Ideas

Thermomix is an (expensive) fancy machine that can do smoothies, risotto, chai, béchamel sauce, dough, baby food and many many other things. Often it reduces the amount of manual labor - and knowledge - required to make good dishes. Things like risotto instructions of “cook for 20 minutes; don’t let it boil; stir often” translates into a couple of button presses on Thermomix and a completion gong 20 minutes later. A person is free to do something else in between.

Thermomix is used in the kitchens of many restaurants. But I think it could also be used in a café as a visible part of the preparation. In fact, the visible part of the preparation could be part of the appeal and engagement.

Basics:

I knew I was neglecting my blog in 2012, but I did not realize just how much until I received WordPress’ year in review for 2012 (Feel free to take a peek at it). The line that stopped me dead was “In 2012, there was 1 new post”. Sure enough - one post it was.

Well, this blog might be comatose, but I am not dead. In fact, quite the opposite, so busy that there is very little time for crafting articles.

Recipe and cooking apps are aplenty, but it is hard to use an app while cooking and having wet or dirty hands. This may not be a big deal to experienced cooks, but for the beginners it is a catch 22. They want to follow the recipe, but get lost between steps, timing and multiple things that sometimes need to happen in parallel. Technology to the rescue.

Imagine a pasta cooking application on an iPhone. You pick a recipe, chose how soft you would like it and what sauce you would like to make for the pasta. Finally, before you start, you put your Bluetooth headset in and say “Start”. Application, recognizes the key phrase and starts walking you through the recipe. The sequence will - roughly -  look something like this:

Seems like it would be a valuable service to have a website that people could record their names on. Given that most the podcast speakers know the people to be mentioned one way or another, it would not be to difficult to send them an email request to hit a website that allows to record that name. Then, every time they need to pronounce the name, they could consult the website and save the time to all the listeners with bad attempts and apologies.

I am frustrated. I know my corpus (resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly) shares a lot in common with biomedical and legal domain. And I can find interesting articles in biomedical domain dealing with similar issues of complex tokenization, long named entity mentions (though mine are much longer), etc. But I see nothing in legal domain. I have just gone through all of Jurix’ proceedings as well as all of [Artificial Intelligence and Law][3] and all I got is [between 2 and 4 articles worth following-up][4].