The hidden art of Google translation revealed!
This has to come with a warning – “don’t try it at work, it’s addictive”. But by all means try it at home! Translation Party is a site that seeks out the inner truth and artistic heart of any English phrase. Just type in your phrase, and it will automatically use Google translation to hop between English and Japanese until it finds equilibrium – a common representation that no longer changes on successive translation.
Give it a go – it seems to work well with song titles and catch phrases. For example, “All’s well that ends well” becomes “To terminate the common interest of all”.
This is clearly a pioneering web site, or as James T. Kirk so aptly described his mission: “In front of him, please go to the bold.”
Are services like software systems?
As part of my studies at Glamorgan Business School, I’ve been exploring the world of service evaluation, and relating this to what I know about software system evaluation. The initial outcome is a paper I am due to present at the PAC 2009 Conference in Cardiff in early September.
I have been drawn to the conclusion that, just like software systems, all services have an architecture, and that many of the methods and practices that deal with software system architectures are equally appropriate to service architectures. The paper focuses on architecture reviews and quality attribute models. What other IT architecture approaches are directly transferable, I wonder?
In the course of my work, I came across a new but blossoming academic community on “Service Design”. Of particular interest to me was the superb work of Roberta Tassi, whose graduate thesis is a work of art in itself. Her service design tools repository is beautifully laid out, and I especially like the family tree showing the provenance of the different tools and techniques. Fascinating work, beautifully and elegantly presented (what else would expect from the design school in Milano!).
IBM buys SPSS for $1.2 billion
Here’s an interesting development (some more details here). It looks like the deal has been led by Ambuj Goyal at IBM, who was head of computer science at IBM Research when I managed a team in his empire in the Zurich Research Lab. A really smart guy, and you can see why the acquisition is attractive to IBM, but it will be interesting to see whether the smart analytics work that is done in IBM Research can find an outlet in SPSS, or will there be resistance to this within SPSS?
Will this make IBM a more serious player in the statistical computing world? Will SPSS move beyond being a great desktop tool and offer real competition for SAS and R?
Putting government data online
Following the appointment of Tim Berners-Lee as advisor to the government on how to make its data more widely available, it is interesting to see what has been happening in the US, and also to read some of Tim’s early thoughts on what we should be doing.
This is clearly not a lonely journey – the UK is following the US data.gov initiative, and Australia is following along the same path with an initiative similar to the Power of Information Task Force. It was a recommendation from the final report that has led to a focus on making data available.
For National Statistics, this raises some interesting questions. Should National Statistics be part of such an initiative, or might it damage the independence of the UK Statistics Authority? How can we take advantage of a raised focus on using data, but preserve the distinction between data that has been published under the code of practice, and other data that should be treated more cautiously? With all the excitement surrounding data mashups and the power of mixing data from multiple sources, it would be a pity if the quality dimension got left behind. Does data need a watermark so that sources can be traced, and conclusions drawn from mixed sources can be given the caution they deserve?
Common standards will be needed, but as ever, the problem with standards is that there is too much choice.
The international statistics community has settled clearly on SDMX – backed by the UN, OECD and Eurostat, and almost every leading National Statistics Institute is following it (including ONS). This could be an opportunity for it to become the predominant standard for published aggregate data across government, but it is not yet widely known beyond the statistical community. A prototype repository at ONS, serving up SDMX datasets is showing encouraging results, and we are already engaging with a wider community in the development of a suitable API.
Its wider adoption would encourage a wider community of developers, and it would be great if ONS and other NSIs could seed this with some further open source assets.
Goodbye to Powerpoint?
I’ve been playing with Prezi for a while now, and I think it really has something. It’s an innovative product that allows you to create presentations on multiple levels. You can fly over them at a high altitude, or zoom into the detail when required to do so. It looks good, can embed videos, pictures and the like, and if you want it to behave like boring old Powerpoint, with bullet points and a steady progression through a series of frames, then it will also do that for you (though you’re missing the point if that’s what you do with it).
It is very easy to use, with a great UI, and is particularly good for creating mind maps that can also be used as presentations.
The best introduction to it is, of course, a demonstration Prezi. Take a look – it’ll only take up five minutes of your time.