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Nail Artistry - an evening with Boots No.7 and Jamie Nunn

My nails have never been my most attractive feature. They get to a decent length and then they split, crack and shatter at the slightest knock. They only really look good when painted but this seems to weaken them further. I envy those with almond shaped tapering nails topping long and slender digits. Mine are short and stubby and my hands are ridiculously small for the rest of me preventing me from a career as concert pianist (well that's my excuse anyway).

So a Handpicked Media event with Boots No.7 and nail artist Jamie Nunn wasn't ever really going to light my fire and I went really to show support and see our lovely beauty bloggers in action. How silly was I!

Image: The Beauty Button

The ladies at the PR agency had everything covered - and it didn't matter that my nails looked like I'd been relandscaping my garden with my bare hands because they provided us with nifty things known as 'nail-wheels' to work with. These plastic nails were the perfect place to get creative with the 20 new Staycolour polishes they have launched. The pink fizz flowed and the food replaced supper - particularly fantastic were the Lollipop cakes in the seasons colours - check out Molly Bakes cakes on Twitter @mollybakes.

Image: The Beauty Button

Jamie is a celebrity nail artist - how you get to be one of those I have no idea but boy does he know his stuff. Within minutes he had us stippling, marbling and creating beautiful suede effects. Growing in confidence we moved on to add jewels and hand-drawn designs, in my case a rather boring stripe but the others got really creative. Jamie is currently creating designs for the next Lady Gaga video - here are some of his prototypes - not particularly practical for the office but I loved all that Swarovski crystal!

Image: The Beauty Button

Here are some of the techniques as shown by Jamie for those of you who want to have a go. Obviously we were using Boots No.7 products but you can create the same with your own box of nail tricks.

Plaid effect

• Plaid

–This simple technique is striking and perfect for the more daring. It works particularly well with bright opaque colours. For a different effect try with more than two colours or change the angle of the lines.

•What you’ll need

–No7 Stay Perfect Nail Colours in Me Me Me and Crave Me

–No7 So Smooth Base Coat

–No7 Stay Perfect Top Coat

–Nail art striping brush

•Step by steps

–1. Apply a thin coat of No7 So Smooth Base Coat

–2. Once the base coat has dried, apply two coats of No7 Stay Perfect in Me Me Me! ensuring you let the first coat dry before applying the second

–3. When dry, apply a small amount of Crave Me onto the striper brush. 

–4. Using the striping brush paint diagonal stripes in the same direction across the nail from base to tip . As you get more confident with the striping brush you can decrease the space between the lines for a more intricate and detailed effect

–5.Repeat step 4 but in the opposite direction creating a 'criss cross' effect

–6. Slick on a coat of No7 Stay Perfect Top Coat for a high shine finish

Antique Marble

•Antique Marble

–This simple yet effective technique gives your manicure a vintage style glamour and can be varied depending on the colour combinations used. Metallic shades work particularly well as the second colour to be applied with the sponge

•What you’ll need

–No7 Stay Perfect Nail Colours in Singing The Blues and Hot To Trot

–No7 So Smooth Base Coat

–No7 Stay Perfect Top Coat

–Clean make up sponge

• Step by steps

–1. Apply a thin coat of No7 So Smooth Base Coat

–2. Once the base coat has dried, apply two coats of No7 Stay Perfect in Sing The Blues ensuring you let the first coat dry before applying the second

–3. When dry, using a clean dry make up sponge brush a small amount of Hot To Trot onto the sponge.  Dab onto the nail going from the corner of the free edge towards the cuticle creating a marbled effect

–4. Paint a second coat of Hot To Trot to give a faded antique effect

–5. Slick on a coat of No7 Stay Perfect Top Coat for a high shine finish

Applauding the 2011 Knight News Challenge winners

(Cross-posted on the Google News Blog and the Google Public Policy Blog)

Over the past few months, we’ve announced $5 million in grants to be distributed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the International Press Institute—two non-profit organizations developing new approaches to journalism in the digital age—and we’re pleased to congratulate the first initiatives that have been selected as part of that funding.

