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(Cross posted to the Google Affiliate Network blog)We’ve blogged before about Google Affiliate Network, which helps you earn more from your site with ads that pay based on conversions. Earlier this year, we launched Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger i…

On Tuesday, October 2nd, Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display Advertising, moderated a presidential-style debate about programmatic buying and building brands online at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference. He was joined on-stage by Jon…

Small business owners are used to being pressed: for resources, for time, and especially for credit.  Juggling expenses across different credit cards and managing seasonal business spikes and valleys doesn’t leave much room for other spending, l…

Cross-posted from the Google Africa BlogNew to campus? Lost your way in the university?  Check out the latest and  detailed universities maps across sub saharan Africa . Map of University of Ghana, Accra Google Student Ambassadors from 65 …

Happy Friday! As the US moves to Fall, which my Sydney friends tell me should really be Autumn, but in Sydney is Spring, my thoughts naturally turn to videos. That’s right, it’s another video from Maps Developer Live. This week, I had a guest, R…

Posted by Tia Lendo, Google in Education TeamTwelve years ago, in my first year teaching, I often felt very isolated. Not only was my fourth grade class housed in a mobile trailer outside of the main school building, putting physical distance between m…

Introduction: Over the summer we host a variety of programs and internships for technical and non-technical students. We’re relaunching the My Summer @ Google series to give you an inside look at each of these programs, hearing from the students them…

Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!A few weeks ago, we talked about the pos…

Time in current traffic has been a feature of Google Maps since March 2012. Today we are excited to announce this great feature for our Enterprise customers. Using both live and historic traffic data, the Google Maps API enables you to see the estimat…

We are pleased to announce the release of an open source, general-purpose framework designed for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), now available at: http://code.google.com/p/refr/.Many types of systems capable of processing speech and huma…

Posted by Dan Bikel and Keith Hall, Research Scientists at Google

We are pleased to announce the release of an open source, general-purpose framework designed for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), now available at: http://code.google.com/p/refr/.

Many types of systems capable of processing speech and human language text produce multiple hypothesized outputs for a given input, each with a score. In the case of machine translation systems, these hypotheses correspond to possible translations from some sentence in a source language to a target language. In the case of speech recognition, the hypotheses are possible word sequences of what was said derived from the input audio. The goal of such systems is usually to produce a single output for a given input, and so they almost always just pick the highest-scoring hypothesis.

A reranker is a system that uses a trained model to rerank these scored hypotheses, possibly inducing a different ranked order. The goal is that by employing a second model after the fact, one can make use of additional information not available to the original model, and produce better overall results. This approach has been shown to be useful for a wide variety of speech and natural language processing problems, and was the subject of one of the groups at the 2011 summer workshop at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Language and Speech Processing. At that workshop, led by Professor Brian Roark of Oregon Health & Science University, we began building a general-purpose framework for training and using reranking models. The result of all this work is ReFr.

From the outset, we designed ReFr with both speed and flexibility in mind. The core implementation is entirely in C++, with a flexible architecture allowing rich experimentation with both features and learning methods. The framework also employs a powerful runtime configuration mechanism to make experimentation even easier. Finally, ReFr leverages the parallel processing power of Hadoop to train and use large-scale reranking models in a distributed computing environment.

As we’re nearing the end of 2012, we’ve all got business goals to meet. Some of you might even be prepping for your busiest season. Today, we’re announcing our next series of Learn with Google webinars, which will arm you with the tools you need …

This is the final post of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Using these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. To see these principles applied to …

To make Google Maps even more comprehensive, accurate and useful, today we’re making Street View available on mobile browsers. With access to Street View on your phone, you can use panoramic, street-level imagery to explore and navigate the places ar…

Earlier this year, we shared a snapshot of how architect Nick Sonder uses SketchUp Pro and LayOut to work up construction documents. In comments on this blog and our YouTube channel, we noticed that folks wanted to learn more about the ins and outs of this process, so we tapped Paul Lee, author of “Construction Documents using SketchUp Pro & LayOut“ to walk through the basic process for porting SketchUp scenes to plan views in LayOut:

Creating a plan in LayOut is a snap. In this tutorial we will take a pre-formed model, apply a Section Cut and create a Plan Scene for display in LayOut. Below is a view of a house construction model you can download from here. Once you’ve opened this model (or one of your own), select the Section Plane tool from the Tools menu. Use this tool to align the desired sectioned view of the model. (Remember: Hold down the shift key to maintain alignment while positioning your section cut.)

With your model queued up, you’re ready to slice and dice with the Section Plane tool

Sectioning a SketchUp model

Under the Camera Menu, Set the view to Parallel Projection; notice that you’ve now provided straight-on view for your plan. Next, under Window, select the Scenes console. (Tip: you can hide the Section Plane itself in your LayOut document by opening the Styles window in SketchUp, and editing the default style of your scene to hide the section plane).

Now click on the “+” button and create a scene called “PLAN”. Open LayOut and access your SketchUp model by selecting File > Insert. From here, simply right-click on the SketchUp window and select Scenes: “PLAN”. Then right-click and go to Scale = 1mm:50mm. Your scaled plan is now finished in LayOut, and you’re all set to start dimensioning and annotating the important details.

Setting up your plan as a scene in prep for LayOut

Voila: a SketchUp scene imported to LayOut

Posted by Paul Lee, Viewsion Virtual Environments, SketchUp ATC

This tutorial is based on techniques found in Paul’s new book “Construction Documents using SketchUp Pro & LayOut” available here from SketchUcation and also on the Viewsion Authorized Training Center website.