Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Why translations of Lady Gaga go awry and the robot doctors can see you now.
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• Musical minx is a joy to many and a trial to others, including Google translate. Ask it how to say the Malay pronunciation of "Lady Gaga" in almost any other language and it will spit out "Britney Spears". just what is going on.
"Google Translate doesn't work by people typing dictionaries into a computer - instead, it's a statistical thing where it compares texts to extract common terms between two languages. People quite frequently make lists of bands, and it's quite likely that these lists might be similar between languages - except a local band might take the place of a US band in these lists - and the statistical process gets a wrong result."
• It is not just unexploded bombs that can be treated by a robot, so can you. about how hospitals are starting to use them so doctors, often hundreds of miles away, can look over patients and decide on what treatment they should receive.
"For now, most of the mobile robots, sometimes called telepresence robots, are little more than ventriloquists' dummies with long, invisible strings. But some models have artificial intelligence that lets them do some things on their own, and they will inevitably grow smarter and more agile. They will not only represent the human users, they will augment them."
• For those geeks who find the duality of binary too black and white comes news of chips that employ the many shades of maybe. about the work of Lyric Semiconductor which is creating probablistic processors.
"A big application for Lyric's new technology will be error correction. 30nm NAND flash memory will typically have 1 bit wrong per 1000. As we reach to build smaller and smaller chips, that error rate is likely to increase. Lyric Error Correction (LEC) uses their probability processing to counter for mistakes in memory processing. LEC gets the same results as traditional binary chips but in an area 30 times as small, and with only 10% of the power."
• Somaliland may be about to go where only science fiction writers have so far dared to tread. the African nation could be the first to do away with physical money in favour of electronic cash.
"Selesom, the major mobile carrier has launched a service where cash is completely bypassed. Mobile banking in Africa is nothing new and is far more advanced in the West or Asia, but Somaliland can take this to a further level because the country itself doesn't officially exist. The state itself runs on a budget of only $40 million dollars so entrepreneurship and innovation is vital to keep the country going as it strives for formal recognition from the rest of the world."
• Finally, here's some pictorial pornography for Tech Brief's hi-tech audience. A look around one of the three dedicated ships used to lay the submarine fibre-optics. depicting splicing, big spools and the giant plow that sets the cable on the sea bed.
"The cable can be buried up to 3m under the sea bed, which happens in waters up to 1.5km deep. This is the limit of what those in the industry consider to be "shallow" waters - areas where fishing takes place, and cables need to be especially well-protected."
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