The Industry Standard - Comments

I would never go back to

Blog Bloke — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:59:11 -0700

I would never go back to Blogger and my only regret is waiting as long as I did. Thanks for the mention Ian.

Of course they'll break

Constable Odo — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:53:07 -0700

Of course they'll break 10,000 apps by the end of this year and probably double that by the middle of next year. The main problems will be on how many duplicate apps there'll be and how will users be able to cut through all those thousands of apps trying to find one's of value. I spend hours looking and find it difficult to wade through what is available now. Maybe the App Store needs better cross-referencing or more categories like the top 50 selling apps for each type of app. Somehow the App Store seems cramped or something. I can't see enough apps at a time.

It's going to be tough on developers of apps that don't have large appeal but are still very useful. Their less than popular apps are going to get lost in the shuffle in no time at all. They're going to need help from other internet sites doing reviews on the many apps that will be popping up on a daily basis. Looks like there might even be a need for magazines doing reviews on all types of apps. 10,000 apps is a heck of a lot to wade through and I don't even want to think about 20,000.

newfag is new

anonymous — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:21:07 -0700

newfag is new

I would like your people to

Manspeaker — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:15:02 -0700

I would like your people to read my blog Titled "Systematic Monetary Ostracism" It is located on blogger.com/ under my name: marc manspeaker. By the way, the Actor Portaing me is a master-neo-cheater. Most people in Screen Actors Guild are master-neo-cheater.

Your Friend

Marc Manspeaker

2008

I have submitted information

Marc Mansapeaker — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:06:57 -0700

I have submitted information on my own behalf and the behalf of e-gold. Please read and let's get the owners of e-gold and myself their freedom to use a ethical minded and safe way to transfer monies on and international basis. The CIA and the FBI are to blame. Blame is not going to solve this intigrated master neo-cheating problem. Hard effort on an international basis and defectors will be able to help. If you can travel on your own means and do your own investigation of this international crisis, you will be able to help yourself and many other people who may be on your side. Separate and do your research and know your suroundings. Spys are all over.

Marc Manspeaker
Glendale, Arizona USA
2008

"We've been engaging with

cspr — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:02:02 -0700

"We've been engaging with the open-source community for Java to finish off the OpenJDK project, and the specific thing that we've been working on with them is clearing the last bits that we didn't have the rights," to distribute, Sands said. sohbet

Hello Ric Have you fined out

Alex — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:53:34 -0700

Hello Ric
Have you fined out new information when the e-bullion.com website will be online ?
Alex

thankss Sohbet Chat Kadin Hab

john — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:51:08 -0700

thankss

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Haber
Edirne
diyalog
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Mirc

@Payday, not sure what your

keith — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:19:50 -0700

@Payday, not sure what your comment has to do with this prediction, but since you bring up Mrs. Palin, "Alaska Inquiry Concludes Palin Abused Powers" -- Maybe she can share a cell with Mr. Kernell.

@Lev, I have active

David Kuan — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 07:47:10 -0700

@Lev, I have active "against" bets. I am expecting wild and large swings on a daily basis until the crisis is tamed (as seen on Friday Oct 10). However, +1000pts above open is a challenge in the given time frame. With multitude of countries now enacting bail out plans of their own (requiring passage through their own legislatures), it will take some time before any of these bailouts take real affect. The highest ever daily gain is about 15% which took place in 1933 when the DJIA was still below 100. It will take more than 10% to break the 1000 points mark today. The largest point gain in a day ever is tad below 500.

I also posted two new suggestions http://thestandard.com/predictions/suggestions/10-drop-dow-jones-industr... and http://thestandard.com/predictions/suggestions/10-gain-dow-jones-industr.... Can I count on your vote?

I thought some more on the

Erik Sundelof — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:18:17 -0700

I thought some more on the topic and I have some additional comments and thoughts.

Personally I valued their questions as a critical mind is something very important for journalists (and all other professions for that matter). It also gave me the opportunity to further explain the validation process in allvoices. It is from the blog post not transparent in what context these questions were raised and how we address those in allvoices. Basically all of the questions you mentioned are related to the students being unused to the concept of an open platform weaving multiple perspectives to each post via aggregation, community and reputation, but also that they were unaware of the issues faced with editor-driven validation. I have written plenty on that topic here.

