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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Ipsos-MORI finds CON and LAB level pegging – but with Boris as leader they’d be 5% ahead
LAB & CON level pegging amongst those certain to vote with @IpsosMORI . LAB 2% ahead with all expressing VI pic.twitter.com/Je4sGsBxGa
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I said if UKIP don't win each seat, a pro EU party will.. no one said anything about MPs
Why don't you spend some time trying to make your party more electable rather than insulting people who disagree with their policies? #Nastyparty
We need a yellow box to explain why no wage growth is a sign of Osborne's genius.
Then you have the problem of converting speech-to-text to feed into the translator. Anyone who has used Dragon, IBM, or a.n.other speech-to-text tool knows that you have to teach them your speech, and even then they often get it wrong. In face-to-face communications they just don't work.
Also, different dialects - for instance an English to Cantonese translator would find it hard to cope with Brummie or Scouser accents if programmed with RP. The fact we can (mostly) understand those accents (and they can understand ours) is a tribute to our brains.
And your idea of interfacing directly into the brain is, for the moment, pure SciFi. Some rather trivial and self-publicising experiments aside, we have precious little idea about how the brain really works.
The instant face-to face advantage of speaking, and having a thorough grasp of the idioms of another language will not be beaten by technology for a long, long time.
As someone who loves technology I would love to say the problem will be solved in twenty years. Sadly, it will only really be solved when AI comes in, because good speech to text and text translation will depend on a rather good AI. And when that happens, everything changes. (ref. Skynet).
Good luck with the Babelfish.
wisdom of the crowd, gawd bless em...
[You do want the economy rebalanced from high unemployment and excessive reliance on financial services, I imagine?]
Sorry ICM but you really must try harder.
abolutely rebalanced Richard it's long overdue.
but I don't want ordinary people's wages shoved down because of excessive immigration, poor skills, crappy no hours contracts and all the rest of the Blair paraphenalia Cameron has done bugger all about.
Osborne simply Gordon Brown in first gear.
For me the biggest divergence between the public image of Boris and the reality is that some people I know who have had dealings with him describe him as far, far less amiable than you might be led to think from his public persona.
From your quoted article
"The German computer scientist and his team have already made substantial progress. Google Translate can now translate text back and forth between 71 languages, be it from English into German or from Icelandic into Japanese."
Have you ever tried to use Google Translate? It is a heap of junk. The idea that you could translate from one language to another and then to a third whilst retaining the meaning is fanciful. For a phrase it is sometimes useful in giving you, with some imagination on your part, the gist of the meaning. For a block of idiomatic text it is worthless. For technical stuff, where jargon is common, it is even worse. As a test take a chunk of one of your own novels and feed it in, go on, and let us know what you think of the text that comes out - how many books would you sell if that was the sort of content?
Yes, it will get better but nowhere near good enough in your lifetime, let alone mine, to rely on for entertainment let alone money or engineering issues, and they are what matter.
Firstly the average tells you very little: if we do have people moving from unemployment into mostly not particularly-well paid jobs, and a lower dependence on massive pay in the financial service sector, the average wage will appear to come down. Elementary arithmetic, which doesn't mean ordinary people's wages are coming down (there are lots of other factors as well, of course). Of course it is true that ordinary wages are not rising much if at all, so far. That will come soon.
Secondly, yes, immigration has been too high. Hardly Osborne's fault, though. He inherited the mess, he didn't create it.
Thirdly: Yes, poor skills are a key factor, but you are too impatient. That will take three parliamentary terms to fix, but Gove has made a superb start with getting the basics right, notably for the bottom 25% by household income who were abjectly failed by the education system the government inherited.
Osborne is the complete opposite of Gordon Brown: he's doing the right thing for the long-term. The results are now so clear that only the most blinkered, such as David Blanchflower, can possibly fail to see them.
Never underestimate technological change.
Learn a language. Programming language. Or several.
Or Networks.
Oh yes! They were in the Eagle comic when I was a boy, they are just appearing a a lot later than we were led to expect. They are also stuck to the roads which wasn't part of the plan.
So actually for some of these wonders of technology that we have undoubtedly experienced are a bit short of what the far-seeing people predicted. Thus when Mr. T and others predict that in twenty years being able to speak a foreign language will be unnecessary because we will have Babelfish, some of us are inclined to say, "Oh, yes, we have heard that sort of thing before" and be a bit cynical.
The reason some English do learn foreign languages are reasons that are not replicated by computers eg socialness , politeness, because its a challenge, to appreciate the beauty of a language. Whilst a machine can deal with the technical side it seems a bit soulless (I am sure Stephen Hawking would prefer to speak with his tongue not through a box)
If so - why ?
