Other places and things that begin with KAIST

Recently I have been working on another, new website. I may have mentioned it before but it is starting to actually have pages and content and stuff. I can not get a RSS feed out of it very simply yet so I am not bothering but I hope to at some point. In any case, my new home page is now located at google sites. For now the URL is not really that nice but at some point I am hoping to get a good one.

KAIST Emblem

In other news. I have been accepted to KAIST and have been given the appropriate scholarships to go there. I will be pursuing a Masters in Design Management and Strategy and hopefully learning a lot of Korean at the same time.

In other unrelated news, Soumitri is working on a project that I think is kinda cool and has been pushing me to think more about the before mentioned Google Design School. Also, given the new website etc. I have been commenting on my project more here, than on this blog.

Comments comments comments. Any medium available.

11-11 11:11:11

From Da Zai

Me in Da Zai, we were in a mountainous hotel in room 11

11 is my favourite number which makes November 11th my favourite day. I know this conflicts with most of the world's thoughts on this day so I try not to bother people with my strange habits.

Pepero Box

Also, I should add, 11-11 is Pepero Day in Korea and Singles Day in China which are both related to love and things, a bit like valentines day.

Writing to be translated

With Google Reader's recent new feature, being able to translate all one's feeds into a language of their preference, using Google Translation Tools, it seems the language of the web is becoming less and less noticeable. However, reading the output of translated sites can often remind us of the value of knowing more than one language. The value I perceive is of course having expression for things which are not included in ones base language. French, the language of love has many shortcomings when describing technical situations,  German, great for precise and complex descriptions but with a very different kind of romance, and for my self with asian languages, a word like rènào or 热闹 which has no direct English translation yet describes one of the key things I love about China.

When it comes down to it, Google translator sucks quite a lot, however languages do not make this task easy.

Where do we go from here?

I think there are 2 directions of interest.

1. Write content with the intention of it being translated - For the time being we do not really know what this means I think most of us do not really know how Google Translator works, perhaps however Google could provide some guidelines on how to make things more translatable by their service. I think this could also include a feature which evaluates a given translation task and suggests words that are uncertain or sentience structures that may cause some problems.
   
2. Create a systems of exceptions - If a writer tacks advantage of the specific strengths of a language it will become harder to translate, however those strengths are really important and can offer significant changes in meaning. To deal with this situation I think known exceptions could be added to a system like the Google Translation Tools. These exceptions would extend the ability of the translation system to firs state that there is some difference in meaning and secondly suggest words that may approximate the idea in the target language. The scheme of having user editable results (which google now has) is great but going on to use that data to create richer output would be really fabulous. 

What do you think about this?

Things that start tomorrow

I have not been blogging much recently because I have been travelling and working and not doing this. In any case, I think I might start doing some more because it can be fun etc.

I need to make more of the things that are supposed to start tomorrow start today. But I guess it is getting late, so it will end up being tomorrow again.

Why are most Australian movies bad?

Does anyone else agree that most Australian made movies end up being relatively bad? It is almost like a trademark of the local industry and yet they keep trying and there is quite a lot of related activity with all the movie shows and film festivals.

Tonight I plan to watch a movie with friends that is said to be a good Australian movie, even here in the states, Australia's movies have a reputation that far proceeds them as most people have not seen too many.

Who knows... Any insight would be nice.