Today at M.I.T., the Knight Foundation showcased 16 projects selected as the winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge. Now in its fifth year, this media-innovation contest included $1 million in support from Google. As you’ll see in the full list of winners, these initiatives come from organizations large and small and are reminders that entrepreneurship can be sparked anywhere. Here are just a few examples of the creative ways the journalism community around the world is merging traditional skills with an online landscape:

• At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, OpenBlock Rural will use its seed money to work with local governments and community newspapers across the state to collect, aggregate and publish data.
• In Virginia, the Miller Center Foundation’s State Decoded will serve as a platform to display state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen.
• The Chicago Tribune will collaborate with the Investigative Editors & Reporters organization and The Spokesman-Review on a set of open-source, web-based tools that make it easier for journalists to use and analyze data.
• Liverpool, U.K.-based ScraperWiki will bring its experiences with public data to journalism camps in 12 U.S. states.
• Chile’s El Mostrador will develop an editorial and crowdsourced database to bring greater transparency to potential conflicts of interest.
• Ushahidi will build off its past crisis efforts to improve information-verification across email, Twitter, web feeds and text messages.

Other winning proposals tell rich multimedia stories, bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media and further improve the utility of data to journalists. Our sister program in partnership with the International Press Institute is also well underway. The entries in that competition are now in and the winners will be announced later this summer. We look forward to seeing the impacts these initiatives have on digital journalism and hope they encourage continued experimentation and innovation at the grassroots level.

Posted by Jim Gerber, Director, Strategic Partnerships, News

Melissa Nathan Award - helping families in crisis

This year was the fifth of this award and I know we are inundated with awards these days but this is one that is definitely close to my heart. In 2006 novelist Melissa Nathan died of breast cancer leaving her lovely husband Andrew and small child Sammy. She was hugely talented and after her death it transpired that she had been quietly working to raise funds for families in crisis. Her parents and Andrew decided to carry on this work in the form of the Melissa Nathan Foundation.

Author Melissa Nathan

The Awards held in London's Cafe de Paris, were set up five years ago to champion funny female-targeted writing as well as to promote the foundation. Because of the enormous affection held for both Melissa and Andrew the judging panel is pretty awesome and has been the same for the full five years. Once again Jo Brand, Joanna Trollope, Sophie Kinsella, Morwenna Banks and Liza Tarbuck have got together along with Waitrose book buyer Freya Wright and this years award sponsor Andrew Cleaves (MD of National Express Coaches) to read all seven finalist books.

The shortlist was Foursome by Jane Fallon, Getting Over Mr Right by Chrissie Manby, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson, Obstacles to Young Love by David Nobbs, Perfect Proposal by Katie Fforde and Sweet Temptation by Lucy Diamond. You may have read one or more of these - I must confess I haven't, but will definitely be checking out the overall winner, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

Each judge gave a brief overview of one of the finalists, Jo Brand gave us a fabulous and filthy 20 minutes of stand-up and the drinks and food was plentiful. The star of the event however was the promotion of The Writer's Club which is on sale with all proceeds going to the foundation to help families in crisis. Melissa's friends who are writers have all contributed plus there is a story by her nine-year-old son Sammy and an unpublished play, The Big C, by Melissa written while she was undergoing treatment. If you see this in the shops please buy a copy - you will be helping a worthwhile charity details of which are here.

The focus of this charitable foundation is to support families in crisis such as those split up by poverty with parents going away to earn a living, families divided by war, families with very ill members, those in poverty, those who have suffered  financial hardship because of crime, and anyone else who needs their help. A little goes a long way to make life for these families more bearable.

When she was alive Melissa Nathan provided laughs through her novels which include The Nanny which is one of my favourites, even though she's no longer here the laughter continues through her awards - a really fitting tribute to a very special woman.

Wyoming has officially gone Google

Q: What do national parks, female governors and Google Apps have in common?

A: Wyoming was the first state in the country to have each of them.

This morning, Governor Matt Mead announced that the state of Wyoming has completed its transition to Google Apps for Government. Since the state first declared its intention to go Google eight months ago, Wyoming has worked quickly to move all 10,000 state employees onto Google Apps.

