Babel

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Babel

Archives for April, 2011

DEviaNT: Double Entendre via Noun Transfer

Posted by  on Saturday, April 30th 2011     

“Software that tells dirty jokes” … Double entendres have been making us laugh since the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but up until now computers weren’t in on the joke. Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, two computer scientists at the University of Washington, have developed a system for recognising a particular type of double entendre [...]

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Haunted

Posted by  on Monday, April 25th 2011     

HAUNTED From night to day to night again the clock’s hands grasp illusions. Love knows nothing of time. Love knows passion, fever, reaching for someone to hold onto forever. Like a sorceress, or prankster witch, you left your memory in the dark to haunt me each night when I turn out the lights. I sleep [...]

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Max Mathews, computer music pioneer, dies

Posted by  on Sunday, April 24th 2011     

Computer music pioneer Max Mathews has died from pneumonia at age 84 in San Francisco, his son said. Mathews, often called the father of computer music, wrote the first program to enable a computer to synthesize sound and play it back, the New York Times reported. … His first computer program was written for the [...]

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Get Off My Lawn!

Posted by  on Thursday, April 21st 2011     

    “Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or we boil at different degrees. One man is brought to the boiling point by the excitement of conversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eloquence[1]) What happens when two different forces meet? Do they blend, or do they [...]

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A Conversation between Two Chat Bots

Posted by  on Saturday, April 16th 2011     

Yiran Sheng started a conversation between two chatbots and watched the results: splotchy ==> You like the movie Matrix? jabberwacky ==> I hate it. Do you? splotchy ==> It is not so bad, really. jabberwacky ==> Me, I’ve got a different problem. splotchy ==> Why have you? jabberwacky ==> Yes indeed. Do you have a [...]

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Teaching Computers Regret

Posted by  on Thursday, April 14th 2011     

“By Teaching Computers ‘Regret,’ Engineers Hope to Teach Them to See the Future.” Artificial Intelligence researchers have struggled for decades to create computers that can understand the range of human emotions and feelings, but a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University simply wants to make them feel regret. Working with funding from Google, they [...]

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Speaking your native (heritage) language despite ridicule

Posted by  on Thursday, April 14th 2011     

It’s assumed that just because I grew up speaking Russian that it was always easy for me to speak Russian. No way! My parents’ Soviet immigrant friends liked to talk about how well their children spoke Russian. These dinner parties were horrible for me as a kid because there was such a negative complaining tone [...]

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Ads that analyze and target you personally

Posted by  on Thursday, April 14th 2011     

Billboards that analyze you — the viewer — and change messages accordingly: Imagine an ad that stares back at you when you glance at it — analyzing your face, your age, and who you’re with. Then imagine that ad going one step further, changing its message to display something its analysis suggests will hook you. [...]

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::::: American Effigy 6 :::::

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 13th 2011     

::::: American Effigy 6 ::::: (06.07.10)   Question is Do we love America, More than we love fairness or, Do we even care, Whether the majority of our neighbors, Who share the same values, Have enough or, Have any food to eat,   Question is What defines destitution or, Despair in a depression, Labeled a [...]

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Do you need musical talent to learn languages? No.

Posted by  on Tuesday, April 12th 2011     

Do you need musical talent to learn languages? When people hear the title of my book, Language is Music, they often assume that one has to be a musician or a good singer to learn languages or that I profess that someone can learn language just through music. Neither is true. Language is music because [...]

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