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NEWS AND COMMENTARY


New technology being developed to break through the language barrier

CNN—Communications technology has shrunk the globe, but there remains one large boundary to all this togetherness: language.

So far businesses can only spread as far and as fast as they can find people speaking a common tongue. However, researchers at IBM may be about to punch a hole through this barrier.

The multinational currently has 100 staff working on an internal project named "n.Fluent" that offers instantaneous translation across a variety of platforms.

"We have a web page interface, where you type in a URL and it automatically translates the web page for you," Salim Roukos, chief technology officer for translation technologies at the company's T.J. Watson Laboratory in New York, told CNN. "We also have an app that you can put on a web page and when users arrive... they can pull down a menu and change the language. The ability to translate URLs is something that our customers love a lot, because once you translate the page, you can click on all the links and suddenly you are exploring the foreign language web as an English speaker."

At the moment the software is still in development and only available with IBM, but the company's intention is to take the project to market. They are also developing versions for instant messaging and mobile devices.

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As honor students multiply, who really is one?

COMMACK, N.Y.—There have been so many honor societies created at Commack High School on Long Island in recent years that some students ended up in six or seven of them, racking up memberships like so many merit badges or thanks-for-playing trophies.

But the school reversed course this school year, cutting out its 28-student technology honor society and combining those for sign language, Latin, German and French. That left 11 societies, and a community wondering how much honor is too much.

With so many societies, some students are unable to attend all of the meetings and shirk their duties with the groups, showing up only to collect the “honor cord” — a decorative tassel — to wear at graduation.

Commack is one of many places where educators and parents are re-examining the role of honor societies, which started out as an academic distinction reserved for the top 5 or 10 percent of a class but have become a routine item on college résumés.

While the prestigious National Honor Society still requires members to maintain at least a 3.0 grade-point average (many chapters like Commack set the bar higher), fledgling societies in individual subjects often accept lower grades in other areas.

In Commack, where a sizeable number of graduates are accepted into Ivy League schools every year, nearly a third of the 1,200 juniors and seniors belong to honor societies; the average among those students is three apiece.

“This cheapens the currency,” ”said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit educational policy group in Washington. “Once everyone’s wearing rhinestones, you might not notice someone wearing diamonds.”

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Study calls attention to speech disorders

A U.K. study finds that one in six children struggle with speech, due in part to busier parents, but the outlook may not be as bleak as it seems.

Children’s communication expert Jean Gross blames children’s increased TV-watching and video/computer game-usage, and less time spent with adults and parents, according to Rachel Williams in The Guardian. Research also revealed that “twice as many boys struggle as girls,” and that nearly a quarter of children with speech difficulties do not get any help, leaving them at risk for “mental health problems” or future run-ins with the law. Statistics were gleaned from a survey of 1,000 parents living in England, carried out by YouGov.

Gross said higher mortgages and other costs of living are preventing overworked parents from spending necessary time with their children. According to Williams, Gross offered this bit of advice: “Think about what children need. It's not expensive toys and big houses. It's you."

What are the solutions for busy parents?

The BBC posts a video of an interview with Gross, in which she says parents need access to expert advice before children begin school, and that “more speech language therapists” are needed in “the school setting.”

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Google News tool to allow online media opt out

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP)—Google News has launched a “news-specific crawler” that lets online media automatically keep stories, photos, or video out of its index.

The announcement comes a day after the California-based Internet giant said it is letting publishers limit the number of online pages people can view after being routed to their websites by Google’s search engine. Publishers have always been able to block Google from including their website content in the search engine index.

Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said in a blog post that a new “web crawler” extends that option to Google News. Web crawlers are automated programs that scour the Internet for content and then index it in databases routinely mined for results to online search queries.

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Technology gives kids a window on world

OSAKA—Students at Mikanodai Primary School in Kawachi-Nagano, Osaka Prefecture, occasionally enjoy speaking English to their counterparts in Australia—without ever traveling out of the city. The public school takes full advantage of an Internet teleconference system as part of its English lessons.

On an early autumn day, for example, about 40 fifth graders gathered in front of a television screen that was displaying a live image of a girl at Wodonga West Primary School in Victoria, Australia.

Konnichiwa. Watashi no namae wa Anii desu. Tempura o tabemasu (Hello. My name is Annie. I enjoy eating tempura),” said the girl, who received a round of applause from the other side of the equator.

During the half-hour session, Mikanodai and Wodonga West students spoke to each other in English and Japanese. They introduced themselves and had a question-and-answer session, while also singing together and playing a paper-rock-scissors game.

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Number of institutions accepting TOEFL surpasses 7,300 worldwide

PRINCETON, NJ—Educational Testing Service (ETS) announced today that more than 7,300 institutions worldwide are now accepting the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) test to assess English-language proficiency for both undergraduate and graduate applicants.

Of this number of educational institutions accepting the TOEFL test, about 5,175 are located in the United States and Canada, 1,000 in continental Europe, 200 in the United Kingdom, 600 in Asia, 100 in Australia and New Zealand, with the majority of the remaining institutions located in Africa and the Middle East.

Within the last year alone, an additional 383 institutions have become TOEFL score users and the number of institutions signing on to use TOEFL scores continues to increase at a fast pace, the ETS said.
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In response to the growing demand for the TOEFL test by colleges and universities, ETS has increased the number of test administration sites to allow greater access and flexibility for test takers. Currently, there are more than 4,500 test administration sites globally.

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Children’s schooling should start at six, a British study recommends

Schoolchildren should not start formal lessons until they turn six, and Sats should be scrapped to relieve the damaging pressure England's young pupils face, the biggest inquiry into primary education for 40 years concludes today.

In a damning indictment of Labour’s education record since 1997, the Cambridge University-led review accuses the government of introducing an educational diet "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools".

It claims that successive Labour ministers have intervened in England’s classrooms on an unprecedented scale, controlling every detail of how teachers teach in a system that has “Stalinist overtones.” It says they have exaggerated progress, narrowed the curriculum by squeezing out space for history, music and arts, and left children stressed-out by the testing and league table system.

The review is the biggest independent inquiry into primary education in four decades, based on 28 research surveys, 1,052 written submissions and 250 focus groups. It was undertaken by 14 authors, 66 research consultants and a 20-strong advisory committee at Cambridge University, led by Professor Robin Alexander, one of the most experienced educational academics in the country.

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Wikipedia edit system should be in place by year's end

The English-language Wikipedia should have a system in place by December to vet anonymous edits for certain high-profile entries, according to the online encyclopedia's founder.

The system, called "flagged revisions," would allow anonymous users to make changes to certain pages. However, the edits must be approved before going live, said Jimmy Wales on Tuesday. The system is already in place for the German version of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, which is run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, said in January that it would test the flagged revisions system on the English pages. That followed a couple of notable incidents where the biographies of U.S. senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd had been wrongly changed to say both men had died.

Other Wikipedia entries have also been subject to frequent vandalism. In response, Wikipedia locked the entries and required those who wanted to edit to be logged in. New registrants had to wait four days before they could submit changes, which then had to be approved.

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