If you don't want your daughters to have a second language or maybe even a third and the extra ability to learn that studying foreign languages brings that is for you. However, if you don't want your girls to learn a language then might I suggest you encourage them to take up a musical instrument.
But you really have to try and get away from the mindset that UKIP voters are going to be browbeaten into voting Tory because you want them to... you keep trying this with me, someone who has never voted Tory and disagrees with almost all that Cameron says and does. Things have changed
There is value in learning a language, e.g. even a dead one like Latin, but for practical business use machine translation will become more and more the norm.
ARF!!!
Just asking.
Maybe it is as computers don't do dancing . (that Japanese robot that James May /Karl Pilkington keep visiting is chit at it)
http://www.epo.org/searching/free/patent-translate.html
There has been massive progress since the DARPA Grand Challenge ten years ago. But don't be fooled by Google's publicity: they've been doing good stuff, but all their publicity about so-many hundreds of thousand of miles driven contains a certain amount of smoke and mirrors.
It's the old story: any idiot can knock up a prototype in their bedroom, reliable production products with no edge- or corner- cases is much, much harder to produce. The last 10% of effort can take 90% (or more) of time and money.
The cars also have $150,000 of equipment, including LIDAR. Look at all the idiots who drive at the moment: do you really think they check their tyres or lights as often as they should? Would they check the relevant sensors? Of course not.
Safety is also paramount. There's a story from a couple of decades ago about a certain manufacturer's attempt to remove the physical link between steering wheel and steering being brought down by someone changing a CD... (yes, really). (*) Expect many of these when the first driverless cars appear in any number.
It will happen (and before automatic real-time translation). But it will be painful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/6300/20140501/heres-how-googles-driverless-car-avoid-pedestrians-bikers-on-the-streets-at-least-most-of-them.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/04/28/google-driverless-cars/8409475/
(*) If you want to know the gory details, it was a fly-by-wire system. The steering wheel inputs were converted to electrical impulses and put on a data bus. Sadly, they also put the CD player on the same bus. In certain circumstances, when changing CD the bus would get saturated with data, leaving the steering unresponsive. It's fairly incredible that some brilliant engineers made that mistake, but that's life.
The EU will be the first large organization to switch to one of the machine translation, interpretation and translation costs because they .... € 11 bn. Yes it is. One billion euros a year.
Or they can buy some Babelfish platform will be, it will cost them about 200 pounds and chips for a guy who opened a package on the computer.
Translation may not be so good human translantions, for many years, but they can - and huge savings will be too tempting to resist.
The same happened in so many industries. In the Uber taxi driver, has a GPS, is not as good as who did the black taxi driver knowledge, but the former is seriously cheaper, faster, and so win.
Of course, in time, Uber taxi will be unmanned.
I always feel poignant Unfortunately, when I see people on mopeds learn. It's like seeing someone Encyclopedia of trickery.
Its perhaps inevitable and I don't want to sound like a Luddite but it will not be a perfect world when we get to a stage when people do not need to know or learn anything at all , no need to read a map, no need to learn a language , no need to learn mental arithmetic, no need to have a general knowledge, no need to drive because computers can do that for you.
It will not be a perfect world but rather a sad one!
I see Foyles at St Pancras has shut its doors btw Again rather sad but ineivtable
Prices are rising and wages aren't. Go figure.
As for doing things for the long term, simply a joke. Osborne has no more been a reforming chancellor than Gordon Brown.
My tongue is indeed very talented.
And I'm trying to learn Portuguese and Spanish over the next year or so
Besides, that is text translation. Sean was talking about voice translation, which is a much larger kettle of fish.
Also note these translation services send the text to a server to be translated by a rather large bank of machines. Without Internet access they are useless, and you have the security aspects of another company knowing your secrets (i.e. what you are translating).
Anything is possible.
I think this will be the case for a long time. And it is not new. James I & VI once claimed that lawyers knew no more law than anyone else, they simply knew where to find it. That seems ever more relevant today.
Also the English -> A.n.other -> English test is rather easy for the server to game.
As an aside, I heard a Radio 5 interview from the Welsh parliament a few years back, where it turns out they employed two sets of translators: one from Welsh to English, and the other from English to Welsh. I find that hard to believe, and would love to know if that was actually true...
LEAST Ukippy seats in Eng&Wales:
#5 Hampstead & Kilburn
#4 Kensington
#3 Brent North
#2 Ilford South
#1 Cities of London & Westminstr
In my experience Inshallah ("if God wills it") can mean anything from "Fanatastic Idea, Boss, we will get on with that right away" to "You can F*ck right off with that load of crap" and any and every blend of meaning in between. When a machine can do as well as a human mind in sorting out what the speaker meant when he uttered just that one phrase then we might be getting somewhere.
