ideas or work plzzz

[shiv]

Hi all,
i am planning to do a project on web personalisation
through data mining .That is the web pages that redesign themselves for
the taste of the user( optimistically). If ur website falls within
this domain ur website could be built for free (for some bucks would be
even more preferable. I never had a dislike for money ). It will be
developed in
XML using java technologies nd the client side could be in java
script.Also the site could have the AJAX design pattern.
If u have some ideas abt any websites that will be grt
too pls share with me. I have already posted this but i find this quite
annoying that the web masters themselves rnt quite interested.Pls share
if u r quite serious. Ideas plzz i need them fast.
Thank you nd have a good day,

Shiv.

 

[Oliver Wong]

Hi all,
i am planning to do a project on web personalisation
through data mining .That is the web pages that redesign themselves for
the taste of the user( optimistically). If ur website falls within
this domain ur website could be built for free (for some bucks would be
even more preferable. I never had a dislike for money ). It will be
developed in
XML using java technologies nd the client side could be in java
script.Also the site could have the AJAX design pattern.
If u have some ideas abt any websites that will be grt
too pls share with me. I have already posted this but i find this quite
annoying that the web masters themselves rnt quite interested.Pls share
if u r quite serious. Ideas plzz i need them fast.
Thank you nd have a good day,

I don't understand what you are asking for.

Design ideas for websites?

Permission to modify websites maintained by other people?

Clients for your business? (And if so, it's not even clear to me what
service it is your business is providing).

- Oliver

 

[Dave Glasser]

if u r quite serious. Ideas plzz i need them fast.

lrn2spl


--
Check out QueryForm, a free, open source, Java/Swing-based
front end for relational databases.

http://qform.sourceforge.net

If you're a musician, check out RPitch Relative Pitch
Ear Training Software.

http://rpitch.sourceforge.net

 

[Rhino]

lrn2spl

Exactly what I was thinking! I've noticed that people from India (or with
Indian names) seem especially prone to shortening everything, like "you are"
to "u r". I wish someone would tell them that this may be trendy but that it
is not good communication. I'm fond of capitalizing sentences too but maybe
I'm old-fashioned....

 

[Thomas Weidenfeller]

I wish someone would tell them that this may be trendy but that it
is not good communication.

As a non-native speaker it always surprises me. Here I sit and try very
hard to make as few mistakes as possible (still too many), and on the
other hand there are people out there who find it cool to butcher there
language.

/Thomas

 

[Chris Uppal]

shortening everything, like "you
are" to "u r". I wish someone would tell them that this may be trendy but
that it is not good communication.

It's not communication at all, at least not with me. I have no choice but to
ignore posts that I can't read.

-- chris

 

[Roedy Green]

As a non-native speaker it always surprises me. Here I sit and try very
hard to make as few mistakes as possible (still too many), and on the
other hand there are people out there who find it cool to butcher there
language.

Oddly it is easier for computers and humans to accurately comprehend
the speech of a non-native speaker. Even with the distorting accent,
they tend to enunciate more clearly.

I was watching a commercial for a Gravitar vehicle. It turned out it
was actually a Grand Vitara slurred. I notice again in commercials
the way t's are more and more frequency dropped "twenny" for twenty"
or turned to d, "wadder" for "water".

My Mom was a stickler. Dropping the R in February was a good way to
get the strap. So it still jars my ears when people modify
pronunciations.

On the other hand, listen to early voice recordings made the 30s.
People talked in such a stiff, wind-bag rhetorical sort of way. The
"proper" way to speak now sounds stilted.

Similarly consider how the Brits, whom we generally look upon as the
pronunciation sticklers, have mangled words:

strawbries for strawberries.
Worster for Worcestershire
Chumly for Cholmondley
Sinjon for St. John

I got an email the other day from a man claiming he was going to
college next year then he was going to join the military. Yet my
spelling and grammar were better than his by grade 5.
The standards have plummeted.

What will the world be like? Will the CEOS be using "ur" in their
memos?

I would have thought that spelling would be improving for two reasons:
1. constant feedback from spell checkers to tell you about the words
you commonly get wrong.

2. looking things up in Google and coming up dry if your spelling is
too far off. If you are just a bit off you get all the crud written
by people who can't spell, often with no clue there is a world of good
stuff awaiting those who can spell.

 

[Oliver Wong]

Oddly it is easier for computers and humans to accurately comprehend
the speech of a non-native speaker. Even with the distorting accent,
they tend to enunciate more clearly.

Non-native speakers usually have trouble with sounds that don't exist in
their native language though. For example, I'm told my pronounciation of the
Japanese character \u30E9 is horrible; I'm told the correct pronounciation
is somewhere between "RA" and "LA", but because this sound doesn't exist in
English, I end up pronouncing the character either as "RA" or "LA". This is
the converse of a Japanese person trying to speak English and pronouncing
the "R" and L" sounds identically.

