Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Google upgrades search technology

Google unveiled new features for its signature search tools Monday, including an ability to search by sight, a mobile translator and a real-time search of more than 1 billion new social media pages created every day. Google executives showed off the upgrades at an annual company event called Searchology.

The search engine giant said it was working to tie its search service more closely to cellphones. It showed off a new search option called Google Goggles that allows users to submit pictures rather than key words as queries, which would allow for identification of images taken via cellphones. "It is our goal to be able to identify any image," said Google's vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra. "It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query." Gundotra said the company has the capability of integrating facial recognition into the technology but was delaying the implementation while it considered the privacy implications.

"For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition," Gundotra said. "We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place."

Future search results would feature the company's "near me now" technology that will prioritize location-based items, he said. Gundotra also showed off the search engine's ability to translate a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone. The translator feature will become available early next year and Google will rapidly expand the number of languages it can use, Gundotra said.

"Our goal at Google is nothing less than being able to support all the major languages of the world," he said. The real time search technology is a product of partnerships announced Monday with Facebook and MySpace. Google already had an agreement with microblogging site Twitter, and said that the new search would be rolled out worldwide in the coming days.

BJP fully responsible for Babri mosque demolition: P. Chidambaram

BJP fully responsible for Babri mosque demolition: P. Chidambaram

Amid acrimony in the Lok Sabha, Home Minister P. Chidambaram held the Sangh Parivar responsible for the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 and dismissed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sushma Swaraj's contention that there was no conspiracy behind the incident.

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In his reply to the debate on the Liberhan Commission report, Chidambaram said every single promise by the BJP leaders and then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh to protect the mosque was broken.

Amid continuous slogan-shouting by the BJP-led opposition, Chidambaram admitted that the P.V. Narasimha Rao government had erred but said that it was an error of political judgement as the former prime minister believed the 'false' promises of the BJP leaders. 'The Congress party paid the price of its political judgement,' he said.

Extensively quoting from the report, the minister said there was evidence that the Babri mosque was pulled down as a pre-planned act. 'The plan was conceived by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It controlled every aspect of the Ayodhya movement.'

'The promise to protect Babri masjid was one big lie. The then Uttar Pradesh chief minister lied to the centre and the Supreme Court,' he said.

The minister said that kar sevaks carried hammers and iron rods and the mosque was demolished by pulling it down from inside and not from the top

He said that the BJP had not expressed regret over the
demolition and its policies continue to be 'divisive'.

While the minister was replying, Samajwadi Party members raised slogans that both Congress and BJP were responsible for the demolition.

Chidambaram, who spoke for almost an hour amid unabated slogan shouting, restrained his colleagues from reacting after a paper ball was lobbed towards him. As slogans like 'Down, down Chidambaram' and 'Jai, Jai Atal' rent the air, the minister did not give up, and was repeatedly cheered by his party colleagues through thumping of tables.

The minister, who was barely audible due to slogan shouting, said the idea of 'inclusive India' represented by the Congress and other secular parties had been preferred by the people of India in 2004 and 2009 elections and 'divisive politics' of the BJP had been rejected.

The uproar in the house started before the minister's reply after P.C. Chacko, who was presiding over the proceedings, asked the members, who had not got the opportunity to speak, to lay their speeches on the table of the house.

The opposition members protested at this. The house had earlier witnessed noisy scenes and two adjournments over derogatory remarks by Congress MP Beni Prasad Verma against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders indicted in the report.

Congress leader and Minority Affairs minister Salman Khurshid later said that the Home Ministry will take the necessary action on the Liberhan report.

Rahul Gandhi violated security norms? Probe ordered

Rahul Gandhi violated security norms? Probe ordered

The DGCA on Tuesday decided to probe the landing of the helicopter carrying Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi in allegedly poor visibility conditions in Uttar Pradesh's Sitapur district on Monday evening.

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Official sources told PTI that the statements of the two pilots of the helicopter and the district magistrate of Sitapur will be recorded in a couple of days.

Rahul earlier in the day sought to stave off a controversy that he had forced the pilot to land his helicopter in poor visibility conditions in Sitapur.

'I am a pilot and I am absolutely aware of the dangers of flying in low visibility conditions. I will be the last person to do it,' he told a press conference in Lucknow.

Sitapur district magistrate Sanjay Kumar said the copter landed after sunset in poor visibility.

Meanwhile, the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh sent a letter to the Central Home Ministry, complaining that Rahul violated security norms during
his visits to the state.

'The state government has made it clear to the Centre that if Mr Rahul Gandhi continued to bypass and violate laid down security rules, then the Centre must not hold the state responsible in case there was any mishap,' Mayawati's trusted aide and state's Additional Cabinet Secretary Vijay Shankar Pandey said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Contradicting the Congress leader's claim that he always believed in strictly adhering to all security norms, he said, 'Since Mr Rahul Gandhi is covered by SPG there are certain norms which need to be observed, but it was a matter of deep concern for the state government that he has repeatedly violated these norms and rules.'

