My Thoughts – Assignment Bank

Tweetz

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Feeling a little twittery, I’ve decided to go ahead and do the Phun with Phake Tweets DS106 assignment. It involves a couple simple steps. Coming straight from the DS106 assignment page, all you have to do is “Use the Twister tool from ClassTools to generate a series of images representing the voices of past figures if they could express themselves in twitter. Notch it up, and recast a historical event with a new plot line, and notch it up again, but making it a back and forth between two figures (use @person!) – my example is not developed as a fanfic, but should give you an idea of what to do (okay, okay, I will do a real assignment, sigh).”

So for my spin on things, I chose to do a conversation with some well known historical figures, Socrates and Plato. The fake conversation I made between them concerns the trial that Socrates went through that eventually condemned him to death. Plato, a disciple of Socrates, is the person who we have to thank for putting most of that account in written record. If you guys aren’t that familiar with the either Socrates or Plato, I do advise reading up on them to at least familiarize yourself with some of our most beloved ancient philosophers. So just click the links below to see what I wrote!

What I wrote is definitely historically accurate.

*cough*

Definitely.

Socrates

Plato

I hope you enjoyed that tweet on history! Did you notice how Socrates and Plato look shockingly similar? Must of been that ol’ Greek Physique! Ahaha…

Feel free to leave any comments below! Thanks!

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Whatever humans can do…

…computers can do it better!

Right?

???????????????????????????????? ?That we fear in the industry and we welcome war to the consumption tax hike in two years after the first bullet.

Eh…maybe not.

For this DS106 assignment, “Google Translate Fail”, one must “find something in a foreign language and use Google Translate and laugh about how awful it is.” Oh, and while you’re at it, “if its a language you know, give an explanation of what it should be and list possible reasons it got messed up.” For this assignment, I chose to translate something from Japanese to English. The results, as you have seen, are quite..um, remarkable (kind of, at least).

For my line, I took it from a news page after typing in ? ???in Google search.

First, in regards to why the explanation is “messed up”, is because Google translate does not have the ability to understand the complex nuances of the language. Taken from a video (produced by Google presumably) found on the blog entitled Google Operating System, “these computers use a process called ‘statistical machine translation’ — which is just a fancy way to say that our computers generate translations based on patterns found in large amounts of text.” That means that there is really is no true “understanding” of a language to a computer. Translating comes down to, in simple terms, numbers or statistical correlations. So, in terms of quality, the translations are usually more wrong than correct. In terms of speed, however, it is certainly much faster.

So while Google translate isn’t the greatest in terms of quality, the speed it is able to translate at is incredible and will no doubt have us coming back to it again and again regardless of the lack of quality.

A Ceaseless Seaside Sunset

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Sunsets are beautiful, aren’t they?

In this DS106 assignment, A Sunset, one was supposed to “Take a picture of a beautiful sunset. Nothing fancy, just a nice picture”.

But are pictures ever that simple?

The photo you see above was taken in Japan in Yokohama (I think that’s where I was). I remember the day’s events vividly as I walked with my friend down the beach. She, too, was taking pictures of the sea (or whatever this large body of water was), while walking down the beach getting her feet wet in the tide. I remember a little boy ran around her and fell forward in the oncoming tide. Quite unlucky, I thought, as it was rather windy, and the temperature was dropping as night fell. He seemed to rebound quickly, as I remember, for he soon ran back into his mother’s arms after his somewhat tragic fall.

I remember as the tide swept in and cleared all the footprints away, I saw a figure further down the coast staring into the setting sun. I felt at the time that this was quite a symbolic pose, and I was compelled to take this picture. While the setting sun is beautiful, the anonymous person to the right, perhaps the most central part of this picture, is what makes this picture special. The feeling of looking to the horizon, not sure if there really is an end to the vast sea before you, is what I wanted to convey, among other things.

Lastly, I’d like to say that I hope you enjoyed viewing this quaint photo of the sea as much as I have enjoyed taking it. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Thanks!