http://www.gregplesur.com/blog Insightful posts delivered near-weekly since early 2008 Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:16:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Now that Faye and I have been married for more than six months, I'm pretty sure that we're experts at it. Here's the conversation from today that proves it: Faye: I like John Malkovich Me: I liked him in Being John Malkovich. Faye: I saw him in something else that I liked...it ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/06/17/marriage/ I don't yet have a useful idea for a Google Language project, but the little script at the bottom of this post is me playing with their translation API. My fundamental theory is that translating text from English to another language and then back provides a good test of your translation ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/03/27/silly-google-language-test/ Okay, so much for the weekly-posting pledge. To get into the habit of writing something here regularly, I'll post what I'm thinking about right now, which is this. Google provides an API for automatic language translation. I have no idea how good the translations are, but soon I'll use this for ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/03/24/ahem/ I forgot to post - I wrote a first-pass at the speech->MTurk->speech script last week.  I may clean it up and post the script someplace public, in case anyone else wants to play with it. I get a variety of kinds of answers: If I ask a question of fact ("How many ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/02/15/audioturk/ Huh. I just posted the "Summer day" question to Mechanical Turk for $1.00 and got a response within seconds. I posted it again for $0.05 and got a response in less than a minute. Awesome. I'm going to implement the "Ask the internet" engine now. ... But first, I just spent $0.05 on the ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/02/09/mturk-follow-up/ An article today reminded me of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which I've been meaning to look at for a while. The idea behind the Mechanical Turk (named after a clever 18th-century scam) is that there are some tasks that are tough to perform computationally, but are very simple for humans...recognizing things in ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/02/09/request-for-ideas-mechanical-turk/ (This slackery right here is why I didn't commit to posting something every day.   So: Now I'll commit to two posts a week and see where that goes.) I just realized that I can use the "Pages" area off there to the right to aggregate links that I've been ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/02/03/link-pages/ Honestly, at this point I've pretty much said everything that I wanted to say here. I consider this exercise in public journaling to have been a great success, and I'd like to thank all of you for participating. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have made it this far. ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/01/29/day-two/ Here's everything that I read in 2007, with the following stats: Total books: 35 Ratio of non-fiction/fiction: 0.167 (I'd like this to be higher.) Ratio of books that I didn't like to books that I'd recommend: 0.375 (This actually seems pretty healthy.) Ratio of books whose titles begin with vowels to other books: ... http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/01/27/books-2007/ http://www.gregplesur.com/blog/2008/01/27/honeymoon-pics-before-and-after/