The whole idea with allvoices is to provide context and diversity around any(!) report posted together by providing the readers with some guidance of the validity of the report. Basically the really cool part here is the uniqueness of mashing up content together to provide a new more complete overview of any report, whether it is news, opinions or just a human story. As we let you interact around all different news items and opinions, you create something as cool as a content-based network.

I do completely disagree with the statement "automation only provides efficiency, and not quality or accuracy". If that would be the case then I assume you also doubt that Google is either accurate or quality in their search results. We even broaden this concept by bringing in an element of community and also reputation to fight of the issues with PageRank type ranking systems. I therefore do not really follow your point here or the grounds for your claim on automation not being able to create quality or accuracy.

@David, during these

Lev Danilov — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:06:49 -0700

@David, during these economic times, it is more likely than usual. My bet is "for" it, right now, and against the community consensus, so I have a little more to gain than to lose, in this prediction. Have you wagered anything?

David Kernell, the

Payday Loan Advocate — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:36:07 -0700

David Kernell, the 20-year-old son of Democratic Representative Mike Kernell of Tennessee, got popped. According to CNN (“Democratic lawmaker's son indicted in Palin hacking”), he reset the password and gained access to GOP VP candidate Palin's personal E-mail account. It is alleged that he read the contents, took a screenshot of her E-mail directory and obtained other personal information. The information that may have been compromised includes E-mail addresses and pictures of family members, one or more cell phone numbers of family members, family birthdates and more from Palin's address book. Interestingly, after turning himself in, David Kernell pleaded not guilty. He pleaded not guilty despite the fact that he (allegedly) took the information he hacked from Palin's personal account and posted it to a public Web site. Not only that, but he posted the new password he’d created, which would enable others to easily access Palin's E-mail themselves and view any of the contents. As a result, Kernell Junior may be subject to the heat of a five-year prison term, $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. That’s enough to turn anybody into a fluffy white piece of popcorn. At the maximum of $1,500 per loan, that bail would require about 167 individual payday loans to free that fluffy little popped grain treat from being overcooked by cellmates.
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I think the way Dell

Dominique Hind — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:11:06 -0700

I think the way Dell addressed their negativity shows they really get their customers. It took them three years to understand that they need to listen and engage with the consumer, but they have learnt from their mistakes. I think IdeaStorm is a great idea and they really are the pioneers in listening to their customers. I have been following Dell's journey to listening and wrote a post and prepared a presentation about it. It's available at the following URL: http://dominiquehind.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/dells-journey-to-listening...

Would be interested in anyone's thoughts. I do really like Dell and think their marketing should be the poster company for all companies interested in their consumers.

I think this article

Kirti Vashee — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:25:07 -0700

I think this article neglects to mention several new competitors that are also able to produce high quality statistical machine translation systems and are described below. Readers may also be interested to know that there is a well developed open source movement in the SMT technology area that is likely to produce many new interesting companies that address many content translation problems in a unique and very focused way.

I think it is important to point out that none of the MT out in the world today produces human quality translation output. In your interview, it is suggested that MT produces translation at a fraction of the cost of human translation, however, in most cases the output is significantly lower in quality than human quality. The reason it is cheaper is because it is much lower in quality. Many today are pointing to much more intensive man machine collaborations that can and will produce increasing quality within very specific domains. Many are saying this is where the breakthroughs will come from.

It has been understood for some time now, that as the quality of MT gets better, the market will expand and extend the reach of MT into the enterprise, and make all kinds of previously high value monolingual content multilingual. Unfortunately this has been a very slow process.

The most recent NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology) MT competition results show that MSR, Google, IBM and BBN produced the best (as in highest quality measured by BLEU) generic Arabic and Chinese systems. But they were all pretty close, and none produced really huge improvements over last year’s results. Technology initiatives like syntax and hybrid approaches make small differences but something else is needed to really accelerate the rate of improvements. The quality that these generic systems produce today is not likely to get many major enterprises to step up and pay big money for the right of use, even though they are good enough to get millions of Internet users, who will use it as long as it is free.

