes on a standard keyboard, we provide category browsing by Images and related searches so that people don't need to type as much. Similarly, we are now launching Google Suggest, or real-time completion of queries, in many languages.So far I described how we improve the quality of search in a language. However, there is a strong effect of the location of the user, even if it is only approximated to the country, since in many cases local content is more relevant than global information. For example, searching for Spanish Yellow Pages [Páginas Amarillas] will result in several documents of global interest and several local results in Peru, Mexico, and Spain. Similar to that, searching for [Côte d'Or] in France will return results for that region, whereas searches in Belgium will return results about the chocolate maker.Note that the display of information should conform to the standards in that country, so we display "," as a decimal notation for Croatian users who want to know how many millimeters are in an inch [in? u milimetrima], or for Italian users who are interested in currency exchange rates [50 euro in dollari]. Similarly, temperatures in Norway [Været i Oslo] will be displayed in Celsius, while in the U.S. ? in Fahrenheit [weather Boston].If everything else fails, we provide cross-language translations based upon Google's translation technology described in this blog post. We will translate your query to English, search English documents on the web, and translate the returned results from English back into the original query language. For example, Japanese users who are interested in viewing Halloween illustrations (Halloween is a holiday which originated in Ireland) can search for [????? ????]. You can then request a Japanese translation of the English pages (at the bottom of the page), which will bring up the translation page in the screenshot below. Similarly, Korean users can search for the latest on Harry Potter [?? ??], and Arabic readers can search for the opening of the Sydney Opera house [?????? ??? ??????? ?? ?????]. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)All in all, Google Search is being actively developed for more than 100 languages, in 150+ countries, with dozens of improvements launched each month. So far I've covered the basics of how international search works, but this is just the surface of all the international work we do. There are many other interesting topics that impact international markets like usability, homepage and results page layout, and connectivity. An understanding of real cultural and human factors is essential to creating a search engine that resonates with the people who use it. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)(Update: Replaced example in the 4th bullet point.)Posted by Daphne Dembo, Engineering Director http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/internet/searching/search-engines/google/our-international-approach-to-search-20081137023.htm 2008-11-23T13:32:38Z 2008-11-23T13:32:38Z Blogger.Com http://www.blogger.com/feeds/10861780/posts/default/4362465617786888552?v=2 Our international approach to search {new window}   Www.Blogger.Com - In previous posts in this series, you have read about the challenges of building a world-class search engine. Our goal is to make Google?s search be relevant to all people, regardless of their language or country. As my colleague Amit Singhal described, we use statistical data as the basis for making sweeping algorithmic changes. Many of these changes can be rolled out across all languages we support, but in some cases the unique characteristics of each language require some algorithmic considerations and tuning. And to make things really interesting, there are cases where the same language is different across countries. Obvious examples are "color" in the U.S. vs. "colour" in the U.K., or "camião" in Portugal vs. "caminhão" in Brazil.My name is Daphne Dembo, and my focus is improving Google's international search. This is a tough challenge, since Google search is used in many countries and languages where our engineers have little personal knowledge. Initially, the international search improvements were done by Search Quality engineers who were passionate about their languages and countries: Lina from Sweden improved our parsing of compound words in German and Swedish; Dimitra from Greece introduced diacritical support; Ishai from Israel worked on transliteration corrections for Hebrew and Arabic; Trystan from Australia created methods for identifying local search results and ranking them together with foreign ones from the same language; Alex, a bilingual Ukrainian and Russian, introduced morphological understanding of these languages. As the importance of our international search grew, we solicited help from Googlers in all our offices. Finally, we are leveraging an international network of search specialists who help us understand search within the unique combination of their language and country.Our first step in providing search support for a language is to train our language model on a large collection of documents in that language. This ensures that our language model is more precise and comprehensive ? for example, it incorporates names, idioms, colloquial usage, and newly coined words not often found in static dictionaries. For instance, we recently started identifying Swahili, and used pages such as this one for the Parliament of Tanzania to train our system with the language's nuances. Having a trained language model helps to categorize documents during crawling and indexing of the web and to parse the user's query. Once this stage was complete, we launched Swahili search in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, enabling local searches for the "Dar es Salaam stock exchange" [Soko la hisa dar es salaam], and "cure for Malaria" [Tiba ya malaria]. (As always, we are using square brackets to denote a search query. For example, you can search for "soccer" in Hamburg, Germany by clicking on [fußball in hamburg]).We learn some things from our users, so as people start using our search engine, we can improve the way we rank in that language. Here are few examples:Spell corrections: We recently launched spell corrections in Estonian. If your Estonian is rusty, and you don't remember how to spell "smoke detector," we can suggest a spell correction for [suitsuantur], leading to better search results.Diacritical marks: Many languages have diacritical marks, which alter pronunciation. Our algorithms are built to support them, and even help users who mis-type or completely ignore them. For example, if you're a resident of Quebec, Canada and would like to know the weather forecast in Quebec City, we'll serve good results whether you type with diacritical signs [Météo à Québec] or without [meteo quebec]. Czech users can read the same excellent results for a popular kids' cartoon by searching for [krtecek] and [krte?ek]. On the other hand, sometimes diacriticals change the meaning of the word and we have to use them correctly. For example, in Thai, [????] is "rice," with