[...]

Similarly consider how the Brits, whom we generally look upon as the
pronunciation sticklers, have mangled words:

strawbries for strawberries.
Worster for Worcestershire
Chumly for Cholmondley
Sinjon for St. John

I got an email the other day from a man claiming he was going to
college next year then he was going to join the military. Yet my
spelling and grammar were better than his by grade 5.
The standards have plummeted.

What will the world be like? Will the CEOS be using "ur" in their
memos?

One (unlikely) solution would be to have English use a syllabary instead
of an alphabet. With an alphabet, any number of characters can form a single
syllable; "through" is considered to be a single syllable, for example, and
yet is seven characters long! In a syllabary, each character represents
exactly one syllable. So "U R" might indeed be a correct way of writing what
is traditionally "you are" for some syllabary.

Why is this a solution? Because of the one-to-one mapping between
characters and syllables, this also means that for every sequence of
syllables that can be uttered, there exists a unique spelling. If you type
in the incorrect character, the pronounciation of the sequence is changed.

This also solves the problem of wondering how to spell a word: if you
can pronounce it, you can spell it.

I would have thought that spelling would be improving for two reasons:
1. constant feedback from spell checkers to tell you about the words
you commonly get wrong.

2. looking things up in Google and coming up dry if your spelling is
too far off. If you are just a bit off you get all the crud written
by people who can't spell, often with no clue there is a world of good
stuff awaiting those who can spell.

Google offers a "did you mean ____?" feature, which I sometimes use as a
quick spell checker for words I'm unsure of.

- Oliver

 

[Roedy Green]

Google offers a "did you mean ____?" feature, which I sometimes use as a
quick spell checker for words I'm unsure of.

it does not kick if for local desktop searches or if enough people
spelled the word incorrectly.

I have even seeded the glossary in a few spots with deliberate
incorrect spellings as spider food.

 

[Chris Uppal]

Why is this a solution? Because of the one-to-one mapping between
characters and syllables, this also means that for every sequence of
syllables that can be uttered, there exists a unique spelling.

Not such a good idea. Pronunciation differs over both time and space. E.g.
most English people talk (in fact rather than theory) of a "bu'on", whereas I
believe the same word is often pronounced "budon" in the US. So what you
javax.swing.JButton be called ? Similar observations apply to vowels. E.g.
there are at least two very different pronunciations of the word "vase".

If the spelling worked in terms of some sort of "logical" syllables (where the
underlying syllable was the considered to be same all over the world, but the
pronunciation differed from place to place), then we'd have a situation at
least as complicated[*] as the current one, and the logical syllables would
have to be "just learned", just as English spelling is now.

([*] Arguably it would be exactly as complicated, since English has
phonetic[**] spelling, it's just that pronunciations have drifted since word
spelling became fixed.)

([**] Ignoring later imports from French, and other dilutions, distortions, and
approximations.)

-- chris

 

[Stefan Ram]

([*] Arguably it would be exactly as complicated, since English
has phonetic[**] spelling, it's just that pronunciations have
drifted since word spelling became fixed.)
([**] Ignoring later imports from French, and other dilutions,
distortions, and approximations.)

(...)
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
(...)

http://bertel.lundhansen.dk/sprog/sprog.php?page=english_is_tough

 

[Alex Hunsley]

Hi all,
i am planning to do a project on web personalisation
through data mining .That is the web pages that redesign themselves for
the taste of the user( optimistically). If ur website falls within
this domain ur website could be built for free (for some bucks would be
even more preferable. I never had a dislike for money ). It will be
developed in
XML using java technologies nd the client side could be in java
script.Also the site could have the AJAX design pattern.
If u have some ideas abt

IF you want anyone to take you seriously, learn to write real English.
"u" and all that nonsense is an instant turnoff and it just looks plain
lazy.

 

[Oliver Wong]

Not such a good idea. Pronunciation differs over both time and space.
E.g.
most English people talk (in fact rather than theory) of a "bu'on",
whereas I
believe the same word is often pronounced "budon" in the US. So what you
javax.swing.JButton be called ? Similar observations apply to vowels.
E.g.
there are at least two very different pronunciations of the word "vase".

I'm thinking that possibly by having an explicit mapping from syllable
to character, this would discourage "pronounciation drifting". As for
"vase", I guess someone would just dictate a "proper" spelling for it in the
new syllabary, which would in turn dictate a "proper" pronounciation.

Even if we had two spellings for "vase" (one for each pronounciation), I
believe it would be no worse than the situation of having two spellings for
many other words as well (e.g. color/colour, meter/metre, etc.) while still
solving the problem of "how do you spell this?"/"how do you pronounce this?"

