Why human translation still matters
For all the progress made in machine translation, some things are perhaps still best done by humans:
Posts
Bring low standards to English language teaching
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/05/teaching-english-fractal-grammar-claypole " Bring chaos theory to English language teaching By relying on grammar rules in class, learners are in danger of becoming detached from the dynamism of spoken language" Sigh, this old relativist bunkum again, re-packaged in pseudo-scientific drivel by making "non-sequitious" references to fractals. The rules of grammar may be flexible and may appear elusive at the fringes, but they are certainly not "chaotic"; there is a huge difference between "playing with language" within the confines of its complex but flexible "rules" (e.g. the "does my broadband look big in this" example), and simply making grammatical errors that reflect errors in both thinking and elementary sentence construction (e.g. dangling modifiers). Pretty much by definition it is children that do not know the difference, and you first need to learn and master the f...
Biggest threat to Facebook
When an entire generation of teens and their parents are simultaneously online, it will become 'your parents network' and kids will want a new network to interact more covertly ... ?
TLex tutorial videos
Been creating some online tutorial videos for our software, TLex, tlTerm, tlCorpus, tlDatabase , etc., e.g.: More here: http://www.youtube.com/user/tshwanedje
Housing bubble
Paul Krugman, 2002 : "To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that ... Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." Brilliant idea, mission accomplished, that turned out so well. Maybe the thinking goes something like this: Feed the goose that lays the golden eggs to the people, and hope they vote for you during the feast, before they realize where the meal came from.