completely different results than [????], which is "news"; or in Slovakia, results for "child" [die?a] are different than results for "diet" [diéta].Synonyms: A general case of diacritical support is the handling of synonyms in different languages. Korean searches showed that "samsung" can be viewed as a synonym of "??", so that when users search for [samsung], they find results which have the company's name in Korean. Compounding: Some languages allow compounding, which is the formation of new words by combining together existing words. You can see a nice example in Swedish, where we return documents about a Swedish credit card for both compounded [Visakort] and non-compounded [visa kort] queries. Stemming: Google has developed morphological models that can receive compound words as queries, and return pages which contain their stem, possibly as part of a different compound. For example, when searching for cars in Saudi Arabia, you can search for [?????] and [??????] because both are variants of the same stem, and both return many common results. A Polish user can search for "movie" [film], and get back results that contain other variants of the stem, such as "filmów," "filmu," "filmie," "filmy." A user from Belarus will find results for all word forms of the capital, Minsk [?????]: "??????," "??????," "????????." In addition to these semantic factors, Google does even more to parse documents and queries. Understanding the details of language usage in a country is important. Notation of acronyms is different across languages: In Hebrew it is double quotes before the last (left-most) character, as in "prime minister" [??"?]; in Thai ? a dot at the end of the word, as in police station [??. ]; while in the U.S. ? dots after each character, as in [I.B.M.]. Chinese users quote works of art with a "?", as in: [??????], and denote dates with a "?", as in: [2006?1?13?].Beyond the linguistic elements of a language, we consider how people enter a query. For example, some languages that do not have Latin scripts require keyboards with dual alphanumeric keys. The user can switch between language input modes by typing special keystrokes. In case the user forgets to type this sequence, the queries end up being gibberish. You can see correct handling of these mistakes in Arabic ([hgsuv] corrected to [?????]) and ([???????????? ?????????? ] corrected to [presidential elections]), Hebrew ([vdrk, kuyu] corrected to [????? ????]), and Cyrillic ([rehc ljkffhf] corrected to [???? ???????]).Another way of avoiding the inconvenience of switching keyboard modes is by typing the phonetic sounds of the query in Latin characters. Recreating the correct query in the target language isn't trivial, since there might be many possibilities. We can see several such examples in which we suggest the same query in the intended language for Russian ([biskvitnyi rulet] to [?????????? ?????]), "movies" in Chinese ([dianying] to [??]), and "Bank of Attica" in Greek [trapeza attikhs] returns good results for "??????? ???????". Users of 8 Indic languages (such as Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu) can type the phonetic sound of the query, and choose the words in Hindi script:Ease of typing and reading is also influenced by the language used. Since every Chinese word requires several keystrokes on a standard keyboard, we provide category browsing by Images and related searches so that people don't need to type as much. Similarly, we are now launching Google Suggest, or real-time completion of queries, in many languages.So far I described how we improve the quality of search in a language. However, there is a strong effect of the location of the user, even if it is only approximated to the country, since in many cases local content is more relevant than global information. For example, searching for Spanish Yellow Pages [Páginas Amarillas] will result in several documents of global interest and several local results in Peru, Mexico, and Spain. Similar to that, searching for [Côte d'Or] in France will return results for that region, whereas searches in Belgium will return results about the chocolate maker.Note that the display of information should conform to the standards in that country, so we display "," as a decimal notation for Croatian users who want to know how many millimeters are in an inch [in? u milimetrima], or for Italian users who are interested in currency exchange rates [50 euro in dollari]. Similarly, temperatures in Norway [Været i Oslo] will be displayed in Celsius, while in the U.S. ? in Fahrenheit [weather Boston].If everything else fails, we provide cross-language translations based upon Google's translation technology described in this blog post. We will translate your query to English, search English documents on the web, and translate the returned results from English back into the original query language. For example, Japanese users who are interested in viewing Halloween illustrations (Halloween is a holiday which originated in Ireland) can search for [????? ????]. You can then request a Japanese translation of the English pages (at the bottom of the page), which will bring up the translation page in the screenshot below. Similarly, Korean users can search for the latest on Harry Potter [?? ??], and Arabic readers can search for the opening of the Sydney Opera house [?????? ??? ??????? ?? ?????]. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)All in all, Google Search is being actively developed for more than 100 languages, in 150+ countries, with dozens of improvements launched each month. So far I've covered the basics of how international search works, but this is just the surface of all the international work we do. There are many other interesting topics that impact international markets like usability, homepage and results page layout, and connectivity. An understanding of real cultural and human factors is essential to creating a search engine that resonates with the people who use it. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)(Update: Replaced example in the 4th bullet point.)Posted by Daphne Dembo, Engineering Director
Indexed: November 23, 2008, 1:32 pm - Page Size: 20KB
Category: Computers > Internet > Searching > Search Engines > Google

]]> {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo branded 'malicious bigmouth' by Brazil Brazil defender Silva can't accept tackle made by Portugal player as tempers flared in 62 win in Brasilia. http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/recreation-and-sports/sports/football/news-and-media/manchester-united-s-cristiano-ronaldo-branded-20081112424.htm 2008-11-20T17:36:50Z 2008-11-20T17:36:50Z Telegraph.Co.Uk http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/manutd/3491200/Manchester-Uniteds-Cristiano-Ronaldo-branded-malicious-bigmouth-by-Brazil-players-Football.html Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo branded 'malicious bigmouth' by Brazil {new window}   Www.Telegraph.Co.Uk - Brazil defender Silva can't accept tackle made by Portugal player as tempers flared in 62 win in Brasilia.
Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo branded ‘malicious bigmouth’ by Brazil players: Football - Telegraph {...} Thiago Silva, who claimed that Cristiano Ronaldo nearly broke his leg with a wild challenge in Portugal’s 6-2 humbling against Brazil, has described the winger as ‘”a malicious guy” and refuses to accept an apology. {...}
Published: November 20, 2008, 5:36 pm - Indexed: November 21, 2008, 1:45 pm - Page Size: 53KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > Recreation and Sports > Sports > Football > News and Media

]]> {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Brazil end drought in style and Fernando Torres and Robin Van Persie hit friendly fire Brazil thrash Portugal and Robin van Persie and Fernando Torres help Holland and Spain to friendly wins. http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/recreation-and-sports/sports/football/news-and-media/brazil-end-drought-in-style-and-fernando-torres-20081122025.htm 2008-11-20T11:00:45Z 2008-11-20T11:00:45Z Telegraph.Co.Uk http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/international/3488877/Brazil-end-drought-in-style-and-Fernando-Torres-and-Robin-Van-Persie-strike-friendly-fire-Football.html Brazil end drought in style and Fernando Torres and Robin Van Persie hit friendly fire {new window}   Www.Telegraph.Co.Uk - Brazil thrash Portugal and Robin van Persie and Fernando Torres help Holland and Spain to friendly wins.
Brazil end drought in style and Fernando Torres and Robin Van Persie strike friendly fire: Football - Telegraph {...} Brazil ended a run of three matches without scoring with a comprehensive 6-2 win over Portugal on a night of international friendlies that saw Dirk Kuyt and Robin van Persie score for the Netherlands and Fernando Torres help Spain to a 3-0 win over Chile. {...}
Published: November 20, 2008, 11:00 am - Indexed: November 21, 2008, 1:45 pm - Page Size: 51KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > Recreation and Sports > Sports > Football > News and Media

]]> {AUTOS > MAGAZINES AND E-ZINES} - Nissan Will Try and Make the Red Dragon Greener Nissan Motor is heading to China with new plans for electric vehicles. The president of the car company's China division, Yasuaki Hashimoto, said at the Guangzhou International Auto Show that the company will start selling electric cars in the country by 2012, according to Bloomberg. Nissan, though always having been comparatively behind in hybrid technology, has consistently been on the heels of the front runners and with this new development looks poised like a late breaking Derby horse to make things a little interesting if not neck and neck. In 2000, Nissan rolled out its Tino Hybrid car in Japan and only the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight beat it to market. Nissan's Tino full-hybrid car sported a 100-hp gasoline engine, two electric motors, a lithium-ion battery pack and regenerative braking features. The Tino Hybrid increased fuel efficiency by 50-percent while decreasing pollutants by 50-percent over the standard Tino.  In addition to the Tino, Nissan has since been building their 158-hp 2.5-liter 4-cylinder gasoline engine and 40-hp electric assist motor Altima hybrid cars at their Smyrna, Tennessee plant, which has the capacity of building up to 50,000 vehicles. The Chinese government is hoping to push more environmentally friendly cars like the Altima into the country by cutting taxes on fuel-efficient vehicles and plans to support domestic research in greener cars. As a result, Yasuaki Hashimoto said that China is one of the most important markets for electric cars. And from the looks of things the words "most important" may be a smoggy understatement. GM and Toyota have already established a footing in the Chinese hybrid market but have had a less than stellar success selling vehicles. Chinese drivers have out and out shunned hybrids so far, with Toyota Prius, the bestselling model in China, racking up 616 sales nationwide in the first nine months of the year. 616 out of 1.3 billion---you do the math. Despite extremely low hybrid sales numbers, Nissan looks ready to meet the challenge in China having already boosted sales on the fuel-efficient Teana sedans and Tiida compacts 23 percent in the first 10 months and established significant electric vehicle deals with its French partner Renault in Israel, Denmark and Australia, Portugal, and France. In addition, Nissan unveiled in August an all-electric prototype based on its Cube model. At the time the company said the production version will have a unique bodystyle and won't be based on any existing Nissan models. Renault also showed off its electric concept car in October, based on the Renault Kangoo. The battery packs for the planned Renault-Nissan electric cars will come from Automotive Energy Supply, a joint venture between Nissan and NEC. The cars are expected to hit the road in Israel and Denmark in 2011 and Australia the following year. Photo by Flickr user Chris Motes http://articles.world-of-newave.info/recreation/autos/magazines-and-e_zines/nissan-will-try-and-make-the-red-dragon-greener-20081112020.htm 2008-11-19T09:14:05Z 2008-11-19T09:14:05Z Blog.Wired.Com http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/11/the-red-dragon.html Nissan Will Try and Make the Red Dragon Greener {new window}   Blog.Wired.Com - Nissan Motor is heading to China with new plans for electric vehicles. The president of the car company's China division, Yasuaki Hashimoto, said at the Guangzhou International Auto Show that the company will start selling electric cars in the country by 2012, according to Bloomberg. Nissan, though always having been comparatively behind in hybrid technology, has consistently been on the heels of the front runners and with this new development looks poised like a late breaking Derby horse to make things a little interesting if not neck and neck. In 2000, Nissan rolled out its Tino Hybrid car in Japan and only the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight beat it to market. Nissan's Tino full-hybrid car sported a 100-hp gasoline engine, two electric motors, a lithium-ion battery pack and regenerative braking features. The Tino Hybrid increased fuel efficiency by 50-percent while decreasing pollutants by 50-percent over the standard Tino.  