Of course, that brings us on to the point of how much communication relies on the words we say, as opposed to the way we say them and the body language that is going on at the time we say them. The actual problem of working out a reliable translation machine is trivial compared to getting a machine that can cope with the full meaning of human interaction and do so across races and cultures.
I fear when I said that Mr. T's babelfish would not happen in his lifetime, I think I might have been optimistic. In probably won't happen in his great-grandchildrens' lifetime.
Hmm. Not sure I believe this would really happen. Boris is likeable, but I'm unconvinced he'll travel well beyond the south. I might be wrong, he certainly confounded expectations in London. Maybe we'll get to find out.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/722387.html
What it is Martin Day would say? Taxi For The Yellow Peril! :^O
Surprisingly perhaps, most employers, when polled, want skills rather than knowledge and soft skills rather than hard skills (how to run projects rather than how to lay bricks or fibre-optic cables).
Now, whether educationalists (the blob) are right to assume that you can have skills independently of knowledge is open to doubt but then, I'm no Nicky Morgan.
Mir gehts warm, or similar is how Germans say they're warm (if memory serves, it's a while ago).
If I had to get a book translated I'd far prefer, if possible, a human to do it so they can get the nuance and subtlety right.
It's also a matter of vocabulary level. When I was, briefly, in China a delightful young lady who worked for a bank asked me to cast my eye over a document she'd prepared in English, to check it. Of course, I agreed. The only flaw I found was that I didn't know some of the words, because they were too advanced (which did make them seem out of place). That's not technically wrong, but would a computer ever be able to assess whether something was high brow or 'slangy' enough?
As a rambly aside, I wish more computer games had German language options, and DVDs subtitles. I learnt a bit playing Shadow Hearts: Covenant auf Deutsch, back when RPGs were mostly text rather than spoken. It really is a good way to learn some stuff.
و بيقتلك لو قلتلو ولاية إسلامية
Anyone able to translate that lot ? Google gives me a load of nonsense.
(Central forecast)
Con vote lead 8.5%
Con seat lead 76 seats
(10000 Monte Carlo simulations)
Chance of Tory vote lead: 100.0%
Chance of a Tory seat lead: 99.5%
Chance of a Hung Parliament: 38.8%
Chance of a Tory majority: 61.2%
Chance of a Labour majority: 0.0%
The Tory position seems to be gradually strengthening...
No alcohol or homosexuals?
I like to think that's because they have a sense of humour...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mod-launches-new-skynet-satellite
Let me give you a small example of what I mean. Years ago I was working in a middle east country, primarily for their government. As I was leaving the complex one afternoon I fell into step with an American chap, he was very, very frustrated. He had been there two weeks and had not yet secured an appointment to see the person he wanted to talk to or pretty much anyone else.
What had happened is that he had made his sales pitch, and received the answer, "Yes of course, inshallah", which he had taken to mean, "OK it will happen and you will get your appointment with the big guy" What the chap he had spoken to meant was, "You might as well get back on the plane now because your idea is batshit crazy".
When you have a babelfish that can workout that level of human interaction to that degree, then there will be no point to learning foreign languages except for the fun of it.
Byelection swingback: -1.2%
Fisher: 3.9%
2009-2010 repeat: 4.9%
Prosser: 5.0%
L&N: 8.5%
Defenders of a liberal arts education cannot depend on the support of employers. The irony is that what is seen as a left wing position in the USA is seen as a right wing position here. Perhaps that means it is neither.
"We have a brave Fedaykin here," Alia said, motioning toward al-Fali. "This argument can wait."
"It can wait forever," Jessica said, speaking in Chakobsa, her words double-barbed to tell Alia that no argument would stop the death command."
Like to see the Bablefish that could cope with that.
Funny, I read English at university, even though most of the planet already seemed to speak it.
Still managed to have a reasonable career for 30-years.
Learning a language shows you have the mental ability and discipline to master a difficult challenge.
That is something employers will always value.
Now 95% of the photographers are unemployed.
I know, Mr. T, I am a daft old coot and maybe one day the ability to communicate meaning rather than words will be taken over by machines.
By the way the fact that I have a umpteen mega-pixel camera on my phone doesn't actually make me a good photographer. Any more than the fact than in the annexe I have an easel and a box of water colour paints. Both give me the ability to produce stunning images, but only the imagination and skill of the person using such tools will produce good pictures. I have a keyboard and a word processor does that mean I can write novels that will sell as well as yours? I don't think so. Human communication is a very complex thing.