TransRio en Ingles

More than a year ago I posted a lengthy article on machine translation, reporting the state of things back then, and testing six leading MT products ("MT playoffs, March 2009"). The results had Google in first place, with Language Weaver next, and Microsoft third. I closed the article with this: "Bear in mind this was a single test of 500 words, and just English-Spanish. But things are changing so fast a person really should do their own tests anyway once a year…"

Testing is actually hard work, not as easy as you would think. You really should do it, though, if you routinely use these tools. Get a chunk of sample text, run it through the various MT options out there, and compare the output. Seems quick and easy. The hard part, though, is that the output (in my case) is Spanish, and while I read it OK, it’s slow going for me really judging quality. Added to that, first impressions of MT quality can really be deceiving. A butchered first sentence makes a whole paragraph look like crap, and it’s only after digging into it that you might notice what’s good about it.

Well, I did the work, as well as some other research having to do with translation in general, and I’m feeling really good now. All caught up on things. In a nutshell, here’s what I found:

I tested seven MT providers, including all the current leaders. Overall I was very impressed by the quality I was seeing; links to their translation pages are provided at the end of this article, if you want to see what I mean. The biggest surprise by far was that, over the past 16 months, Microsoft must have been grinding away pretty hard in the back room, because they’ve quietly closed the gap with Google. In my opinion they can claim the number one slot now, at least for Spanish. I totally wasn’t expecting that. In fact, I had to stare at it from several directions before I could actually believe it. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Language,Recommendations
No Comments

I went to the bank last week, and I had my computer Joe slung over my shoulder just in case I needed something. It turned out to be a good thing because I was missing some account info. While I was looking it up I could see my banker was watching with quite a bit of curiosity. Finally she said "Wow, that’s pretty cool, I’ve never seen an iPad before."

Now Joe is a lot of things, but he’s definitely not an iPad. Just for starters, he’s a 3 pound ruggedized brick, built for construction sites. He’s all Windows. He might be portable, as real computers go, but still he’s full-size. My banker is a smart person. It’s just that for many people the iPad is the first slate they’ve run across.

iPad’s ARE beautiful. Much more beautiful than Joe. I got to play with one “˜til my heart content, at the Apple store in Salt Lake when they first came out. Now… I’m keenly aware that the world doesn’t need another blogger jabbering about the iPad. But because I have five years of computing exclusively on a slate, I did see that I was having an entirely different experience than the other people in the Apple store. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
No Comments

I’ve now had my new computer, Joe, three full months, plenty of time for bonding. My old computer Moe is pushing five years old. Here’s a family portrait:

Joe is just the next generation on Moe. They’re both slates as you can see, from Motion Computing. Moe was my favorite computer of all time, and Joe is just better yet. Since a sweet computer is one of the three pillars of Pete’s happiness (and the other two are also doing very well right now) I’m feeling quite cheery.

Prior to Moe I was what you would call an "advanced keyboarder," one of those guys with a bevy of speedy shortcuts and macros, all second nature. I loved my keyboard; I still love keyboards. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
2 Comments

I’m a tablet guy, so I scribble constantly when I work without thinking about it. Most of my productive output, even in Excel or Word, is a mixture of regular text and digital ink. The minute I started writing things online I just naturally hand-wrote along, doodling as I went. Boom! I hit a brick wall. I seriously wasn’t expecting it, either. For some dumb reason I thought it would be easy to draw on a blog or a webpage, the same as it is in e-mails, web clippings, documents, or PDFs.

Well holy smoke, was I ever wrong.

So being stubborn to a fault when it comes to computers, I’ve bogged down horribly, setting things up so I can scribble anything I want to on a webpage. For starters, it took me awhile to even understand what graphical people were talking about. I don’t have an art background. I had to bump around, trying random drawing programs, before I even "got" that there’s this chasm of difference between vector and raster.

If you’re like me and never knew squat from vectors, here’s how it shakes out. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Recommendations
No Comments

I don’t usually do book recommendations. I don’t even read books that much, maybe five a year. I have to fall in love with a book, or I’ll never finish it. I did love this book. So much so in fact, that I finished it.

It’s a business book, but that’s not the reason I loved it. I loved it because this is the first time I’ve ever seen somebody put down so clearly a simple principle which seems to me to apply to all of life — not just to business, but to success in general, along with creativity, productivity, innovation. The book is about expert intuition and how it really works. Expert intuition is that seemingly magical ability that some people have, where they can see the right course of action amidst all the clutter and, confidently, just go for it.

In our culture it’s hardly questioned that the way to make big things happen is to have a really good goal, a vision, then make it happen through planning, motivation, and hard work. That central idea is at the heart of business strategy, success coaching, everything really right down to parenting or planning your day. Decide your goal. Make it happen.

Duggan needs an entire book to really drive home the point (the truth in my opinion) that this is not the way the world works. He gives case-study after case-study, with quotes and stories from many of the business people I’ve always most admired, showing how expert intuition works exactly backwards from the generally-unquestioned goalsetting model we’re all familiar with. Stated simply, the people we most admire for their creativity and effectiveness 1) suddenly recognize something cool they can do, and a way that they can make it happen, and only then 2) state that thing as a goal.