According to Pandey, the state government had raised its concern with the Centre for the first time when the Congress General Secretary visited Kanpur in October 2008.

The state government has also objected to Gandhi's waving out to people in Etah and shaking hands with the crowds outside the security ring.

No intelligence input on David Coleman Headley's stay in Goa: police

No intelligence input on David Coleman Headley's stay in Goa: police

Goa Police Tuesday denied receiving any inputs from central intelligence agencies about the presence of terror suspect David Coleman Headley in Goa earlier this year.
'The Goa police is not in receipt of any such information about Headley being in Goa,' Superintendent of Police Atmaram Deshpande said at a press conference.

Asked if the police were ruling out the possibility of Headley staying in Goa, Deshpande said: 'I am not ruling it out. All I am saying is that we have not received any report from agencies on this matter'.

Media reports Tuesday, quoting union home ministry sources, had said that suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative Headley, who is in US custody on charges of terror, had surveyed Arambol and Anjuna beaches in north Goa for a week early this year.

Incidentally, both Anjuna and Arambol beaches are immensely popular with Israeli tourists.

In fact, Anjuna also has a Chabad House, a Jewish prayer home, which is frequented by Israelis during the tourist season. Israeli tourists, who form a sizeable portion of the 4.5 lakh odd foreign tourists in Goa, visit the state in the months of October to February.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) has charge-sheeted Headley for conducting 'extensive surveillance of targets in Mumbai for more than two years' preceding the 26/11 terrorist attack on the financial capital that killed 166 people, including six Americans.

Mumbai's Chabad House, the city's headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews, had also come under attack on 26/11 last year. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his pregnant wife Rivka and four others were killed as the terrorists stormed in and held them hostage for hours on end.

Meanwhile, the Goa police late Tuesday hosted a multi-agency meeting to take stock of the security scenario in the state, ahead of the peak tourist season stretching over from last week of December to the first week of January, a period which has seen the state receive several terror threats over the last few years.

The multi-agency meeting was attended by representatives from the Indian Navy, Indian Coast Guard, Indian Army, Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and representatives from various intelligence agencies.

The meeting reviewed the security scenario in Goa, especially the marine preparedness of the security forces to ward of any sea-borne terror threats, informed sources said.

copenhagen climate summit, copenhagen, copenhagen summit, copenhagen climate conference, copenhagen news, copenhagen climate

copenhagen climate summit, copenhagen, copenhagen summit, copenhagen climate conference, copenhagen news, copenhagen climate

The Dec 7-18 climate summit was thrown into turmoil on its second evening as developing countries came together to condemn a Danish draft of the final Copenhagen declaration.

The existing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol (KP) place the onus of mitigating emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) squarely upon industrialised countries, as almost all the GHG - mostly carbon dioxide - in the atmosphere now has been put there by them.

significant departure from that, the Danish draft proposal asks developing countries - except the least developed countries - to 'commit to nationally appropriate mitigation actions, including actions supported and enabled by technology, financing and capacity-building.

The developing countries' individual mitigation action could in aggregate yield a [Y percent] deviation in [2020] from business as usual and yielding their collective emissions peak before [20XX] and decline thereafter. The square brackets reflect points to be negotiated.

Condemning the whole idea, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, Sudan's ambassador to the UN, said here Tuesday evening (early Wednesday India time) that the Danish proposal 'merges the UNFCCC and the KP and destroys both?It creates new sets of obligations for developing countries?it tries to have finance flows from South to North.'

Sudan is now the chair of the Group of 77 countries, which, together with China, negotiates climate treaties as a bloc on behalf of almost all developing countries.

The Danish proposal 'tries to divide vulnerable and culpable countries in the developing world to preserve the economic supremacy of advanced
countries,' Di-Aping charged while addressing a press conference.

'It robs developing countries of their just, equitable and fair share of atmospheric space.'

India has also been quite upset with the Danish proposal, which was circulated Nov 27. Reacting to one point in the text that sets a date by which major developing countries would start reducing their GHG emissions, the so-called 'peaking year', Environment Minister had threatened that India and other developing countries would walk out of the summit if any attempt was made to push this through.

Together with China, Brazil and South Africa, India had promptly cobbled together a counter-proposal, the so-called BASIC text.

The Danish government had seen the reaction to its proposal and had decided to disown it. Denmark's Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard had said Monday that it was not a proposal but a 'discussion paper that had been withdrawn'. The UNFCCC secretariat has also been at pains to point out that this was not a proposal submitted to it officially.

A member of the Indian government delegation told IANS that in a pre-summit meeting here last week, 'numbered copies' of the Danish proposal had been circulated to some countries - including India - and then taken back after the meeting, a highly unusual move.

Despite all this, the publication of its text Tuesday in the British newspaper The Guardian got the controversy flared up.

Di-Aping said G77 would not walk out of the summit over this issue 'because we can't afford failure here. We have to find a way for an equitable and just deal to save the world'.

'However, we'll not sign an inequitable deal, we won't accept a deal that condemns 80 percent of the world population to further suffering and injustice.'