As an editor and writer for the school newspaper, I record my interviews, either in writing or digitally. While using an electronic recorder lets me to keep track of the conversations I have, I usually prefer to use a pen and paper so as to have my own version of things. This approach lets me jot down questions, organize thoughts, and underline the most important information to make the writing process that much easier.

Of course, my preference comes with a caveat; very few people can write quickly enough to keep up with a conversation while maintaining full attention to detail.  Tapes and digital recorders, of course, don’t have that issue. Eventually I wondered whether you could combine the perfect “memory” of a digital recording with the ability to draw attention to the most important snippets of whatever is going on in real time. The solution doesn’t have to be complicated, and I’m fairly certain it isn’t. If a manufacturer were to add a button that could be depressed and returned to normal by users, and if the recording had a special indicator, the interview process would be easier by leaps and bounds than it currently is.

Enter Cohdoo Highlight. It’s an app for iOS devices that allows for just what I described. Recordings appear to work just as they do on the iDevices’ built-in Voice Memos app, with the significant addition of a big “Mark Highlight” button in the center of the screen. As one might guess, users tap the button to visually highlight the parts they deem important.

For journalists, this still isn’t a perfect substitute for scratch paper to record thoughts and new questions. And there will always be the occasional Luddite source who prefers that the reporter not use any recordings. Of course, there’s also the risk that this might cause some information loss in the hands of writers on tight deadlines, giving them a tool that lets them skim over their interview files and miss the content they forgot to highlight. But the benefits here are pretty significant, and the idea has applications in many places. Take this quote from a student reviewer, for example.

We really enjoyed having the ability to highlight important parts of each recording. While listening to a lecture, we took written notes while using the Cohdoo Highlight to record the lecture. As the instructor emphasized on important points, we highlighted those parts and noted the highlight number on our notes for our future reference when cramming. Compared to Voice Memos this app definitely has significantly better features which make the app absolutely a charm to use when recording and especially when listening to recorded content.

(“Cohdoo Highlight Review“ by Erphan Al-Delgir)

The logical next step would be to apply this not just to audio but to other recorded media. I’m looking forward to seeing new iterations of the idea. As a side note, how about combining Cohdoo Highlight’s features with a speech transcription app such as Dragon Dictation?

For more information on Cohdoo or the $4.99 Highlight app, check out the company’s products page and the blog. Apparently, they’re working on a few updates.

Please donate to humanitarian efforts in Japan, North Africa, or anywhere else your help is needed.

Read More

via The Graphic Side of Life

As you can see in the video, the app is fast and the view is clear. And according to PC Mag, it works as shown in the clip except when translating long paragraphs or fast-moving text.

Word Lens is available for free, but translation packs are a premium feature. To see the app for the iPhone or iPod Touch, start here.

I could elaborate more, but I’ve got a ton of other work to do right now, so I’ll have to cut this a little short. What I’m trying to say is that traditional dictionaries are great tools for seasoned language learners who just can’t recall the right word. When it comes to helping the new students, though, they fall flat because the words exist on their own. Tatoeba takes a different approach by giving translations of sentences, not individual words. Because everything is generated by users who are for the most part accessible and because it teaches with actual examples as opposed to rules, I think Tatoeba could be a great way to pick up a language.

Here are all the versions of “My name is Jack.” And here’s a video explaining the idea behind Tatoeba.

This is a great idea, and I’ve already started translating some sentences in English, Spanish, and Ukrainian. But I also see a whole lot of untapped potential. As translation and language education become more open and more collaborative processes, this same concept of bit-by-bit translation across multiple languages can be exported. I’d like to see within the next few years a large-scale project focused on translating books in the public domain. A crowdsourced version of say, Moby-Dick in Esperanto would be a great read, if you ask me.

One issue: I can’t seem to get Arabic text (or anything else written from left to right) to type correctly. Maybe it’s just me, though.

