Two books, two views - no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks. Is the Internet full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are loosing all our good information sources? That is a point of view of Andrew Keen, author of the book Cult of the Amateur. On the other hand Weinberger, with his own book Everything is Miscellaneous, agrees that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, but argues that there is a lot of good stuff too.

Just a link to an interesting article by Sunayana on Natural Language Processing as applied to problems in India. She has an interesting point that because NLP is so underdeveloped in India, even undergraduate-level projects may be contributing to the cutting edge of research. This is similar to what was mentioned in the podcast about Somali speech synthesis for clinicans that I pointed out a while ago. (Update for July 18: Sparked by my link, there is now a link-rich counter argument at ResNotebook__)

Somewhere between upgrading WordPress and (possibly) upgrading MySql database, all the non latin characters got corrupted. This included my Russian, Spanish, French and possibly Esperanto writing. Basically, anything in UTF-8 that is not in latin-1. The partial solution was go into database administration and changing the text columns collation order to Unicode. Unfortunately, that only fixed the new entries and not the old ones. So, I have to compare latest export with the older backup (which I take before every upgrade) and reconstruct entries from that.

I have tried Tamarind before as an ingredient in dishes, but I have never actually seen the real fruit. I wasn’t even sure it was edible uncooked. So, when I saw it sold in the shop, I had to try it. It turned out to be a very educational experience. The fruit is layered with multiple inedible seeds covered by sweet and sour pulp, inside a little cage in the hard-shell pod.

WordChamp and LingQ are competing online language learning services that use learner driven approach and try to support multiple languages. WordChamp is a (recently) free service. LingQ is free during the current beta stage, as it is a rewrite of the existing paid English-only service The Linguist. Because both services try to be language-agnostic, they use methods that are largely independent of the target language. LingQ’s methodology (from my understanding) is based around repeated reading and listening to the target language material with the learning process based around finding new words, recording them down with their real-world usage and identifying known and new words in the texts.