In addition to the Tino, Nissan has since been building their 158-hp 2.5-liter 4-cylinder gasoline engine and 40-hp electric assist motor Altima hybrid cars at their Smyrna, Tennessee plant, which has the capacity of building up to 50,000 vehicles. The Chinese government is hoping to push more environmentally friendly cars like the Altima into the country by cutting taxes on fuel-efficient vehicles and plans to support domestic research in greener cars. As a result, Yasuaki Hashimoto said that China is one of the most important markets for electric cars. And from the looks of things the words "most important" may be a smoggy understatement. GM and Toyota have already established a footing in the Chinese hybrid market but have had a less than stellar success selling vehicles. Chinese drivers have out and out shunned hybrids so far, with Toyota Prius, the bestselling model in China, racking up 616 sales nationwide in the first nine months of the year. 616 out of 1.3 billion---you do the math. Despite extremely low hybrid sales numbers, Nissan looks ready to meet the challenge in China having already boosted sales on the fuel-efficient Teana sedans and Tiida compacts 23 percent in the first 10 months and established significant electric vehicle deals with its French partner Renault in Israel, Denmark and Australia, Portugal, and France. In addition, Nissan unveiled in August an all-electric prototype based on its Cube model. At the time the company said the production version will have a unique bodystyle and won't be based on any existing Nissan models. Renault also showed off its electric concept car in October, based on the Renault Kangoo. The battery packs for the planned Renault-Nissan electric cars will come from Automotive Energy Supply, a joint venture between Nissan and NEC. The cars are expected to hit the road in Israel and Denmark in 2011 and Australia the following year. Photo by Flickr user Chris Motes
Nissan Will Try and Make the Red Dragon Greener | Autopia from Wired.com {...} Nissan Motor is heading to China with new plans for electric vehicles. The president of the car company's China division, Yasuaki Hashimoto, said at the Guangzhou International Auto Show that {...}
Indexed: November 19, 2008, 9:14 am - Page Size: 67KB
Category: Recreation > Autos > Magazines and E-zines

]]> {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Football: Maradona shrugs off Butcher snub and vilifies English achievements of 1966 Diego Maradona took a World Cup semi-final place from England in 1986 and today he took the urine. Argentina's new head coach told a captive audience in Glasgow that it was hypocritical of the English to vilify him for the Hand of God when Sir Alf Ramsey's side had bent the rules to win their own World Cup at Wembley two decades before. A warm reception is anticipated for the 48-year-old when he steps into international management against Scotland tomorrow night .Maradona's accusation was delivered with mirth rather than menace as he held his first besieged official press conference since being unveiled as the surprise successor to Alfio Basile earlier this month. His first game brings him into confrontation with Terry Butcher, the Scotland assistant manager who was part of the England team beaten by Maradona's duplicity and brilliance in Mexico 22 years ago and who this week expressed a lingering wish to punch the former Argentina captain for that infamous first goal."I don't know why Butcher is taking this attitude," said Maradona, rolling his eyes and feigning hurt when informed by a translator that George Burley's number two will not be shaking his hand at Hampden Park. "I am fine with people who are fine with me and I don't understand why Butcher takes this attitude. Let Butcher get on with his life and I will get on with mine. If he doesn't shake my hand I will still be alive the next morning. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it."A female journalist then asked whether he would not feel resentment at being cheated out of a World Cup quarter-final. Maradona paused, then smiled, then drew a parallel between the Hand of God and Geoff Hurst's second goal against West Germany in the 1966 World Cup Final. "I say to the young lady, England won a World Cup with a goal that never crossed the line. It was plain to everyone who saw it that it never went in, so I don't think it's fair that everyone should judge me when stuff like that went on." Warming to his theme, Maradona held his hands a foot apart and added: "It was this much before the line. They just never used to have action replays in those days." Cue raucous laughter from the Scottish and Argentinean contingent inside the Radisson Hotel.England-baiting aside, there was a seriousness to Maradona's address befitting a man with his troubled history and a manager who, prior to taking on the role of leading one of international football's superpowers, had overseen just 23 games from the sidelines as coach of Deportivo Mandiyu and Racing Club in the mid-1990s. The legendary player dismissed the suggestion he has plenty to prove as coach of an Argentina side that has won only one of its last eight matches and lost its last World Cup qualifying game to Chile."I don't feel under pressure at all," said Maradona, who will work alongside his World Cup winning coach, Carlos Bilardo, in the national set-up. "If I hadn't accepted the offer I would have been a coward and I didn't want to shy away from the challenge. We have a long hard road ahead of us, it is not going to be easy, but the Argentinean national team needed someone to guide and help them and now we are on a mission together. Hopefully we will have a collective experience on the road to South Africa."Inexperience is not the only charge levelled against Maradona since his appointment, with his temperament also on trial in the international spotlight. As a