Translation through the iPad Viewer

One of the coolest apps I’ve seen for the iPad is WordLens, which will translate whatever text it sees through the camera viewer.  I didn’t demo it in class because each translation dictionary costs $5.  I bought the English/Spanish dictionary, but since I don’t speak Spanish, I can’t tell how well it is translating.  Nevertheless, here is a picture of the front page of today’s New York Times, and also one of how WordLens translated it (in real time, directly to the screen), when I hovered the iPad over it.

Museum of the Moving Image

We visited my parents in NYC this weekend, and while we were there we went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.  Too bad it's too far for a field trip, because it had a lot of of kid-friendly activities.

In one spot they had still cameras mounted overhead which were pointed down at a flat desk with a marked frame.  On the desk there were cut-outs of characters and props as well as backgrounds to use to make a stop action video. One could position the cut-outs, and then press a button to take a picture.  Once you had a sequence of photos, you could watch your video play back on a screen.

Similarly, in another room, they supplied black paper and scissors so you could make a silhouette stop action animation.  There they used cameras and laptops running iStopAnimation to make the videos.

Zoey is my brother's dog.

Another fun part of the exhibit was the Translation Party.  If you texted a sentence to the given phone number, it would be projected on a wall, then electronically translated to Japanese and projected onto the wall again. Then the Japanese was translated back to English, and then back to Japanese, with each translation projected.  The Translation Party stopped when 2 consecutive English and Japanese translations stayed the same.  Those final versions made no sense.  Maybe digital translation has a ways to go...

Too small to see?

What's in a name?...

I learned last week that Hispanic last names often have 2 names.  I had never really thought much about 2 name last names, but last week I started my stint in middle school, where the kids rotate through subjects, so I tried to begin to learn the names of the 150 kids who come to my cooperating teacher for science.  She gave me a copy of the class roster for each class, organized by assigned seat.  But, the class roster only had room for 20 letters for “last name, first”, and for those kids with 2 last names, the first name was cut off.  I spoke to all the kids whose first name  was missing (which was itself an easy way to start a conversation) and most all of them had Hispanic names.  (As an aside, what's up with having the class roster system cut off names ever?)

So, I came home and researched the practice of 2 last names.  A Hispanic child is given the first last name of his father followed by the first of his mother.  Usually when a woman gets married, she keeps her first last name (the one from her father) and replaces the second with her husband’s first last name (explained in detail here ).  

And then I was looking over the student directory of my daughter’s school, where there are 2 students with the last name Suresh.  Both have their father’s first name listed as Suresh, but none of the  parents’ last name is that.  My internet research only turns up Suresh as a Hindu name, but not the naming convention.  It’s a puzzle to figure out when naming conventions have been mangled by American forms and data entry, and when not.  I wish I knew...

Does anyone out there in cohort 18 know any other naming conventions, and the rules for appropriately using first and last names?