- Oliver

 

[Chris Uppal]

I'm thinking that possibly by having an explicit mapping from syllable
to character, this would discourage "pronounciation drifting". As for
"vase", I guess someone would just dictate a "proper" spelling for it in
the new syllabary, which would in turn dictate a "proper" pronunciation.

Dear Gods, man ! It'd be a blood-bath. You think the odd flame-war over brace
layout or top/bottom posting is vicious ? Wait till we try to standardise
English pronunciation. The English-speaking world would implode in hatred and
violence (cue: lurid pictures of massed Quebequois laughing hysterically as
they annex the blasted remains of Northern America.)

The real problem -- technically -- would be deciding which syllables were
distinct. For instance in some English social groups "suit" is pronounced as a
diphthong (start with something like "sute", and then add in the difference
between "coo" and "queue". It may rhyme with "astute" -- depending on how you
pronounce /that/ ;-). So, for them, that isn't the same syllable as the one in
"sutra", although they /are/ the same for me. So do we have two logical
syllables for this case or just one ? I remember missing a favourite TV
program as a child visiting my grandparents. They asked me if I wanted
to watch "Luke", but that sounded like some boring kids' drama show, and I'd
never heard of it anyway, so I didn't bother. Too late I discovered that they
were talking about the show that was spelled "Look". So again, should "Luke"
and "look" share a logical syllable or not ? And how does the logical
structure of the syllable list reflect the relationships between them: for many
people "suit" and "Luke" share a vowel, for other people "suit" and "look"
share, whilst for others there are three different vowels.

Even if we had two spellings for "vase" (one for each
pronounciation), I believe it would be no worse than the situation of
having two spellings for many other words as well (e.g. color/colour,
meter/metre, etc.) while still solving the problem of "how do you spell
this?"/"how do you pronounce this?"

Interestingly, if perhaps a little ominously for your programme, in both the
examples you mention, the confusion was /caused/[*] by spelling reform
activists...

([*] at least in part -- AFAIK, the US adopted the spellings "meter" and
"color" under the influence of that Webster fellow and his reformist
dictionary.)

One nice effect of your idea of splitting the word into two -- essentially
creating two synonyms where there was only divergent pronunciation before -- is
that could act as a nursery ground for the creation of new words. I have no
doubt that the two "vase"s would diverge in meaning, perhaps referring to large
vs. small, or formal vs. informal, and thus the vocabulary would be extended.

-- chris

 

[Oliver Wong]

Dear Gods, man ! It'd be a blood-bath. You think the odd flame-war over
brace
layout or top/bottom posting is vicious ? Wait till we try to standardise
English pronunciation. The English-speaking world would implode in hatred
and
violence (cue: lurid pictures of massed Quebequois laughing hysterically
as
they annex the blasted remains of Northern America.)

Yes, I mentioned that my "solution" was "unlikely" to be implementable
in practice.

The real problem -- technically -- would be deciding which syllables were
distinct. For instance in some English social groups "suit" is pronounced
as a
diphthong (start with something like "sute", and then add in the
difference
between "coo" and "queue". It may rhyme with "astute" -- depending on how
you
pronounce /that/ ;-). So, for them, that isn't the same syllable as the
one in
"sutra", although they /are/ the same for me. So do we have two logical
syllables for this case or just one ? I remember missing a favourite TV
program as a child visiting my grandparents. They asked me if I wanted
to watch "Luke", but that sounded like some boring kids' drama show, and
I'd
never heard of it anyway, so I didn't bother. Too late I discovered that
they
were talking about the show that was spelled "Look". So again, should
"Luke"
and "look" share a logical syllable or not ? And how does the logical
structure of the syllable list reflect the relationships between them: for
many
people "suit" and "Luke" share a vowel, for other people "suit" and "look"
share, whilst for others there are three different vowels.

Personally, I haven't really made a decision on that. If they made me
"the King of English", then I guess I'd have to start making some decisions
about which syllables are distinct, and which aren't. But I suspect they'd
rather have a linguist (or a group of linguists) make these decisions, since
they probably have a better understanding of what the formal term "syllable"
means and how it might differ from a "phoneme", for example, whereas I
don't.

I'm not particularly "proud" of my way of pronouncing terms, and would
not start a rebellion to fight the reform if it turns out the "official"
pronounciation differs from mine. I'd be willing to learn a new set of
pronounciations if it meant that English were easier to learn, leading to
more people being able to communicate more effectively with each other, make
it easier to share ideas, really have every part of the Internet accessible
to everyone (as opposed to having certain portions naturally unaccessible
because the viewer doesn't speak the language the content is written in,
etc.) We don't have to use English as a base either; it's just that since
the Internet seems to be so heavily English-based already, I figured this
would be the path of least resistance.

