I was bored out of my mind, so I suddenly decided, having nothing better to do, to pop to a YouTube channel I’m suscribed to, property of a hilarious scottish guy who used to make videos quite regularly,  and leave a comment asking why dickens had he been so long without making any.  Once written, the featured video on his channel catched my eye. It seemed to be a concert of a choir of some kind, singing a song called Africa. As I have always loved choirs I clicked ‘Play’…

Posibly many of you had already seen this, as it is hugely popular on YouTube. If you hadn’t, you probably are yet too shocked to keep on reading. Take a moment, breathe. Back with me? Ok.

So, there I was, not bored anymore. I was surprised, delighted, smiling and in tears, all at the same time. I watched the video a couple of times, and then I went to their channel for more. I watched Bee Gees Medley, Aquarela do Brazil, Kradeva Brez Vere/Soba 102 (which was shortly to become my favourite one)… And I loved them all. But the last one arouse a lot of questions. The first one to be What in the name of Christ is he saying?

So I looked around a bit and I found out they were from Slovenia, which explained a lot, and that they had been around since 1983, being the only Slovenian Jazz choir. You can of course learn more of their history and of the around-50-memebers having a look at their website (which is too yellow and hurts my eyes. But it’s cool anyway.)

This was some months ago. Now, having learnt all their songs (including, indeed, the ones in Slovenian and other Slavic languages), around half of their names, their pronunciation, some random Slovenian, and having bought a CD, a DVD and even a t-shirt, I can proudly say I am a proper fan! I adore them. Some of the people I know might be surprised, but the ones who know me well are aware of my quite eclectic taste for music! I love anything that sound like rock, blues, celtic, jazz, punk, metal, funky… But of course my favourite bands are The Beatles, Sonata Arctica, Millencolin, Offspring and Flogging Molly, so having a Jazz choir among them might look a bit weird. But that is how I roll, people.

© Irena Herak (Finance)

They uploaded new videos a couple of days ago. They have made us wait, but the waiting was well worth it. Five new live performances, about which the least you can say is that they are magnificently breath-taking. They were filmed on the Vokal Xtravaganzza 2009, and just showed us they get better and better every year. They also got a sharper fashion, so all of them looked even better than what they usually do. And I have to say that all of them are drop dead gorgeous. Men and women, all of them. I don’t know what they have in that country, but I want some.

So, the first one I watched was Joyful, joyful. If I had to choose one word to define Aleksandra Lamut that would be amazing. Her voice is so soft and powerful at the same time, you get hooked by it since the moment she opens her mouth. But then of course the whole choir begin to sing and the party gets started. Jan Trost’s rapping part is awesome, and what to say about both trios; incredible voices on display. As a whole, a wonderful song, one of my favourite song of PJ to this date. I really like what they did with it!

I got all excited when I saw they were singing a George Benson Medley, as that man is a legend and I love his music. I knew they would do a very special version of the songs, and I wasn’t disapointed. Nino Kozlevčar did, as he always does, a brilliant performance. His voice is very nice, and I specially love it in the This Masquerade bit. From the Turn your love around, the most standing thing is in my opinion the baritones’ work, it’s so good it gives me shivers! My favourite one though, is On Broadway, which is one of my favourite songs of all time. The choreography adds a bonus at a song that genuinelly couldn’t be better performed. The fun with the public was a new thing, but I loved it – and surely they did too! Finally, no words to describe the talent of Sašo Vrabič, multitask beatboxer. Honestly, no words.

Then of course I saw the Killing me softly video, which didn’t disappoint me either. I had already heard this song, as it’s on the CD I bought, but live it’s much better. Sandra Feketija can absolutely kill you soflty with this song or any song she sings. I love the way she makes a song different each time she sings it.

When I saw they had sung Michael Jackson’s Will you be there, I knew it was bound to become their new big boom. But I never thought it would make me feel all the things it actually did. The beginning is a song in latin from a Slovenian composer of the Reinassance, and it sends shivers down my spine. So when MJ’s song began I was already somehow emotional… By the end of it I was in tears. Again Nino’s performance was quite simply unbelievably great. I had already made most of my friends and colleagues listen to Perpetuum Jazzile, and most of them loved them, but it was with this song that they got completely amazed and interested in them.

However, my favourite one has to be Just The Way You Are. As said in the description of the video:

Billy Joel’s love song in an XL vocal group arrangement, featuring a passionate tenor section solo.

