mulufuf - Slashdot User

Submission + - Speech-to-Speech Translator Developed for iPhone

Submitted by

Ponca City, We love you

on Wednesday October 28, 2009 @05:57PM

Ponca City, We love you writes: "Dr. Dobbs reports that Alex Waibel, professor of computer science and language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation. "Jibbigo's software runs on the iPhone itself, so it doesn't need to be connected to the Web to access a distant server," says Waibel. Waibel is an leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces, creating the first real-time, speech-to-speech translator for English, German and Japanese. "Automated speech translation is an expensive proposition that has been supported primarily by large government grants," says Waibel. "But our sponsors are impatient to see this technology become more widely available and we, as researchers, are eager to find new revenues that will help us extend this technology to more of the 6,000 languages now spoken worldwide.""

Submission + - Decline in US Newspaper Readership Accelerates

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Wednesday October 28, 2009 @05:04PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. "Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination," says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. "Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die," writes Mutter. "The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it’s not already too late." Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets."

Submission + - Pliosaur skull found in Dorset

Submitted by jayemcee on Wednesday October 28, 2009 @03:52PM

jayemcee writes: The skull of a sea dwelling reptile that could eat a T Rex for breakfast has been found in Dorset UK and will be displayed in the local museum. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/27/dinosaur-pliosaur-skull-found-dorset-coast Only the skull (2.4 meters long) has been found and the authorities (who bought the item for close to $32,000) will not release the site for fear that the area is too unstable. They speculate that the remainder of the 'monster' may lie under tons of rock and will wait patiently for nature to deliver the goods via landslides and other forms of natural erosion.
'Experts believe it could rival recent finds made in Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, where beasts dubbed "the Monster" and "Predator X" were thought to have measured 15m, and in Mexico, where the "Monster of Aramberri" was discovered in 2002, and is believed to have been of similar dimensions.'
"We only have the head, so you cannot be absolutely precise," said Martill. "But it may be vying with the ones found in Svalbard and Mexico for the title of the world's largest."

Submission + - Nobel prize for Medicine awarded (nobelprize.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05, 2009 @07:29AM

An anonymous reader writes: FTA:

This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes â" the telomeres â" and in an enzyme that forms them â" telomerase.

Comment Use their obsessions --- GameMaker for sure! (Score 1) 962

by mulufuf on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @10:39PM (#26069641) Attached to: Best Introduction To Programming For Bright 11-14-Year-Olds?

My 12 year old loves this. One, it's free, two it has a large community of supporters. Three it reflects many useful aspects such as modularity, extensibility, object oriented principles, shared code, and graphic development environments. I'm not saying it's the most robust language, nor full of best practices - but you cannot beat it's WOW factor for young teens.

In a few short months my son has made tremendous progress. At first he just wanted to generate a gun and explosions. Then he became concerned with the graphics and spent days combing websites for just the right ogre icon to tweak. Then he discovered arrays and decided he wanted to generate all the monsters from an array. Next he decided his code would be much easier to manage if made all the functionality reside in scripts that he attached to the objects. Now he says he's focusing on revising his physics engine! It's a beautiful thing.

Software Missing From Vista's "Official Apps" 288

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 22, 2007 @04:27PM from the big-holes dept.

PetManimal writes "Microsoft has just released a list of 800 applications it says are 'officially supported' on Windows Vista. What's special about this list, however, are the programs that are not included: 'Popular Windows software that is conspicuously missing from Microsoft's list includes Adobe Systems Inc.'s entire line of graphics and multimedia software, Symantec Corp.'s security products, as well as the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox Web browser, Skype Ltd.'s free voice-over-IP software and the OpenOffice.org alternative to Microsoft Office.' Another area in which Vista has found to be lacking is gaming, as discussed earlier on Slashdot."

A Unique Perspective on a 'Game-Related' Tragedy 378

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:55PM from the for-low-values-of-related dept.

Megnatron writes "Penny Arcade has a letter from the stepmother of one of the kids who was recently charged with killing a homeless man. Her article is an extremely sobering tale of the problems dealing with troubled teen. She explains how, in this situation, the parents did everything they possibly could. And, in a refreshing twist, she absolves the games industry of any blame for the tragedy these kids perpetrated. From her missive: 'Video games DID NOT make this kid who he was, and it's unfortunate that the correlation is there. The thing that really gets me with this whole thing is that the kid knows full well that by equating what he's done to a video game, that he will generate controversy and media coverage. It makes me sick that the media is jumping all over this, because that is exactly the result that he wants. The only good thing (if there is such a thing) that has come out of this whole ordeal is that the kid is behind bars. That is exactly where he needs to be.'" Her letter is a passionate, troubling story, but well worth reading.

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