I know of Esperanto, an artificial language designed to be easy to learn
to facilitate universal communication. I haven't learnt it because of the
chicken and egg problem: almost no one else knows it, so I'd have no one to
communicate with.

Even if we had two spellings for "vase" (one for each
pronounciation), I believe it would be no worse than the situation of
having two spellings for many other words as well (e.g. color/colour,
meter/metre, etc.) while still solving the problem of "how do you spell
this?"/"how do you pronounce this?"

Interestingly, if perhaps a little ominously for your programme, in both
the
examples you mention, the confusion was /caused/[*] by spelling reform
activists...

([*] at least in part -- AFAIK, the US adopted the spellings "meter" and
"color" under the influence of that Webster fellow and his reformist
dictionary.)

One nice effect of your idea of splitting the word into two -- essentially
creating two synonyms where there was only divergent pronunciation
before -- is
that could act as a nursery ground for the creation of new words. I have
no
doubt that the two "vase"s would diverge in meaning, perhaps referring to
large
vs. small, or formal vs. informal, and thus the vocabulary would be
extended.

An undoubtedly, people will use "vai-se" when they meant "vah-se", and
the pedants will write posts complaining about how kids these days seem to
take perverse pleasure in intentionally miss-pronouncing words.

- Oliver

 

[Roedy Green]

I know of Esperanto, an artificial language designed to be easy to learn
to facilitate universal communication. I haven't learnt it because of the
chicken and egg problem: almost no one else knows it, so I'd have no one to
communicate with.

With the Internet you have all the people you want to talk to, even
locally. The problem is you can't ask technical questions about Java
in Esperanto. The real problem is the humiliation of dealing with
people who talk many times faster than you can understand.

See http://mindprod.com/esperanto/esperanto.html

Esperanto is phonetic, but it has its pronunciation problems since
everyone speaks it with a national accent that takes some getting used
to.

UTF-8 is a great boon to Esperanto. Formerly there was a major hurdle
to deal with its accented letters on computer.

 

[Oliver Wong]

See http://mindprod.com/esperanto/esperanto.html

Thanks for the link, it was very informative. At
http://mindprod.com/esperanto/esperanto.html#TESTING, the characters that
appear under the "Unicode UTF-8 Rendered Entity" column are different from
the characters that appear under the "iso-8859-3 Rendered Entity" and
"iso-8859-3 Rendered alt-key" columns. I suspect the characters I see under
UTF-8 are correct (the first row appears to be a c with a circumflex in
UTF-8, but like the characters AE in the iso-8859-3 column for me).

It looks like later on in the document you use iso-8859-3, so I'm seeing
the "wrong" characters, and it's somewhat confusing for me. Don't know if
this is something "fixable", as I'm not sure if I'm using an especially
"weird" computer, or if rather most people will be like me, and have UTF-8
fonts installed, but not Esperento fonts. Just letting you know about this.

- Oliver

 

[Roedy Green]

Thanks for the link, it was very informative. At
http://mindprod.com/esperanto/esperanto.html#TESTING, the characters that
appear under the "Unicode UTF-8 Rendered Entity" column are different from
the characters that appear under the "iso-8859-3 Rendered Entity" and
"iso-8859-3 Rendered alt-key" columns. I suspect the characters I see under
UTF-8 are correct (the first row appears to be a c with a circumflex in
UTF-8, but like the characters AE in the iso-8859-3 column for me).

The document encoding applies to the whole document which I believe
some browsers let you override.. Further IE has a bug that strongly
discourages you from using iso-8859-3.

iso-8859-1 with Unicode entities is the way to fly now.

Formerly, you treated Esperanto as if it were Turkish.

 

[Chris Smith]

What will the world be like? Will the CEOS be using "ur" in their
memos?

Perhaps I shouldn't admit it, but I routinely get instant messages from
our CEO saying: "hi chris r u there?" Yet our CEO is generally a
literate, well-educated, and fairly intelligent person, except when
forming correct sentences in some instant messages. I think AOL has
just managed to convince large numbers of people that intentional
misspellings are the norm on the Internet. It's a misguided "When in
Rome..." situation.

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

 

[Daniel Dyer]

Perhaps I shouldn't admit it, but I routinely get instant messages from
our CEO saying: "hi chris r u there?" Yet our CEO is generally a
literate, well-educated, and fairly intelligent person, except when
forming correct sentences in some instant messages. I think AOL has
just managed to convince large numbers of people that intentional
misspellings are the norm on the Internet. It's a misguided "When in
Rome..." situation.

I think, over here at least, that it's SMS text messaging that is to
blame. Tight restrictions on the length of the message and a ridiculously
impractical input method have lead to the evolution of the highly
abbreviated "text speak". Now that it's somewhat acceptable and
understood on mobile phones it follows that lazy people, particularly
those that are slow typists, are using it on the Internet as well.

Dan.