[Cindy]

Thanks to Fair Opinion for the ping to this thread.

Note: The following post is a quote:

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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1701629/posts


IBM Technology Translates Arabic Media Broadcasts to English ~ Technology to help us.....
MarketWatch ^ | Sep 14, 2006 Last Update: 9:09 AM ET | Steven Tomasco IBM Media Relations

Posted on 09/14/2006 2:59:57 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach

Critical Mention, Inc. to Commercialize as Subscription Service for Business, Government and Media

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YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY, Sep 14, 2006 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- IBM

Under the agreement, IBM Research will provide Critical Mention a multi-year license to its speech-to-text translation solution for Arabic and English sources, with the ability to expand to other languages in the future.



"The ever-shifting nature of the market compels business professionals to quickly and easily monitor a wide range of foreign events and world media," said Arthur Ciccolo of IBM Research. "The unique TALES technology, combined with Critical Mention's advanced real-time search and monitoring system, will benefit organizations from all industry segments."



The TALES system combines three core technologies: search, speech-to-text conversion, and statistical machine translation. If a user selects a news source and a particular video clip, for example, the spoken words in this foreign language file are converted into written words. Then, TALES translates the written foreign-language text into the target language, English in this case. To provide the most accurate results, TALES uses statistical machine translation that employs automatically extracted word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translations as used by the United Nations' simultaneous translators. The statistical model for translation improves TALES effectiveness in capturing the meaning of the news it translates.


Critical Mention is adapting the speech-to-text conversion, and statistical machine translation components to integrate with its existing TV search & monitoring platform, CriticalTV, to provide subscribers with real-time monitoring of Arabic TV.

(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...

[Cindy]

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"Has Michigan Become Tracfonistan?" The Examiner ^ | 09/14/06 | Debbie Schlussel
Posted on 09/14/2006 8:13:03 PM PDT by goldstategop

ARTICLE SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON - Five young Muslim men are stopped by multiple TracFones in the Midwest. That’s not illegal. Yet, they are charged with terrorism. Just weeks later, the charges are dropped.

Just a case of Islamophobic law enforcement overreacting to innocents because of Sept. 11. Right?

Wrong.

There’s a lot more to the story with Adham Abdelhamid Othman, Maruan Awad Muhareb, and Louai Abdelhamied Othman — from Texas with 1,000 cell phones in Caro, Mich. — and Ali Houssaiky and Osama Sabhi Abulhassan — from Dearborn, Mich., with multiple cell phones and $11,000 in southern Ohio.

The Texas men had photos of Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge. The Michigan FBI and state police claimed there was no terrorist threat, just tourist photos. But a top FBI Michigan official admitted he sent his “B-Team” of agents to “investigate.” Prosecutors said it was more like arm-twisting to get them to drop terrorism charges.

WJRT-TV reporter Jeff Piechowski reported that the photos were shots of bridge grates, revealing the bridge supports below. How many tourists take pictures of grates? If there was no threat, why did law enforcement authorities beef up security like never before for a Labor Day march on the bridge?

The men threw away 1,000 cell phone chargers. Not a good business move, if you’re truly in it for the “business.” Prosecutors told Piechowski that boxes of the phones were addressed for Lebanon, aka Hezbollah Central.

The indictment of the men said they installed software on their laptop computers, with which they’d already wired the phones to steal free cell phone service from any company in any location around the world — untraceable."