player he blamed a failed drugs test at the 1994 World Cup on a FIFA-led conspiracy to hound him from the game while his cheerleading displays at the 2006 World Cup in Germany are clearly ill-suited to the technical area."I am the manager of Argentina now and I'm not going to get involved in anything like that," he said of football's politics. "As for the touchline, it depends on how the team are playing. If they are making me feel safe and sound then I'll be fine. If they are making me nervy then maybe I will behave like you saw in Germany."Maradona scored his first international goal against Scotland at Hampden Park in 1979 and flirted with the possibility of one day managing in Britain. He also refuted the theory that great players do not make great coaches. "Cruyff showed in his time with Barcelona, with what he achieved there, that that can be the case," he reasoned.It was when asked to describe his own personal journey, one that has entailed cocaine addiction and a fight for his life in a Cuban clinic offered by Fidel Castro, that Maradona gave the shortest reply of all. "I get up every morning, simple as that," he said. "I get up every morning."When stars take chargeFranz Beckenbauer West GermanyTransferred his leadership qualities from pitch to dugout, winning the World Cup as the captain in 1974 and as the manager in 1990, still the only man to do soMarco van Basten Holland Began his managerial career in the national job in 2004 and made a name for discarding big guns, dropping Ruud van Nistelrooy en route to defeat to Portugal in the 2006 World Cup second roundMichel Platini France Appointed as the national coach in 1988 a year after his retirement but failed to reach the 1990 World Cup. Stepped down after early exit at Euro 92Gheorghe Hagi RomaniaThe Maradona of the Carpathians bombed as the national coach and was sacked after six maverick monthsDiego MaradonaArgentinaScotlandguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/football-maradona-shrugs-off-butcher-snub-and-vilifies-20081139119.htm 2008-11-18T19:47:43Z 2008-11-18T19:47:43Z Guardian.Co.Uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/nov/18/diego-maradona-argentina1 Football: Maradona shrugs off Butcher snub and vilifies English achievements of 1966 {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - Diego Maradona took a World Cup semi-final place from England in 1986 and today he took the urine. Argentina's new head coach told a captive audience in Glasgow that it was hypocritical of the English to vilify him for the Hand of God when Sir Alf Ramsey's side had bent the rules to win their own World Cup at Wembley two decades before. A warm reception is anticipated for the 48-year-old when he steps into international management against Scotland tomorrow night .Maradona's accusation was delivered with mirth rather than menace as he held his first besieged official press conference since being unveiled as the surprise successor to Alfio Basile earlier this month. His first game brings him into confrontation with Terry Butcher, the Scotland assistant manager who was part of the England team beaten by Maradona's duplicity and brilliance in Mexico 22 years ago and who this week expressed a lingering wish to punch the former Argentina captain for that infamous first goal."I don't know why Butcher is taking this attitude," said Maradona, rolling his eyes and feigning hurt when informed by a translator that George Burley's number two will not be shaking his hand at Hampden Park. "I am fine with people who are fine with me and I don't understand why Butcher takes this attitude. Let Butcher get on with his life and I will get on with mine. If he doesn't shake my hand I will still be alive the next morning. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it."A female journalist then asked whether he would not feel resentment at being cheated out of a World Cup quarter-final. Maradona paused, then smiled, then drew a parallel between the Hand of God and Geoff Hurst's second goal against West Germany in the 1966 World Cup Final. "I say to the young lady, England won a World Cup with a goal that never crossed the line. It was plain to everyone who saw it that it never went in, so I don't think it's fair that everyone should judge me when stuff like that went on." Warming to his theme, Maradona held his hands a foot apart and added: "It was this much before the line. They just never used to have action replays in those days." Cue raucous laughter from the Scottish and Argentinean contingent inside the Radisson Hotel.England-baiting aside, there was a seriousness to Maradona's address befitting a man with his troubled history and a manager who, prior to taking on the role of leading one of international football's superpowers, had overseen just 23 games from the sidelines as coach of Deportivo Mandiyu and Racing Club in the mid-1990s. The legendary player dismissed the suggestion he has plenty to prove as coach of an Argentina side that has won only one of its last eight matches and lost its last World Cup qualifying game to Chile."I don't feel under pressure at all," said Maradona, who will work alongside his World Cup winning coach, Carlos Bilardo, in the national set-up. "If I hadn't accepted the offer I would have been a coward and I didn't want to shy away from the challenge. We have a long hard road ahead of us, it is not going to be easy, but the Argentinean national team needed someone to guide and help them and now we are on a mission together. Hopefully we will have a collective experience on the road to South Africa."Inexperience is not the only charge levelled against Maradona since his appointment, with his temperament also on trial in the international spotlight. As a player he blamed a failed drugs test at the 1994 World Cup on a FIFA-led conspiracy to hound him from the game while his cheerleading displays at the 2006 World Cup in Germany are clearly ill-suited to the technical area."I am the manager of Argentina now and I'm not going to get involved in anything like that," he said of football's politics. "As for the touchline, it depends