Fortnightly Mailing

Dasher - Open Source software helping skilled users to write at over 30 words a minute by pointing

Source:Dasher Project

Last March I mentioned David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. (Read it before you decide on any domestic or personal energy saving investments.) MacKay is a Professor in the Cambridge University Department of Physics and a leading figure in the artificial intelligence community. He is closely involved in the Inference Group's Dasher, an Open Source "zooming" text entry interface:

"You point where you want to go, and the display zooms in wherever you point. The world into which you are zooming is painted with letters, so that any point you zoom in on corresponds to a piece of text. The more you zoom in, the longer the piece of text you have written. You choose what you write by choosing where to zoom."

The eyetracking version of Dasher allows an experienced user to write text as fast as normal handwriting - 29 words per minute; using a mouse, experienced users can write at 39 words per minute. Here are a three page explanation and some videos; and MacKay will be talking about Dasher (and a newer sister product, Nomon) at an open public meeting in Cambridge on 17 June. If any reader gets to this talk I would happily include a report from the meeting as a Guest Contribution.

Progressive austerity - a term to watch

You know things have come to a pretty pass when a term like "progressive austerity" come into use, especially when an egalitarian (?) think tank originates it. See this 21 May 2009 Financial Times piece by Richard Reeves, head of Demos. Excerpt:

Second, progressive austerity means giving the public sector more than just a hard squeeze. The principal lesson from Canada – where spending was cut by 10 per cent in the mid-1990s – is that whole budgets, agencies and departments should be axed. The default assumption in spending rounds is that money will continue to flow towards an activity. Expenditure must address a clear need, through demonstrably effective policies.

Much of the quangocracy that has sprouted under Labour will fail one or both of these tests. Regional development agencies, sector skills councils and the communities and local government department should all go. Any agency with the word “improvement” in its title could probably disappear without discernible negative effects. Middle-class welfare should end. Child benefit should be abolished. Subsidised higher education ought to be targeted at low-income students.

Mapometer - a well implemented way of tracing and saving a route onto a Google map

Thanks to Nicky Ferguson for sending me a link to Mapometer. You can use it to trace, save, and share a route on a Google Map, Mapometer estimates distance, energy used, and height gained. This example of its output is my regular (well, not that regular) run from my front door. Serving a different function is Where's the Path, which enables you to view an Ordanance Survey map side by side with a Google satellite image of the same terrain, there by working out where in the landscape a route lies. A mashed together version of these two services would be a killer application for fell-runners.

Device diversity. More blurring of the boundary between phone and PC.

Succinct article in the Economist which properly credits One Laptop Per Child with triggering the development of the netbook and points out that several PC-makers are now working on devices relying on a chip designed by ARM (i.e. neither Intel nor AMD) and running Android, a Linux-based "software stack" (operating system, middleware and key applications) for phones developed by/with the support of Google.

Google Translator Toolkit

Google has launched Google Translator Toolkit, a set of tools to enable users to exploit the power of Google Translate whilst enabling them to improve upon the machine-translated output, contributing in the process to the quality of Google Translate's output. Find out more.

Links to previous posts on this subject:

• 12 June 2005 - Combining human with machine translation;
• 24 January 2006 - Machine translation;
• 24 November 2006 - The November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results;
• 26 April 2008 - Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?;
• 30 September 2008 - Google launches eleven more languages at translate.google.com;
• 21 May 2009 - Automatic translation of email.

A wiki full of snapshots of uses of learning technology in UK HE and FE

Here is a wiki with a wide and well structured range of "best practice examples" of learning literacies, defined as the range of practices that underpin effective learning in a digital age, for example academic skills, information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, ICT skills, learning to learn. The wiki has been produced as part of the JISC-funded Learning Literacies for the Digital Age project at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Google Wave - plenty to think about in this 90 minute overview

Updated 4 June 2009

I'm not that easily impressed by new ways of using the Web - because I think there is no shortage of useful tools: instead there is a shortage of useful tools put to good use.

