I got suckered again. Steve Kaufmann - founder of thelinguist.com has been asked by a learner who is also studying to be a second language teacher about the concepts of interlanguage and fossilization. Given that Steve does not hold much respect for educational theories, I thought it would be interesting to see him stretched [...]
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Synthravels (via Springwise) is a barely nascent company that offers a travel guide experience in virtual world. You pick which virtual world you want to go to and what kind of things you want to see and they will find you a guide. Last time I visited the Second Life newbie ground, there was a [...]
Continue reading about Synthravels: Let us show you the (virtual) world
I needed to convert multiple MSWord documents into the OpenOffice.org format and then later to convert those documents further into HTML. How to do it with a single document is obvious; it took some searching to figure out how to do it for multiple documents.
The magic menu turned out to be File/Wizards (Document Converter and [...]
Continue reading about Obscure bulk format converters of OpenOffice.org
I was listening to the Trying to Learn Spanish podcast and in its 11th episode somebody mentioned an interesting e-book (Thirteen Senses by Victor Villaseñor) that has parallel English and Spanish text and allows to quickly switch between them.
I like the idea of bilingual books, so I went hunting for it. The book is available [...]
Continue reading about Spanish/English bilingual e-book is available free via Overdrive
Wendy Seltzer’s plain-english explanation of the Microsoft Windows Vista’s EULA was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. There will be no Windows Vista on my next computer. I am sick and tired of worrying about computer viruses and misbehaving software; having the operating system that decides to remove functionalities or sabotage my work [...]
Continue reading about The next computer in my household will not run Windows
What would I do, if I had 3 more hours a day free? I would learn 3D modelling and animation.
This used to be the skill that only a limited number of people needed and the tools were difficult and expensive. With computer power not that long ago, even having the skills was not very [...]
Continue reading about Wish list for ‘copious’ spare time - 3D modelling and animation
David Rothman of the TeleRead fame has written a good background article on the e-books for the Innovate - journal of online education (free registration required).
While David’s articles at his blog are frequent and in-depth, any one of them is too tactical for a good overview. The article at the Innovate is a good summary [...]
Continue reading about Good overview of e-books - especially for distance education
A new Borders bookshop opened near me. Just for fun, I decided to look at their Russian books section (in original Russian). I expected to find none. The result was much stranger.
There were two books on the shelf. One was something non-memorable. The other one, however, was Nobokov’s translation of Alice in Wonderland. So, what’s [...]
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Couple of interesting things happened recently in the Computational Linguistics related fields that I thought were worth linking to:
ACM Queue had an interview with Mike Cohen of Google (previously of Nuance Communications) discussing recent advances and changes in speech recognition technology.
Pluggd, with its hotly discussed demo of HearHere, uses speech recognition and some sort of [...]
Continue reading about Computational Linguistics - News update for Oct 9, 2006
Philips recently had a Simplicity event, where they showcased a number of concept products that may or may not make it into the real world in the future.
To go along with the event, Philips also setup a voting board for a number of discussion topics. One of the topics currently under discussion is whether e-books [...]
Continue reading about E-book discussion at the Philips’ Simplicity forums