Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

Set in a mythical land Alagaesia, much in theory like Tolkien’s “middle” earth, Eldest (Inheritance, Book 2) continues the saga that Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1) created. In many ways, it’s more satisfying than the new Potter book, because we see actual development of the attributes of the main character as he is trained by the elves. Eldest also introduces a new subplot where his “brother” from home rallies the villagers to move out of the empire into rebel lands. There again, the great war begins, and a new rider is introduced right before the book ends.

There’s even a romance substory between Eragon and the elf he saved before, which amounts to nothing but frustration. Probably Paolini is saving total release until his last book in the trilogy. And while this romantic tension is irritating, everytime Arya refuses his advances when you expect her to finally give in keeps you hooked nicely along.

Read if you liked the first one, or want a quick throw-away fantasy with more plot movement than fresh ideas.

The results of the 2005 NIST evaluation are now online:

www.nist.gov

The winner, hands down, appears to be Google who were able to translate two texts in Arabic and Chinese to English with the best precision on the BLEU-4. If you don’t know what the Bleu metric measures, NIST has an explanation:

Machine translation quality was measured automatically using an N-gram co-occurrence statistic metric developed by IBM and referred to as BLEU. BLEU measures translation accuracy according to the N-grams or sequence of N-words that it shares with one or more high quality reference translations. Thus, the more co-occurrences the better the score. BLEU is an accuracy metric, ranging from “0″ to “1″ with “1″ being the best possible score.

You can also read the original paper from IBM research. The google entry used parallel statistical analysis. You can read about their pride and joy on their own blog.

How does a parallel statistical translation model work? You feed a classifying engine two text streams in the languages of choice, and it will associate words and phrases in one language with words and phrases in the next, for example, feeding it:

Me falta el tiempo.

and the english version

I don’t have time!

The engine may associate el tiempo with time more strongly, since it’s seen that before, but create a special rule for the phrase me falta which in this context means I don’t have and not anything deriving regularly from to lack.

My old high school, Tempe Preparatory Academy, is starting to use blogs as a communication tool. Humane Letters 10A is an informal forum for class discussion outside of class, while instructor Kerstin Byorni is using her MSN space to keep track of assignments! Go TPA!! Now all you need to do is get a properly designed Drupal instance or Wordpress or some other CMS up there…

I was at Barnes and Noble when I saw this horrible book:

It’s not the subject that offends me, it’s that they feature a clownfish on the cover. How likely is a new book to feature a clownfish, unless it’s trying to steal some of the Finding Nemo market?

If you’re bored, the 2005 Results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are out. The contest is an international literary contest along the line of “once upon a dark and stormy night” and is complete parody.

My personal favorite entry is:

“Oh my God!” Amber whispered as the compressor throbbed to life, shuddered rhythmically towards its inevitable conclusion, and shot ninety pounds of sultry air through custom-bored, cold-drawn, boss-lock-fitted crimp-couplings as Chuck Key glanced up with a smile that only tire shop guys can smile.