For the first time ever, Wyoming’s entire state government now shares a common email, calendar and document system, making it easier for employees to find and collaborate with one another. By going Google, the state is also saving taxpaying Wyomingites approximately $1 million annually. Who knows which next great “first” they’ll put these savings towards?



You can view the live stream of the Governor’s announcement starting at 8:00am MT.

Posted by Scott McIntyre, Google Enterprise Team

Google Translate welcomes you to the Indic web

(Cross-posted on the Translate Blog and Research Blog)

 

Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, we’ve launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63.

Indic languages differ from English in many ways, presenting several exciting challenges when developing their respective translation systems. Indian languages often use the Subject Object Verb (SOV) ordering to form sentences, unlike English, which uses Subject Verb Object (SVO) ordering. This difference in sentence structure makes it harder to produce fluent translations; the more words that need to be reordered, the more chance there is to make mistakes when moving them. Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are also highly agglutinative, meaning a single word often includes affixes that represent additional meaning, like tense or number. Fortunately, our research to improve Japanese (an SOV language) translation helped us with the word order challenge, while our work translating languages like German, Turkish and Russian provided insight into the agglutination problem.

You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more of the web content that powers our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, we release alpha languages when we believe that they help people better access the multilingual web. If you notice incorrect or missing translations for any of our languages, please correct us; we enjoy learning from our mistakes and your feedback helps us graduate new languages from alpha status. If you’re a translator, you’ll also be able to take advantage of our machine translated output when using the Google Translator Toolkit.

Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we’ve enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards. For example, if you type in the word “nandri,” it will generate the Tamil word நன்றி (see what it means). To see all these beautiful scripts in action, you’ll need to install fonts* for each language.

We hope that the launch of these new alpha languages will help you better understand the Indic web and encourage the publication of new content in Indic languages, taking us five alpha steps closer to a web without language barriers.

*Download the fonts for each language: Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada.

Posted by Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist

Why I love my Kindle!

I have noticed recently there have been lots of conversations on Twitter about the pros and cons of Kindle and electronic readers in general. Is this the death of books as we know and consume them? Or is it just another way of accessing reading material over and above ink on paper?

I must admit that I am a long-term lover of books. I may spend my life online but books were my first love and my bulging book-shelves are testament to this. And this is where the problem lies, because although I like to think I have a library of well-loved pieces of literature, what I in fact have is shelf upon shelf of yellowing paperbacks which when they are not standing the test of time in terms of their ageing fabric, have dated beyond  help in terms of their content. I know I wouldn't like to live in a house with no books - it is a way of judging someone when you enter their home as to whether they are going to be 'your sort of person' which is pretty terrible when you think of it. There is a comfort to being surrounded by literary classics which you have loved and had an effect on your life and thinking but if we are absolutely honest with ourselves these probably account for around 20% of our books. The rest are made up of disposable entertainment - very much of it's time and dating quicker than I am. 

Okay so I have some great hardback reference books (but even these date) and some timeless classics. Would I chuck out the Shakespeare, Dickens or even the Peter Ackroyd or Sebastian Faulks? No probably not. But last years Dan Brown read on the beach and smeared with suntan lotion? Or all that chick lit that helped my journey on the Piccadilly Line? Does it really warrant display and careful archiving. I think not.

A few years ago we had a clear out. Five boxes of paperbacks went to the local Red Cross Bookshop. And have I missed just one of them? No. And this is where the wonderful Kindle has become my favourite piece of kit. I can browse the bookshop from the comfort of my armchair and I can download chapters to test run the book and see if I like it first. I can carry around in my handbag more books than I will have time to read in the rest of my lifetime and there is nothing to stop me from going out and buying the hard-copy version if it's one I think should grace my bookshelves. I'm discovering more writers because of this and it's costing me much less to do so. I can download the classics for next to nothing and my handbag (and consequently my back) is not suffering because of overload. I simply love my Kindle and believe that every English Lit or Drama student should have one to hand. 

And what am I reading at the moment? The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Before that I read a G K Chesterton because I had never read anything by him before and they were raving about him on the radio. So you see, I read wider and because it's EXACTLY the same as reading from the page I've forgotten that there's a difference really...

Has anyone else bought a Kindle? What are you reading? I'm always on the lookout for recommendations...