The Widmann Blog: May: 2010

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Automatic subtitles

During the election campaign, I wrote a blog posting about an uplifting video.At some point, I discovered that YouTube are testing automatic subtitles, i.e., speech recognition, and that it was available for this video.Here's is my transcription of the video, together with YouTube/Google's take on it:It's quite shockingly bad, isn't it?I have a suspicion that it might have been designed...

Political honeymoon

YouGov have measured the popularity of the new government (PDF here).The overall approval rating of 60% (vs. 33% disapproval) is perhaps not great.However, what I find astonishing is that it seems to be popular in the entire country:Both sexes (men 62%, women 57%)All ages (18-34 61%, 35-54 56%, 55+ 61%)Both social grade bands (ABC1 65%, C2DE 53%)All countries/regions (Scotland 58%,...

Blog database problems

I seem to have lost all categories (tags) from the database, and my latest backup is at least a month old, so I might be somewhat quiet for the next couple of days while I sort out the WordPress database and figure out what caused the corruption.

Update (at 4pm): Somehow the problem has resolved itself. I just wish I knew what happened. Should I find myself a new ISP?

Amaia Montero

One of Phyllis's old uni friends lives in Spain, and when he heard we had named our daughter Amaia, he said that of course Amaia was now a common name in Spain because of the singer, but he hadn't realised she was now also famous in the UK.The truth is, of course, that we had never heard about the singer before, but she's readily available on YouTube and Amazon:It's funny – she seems to have studied chemistry at Euskal Herriko...

Pippinen på tebunen

Da vi var i Danmark i sidste måned, begyndte Anna at bruge efterhængt bestemt artikel.I begyndelsen overdrev hun dog endelsen, og de fleste ord fik påhæftet suffikset -nen: pippinen 'fuglen', bobonen 'bukserne', tebunen 'bordet', Majanen 'Amaia'.På det seneste er hun dog begyndt at forkorte endelsen, men stort set alle ord er fortsat fælleskøn.Hun er også begyndt at overføre danske idéer...
Into the rose garden
The UK has finally become a normal European country. That must be the unavoidable conclusion from the fact that we're now ruled by a real coalition government, bringing together liberals and conservatives. I welcome it. It's not that I'm fond...
A letter to my Tory friends about PR
Dear Tory friends,you might not normally listen to what I've got to say, given that I'm a liberal and so on, but I have something to say to you about proportional representation.You want to keep first-past-the-post, because you think it's...

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