Related Articles

• 10 Online Slang Dictionaries To Learn Jargon & Street Language (makeuseof.com)
• Effective Translation (gretchenspianos.wordpress.com)
• Babylon Aims To Build A “Quora For Linguistics” Off Its 72 Million Members (techcrunch.com)

Image via Wikipedia

As described in a holiday-themed article at Reuters, the Norwegian government has responded to the fact that about 500 reindeer are killed annually in vehicle accidents. So far, officials have had roughly 2,000 reindeer tagged with reflective bands so that they’re more visible to motorists. The idea is intriguing, and I hope everything works out.

Thing is, I’m a little concerned over a different source of danger to reindeer. If they’re more visible to humans, aren’t they also more visible to predators? I assume the people behind the project considered this, but I’m not sure how the danger was dismissed.

Related Articles

• New Car Sharing Service That Hooks Up Car Owners With Renters Is Sweet, But Is It Green? (treehugger.com)

Call me Captain Obvious, but when people in America move, they tend to bring their belongings with them. Though the amount of stuff they bring depends on how much they own or are willing to leave behind, most families can’t fit two closets, a kitchen, three bedrooms, and Fido into the Honda, so they turn to moving companies. U-Haul is one of those companies, and it’s unique in that it’s more or less a self-service system, meaning that customers do what they desire with the product. That’s what gives its network so much potential as an indicator.

This idea writeup is short and simple. People in different professions often wonder where the population moves. U-Haul vehicles are already location-tracked, and customers pick up and deposit them at their own start and finish points. By taking the start data and the finish data and putting them on a map, analysts can see trends in movement across North America. During the upcoming winter holidays, will more New Englanders travel South than West? During which month do the most people depart from Vancouver? Data from the trucks can give views that answer questions like these and allow for market research that is nothing if not interesting.

One limitation to this idea is the budget factor. U-Haul only caters to one segment of a broad market, and more expensive companies that include labor in their services quickly snap up other potential clients. As a result, the market’s “migration patterns” that come from analysis like this probably won’t be entirely accurate.

Image via Wikipedia

I should probably let them speak for themselves (bad pun), but I imagine that any mobile communication is difficult for the deaf. To my limited knowledge, phone calls are out of the question, text messages are tedious and ambiguous, and video calling is expensive and still in its infancy. That’s why this research project by University of Washington students is so promising. Essentially, the team has created software called MobileASL that works with the cameras built into video calling-capable cell phones. The software recognizes American Sign Language gestures made by one caller and transmits them, live, to the other caller’s device in the form of small files, presumably pictures. This idea is powerful because it is much less taxing than video is on users’ batteries, networks, and wallets. It should also be more accurate than choppy video calls.

All in all, this project has great potential, and I’m sure it will be adopted widely. The only dilemma I see is that two-way communication requires front-facing cameras, something that I’ve only seen on a limited number of devices. Hopefully, these will become more commonplace as competitors mimic the iPhone or as MobileASL gains steam.

For more information, including a video explanation, navigate to the project’s official website at mobileasl.cs.washington.edu. Alternatively, check out a blog post explaining more MobileASL features at From the Moon and Beyond.

Bonus: Feel free to let me know if you think that this sounds strange, but I’d like to propose the idea of calling the software ASCell for the sake of convenience.

Remember Battleship? The game with a grid that had you guess the squares on which Little Billy had placed his ships? This shirt is like Battleship, but ships are replaced with itches, and Little Billy doesn’t lie to you about where the itches are. A 26×26 grid (A-Z and 1-26) dominates the back of the shirt. The wearer tells the scratcher where the itch is by giving him the exact coordinates that he wants scratched.

Besides the learning curve and the possibility of the shirt moving and throwing off scratcher-scratchee (?) coordination, the only issue I see is that the design doesn’t seem to cover the entire back, especially vertically. The uncovered spots are easy for a person to get on his/her own, but it would have been a nice feature that made the shirt a little bit more practical. The design also feels a little too basic, as though it needed something like duration and noogie vs. probe, but it accomplishes what it set out to do.