Trying to Understand Language

Posted by lemiffe in A.I., Communication on Sep 10th, 2009 | 2 comments

Language is beautiful. It is one of the easiest methods of communicating something lengthy. As one may know, images express a thousand words, film may even express more, but both are ineffective when it comes to communicating something fast and immediately to someone (unless you have a polaroid of course).

English, particularly, is much more complex than I thought. As you may already know, I am rather into AI. One of the fields of AI is Natural Language Processing which involves speech recognition, syntactic and semantic organisation, separating words into parts of speech, language understanding, and finally speech generation, amongst others.

I genuinely used to believe there were only 8 parts of speech in English: Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Preopsitions, Conjunctions and Interjections. I stand corrected by Wikipedia. There are about 17 different types if we classify them correctly.

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About Our Limits and Barriers

Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Life on Aug 12th, 2009 | 0 comments

Escape the barriers. Why is it that us, as human beings, many times are constricted to the walls our mind creates?

You see it everywhere. People locked within their social barriers. I am not talking about total loss of social control, nonetheless, I am talking about freedom of speech, and freedom of action, within respectable values, moral, and behaviour.

Us humans set limits for everything. For our thoughts, for our actions, for our writing, our drinking, our eating, and all sorts of things. While some of these limits are clearly good for our bodies, some of them do not exactly create a benefit for us. They create limitations as to how far we are willing to go, how to deal with certain situations, how to run our lives.

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Facebook in challenge to Google – BBC News

Posted by lemiffe in Business, Communication, Computers, Entertainment, Internet, Society on Aug 11th, 2009 | 0 comments

“Facebook was unable to acquire Twitter so this is the next best option,” said Ben Parr, associate editor of Mashable, a news blog covering social media.

“Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search,” said respected blogger Robert Scoble.

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr Scoble told the BBC.

“FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.

What does FriendFeed do?

• Friendfeed lets users bring together many of the accounts they have on social media and networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr
• Updates posted on those sites by a user and their friends are echoed on FriendFeed.
• A built in chat system lets FriendFeed users instantly comment or start a conversation about an update.
• These feeds of what friends are up to can be embedded in webpages or fed out to services such as Twitter.
• FriendFeed works with almost 60 sites including Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn and NetVibes.

“With this acquisition, Facebook is gunning directly not only at Twitter, but at Google. This is a warning shot to those two companies,” Mr Parr told BBC News.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook in challenge to Google.

Twitter site reopens after attack – BBC News

Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Internet, Security on Aug 6th, 2009 | 0 comments

Micro-blogging service Twitter was taken offline for more than an hour on Thursday in what the company believes was a co-ordinated attack.

The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm’s official blog.

Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

Facebook has also said it is “looking into” possible problems with its site.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter site reopens after attack.

Are we becoming Robots?

Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Life, Misc, Society, Technology on Jun 12th, 2009 | 0 comments

I would like to know one thing… Where is our dehumanisation and systematisation leading us to?

This is the world as I see it:

People are tending to flock towards online lives, social networks and chat instead of the telephone, live conversations, excercise and real life.

People are becoming more violent, we are also starting to swear a lot more. A lot of people are losing respect for their elders, siblings and even friends.

People are tending to buy more things every time. Technology has led to more consumer-oriented marketing. A lot of people can’t live without the latest items. Status division is becoming a serious rising issue.

Education is going down. War, greed and control is increasing. A growing percentage feels their life is worthless, boring or monotonous.

Why is all of this happening? How can a few generations change so much the aspect of life itself. Is technology the sole factor in the systematisation of people?

It sickens me. Greed? Envy? Violence? Need for Control? Lack of respect? Murder? Lack of respect? Indiference?

Many of these are claimed to be “natural instincts”. Many think they are embedded in us, as animals we are. But then on the other hand, we claim to be civilised, we claim not to be animals.

So then what are we?! If not animals. We sure act as such.

Our past generations had a greater sense of decency. We are falling fast into constant degradation. I remember in primary school, there seemed to be a constant battle for who was the worst student. The best ones got rocks thrown at.

So as I see it, there are those who strive for knowledge, and there are those who prefer to live indiferent unknowledgeable systematic-consumer lives. By doing so not only are we finishing off with out earth and our resources, but with the little hope for knowledge and progress we have.

Maybe it’s not all our fault, but the education system, the goverment and the social laws and restrictions. But nonetheless, where is our curiosity? Why not leave the box? Why not chose to become aware over staying behind.