The official Dilbert website with Scott Adams' color comic strips, animation, mashups and more! Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting - tech - 25 February 2012 SMARTPHONES may soon get a lot better at finishing your sentences for you - with the help of words and phrases gleaned from crowdsourcing. The software packages in today's phones often struggle with texts and voice commands if a user attempts words or phrases that aren't included in the phone's database. To see if the crowd could help, Keith Vertanen of Montana Tech in Butte and Per Ola Kristensson at the University of St Andrews, UK, called upon workers of the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The plan was to try and improve a predictive system used in Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices, which help disabled people to communicate by painstakingly typing out words interpreted from their muscle twitches or blinks. The researchers paid 298 Mechanical Turk workers to imagine phrases they might need if they had motor neuron disease or cerebral palsy. Their responses produced nearly 6000 useful phrases. David Weir at the University of Sussex, UK, agrees that the system has potential.
Top 10 Kitchen Tricks That Speed Up Cooking So you’ve started beefing up your cooking skills, but the process is still a little tedious. Here are 10 surprising kitchen techniques that will save you a bunch of time — not to mention wow your friends. Please enable JavaScript to watch this video. 10. If you don’t love pomegranates, it’s either because you’ve never had one or you hate how much work they take to deseed. 9. Peeling a hard boiled egg is a pain in the butt, but there’s a much easier way to get to the goods inside: just cut it in half and spoon it out of the shell. 8. Most 12 packs of soft drink are designed to sit in your fridge, but who needs an entire box sitting in there? 7. Ladling pancake batter into a pan is a recipe for a mess. 6. If you don’t like eating apples whole (they can, after all, get a little messy that way), but don’t always have a knife around, you can actually break them in half with your bare hands. 5. 4. If you have a particularly garlic-heavy recipe to make (so brave!) 3. 2. 1.