It is quite simply astonishing. I used to be a bariton lover, but I’m totally going to the tenors side, I fear. As I think I told them on a Facebook comment, I’m really close to doing myself a t-shirt with the words I ♥ TENORS. They are too good to be true. I have heard some of them solo (of course Tomaž Cör on Kradeva Brez Vere, Boštjan Usenik on the CD version of Girl from Ipanema -which should totally be sung live-, Aleš Majerič -for whom I have began a kind of small riot on Facebook, as they HAVE to give him a solo on PJ. He’s brilliant!- on some performances of a side project of some of the PJ members, Brkate Cimre) and they are all magnificent, but as a section all of them together are just a legend. But I’m specially impressed by Nataša Jovanović, the first female tenor I have seen. I love the fact that she’s a “woman in a world of men”, and that she always looks like she’s the one having the best time, always sunny and smiling!

© Perpetuum Jazzile, Photoshop by myself.

I genuinelly hope you listen to the songs and enjoy them as much as I do. Perpetuum Jazzile are not just musically brilliant, but they also have this gift I can’t explain, of making you smile and feel more positive and fine. Like love emanates from them. I think that’s why so many people loves them, because, as the Beatles said, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

HTML did not intend to contain tags for formatting a document, but to define the content of a document. When tags were added it started a problem for web developers. Development of large web sites became a long and expensive process. CSS was created to solve this problem. Finally In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be stored in a separate CSS file, and all browsers support CSS nowadays.

Among the advantages, we can find the flexibility of the programming, the separation of content from presentation, the site-wide consistency, the open bandwidth which increases speed and the easy page reformatting.

Reources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets
• http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
• http://www.w3schools.com/css/
• http://www.csszengarden.com/

Berners-Lee, now Sir, was born in 1955, and studied Physics in Oxford university. He soon began to work for CERN, where he had his first idea of the WWW, as he wanted to create a project based on hypertext. He then left CERN, but when he came back he started to work on this project which was soon to become the WWW. In his own words:

“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.”

Since he invented the WWW, he has not stopped woking on it and its development. He is now working as well on his new project, the Semantic Web, as he got a chair on the Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, in the University of Southampton. He is as well now workinf for the British Government, as he was asked to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force.

Apart from having won many awards, he has also been Honored many times:

Honorary Degrees:

• Parsons School of Design, New York (D.F.A., 1995)
• Southampton University (D.Sc., 1995)
• Essex University (D.U., 1998)
• Southern Cross University (1998)
• Open University (D.U., 2000)
• Columbia University (D.Law, 2001)
• Oxford University (D.Sc., 2001)
• University of Port Elizabeth (DSc., 2002)
• Lancaster University (D.Sc., 2004)
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (2008)
• University of Manchester (2008)
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (2009)

References:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
• http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Longer.html
• http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/lee.html

What no one can deny is of course how practical it is. As a reader I know how bad for your back can be to bring along in a handbag a book to read in the tube, if it has more than a thousand pages. The chance of having this book, and all the books you want, in a small -and more importantly; light- tablet is more than attractive.

Some argue that looking at a screen for too long can’t be good for the eyes, but very specific components of these screens make them suitable even for the most sensitive of eyes. So it won’t tire your eyes more than a normal book would.

At the moment the E-book industry is increasing, as more and more people want to try the benefits of this invent. Millions of well known titles are already available, and the actual machines are not too expensive.  So I might as well buy myself one and give it a try, and I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys reading doing it as well.

References:

• http://www.ebookmall.com/aboutebooks.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book
• http://www.ebookedit.com/
• http://www.ebooks.com/
• http://www.ebook.com/

But it of course existed way before the internet was born, as it is used to describe books like Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), which gives you the oportunity of changing the story by taking your own path even if it doesn’t use the hypertext.

It can create not only hypertext, but also multimedia, animated text, and algorithmically generated text, created with HTML, Flash, other Web software, or Storyspace on either Windows or Mac.

As some like to state, when we read a book we don’t see the words, but images and scenes written by the writer, whereas hypertext fiction allows you navigate your way around the text creating your own story. And that is the reason why it’s an innovation in the field of literature: the way it changes the traditional author – text – reader relationship.

In Yellowless Douglas‘ (University of Michigan) words:

By examining in detail both the similarities and differences between interactive and print stories, we can begin to understand the satisfactions we derive from being drawn into fictional worlds not of our inventing—one of the opportunities afforded us when we encounter reading, stories, plots, and characters outside a print environment so familiar to us that we are scarcely aware of print as both medium and technology. By bringing together disparate studies in the fields of psychology, narratology, artificial intelligence, and literary theory, we can begin to understand which elements of storytelling are changeable, open to further development and invention in interactive narratives, and which are changeless and immutable across media and millennia alike.