We have learnt that focusing on a domain (especially a technical domain) makes better systems, and raises the accuracy of raw MT to a level that is much higher than what we see in these NIST competition focused systems. Microsoft has shown that their raw MT translations of knowledge base content is much higher in quality than the generic systems used at NIST and Goggle. This knowledge base content is heavily used by millions of users in their global customer base. Microsoft has disclosed that the satisfaction levels of customers who use raw domain focused MT output can sometimes actually exceed the satisfaction levels of people using the same material in the English source. To my mind this is the most successful use of MT in the world today.

Two recent SMT based startups are a good example of this. In Denmark, a company called Languagelens is having very good luck with translating patent information after training their engines on previous patents. Alfabetics is focusing on developing very high quality (human assisted) SMT translation engine for blog content.

At Asia Online we are seeing that technical domain focused SMT systems we have built with clean data, can produce some pretty compelling raw MT output. We expect that this will be a growth area for MT technology providers in the short term as technology focused enterprises make more and more content available in multilingual formats using MT as an accelerator.

However, it is also clear that none of the MT technology out there today can really replace human beings. Language is too complex, and too filled with variations and exceptions to be completely reduced to algorithmic resolution. I think it is becoming clear that it is important to engage human beings to come and help raise the quality of the raw MT to a level that it becomes more usable, useful and compelling. With SMT, this continuous human feedback can help to drive the quality and capability of these systems to a level that we can start to approach human draft quality.

MT coupled with large scale human feedback can enable systems to improve at a rate that we have not seen yet. Since MT can produce large amounts of content filled with linguistic errors, it is possible to clean this up if a crowd of capable/competent humans can be motivated to help. The popular term for this is phenomena is “crowdsourcing”. We have seen this at work on a small scale, at Facebook already, and at Asia Online we are embarking on a 3 million page translation of the English Wikipedia into Thai initially, then into several other Asian languages. This approach will be used to translate tens of millions of pages and gradually raise this content to human quality levels with assistance from the broad student community that would find the content most useful.
http://news.tourthailand.org/business-news/online-proofreaders-sought.ht...

http://www.bangkokpost.com/100908_Database/10Sep2008_data62.php

MT together with web based massive online collaboration is emerging as a model that can take on huge translation tasks and we see now several initiatives around the world beginning to explore this model. What is special about these efforts is that we are seeing is actually a social phenomenon coming to a focus around a collaborative technological platform involving machine translation. Even in the world of internet video content, we are seeing a company called dotSub that makes a crowdsourced subtitling capability available and allows a lot of video content in English to become viable in other parts of the world or vice versa.

Alain Desilets of the NRC of Canada recently said, “"Two technologies which will drastically change the way we translate content: massive online collaboration a la Wikipedia, and Machine Translation. Shared language data repositories are central to both the collaborative and MT innovations. A year ago, I would have said that MT was still too imperfect to impact the translation industry in any significant way. But recently, progress has been incredibly rapid, even more rapid than its most optimistic proponents ever dreamt of."
http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-index.php?page=Processes+and+tools+...

Brian McConnell of the Worldwide Lexicon Blog makes a prediction in an interesting article on this site:
“The language barrier, as we know it, will be gone by 2010. Computer scientists have been chasing a Holy Grail of machine intelligence for decades, but the breakthrough that will eliminate the language barrier is social, not technical. Language, like music or art, demands people to comprehend it.”

He goes on to say, “The language barrier will be broken down in a series of simple steps. The first phase of this transition will be driven by publishers with large or highly motivated audiences. These early adopters will recognize the value of making their content visible in many languages, and their readers will be happy to contribute. Each website will develop its own translation community from its audience. At this stage of the transition, the system will be driven by a few publishers, and probably a few thousand dedicated translators.

As these projects grow, and as multilingual publishing tools become more sophisticated, aggregators will emerge. These sites will create large translation communities that decide what to translate based on their interests, whether or not a particular publisher is aware of this activity. Roaming mobs of amateur translators will translate whatever they think is interesting. Commercial services that complement volunteer based systems will also appear.”

The full article can be seen at http://blog.dermundo.com/original/2356.html