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How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?

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The Straight Dope tries to answer the question “How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?” and gives a very fascinating insight into the Chinese language:

(3) Enter the syllable into the computer phonetically using Roman (i.e., our) letters. This takes up to six keystrokes plus, in some programs, one more keystroke for the tone. Typically this pops up a menu of possible characters, six characters or so at a time.

(4) Page through the characters looking for the one you want. With 50,000 possible written syllables but only a few hundred possible spoken ones, each spoken syllable can have as many as 131 different meanings (average: 17), each with its own character. You could be paging quite a while, and you still might not find the character you want–no program includes all 50,000. (Answer to obvious question: in speech you figure out the meaning from the context. Never let your attention wander during a Chinese conversation.)

After reading the whole article I am amazed at how the Chinese have managed to be so computer literate!

Our own problems with Indian languages are similar, and if you have any interest in entering Indic languages into a computer, you should check out Lipikaar.com which is trying to use a similar technique.

Taaz.com is way too much fun

Taaz.com is a very easy to use online service that allows you to give any photo a makeover:

This was the original:

If you look closely (by clicking on the photo to get the full size version), you’ll notice that I’ve applied lipstick, foundation, blush, blue contact lenses, mascara, and of course, changed the hairstyle. For each one of those, there are many different options to choose from. Obviously, the “doctoring” of the photo is very visible, but I did not spend too much time trying to get it just right. I have other things to do.

But, try Taaz.com yourself. You’ll have lots of fun.

Hackers can hack your pacemaker!

Up till now, the worst that computer hackers could do was steal your passwords, and maybe your money from your bank accounts. Now, comes evidence, that it is theoretically possible for a hacker to wirelessly hack into the pacemaker that a is installed in a person’s chest and modify its settings - and actually kill the person.

See this post for:

To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.

The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

Gives a new meaning to the phrase “he is in the hospital with a virus infection”.

See full article. (via slashdot.)

Internet for the villages

This is what the internet looks like for a village.

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley’s Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it’s like those “executive assistant” telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).

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The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

Found: here. See also the home page of the question box project.

Ambient Presence

Venkat at RibbonFarm talks about ambient presence a concept that was new to me:

Let’s say you and your spouse work in different cities. You both sign up for a VoIP service like Skype, but instead of dutifully talking every evening, you just turn up the speakers on your respective computers, and leave the Skype connection on. You occasionally say something to each other; you can hear each other’s TVs and kitchen noises. That’s ambient presence. Communication technology becoming so cheap that you can afford to leave it on to create a passive background connection. It is a pretty darn cool concept, so let’s take a serious look at it.

See full article.

This seems to me like a rather powerful idea. Some people are already using this in the IM/chat context. Keeping an IM window open and randomly throwing out a few lines every once in a while is something people have started doing more and more. But if we could extend this to other media (like phones) that could change how we communicate with certain people.

Convert your photos into 3D models

Make-3D is a service out of Stanford that allows you to upload any photo and it converts it into a 3D movie (or more generally, a 3D model that you can explore if you have the appropriate browser plugin). I uploaded this photo:

and a few minutes later, I was the proud owner of this:

This is how it works:

Our software uses a breakthrough technology in machine learning. It estimates depths from the single image by using our monocular vision algorithm, developed in 2005. It captures a variety of monocular cues and learns the relations between different parts of the image using a machine learning technique called Markov Random Field (MRF). Our algorithm first divides the image into small patches and analyzes them at multiple scales to estimate each of the patches’ 3-d location and 3-d orientation. More details could be found here.

The smarter ones amongst you would have realized that what the above means is that the program is pretty much guessing. And it can make mistakes. For example, I uploaded this photo:

and ended up with this 3-D model:

As you can see, the algorithm seems to have put a huge hole in the tower, and Ronak appears to be doing more of a Spiderman routine than regular rappelling.

By the way, the site is very easy to use. Try it yourself.

Plants that sms you when they need water

These guys built a that sends you an SMS via twitter when it needs water.

Found: here.

Facebook meets ICICIDirect?

Cake Financial is a start-up that is trying to bring the concept of social networking to your investment portfolio:

Cake is the free online service that makes it easy to follow the real portfolios and the real trades of your family and friends as well as top-performing members within the Cake community.

The basic idea is that when you and your friends/family sign up with Cake, their actual investments are tracked by cake, and you are informed of who is buying what. Not a “virtual market”, but actual trades made by them with their actual money. Not the exact numbers (for reasons of privacy) but which stocks who invested in, and the percentage returns on their portfolio. The idea is that you can use this information to improve your returns on investment.

15 Years of Java experience required…

This post has a very interesting take on the “Required: X years of experience with Y” concept:

Programming platform experience is like knowing your way around the kitchen. Where are the knives, what size plates do we have, and what spices are available. It’s very useful for getting things done without having to search high and low for every little thing. But it’s also an asset with a cut-off point of diminished returns. Once you have a reasonably good idea where things are, it’s no longer the bottleneck in your culinary performance.

Like chefs, like programmers. Peopleware quotes a study that six months seemed to be the cut-off point for programmers. Once they had six months under their belt, the platform knowledge was no longer the bottleneck in their abilities.

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Which leads me to my point: Requiring X years of experience on platform Y in your job posting is, well, ignorant. As long as applicants have 6 months to a year of experience, consider it a moot point for comparison. Focus on other things instead that’ll make much more of a difference. Platform experience is merely a baseline, not a differentiator of real importance.

See full article.

Cameras to prevent teacher absenteeism in rural India

Update: After writing this post, I looked at the original research paper and wrote a much more detailed post on this topic which is worth reading.

Interesting idea:

Esther Duflo, a French economics professor at MIT, wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India, which is a large problem for remote schoolhouses with a single teacher. Duflo and her colleague Rema Hanna took a sample of 120 schools in Rajasthan, chose 60 at random, and sent cameras to teachers in the chosen schools. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time stamps, and the teachers were asked to get a pupil to photograph the teacher with the class at the beginning and the end of each school day.

It was a simple idea, and it worked. Teacher absenteeism plummeted, as measured by random audits, and the class test scores improved markedly.

Found: here.