Superhuman Voice Recognition, True Partisanship, & Windows Source Code

IBM is continuing to work on voice recognition software. Supposedly they can translate on the fly such as Mandarin Chinese and Arabic to English. Sentences are decomposed into conceptual ideas and then translated into a sentence in the target language. That's pretty neat. That's how I think a good translation should work.

It reminds me of the debate in Bible translation of literal vs. dynamic (conceptual) translation. Some people think it's better to be literal but I think those translations are difficult to understand and not necessarily all that more accurate, if at all. More literal tranlsation include the New American Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, or the English Standard Version. A more conceptual translation is the New Living Translation. The Message version though is way on the end of conceptual, though it isn't really a translation but rather a paraphrase.

There was another funny and disturbing story about a study about the brain activity in Democrats and Republicans. The study said that reasoning seems to shut down and emotions take over when considering the opposite point of view. Basically both sides accept contradictory statements from their side but clearly sees the contradictions in the opposite point of view. In fact, they even get a "fix" from this mindset.

Speaking of politics, there's a story on NPR with a hilarious ad for the Liberal Party in Canada for the upcoming elections. Was that a real ad? There's also a funny satire of that ad in another story.

Also, Microsoft is licensing Windows source code to comply with EU's antritrust ruling. They're still charging for the code but it's very interesting that they're finally letting the workings behind Windows out. I wonder what will happen next.