on how the team are playing. If they are making me feel safe and sound then I'll be fine. If they are making me nervy then maybe I will behave like you saw in Germany."Maradona scored his first international goal against Scotland at Hampden Park in 1979 and flirted with the possibility of one day managing in Britain. He also refuted the theory that great players do not make great coaches. "Cruyff showed in his time with Barcelona, with what he achieved there, that that can be the case," he reasoned.It was when asked to describe his own personal journey, one that has entailed cocaine addiction and a fight for his life in a Cuban clinic offered by Fidel Castro, that Maradona gave the shortest reply of all. "I get up every morning, simple as that," he said. "I get up every morning."When stars take chargeFranz Beckenbauer West GermanyTransferred his leadership qualities from pitch to dugout, winning the World Cup as the captain in 1974 and as the manager in 1990, still the only man to do soMarco van Basten Holland Began his managerial career in the national job in 2004 and made a name for discarding big guns, dropping Ruud van Nistelrooy en route to defeat to Portugal in the 2006 World Cup second roundMichel Platini France Appointed as the national coach in 1988 a year after his retirement but failed to reach the 1990 World Cup. Stepped down after early exit at Euro 92Gheorghe Hagi RomaniaThe Maradona of the Carpathians bombed as the national coach and was sacked after six maverick monthsDiego MaradonaArgentinaScotlandguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Football: Maradona shrugs off Butcher snub and vilifies English achievements of 1966 | Football | guardian.co.uk {...} Diego Maradona dismissed criticism of his Hand of God goal by comparing it to Geoff Hurst's goal for England in 1966 {...}
Published: November 18, 2008, 7:47 pm - Indexed: November 19, 2008, 10:25 am - Page Size: 87KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media

]]> {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Clarence Mitchell criticises 'lazy' Madeleine McCann coverage British journalists following the Madeleine McCann case in Portugal last year were responsible for lazy and distorted stories, the press adviser to the missing child's family, Clarence Mitchell, has said.Speaking at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol yesterday, Mitchell told delegates that he faced the daily problem of dealing with inaccuracies created by a hungry British press pack. He added that 99% of the stories coming out of the local media in Praia da Luiz were "totally inaccurate lies".Mitchell said that the local bar in Praia da Luiz effectively became the newsroom for the British press pack, with its "lethal combination of Wi-Fi and alcohol"."The British press out there in Portugal, and I'm not singling out any particular publication, were - I'm afraid to say this and I don't like to say this because I'm a former journalist myself - they were lazy," he told the conference.He said: "The Portuguese police hid behind the law of judicial secrecy saying they weren't able to comment, either on the record or off the record, but that didn't stop lots of information finding its way from police files into the Portuguese press."However, when the British press made inquiries they came up against a stone wall so they resorted to sitting in the local bar, which had the lethal combination of free Wi-Fi and alcohol, and that became the newsroom predictably enough."It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases."This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went."Mitchell said that British newspapers put reporters under pressure to come up with new angles and exclusive stories in the months after Madeleine went missing in May last year."I had certain reporters from certain groups almost in tears some mornings saying, 'If you don't give me a front-page splash by 4pm I'm going to be fired," he added."I can understand the pressure they are under but when I said 'I can't help you, we honestly haven't got anything of value or anything to warrant that coverage' nevertheless a front page would then duly appear in certain titles."Mitchell added: "Things that were allegations or suggestions in the Portuguese press were hardened up into absolute fact when they crossed the Channel."He also told the conference yesterday that more than £1m in compensation had now been paid by British newspapers to Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and the friends - the so-called "tapas seven" - with whom the McCanns dined on the night their daughter went missing.In March, the McCanns accepted £550,000 from Express Newspapers after the Daily Express, Sunday Express, the Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday ran numerous defamatory articles.Express Newspapers was again forced last month to apologise and pay £375,000 in libel damages to the "tapas seven" after the publisher ran a series of defamatory stories about the group.The News of the World also apologised in September for publishing extracts from Kate McCann's private diary without her permission and made a financial contribution to the search for Madeleine.· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".Society of EditorsPress & publishingMadeleine McCannguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/clarence-mitchell-criticises-lazy-madeleine-mccann-20081198318.htm 2008-11-11T10:20:38Z 2008-11-11T10:20:38Z Guardian.Co.Uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/11/clarence-mitchell-madeleine-mccann-reporting Clarence Mitchell criticises 'lazy' Madeleine McCann coverage {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - British journalists following the Madeleine McCann case in Portugal last year were responsible for lazy and distorted stories, the press adviser to the missing child's family, Clarence Mitchell, has said.Speaking at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol yesterday, Mitchell told delegates that he faced the daily problem of dealing with inaccuracies created by a hungry British press pack. He added that 99% of the stories coming out of the local media in Praia da Luiz were "totally inaccurate lies".Mitchell said that the local bar in Praia da Luiz effectively became the newsroom for the British press pack, with its "lethal combination of Wi-Fi and alcohol"."The British press out there in Portugal, and I'm not singling out any particular publication, were - I'm afraid to say this and I don't like to say this because I'm a former journalist myself - they were lazy," he told the conference.He said: "The Portuguese police hid behind the law of judicial secrecy saying they weren't able to comment, either on the record or off the record, but that didn't stop lots of information finding its way from police files into the Portuguese press."However, when the British press made inquiries they came up against a stone wall so they resorted to sitting in the local bar, which had the lethal combination of free Wi-Fi and alcohol, and that became the newsroom predictably enough."It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases."This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went."Mitchell said that British newspapers put reporters under pressure to come up with new angles and exclusive stories in the months after Madeleine went missing in May last year."I had certain reporters from certain groups almost in tears some mornings saying, 'If you don't give me a front-page splash by 4pm I'm going to be fired," he added."I can understand the pressure they are under but when I said 'I can't help you, we honestly haven't got anything of value or anything to warrant that coverage' nevertheless a front page would then duly appear in certain titles."Mitchell added: "Things that were allegations or suggestions in the Portuguese press were hardened up into absolute fact when they crossed the Channel."He also told the conference yesterday that more than £1m in compensation had now been paid by British newspapers to Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and the friends - the so-called "tapas seven" - with whom the McCanns dined on the night their daughter went missing.In March, the McCanns accepted £550,000 from Express Newspapers after the Daily Express, Sunday Express, the Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday ran numerous defamatory articles.Express Newspapers was again forced last month to apologise and pay £375,000 in libel damages to the "tapas seven" after the publisher ran a series of defamatory stories about the group.The News of the World also apologised in September for publishing extracts from Kate McCann's private diary without her permission and made a financial contribution to the search for Madeleine.· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".Society of EditorsPress & publishingMadeleine McCannguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Clarence Mitchell criticises 'lazy' Madeleine McCann coverage | Media | guardian.co.uk {...} British journalists following the Madeleine McCann case in Portugal last year were responsible for lazy and distorted stories, the press adviser to the missing child's family has said. By Oliver Luft {...}
Published: November 11, 2008, 10:20 am - Indexed: November 11, 2008, 1:07 pm - Page Size: 77KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media

]]> {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - IUCN report warns that a quarter of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction More than a quarter of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction from overfishing, conservationists warned today.A "red list" report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found that 26% of all sharks, rays and related species in the regional waters are threatened with extinction. Seven per cent are classed as critically endangered, while a fifth are regarded as "near-threatened". The total number of at-risk species may well be higher because scientists lack of sufficient information to assess the populations of more than a quarter (27%) of them, the report adds. Many are slow-breeding fish that are especially vulnerable to fisheries.Two species of shark that are highly prized for their meat, the spiny dogfish (rock salmon) and porbeagle, are critically endangered. They are among the few species that are subject to EU fishing restrictions, although these quotas are well above the zero-catch levels proposed by scientists at the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (Ices). Angel sharks and common skates are also critically endangered in the north-east Atlantic, prompting Ices scientists to call for greater restrictions on fisheries that target them or land them as bycatch. The basking shark, the world's second largest fish, was listed as vulnerable.Sonja Fordham, policy director at the Shark Alliance, and co-author of the report said: "The north Atlantic is one of the most overfished regions in the world and yet only four species of sharks and rays are protected. This is a clear consequence of overfishing, whether these species are targeted or taken as bycatch."Another species listed as critically endangered is the deep-water gulper shark, sought for its rich liver oil, which is used by the cosmetics industry. In 2005, Ices urged the EU to effectively ban deepwater shark fishing, but current quotas allow more than 800 tonnes to be taken next year.The percentage of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic region classified as threatened is higher than the figure for species globally (18%), the IUCN found. It said the decline in numbers was due to the activity of fishing nations such as Spain, Portugal, France and Britain. "North-east Atlantic populations of these vulnerable species are in serious trouble, more so than in many other parts of the world," said Claudine Gibson, former programme officer for the IUCN's shark specialist group and lead author of the report. "Most sharks and rays are exceptionally vulnerable to overfishing because of their tendency to grow slowly, mature late, and produce few young. Those at greatest risk of extinction in the northeast Atlantic include