Google to launch smartphones that translate languages in real time

A mobile phone that can act as an interpreter is being developed by Google. The firm says the device will convert spoken words into another language almost instantly.

Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, said: “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”

While early versions of Google's website translation software sometimes produced little more than gobbledygook, an ever-growing database has enabled it to achieve far greater accuracy. It now covers 52 of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages, the latest being Haitian Creole.

Google admits speech will be an even tougher challenge than text but says a customer’s phone would adapt to its user by “learning” their style of talking. “Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch, but recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you,” Mr. Och said.

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Bilingualism might begin in the womb, study finds

By E.J. Mundell, reporter, HealthDay

The sound of two languages spoken regularly during pregnancy might encourage babies to tune in to both tongues soon after birth, a new study finds.

A team of psychological scientists at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in France, watched the sucking reflexes of newborns born to either monolingual English-speaking women, or women who spoke both English and Tagalog, a language native to the Philippines.

The researchers explained that increased sucking behavior indicates newborns’ interest in a particular stimulus, including spoken language.

The team found that babies born to monolingual mothers exhibited increased sucking behaviors when they heard English, but not Tagalog, while infants born to the bilingual mothers showed interest, regardless of which of the two languages was being spoken.

“Monolingual newborns’ preference for their single native language directs listening attention to that language,” the researchers wrote. “Bilingual newborns' interest in both languages helps ensure attention to, and hence further learning about, each of their languages.”

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Working mothers unable to help with children’s homework, says study

Mothers who work full-time spend just three minutes a day alone with their children helping them with homework, researchers have found.

The figure is less than a quarter of the time devoted to children's homework by mothers who work part-time or who stay at home. Their absence prompts children to spend more time watching television, according to the study, published in the British Journal of Sociology.

Fathers, who manage only three minutes on average each day, increase by a minute a day the amount of time they help with homework when their partner works full-time. But that is insufficient to compensate for the loss of attention caused by the mother going out to work.

Daughters fare slightly better than sons in households where both parents work, getting seven minutes of concentrated attention from their mothers, but that still falls far short of the average of 14 minutes that each child gets in a traditional one-income household.

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UNESCO says teachers, students increasingly under attack

UNITED NATIONS (PNA/APP)—A new report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has found that politically and ideologically motivated attacks against teachers, students and schools are on the rise, calling for greater community involvement to reduce such incidents.

Since the first-ever study on the issue, entitled “Education under Attack,” was published in 2007, the systematic targeting of students and teachers has been on the upswing, especially in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Thailand, the new report noted.

The number of attacks almost tripled in Afghanistan from 242 to 670 from 2007 to 2008, while nearly 300 schools were reportedly blown up by Maoist rebels in India from 2006-2009.

The report also pointed out that sexual violence continues to be perpetrated against schoolgirls and women in conflict areas, with incidents resulting from abduction and attacks at schools or during the journey to them having been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Myanmar and the Philippines.

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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.

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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