References:

• Hypertext fiction. (2009, September 21). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:31, September 25, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hypertext_fiction&direction=prev&oldid=320049344
• Robert Kendall, Electronic Poetry and Fiction. http://wordcircuits.com/kendall/htclass-1.htm
• “The End of Books – Or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives,” by Jane Yellowlees Douglas (University of Michigan Press, 2000)
• Christopher W. Dean on Interactive narrative, University of New Hampshire http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/5.2/binder.html?reviews/dean/Douglas.htm

http://thales.cica.es/rd/Recursos/rd99/ed99-0257-01/enciclo.html

http://wapedia.mobi/es/Encyclop%C3%A9die,_ou_Dictionnaire_raisonn%C3%A9_des_sciences,_des_arts_et_des_m%C3%A9tiers

The Spectator

http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20306/addison_index.htm

Grupo Planeta

http://www.planeta.es/esp/asp/areasnegocio.asp?codarea=01

Question Answering has been very popular recently, but not in the multilingual research: It has been focused mainly on English. Multilingual QA has been created in the last few years as a complement, allowing users to interact with machines in their native languages to make the searching easier and faster. Also it makes the QA systems able to access information available only in one language.

Some relevant Question Answering engines are AskMeNow, BrainBoost, DeeperWeb, TeLQAS, True Knowledge and Wolfram Alpha.

Sources:

• Question answering. (2009, June 13). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:02, June 21, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Question_answering&oldid=296213100

• Question answering. (2009). In the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) website. Retrieved 14:11, June 21, 2009, from nlp.uned.es/MLQA06/

• Question answering. (2009). In the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) website. Retrieved 14:09, June 21, 2009, from trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec9/papers/webclopedia.pdf

It is helpful to understand more or less the meaning of the text, but it is common to find a lot of errors on their translation, specially on the syntax. This tool is good to translate word separately, but experts are still working on it to make it more accurate on the gramatical side, which is of course very complex.

There are of course different ways of  working on this translation: The Rule-based, which includes transfer-based machine translation, interlingual and dictionary-based; the Statistical, and; the Example based.

These methods have their base on linguistic rules, but of course the difficulty of natural language understanding is always there. But anyway, as I said before, they already give enough information for us to get an aproximate idea of what the text may say, even if it isn’t properly written.

Sources:

• Machine Translation (2009). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:57, June 15, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation
• Machine Translation (2009). In the AIT website. Retrieved 17:08, June 15, 2009 from http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/MachineTranslation

It is quite a new discipline which combines facts from formal semantics, computational linguistics, and automated reasoning.

Traditional inference tools (such as theorem provers and model builders) are reaching new levels of sophistication and are now widely and easily available. A wide variety of new tools (statistical and probabilistic methods, ideas from the machine learning community) are likely to be increasingly applied in computational semantics. Most importantly of all, computational semantics seems to have reached the stage where the exploration and development of inference is one of its most pressing tasks – and there’s a lot of interesting new work which takes inferential issues seriously.

Sources:

• Computational semantics. (2009, March 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:49, June 4, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Computational_semantics&oldid=275989753
• Computational semantics. (2009). In Edinburgh university website. Retrieved 20:03, June 4, from www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~jbos/pubs/theoria.pdf
• Computational semantics. (2009). In Johns Hopkins university webste. Retrieved 20:16, June 4, from www.cog.jhu.edu/~rawlins/clsbib/

The first applications for this speech recognition were automated telephone systems and medical dictation software. People still us it often for dictation, querying databases, and giving commands to computers, especially in jobs with specialized vocabularie.

Microsoft has been working on it from long ago, and has recently provaided in Windows Vista the Windows Speech Recognition which makes users capable of interacting with their computers using their voices. We can do now things like switch on or off aplications or even write without using the keyboard.

Sources:

• Speech recognition. (2009). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:49, June 02, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speech_recognition&oldid=296866486
• Speech recognition. (2009). In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 19:54, June 02, 2009, from www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/706221/speech-recognition
• Speech recognition systems. (2009). In the Microsoft website. Retrieved 20: 01, June 02, 2009, from www.microsoft.com/enable/products/windowsvista/speech.aspx