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Submission + - Major AWS outage takes down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, Signal, and more (theverge.com)

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently experiencing a major outage that has taken down online services, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. The AWS status checker is reporting that multiple services are “impacted” by operational issues, and that the company is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region” — though outages are also impacting services in other regions globally.

Submission + - SPAM: Ignobel awards: booze really does help with speaking a second language

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Alcohol is well-known to have detrimental effects on what's known in psychological circles as "executive functioning," impacting things like working memory and inhibitory control. But there's a widespread belief among bilingual people that a little bit of alcohol actually improves one's fluency in a foreign language, which also relies on executive functioning. So wouldn't being intoxicated actually have an adverse effect on foreign language fluency? Renner et al. decided to investigate further.

They recruited 50 native German-speaking undergrad psychology students at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who were also fluent in Dutch. They were randomly divided into two groups. One group received an alcoholic drink (vodka with bitter lemon), and the other received water. Each participant consumed enough to be slightly intoxicated after 15 minutes, and then engaged in a discussion in Dutch with a native Dutch speaker. Afterward, they were asked to rate their self-perception of their skill at Dutch, with the Dutch speakers offering independent observer ratings.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - WhatsApp being ditched for Signal in Dutch higher education (dub.uu.nl)

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Signal is rapidly gaining ground in the Netherlands. It is now at the top of the Dutch download charts. Employees of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (HU) were recently advised to switch to Signal. Avans University of Applied Sciences has also been discussing a switch. The National Student Union is concerned about privacy. The subject was raised at a general meeting, as reported by chair Abdelkader Karbache, who said: "Our local unions want to switch to Signal or other open-source software."

Submission + - Universities adapt to Google's new storage fees, or migrate away entirely

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Back in February, Slashdot reported that Google would be phasing out free unlimited storage within Google Apps for Education. Google had a related blog post dressing it up in the exciting language of "empowering institutions" and so forth. Well, now universities all over are waking up to the consequences. Universities in Korea are scrambling to reduce storage use, or migrating to competitors like Naver, while also collectively petitioning Google on the matter. California State University, Chico has a plan to shoe-horn its storage (and restrict its users) to limbo under Google's new limits. UC San Diego is coughing up for fees but apparently under a "favorable" deal, and still with some limits. The University of Cambridge will impose a 20GB per user limit in December 2022. And so on.

If you're at a university, what are your IT crowd telling you? Have they said anything? If not, you may want to ask.

Submission + - What will language be like in the 'human-machine era'?

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Real-time captioning of conversation. Highly accurate instant translation. Auto voice mimicry making it sound like you speaking the translation. Real-time AR facial augmentation making it also look like you speaking the translation. Meanwhile, super-intelligent Turing-passing chatbots that look real and can talk tirelessly about any topic, in different languages, in anyone’s voice. Then, a little further into the future, brain-machine interfaces that turn your thoughts into language, saving you the effort of talking at all. All this will bring us into the ‘human-machine era’, a time when the tech has moved out of our hands and into our ears, eyes, and brains.

Slashdot has long reported on the development of all these technologies. They are coming. When these are not futuristic but widespread everyday devices, what will language and interaction actually be like? Would you trust instant auto-translation while shopping? On a date? At a hospital? How much would you interact with virtual characters? Debate with them? Learn a new language from them? Socialise with them, or more? Would you wear a device that lets you communicate without talking? And with all this new tech, would you trust tech companies with the bountiful new data they gather?

Meanwhile, what about the people who get left behind as these shiny new gadgets spread? As always with new tech, they will be prohibitively expensive for many. And despite rapid improvements, still for some years progress will be slower for smaller languages around the world – and much slower still for sign language – despite the hype.

‘Language in the Human-Machine Era’ is an EU-funded research network putting together all these pieces. Watch our animations setting out future scenarios, read our open access forecast report, and contribute to our big survey!

Submission + - Amazon launches in Sweden, but with embarrassing translation issues

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: As reported in Sweden's The Local, Amazon has just launched in the nordic nation, and all the listings are in Swedish... just, not always the right Swedish. For example, "A greetings card depicting a duckling in a field was named söta-ansikte-kuk or 'sweet-face-dick'." Oops.

Submission + - Would rationing air travel work?

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Last year The Guardian ran a leader article arguing that everyone should be allocated "an air mile allowance – say enough for one long-haul return flight a year, or three short-haul flights ... . If you don’t want to use your allowance, you could sell it off in a government-regulated online marketplace. If you’re keen to do a holiday a month, you’ll have to buy your allowance from someone else." But despite continuing concerns over the environmental harm caused by air travel, this idea has not found much subsequent support. Instead serious air time is given to meagre plans like weighing passengers. Do Slashdotters think rationing would work? Could serious co-ordinated inter-governmental restrictions on air travel change our behaviour? Might it just spur corporations into finishing up carbon-neutral passenger planes?

Submission + - Secrets of Beatboxing Revealed by MRI

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Beatboxing, pioneered in the 1980s and made famous by Michael Winslow in Police Academy (1984), and recently demonstrated by Tom Thum at TEDxSydney), has long been something of an enigma. Phonetic transcriptions have been attempted, including Standard Beatbox Notation and The Beatbox Alphabet (the latter based more closely on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)). The Beatbox Bible also uses phonetic terminology to teach the technique. Now, an international team from UCSD and Philips Research have published a paper (article paywalled; extensive free related resources at UCS here) in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, showing the results of real-time magnetic resonance imaging conducted on a beatboxing performer. The authors make interesting comparisons to sounds in many minority languages around the world (such as the 'click' consonants in many African languages); they also show how beatboxing sounds can be represented using the IPA.

Submission + - NSA Spying Hurts California's Business

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: Interesting opinion piece by Joe Mathews published today (http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/jul/13/could-nsa-spying-hurt-california-economy/all/?print)
makes the argument that California's economic life depends on global connections. "Our leading industries — shipping, tourism, technology, and entertainment — could not survive, much less prosper, without the trust and goodwill of foreigners. We are home to two of the world’s busiest container ports, and we are a leading exporter of engineering, architectural, design, financial, insurance, legal, and educational services. All of our signature companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Chevron, Disney — rely on sales and growth overseas. And our families and workplaces are full of foreigners; more than one in four of us were born abroad, and more than 50 countries have diaspora populations in California of more than 10,000."
It quotes John Dvorak: "Our companies have billions and billions of dollars in overseas sales and none of the American companies can guarantee security from American spies. Does anyone but me think this is a problem for commerce?”
It points out that: "Asian governments and businesses are now moving their employees and systems off Google’s Gmail and other U.S.-based systems, according to Asian news reports. German prosecutors are investigating some of the American surveillance. The issue is becoming a stumbling block in negotiations with the European Union over a new trade agreement. Technology experts are warning of a big loss of foreign business."
The article goes on to suggest that perhaps a California constitutional ammendment confirming privacy rights might help (but would not guarantee a stop to Federal snooping).

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