Wednesday 30 March 2011

Google's Newest Guru

Google Talk Guru is a new automated chat bot that can be asked simple questions and will provide you with an instant answer. It is currently an experimental service form Google, but simply invite guru@googlelabs.com in Gmail chat (or any other chat client you may use for Gmail chat) and you can ask things such as the weather for an area or the score for a team and the Guru will reply with the answer.


I wouldn't say it is quite a Guru yet as you can currently only ask it the following topics: score, weather, define, translate, web. However it is a nifty little gadget and has some great possibilities for future expansion.

Back to Black

So everyone has been talking about her for the last couple of weeks so I thought I would voice my opinion. The video I am sure you have all seen along with just over 65million other people, but I am still astounded by the sheer volume of hatred this video has brought out of people! Rebecca is just someone who wanted 10mins of fame on youtube, but seems to have accidentally become the next Justin Bieber!

Granted this song is a bit of a shocker, but these day's that seems to be the best way to get famous! The song covers the dilemma faced by many teenagers..... which seat in the car to sit in?! I personally used to always want to sit in the front seat after years of being forced to sit in the back due to being to small to sit in the front! Anyway i digress. Although being a lyrically challenged song, Rebecca does not deserve some of the horrible comments that she has received.

There is witty satire and then there is just outright bullying!! I personally say well done Rebecca for looking past all the hatred and just enjoying being 13 and famous! If you want someone to complain at, complain at the Ark Music Factory for writing such a dreadful song! Bring on FRIDAY!!!

Tuesday 29 March 2011

The Birth of a Word

So this is my first post so I thought I would put something intelligent in it. Recently I had to write an essay about emerging technologies for university, one of which was social TV. During trawling through pages of people simply linking the original article we were given I found the video shown below. A researcher at MIT named Deb Roy looked into how his son began to learn the English language. To do this he recorded his son's life from birth to the age of 5 and parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaa" slowly turn into "water". He then goes on to show how similar techniques can be applied in the field of Social TV.

Anyway I won't give away anymore, you'll just have to watch it for yourself but I found it very interesting! The original source of the video can also be found here.