I’ll read now from the book, and show you what I mean: (more…)

Filed by Pete under Business,Recommendations
2 Comments

Imagine my astonishment and delight at receiving this out-of-the-blue little e-mail:

Hi Pete,

Mike Hofman from Inc. here. I remember you well from when Michael Hopkins first wrote about you… You may be interested to know that Michael’s article on Great Harvest was ranked No. 4 on our list of the top 30 Inc. articles of all time in conjunction with our recent 30th anniversary…

I’m also writing to see if you have any interest in blogging for us about developing a franchise. I know it’s a subject near and dear to your heart, and it’s one that we’re interested in exploring in depth on Inc.com.

Best, Mike Hofman, Deputy Editor, Inc. Magazine + Inc.com

Although flattered, I of course declined Mike’s offer to write about franchising. I wouldn’t feel good about playing expert unless I was actively making hard decisions. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Business,Franchising,Recommendations
No Comments

(MT = Machine Translation, not Montana.)

I just finished testing six MT products against each other. Skip to the bottom to see my conclusions, or just read along and learn about a very interesting (and soon to be hot) subject.

I’ve followed the progress of machine translation for 15 years; basically I’m fascinated by it. During that time I’ve owned, actively used, and kept upgraded on several desktop MT programs, as well as experimenting with online versions. Many people like to laugh at MT, and some of the translations are pretty funny, or worse, mangled. Professional translators in particular enjoy deriding MT, for obvious reasons. But now, quietly, many of them are incorporating MT into their workflow.

Personally, even in the primitive versions years ago, I have found MT to be extremely useful in my work, like a super-dictionary. Paste in a block of text in the source language, it quickly spits out, at the very least, a big pile of useful words in the target language. For a person like myself with very weak Spanish, it gives a jump-start to anything I’m trying to write.

Well, Folks, fast-forward to 2009. If you’re reading it here first, I’m pleased: MT is at a tipping point where the output is suddenly not just a pile of useful words, but something a person can basically read and understand. And for reasons I’m about to explain, it’s going to get much better, very quickly. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Language,Recommendations
2 Comments

Back in June I mentioned a new piece of software I was trying out. It’s turned out to be something I use every day; in fact I realize now that I’ve been subliminally looking for it for years. I hesitate to recommend it outright, it would depend a lot on your own style and needs.

What it has done for me is allow me to contain and corral all general-interest reading such as magazines. I like relaxing with a good article about something that’s truly interesting, but it needs to be on my terms; I hate that feeling of getting stuck in a magazine, or spending more time than I wanted, reading online. With SuperMemo, anything really cool that I stumble across gets clipped, saved, and then seems to crop up magically at just the right time. There’s never any feeling of being hurried, it’s like the “magazine pile” is all under the surface, out of view, and clutter-free. If I see a sentence, paragraph, or quote that “rings” for me, I absentmindedly highlight it with my pen, and it comes back around as a snippet later when I least expect it. The end result is a feeling that my reading material has doubled in quality. It’s all stuff I’ve chosen personally, with the highest priority or highest interestingness always coming up to the surface.

I recently saw this great quote by Albert Einstein: “Reading, (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
1 Comment

In my spare time I’ve been learning an intriguing piece of software called SuperMemo. I’ve never seen anything like it; it’s strangely addicting. It was written by a fellow in Poland, he’s been working hard on this one idea for about 20 years. It’s not related to my business, but it is (obliquely) KM.

Basically it’s learning software. It automates a process he calls “incremental reading.” You import high-quality articles into SuperMemo, then as you read you highlight the best parts. SuperMemo extracts the highlighted sections, saves them, and keeps track of them by a sophisticated algorithm. They seem to disappear, but then they come back to you days or weeks later, just about the time you would normally forget them altogether. The whole idea is spaced repetition of any snippet of knowledge that you would like to retain. You can literally be reading 15 articles in parallel, simultaneously, easily changing their relative priorities depending on your interests, saving only what matters, and SuperMemo organizes it all for optimum retention. Sounds like a hyper way to read, I know… but it’s oddly enjoyable.

SuperMemo is hard to get the hang of, but I think I’m going to like it. I learned about it in Wired, here. Definitely not for everybody. But it isn’t every day that I run across something totally new. Ask me again in a few months; I’ll know by then if it’s a toy, or a real tool.

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
No Comments

This blog is just a practice-space leading up to the Transrio website, which will be in Spanish. I set a requirement early on that I needed to have a way to mix natural handwriting with normal text. Over the years this has become my working style with everything else — e-mails, documents, notes, spreadsheets — and it was important to me that I crack the code on handwriting into a website. This hasn’t been quite as easy as I expected.

There is already an interesting community of people out there doing ink blogging, but most of this takes the form of scanned or clipped images of block longhand. There’s also a completely separate community of web designers (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Recommendations
2 Comments