If you've got 90 minutes to spare, and can tolerate the self-congratulatory tone, which measured about 5 on the Wolfram scale, the presentation below explains Google Wave, a very sophisticated "rendered-in-your-browser" but "running-in-the-cloud" collaboration environment, which Google says it will launch later in 2009, and which makes Google Docs (and a lot of other collaboration products, VLEs, e-portfolios, social networking environments) look extremely primitive. 

John Lanchester in LRB on the banking crisis

"The RBS corporate report  is like that. (So are their slogans: ‘Make it happen.’ Make what happen? A £100 billion tab for the taxpayer?) The section on corporate citizenship at the beginning is particularly good value. The firm is involved in plans to increase general levels of financial education. ‘When people have been educated about money and how to work with financial services firms they are more likely to make the right decisions and to avoid difficulties.’ That’s true, but you can also just rob post offices. ‘RBS is a responsible company. We carry out rigorous research so that we can be confident we know the issues that are most important to our stakeholders and we take practical steps to respond to what they tell us. Then occasionally, we blow all that shit off, fire up some crystal meth, and throw money around with such crazed abandon that it helps destroy the public finances of the world’s fifth biggest economy.’ See if you can guess which of those sentences is not in the report."

The 28 May London Review of Books has a long, entertaining and informative piece about RBS and the banking crisis by John Lanchester, from which the extract above is taken.

Social solidarity, high levels of taxation and economic competitiveness are not mutually exclusive

This letter appeared in the 23 May 2009 Economist, and I am posting it with Bo Rothstein's permission.

SIR – You pointed to a shift in our understanding of which socioeconomic template is “the best” in Europe (“A new pecking order”, May 9th). The neoliberal Anglo-Saxon blueprint is in shreds, you say, and the French model, with its heavier regulation and higher taxes, is being given a second glance. However, looking at the data it is not the French but the Nordic countries that have the upper hand.

The World Economic Forum ranks the Nordics at the top for economic competitiveness; Transparency International ranks them towards the bottom on corruption; and the World Bank places them ahead of other countries when measuring the “knowledge factor”. On almost all measures of social trust and social capital, the Nordic countries come out ahead. Moreover, they have outperformed most of their neoliberal Anglo-Saxon counterparts as well as France and Germany in economic growth during the past 15 years.

Simply put, and contrary to what most economists take for granted, the Nordic countries have shown that social solidarity, high levels of taxation and economic competitiveness are not mutually exclusive. Public investment in human capital creates a sense of equality in opportunity among large segments of the population, which in turn has a positive effect on social capital. Together these factors increase economic prosperity.

Bo Rothstein
Professor of political science
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden

Automatic translation of email

With minor revisions, 25/5/2009

I've occasionally written about machine translation, the quality of which has improved greatly in the last few years, along with an increase in the number of language pairs between which machine translation can be made. (There are some links below.)

Between 2004 and 2006 I was involved in a transnational trade union education project, and I can remember speculating with someone during an early morning run along a beach in Portugal that sooner or later Google would introduce a feature to Gmail which enabled users without any language in common to sit at opposite ends of a communication, each reading and writing in their own language.

On 19 May, Google announced that Gmail now provides this; and a user can activate it through the "Settings" and "Labs" tabs, then scrolling down and activating "Message translation". I think the arrival of this feature is very significant.

I've tested it superficially, and it works pretty well. To judge the feature's utility properly you would need to have several rounds of an email exchange relying entirely on machine translation. Anyone who is a Gmail user with the feature activated, who wants to email me in a language other than English is welcome to do so in order to test this out a bit more.

Links to previous posts on this subject:

• 12 June 2005 - Combining human with machine translation;
• 24 January 2006 - Machine translation;
• 24 November 2006 - The November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results;
• 26 April 2008 - Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?;
• 30 September 2008 - Google launches eleven more languages at translate.google.com.

With thanks to Dick Moore for highlighting the announcement to me.