heavily fished large sharks and rays like porbeagle and common skate, as well as commercially valuable deepwater sharks and spiny dogfish."Marine conservationists urged EU fisheries ministers, who are due to agree fishing quotas in December, to impose tighter restrictions in line with scientific advice. "Country officials should heed the dire warnings of this report and act to protect threatened sharks and rays at national, regional and international levels. Such action is immediately possible and absolutely necessary to change the current course toward extincction of these remarkable ocean animals," said Fordham.ConservationFishingWildlifeEndangered speciesBiodiversityZoologyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/iucn-report-warns-that-a-quarter-of-sharks-and-rays-20081141310.htm 2008-11-10T13:16:44Z 2008-11-10T13:16:44Z Guardian.Co.Uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/10/conservation-fishing IUCN report warns that a quarter of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - More than a quarter of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction from overfishing, conservationists warned today.A "red list" report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found that 26% of all sharks, rays and related species in the regional waters are threatened with extinction. Seven per cent are classed as critically endangered, while a fifth are regarded as "near-threatened". The total number of at-risk species may well be higher because scientists lack of sufficient information to assess the populations of more than a quarter (27%) of them, the report adds. Many are slow-breeding fish that are especially vulnerable to fisheries.Two species of shark that are highly prized for their meat, the spiny dogfish (rock salmon) and porbeagle, are critically endangered. They are among the few species that are subject to EU fishing restrictions, although these quotas are well above the zero-catch levels proposed by scientists at the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (Ices). Angel sharks and common skates are also critically endangered in the north-east Atlantic, prompting Ices scientists to call for greater restrictions on fisheries that target them or land them as bycatch. The basking shark, the world's second largest fish, was listed as vulnerable.Sonja Fordham, policy director at the Shark Alliance, and co-author of the report said: "The north Atlantic is one of the most overfished regions in the world and yet only four species of sharks and rays are protected. This is a clear consequence of overfishing, whether these species are targeted or taken as bycatch."Another species listed as critically endangered is the deep-water gulper shark, sought for its rich liver oil, which is used by the cosmetics industry. In 2005, Ices urged the EU to effectively ban deepwater shark fishing, but current quotas allow more than 800 tonnes to be taken next year.The percentage of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic region classified as threatened is higher than the figure for species globally (18%), the IUCN found. It said the decline in numbers was due to the activity of fishing nations such as Spain, Portugal, France and Britain. "North-east Atlantic populations of these vulnerable species are in serious trouble, more so than in many other parts of the world," said Claudine Gibson, former programme officer for the IUCN's shark specialist group and lead author of the report. "Most sharks and rays are exceptionally vulnerable to overfishing because of their tendency to grow slowly, mature late, and produce few young. Those at greatest risk of extinction in the northeast Atlantic include heavily fished large sharks and rays like porbeagle and common skate, as well as commercially valuable deepwater sharks and spiny dogfish."Marine conservationists urged EU fisheries ministers, who are due to agree fishing quotas in December, to impose tighter restrictions in line with scientific advice. "Country officials should heed the dire warnings of this report and act to protect threatened sharks and rays at national, regional and international levels. Such action is immediately possible and absolutely necessary to change the current course toward extincction of these remarkable ocean animals," said Fordham.ConservationFishingWildlifeEndangered speciesBiodiversityZoologyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
IUCN report warns that a quarter of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction | Environment | guardian.co.uk {...} More than 25% of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction from overfishing, conservationists have warned {...}
Published: November 10, 2008, 1:16 pm - Indexed: November 11, 2008, 12:36 pm - Page Size: 79KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media

]]> {ENVIRONMENT > NEWS} - ENERGY-EU: Zero Carbon Communities MOURA, Portugal, Nov 3 (IPS) - This small municipality in the south of Portugal is becoming increasingly well-known for its alternative energy initiatives. The latest is the Sunflower project, which also involves communities in seven other European Union countries. http://articles.world-of-newave.info/science/environment/news/energy-eu-zero-carbon-communities-2008118703.htm 2008-11-04T11:28:26Z 2008-11-04T11:28:26Z Ipsnews.Net http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44558 ENERGY-EU: Zero Carbon Communities {new window}   Www.Ipsnews.Net - MOURA, Portugal, Nov 3 (IPS) - This small municipality in the south of Portugal is becoming increasingly well-known for its alternative energy initiatives. The latest is the Sunflower project, which also involves communities in seven other European Union countries.
This small municipality in the south of Portugal is becoming increasingly well-known for its alternative energy initiatives. The latest is the Sunflower project, which also involves communities in seven other European Union countries. {...}
Indexed: November 4, 2008, 11:28 am - Page Size: 65KB
Category: Science > Environment > News

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