ASPO newsletter #54 out

The 54th edition of the ASPO newsletter dated June 2005 has been released. Jake Gordon of peakoil.ie is now maintaining the current and past ASPO newsletter archive.

Colin Campbell's estimated peak date is still around 2007 or thereabouts. I'm sure that there are people who will take issue with this, both on one side ("it's too pessimistic!"), and perhaps to a lesser extent, the other ("we've peaked already", or "Peak Oil is 2005!").

*shrug* What's important isn't the exact year/month/day, but what happens to *you* in the meantime - your immediate family, the local economic conditions where you work, the particular region where you live.

(2005-06-02 13:40:50 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

Are CRTs History?

slashdot.org :

DreamWheezer asks: "I work on a medical imaging program that uses CrystalEyes for high resolution true color stereoscopy. This program requires high resolution high frequency true color CRTs. Very recently, a vendor trend has developed: almost all are dropping out of the CRT market in favor of LCDs. Unfortunately, LCDs cannot render high resolution page sequential stereoscopy. The vendors have said that autostereo LCDs are on the way in 12 to 18 months, but what can I do in the meantime? Furthermore, does this mean the end is near for CRTs?" While there does still seem to be a market for CRTs, it seems to be dwindling to a narrow niche. Are LCDs ready to take over as the primary computer display or is the retirement of CRTs, premature?

Nope, I'd suppose not. For various reasons including price, performance, reliability, contrast, colour reproduction, CRT's should stay around for a while.

Coming soon : (improved) Google Translator

slashdot.org -> blog.outer-court.com :

At the recent web cast of the Google Factory Tour, researcher Franz Och presented the current state of the Google Machine Translation Systems. He compared translations of the current Google translator, and the status quo of the Google Research Lab's activities. The results were highly impressive. A sentence in Arabic which is now being translated to a nonsensical "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden" is now in the Research Labs being translated to "The White House Confirmed the Existence of a New Bin Laden Tape." ...

How do they do that? ... to the translation system, any language is treated the same, and there is no manually created rule-set of grammar, metaphors and such. Instead, the system is learning from existing human translations. Google relies on a large corpus of texts which are available in multiple languages.

This is the Rosetta Stone approach of translation ... all it needs is someone to feed the system the two books and to teach it the two are translations from language A to language B, and the translator can create what Franz Och called a "language model." I suspect it's crucial that the body of text is immensely large, or else the system in its task of translating would stumble upon too many unlearned phrases. Google used the United Nations Documents to train their machine, and all in all fed 200 billion words. This is brute force AI, if you want – it works on statistical learning theory only and has not much real "understanding" of anything but patterns ...

- So, when will this be rolled out? Will the biblical Tower of Babel thing happen again or is that passé already, with the successful completion of Taiwan's Taipei 101 ... :)

(2005-06-02 13:25:35 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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