I bought myself a treat the other day: a handcrafted pen by Gunnar Langemark of Langemark Pens (site in Danish). I was struck by the beauty of the colors of this pen. The black wood is “bog oak” – oak that has been buried in a bog for hundreds of years, even thousands. This particular bog oak comes from the area around Roskilde, Denmark. One of Gunnar Langemark’s friends discovered it when he was out riding in the forest. The lighter colored wood (my photograph doesn’t do it justice) is called “Purple Heart”, which is a popular name for a tree that is native to Central and South America. It has a nondescript story, but it is beautiful to hold and behold. Gunnar has videos on his site so you can see how he makes the pens. I hope you can sense the care he puts into bringing these bits…
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What do you do when your wife gets a job in Nepal and you tag along? You help to build the foundation for machine translation between Esperanto and Nepali, of course! That’s what Jacob Nordfalk did. He was the first speaker at today’s session of Talk IT at Copenhagen Business School. Apertium Jacob talked about working with Apertium, a free and open-source machine-translation platform. Don’t worry, translator friends, this was not a push to replace the human element! The value here is a machine translation tool that is open source and free. Participation in Apertium does require XML knowledge as well as knowledge of the languages used in the corpus, the body of electronic texts that provides the translation foundation. Jacob has even received stipends from Google Summer of Code for projects to build the corpus for Nordic languages. Apertium does a rule-based type of translation, making it more reliable,…
1 CommentThat would be a great name for a rock band – Ada Lovelace and the Librarians! You see, it is Ada Lovelace Day 2010, where we can all give a special tribute to a “woman in tech”. My 2010 Ada Lovelace tribute goes to two women – Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom. They recently displayed their magic skills at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, which I did not attend. @marks did, and he sent me a tweet saying I’d love the panel and that they were very funny. The title of the panel made my heart go pitter-patter: How the Other Half Lives – Touring the Digital Divide. Awestruck, I immediately started following @jennylish and @jessamyn. I viewed the slides and some follow-up material as soon as they were available, but I have not yet listened to the MP3 audio file of the talk (SO bogged down in work…
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