You can’t passively learn a language and expect fluency in it, but you can boost your understanding in creative ways. Which is to say, you’re probably not going to learn complex verb and tense rules with these methods, but you will significantly boost your understanding. The idea here is to make you house and gadgets speak to you in as many ways as possible and to surround yourself with a new language without disrupting your daily activities.

If you’re concerned that you’re an old dog who can’t learn new tricks, don’t be: Studies have shown that adults can pick up a second language with considerably more ease than most of us think. Even if it has been 10 years since your high school Spanish class, some of that knowledge is still stored up. If you didn’t take a foreign language, consider learning a language that you’re geographically embedded in already. Spanish, for instance is a snap in the southwest because there are plenty of Spanish language grocery stores and restaurants in the area. You might find another language in your area easier to embed yourself into, but if you’re surrounded by foreign speakers, it’s an easy way to pick which language to concentrate on.

…

The common aim of Smule’s products is to prod nonmusicians into making music and to interact with others doing the same. There are singing apps like I Am T-Pain and Glee Karaoke, and digital versions of instruments like Magic Piano and Magic Fiddle. What connects these easy-to-use diversions to Wang’s more abstruse gear-tinkering is the exploration of expressive sound via technology: everyone can make music, he believes, and everyone should.

It’s hard to overestimate how much Smule’s strategy revolves around Wang himself. Before the first Project Oke demo, I asked another Smule employee what the app would consist of, how it would work. He shrugged. “Right now,” he said cheerfully, “it’s all in Ge’s brain.”

What marched out of Wang’s brain at that first Project Oke demo in July was a cute robot, singing and dancing. The app, now known as Sing, Robot, Sing!, is likely to be in Apple’s App Store early next year, depending on how quickly the final version moves through the approval process.

There it will join what has become a bewildering array of products in the “music” category. This includes services like Spotify and Pandora that are analogous to radio, and games like Tap Tap Revenge, which involve tapping dots on your phone’s screen in sync with songs. Artists routinely release phone and tablet applications that include remix-it-yourself options. Reality Jockey, based in London, has created “reactive music” apps that respond to sounds in the listener’s environment as well as user actions. There are sophisticated instrumentlike apps that require technical skill or musical knowledge to master, and apps that recreate that ultimate amateur form, karaoke.

…

infoneer-pulse:

Though a deeply divided Congress is currently considering Internet website censorship legislation, the US has no such official policy—not even for child porn, which is voluntarily blocked by some ISPs. Nor does the US have a government-backed “three strikes” or “graduated response” system of escalating warnings to particular users accused of downloading music and movies from file-sharing networks.

Yet here was the ultimatum that the US Embassy in Madrid gave the Spanish government in February 2008: adopt such measures or we will punish you. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have the text of the diplomatic cable announcing the pressure tactics.

We propose to tell the new government that Spain will appear on the Watch List if it does not do three things by October 2008. First, issue a [Government of Spain] announcement stating that Internet piracy is illegal, and that the copyright levy system does not compensate creators for copyrighted material acquired through peer-to-peer file sharing. Second, amend the 2006 “circular” that is widely interpreted in Spain as saying that peer-to-peer file sharing is legal. Third, announce that the GoS [Government of Spain] will adopt measures along the lines of the French and/or UK proposals aimed at curbing Internet piracy by the summer of 2009.

The Watch List referenced is the US Trade Representative’s “Special 301” list, updated annually. Spain was duly put on the list in 2008 after failing to take such measures. (“The United States is concerned by the Spanish government’s inadequate efforts to address the growing problem of Internet piracy, described by U.S. copyright industries as one of the worst in Europe,” said the 2008 report.) Spanish copyright holders applauded the move; indeed, the cables show that they repeatedly asked US officials to make it.

» via ars technica

By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: January 2, 2012

The best-selling biography of Steve Jobs is flying off the shelves at libraries in Queens, which is not surprising. But in many of the borough’s 62 branches, the copies being borrowed are in Korean, Chinese or Spanish.

By NICK WINGFIELD

Published: December 2, 2011

The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — there is no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.

But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.

In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.

“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.

polyglotproblems:

English: Especially vs specially, affect vs. effect, through vs. thorough, farther vs. further, allot vs. a lot, dessert vs. desert, vane vs. vain, stationery vs. stationary, wine vs. whine, weather vs. whether, council vs. counsel, lose vs. loose…

French: allocation vs. allocution, irruption vs. érruption, apurer vs. épurer, colorer vs. colorier, au dessus vs. en dessous, balade vs. ballade, cerfs vs. serfs, estomper vs. estamper, enfouir vs. enfuir, rabattre vs. rebattre, inclinaison vs. inclination, poison vs. poisson, conjecture vs. conjoncture…

Portuguese: Deferir vs. diferir, delatar vs. dilatar, descrição vs. discrição, emergir vs. imergir, emigrar vs. imigrar, eminente vs. iminente, enfestar vs. infestar, comprimento vs. cumprimento, pontoar vs. pontuar, roborizar vs. ruborizar, soar vs. suar, acender vs. ascender, acético vs. ascético vs. asséptico, decente vs. descente, concerto vs. conserto, paço vs. passo, ruço vs. russo, coser vs. cozer…