18 Days in Egypt is “a collaborative documentary project about the revolution.” The co-founder of this project, Jigar Mehta, was in Copenhagen June 14th, and I was one of a handful of people who was privileged to hear him speak at Politiken’s Hus. I was sad that so few attended this talk. He did tell his tale to a much larger audience the next day at another conference, but he had a valuable tale that deserved more listeners of the journalist variety. (News of this talk was circulated in journalist circles.) Here are my brief notes from his lessons learned about crowdsourcing “an interactive documentary of the events in Egypt” that occurred from January 25th to February 11th 2011. My notes from the talk Mehta describes how he watched the tale unfold on television. He noticed that many, many people were holding up their mobile phones to record the events.…
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What do you do when your wife gets a job in Nepal and you tag along? You help to build the foundation for machine translation between Esperanto and Nepali, of course! That’s what Jacob Nordfalk did. He was the first speaker at today’s session of Talk IT at Copenhagen Business School. Apertium Jacob talked about working with Apertium, a free and open-source machine-translation platform. Don’t worry, translator friends, this was not a push to replace the human element! The value here is a machine translation tool that is open source and free. Participation in Apertium does require XML knowledge as well as knowledge of the languages used in the corpus, the body of electronic texts that provides the translation foundation. Jacob has even received stipends from Google Summer of Code for projects to build the corpus for Nordic languages. Apertium does a rule-based type of translation, making it more reliable,…
1 CommentThe American Management Association (AMA) is producing some great – and free! – webcasts these days. Today’s webcast was valuable to me for my life outside work. When I am not at the day job that puts bread on the table and provides fun challenges for a technical communicator, I am the “SIG Advocate” for the leaders of all the special interest groups (SIG) in STC. We are spread across 9 time zones and have different areas of focus. All our activities are volunteer – no one gets paid. So how do we manage ourselves and each other and get the job done? When I saw that today’s topic was “Leading Virtual Teams: Managing When People are at a Distance”, I had to sign up to pick up some tips. We are all intelligent and independent adults, and we all lead busy lives and have diverse interests. How can we…
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