Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Announcing : the first trivia tournament on about2findout.com!

In July, the first Big Trivia Tournament will go live. This is what you can expect:
- There will be 25 brand new quizzes posted during the entire month. That is almost one per day.
- Only logged in users can participate (if needed you can create a free account)
- You have the entire month to solve the quizzes, so you can do it when best fits you. Do one every day, do them all at the end, or before or after you take a holiday.
- Your tournament score is the sum of all points on all the questions in the tournament. You will still get your regular points too and those include the double points for getting 7 or more on a quiz. For the tournament, it's just the sum of your points on the questions you had right.

So, just a little more patience, and the game begins...

Labels: about2findout, game, quiz, tournament, trivia

SmallWorlds is a virtual world currently in beta. It runs entirely in your browser, so you don't need to install a client program. (It's based on Adobe Flex technology I believe, so you just need Flash.)

It is not made of worlds or islands, but is a collection of rooms. When you sign up for free, you get your own room that you can decorate. On the image you see me and my cat pet shopping for some furniture.

What is cool is how they integrate for exampe YouTube video's: you can have a TV player set, and watch with other avatars to YouTube video. The place is also packed with all kind of games to play, and I think they are working on an API set to include your own games in there. Now, would it not be cool to play trivia quizzes in this virtual world with questions that come from this site? :-) Just dreaming out loud.
Anyway, looked promising...

Labels: Second Life, smallworlds, virtual worlds

I've been very lazy posting to my blog lately. My apologies.

This is one of the cool sites I encountered in the past time and wanted to share with you for no other good reason than to share a site: akinator.com . It's a Gini with some articial intelligence behind (at least I think, I hope they don't pay a bunch of Vietnamese or Indian people to type it in :-) ) that will ask you a series of questions on the person you are thinking off. I thought of my cat. It worked!

(Thanks to Ralph for sending the link.)

Labels: sites

Google has a translation page, where you can translate sentences and web pages between many languages. It is automatic translation that is about 70% accurate I would say, and will in the other cases return wrong or funny results. Machine translation is still not at a point where it can reliably translate texts, but it can provide enough to get the gist of the text, and it helps translators out because the base translation is done, you just need to correct.

So I have experimented with the Google AJAX Language API today. You can find more information and a sample on the following links:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/reference.html#LangContentType
http://www.google.com/uds/samples/language/translate.html

I was able based on this documentation to create a page where the original text of a question in in the left column, and the automatic translation in the right. An administrator can then verify and correct the new language, and save that question as a draft. As I'm using the Ajax calls, all is implemented in pure javascript on the browser itself, so I don't need any server-side calls or an API license, as it is the client that will request the translation to Google.

An what about the first results? Well, it is not perfect, but it does save a lot of time translating as especially the answer options are usually correct (they are short). The longer the question, the more trouble the automatic translation has to make a correct grammatical sentence out of it.
But first results are promising. I still need to work on it further, but I don't plan to make this a general tool on the site as I fear it will generate a lot of poorly translated questions. I prefer to keep it as a productivity tool to help real flesh and blood administrators to speed up the translation work.

Labels: asp.net, google, google language, machine translation