Random Acts of Reality reports on using the phonetic alphabet (apparently the London Ambulance Service use the NATO alphabet, see earlier entry).

The comments on the story mention a rumour going around Newham that ‘there is someone going around biting chunks out of people’. He has moved down from Birmingham and has attacked people in Poplar and Ilford, and he can take the form of an animal and appear in different places. Tom refers to an account in the Guardian of this urban legend, which started recently in Birmingham:

bq. A vampire is on the loose in Birmingham. And an inept one, if reports are to be believed. Which they aren’t. Last month, this “vampire” went on a “rampage” in Glen Park Road, Ward End. The attacker reportedly bit a male pedestrian and then bit neighbours who came to the man’s aid. One woman had “chunks” bitten out of her hand, according to reports, which feature lots of one-word “quotes” and very little in the way of named sources.

The Guardian article has a nice list of the urbanlegends.about.com top ten legends of 2004 (unfortunately the Guardian gave the wrong URL).

bq. David Emery, chronicler of folklore for urbanlegends.com [no, it is urbanlegends.about.com], defines urban legends as “apocryphal stories, told as true and plausible enough to be believed, about horrific, embarrassing, exasperating or ironic things that have supposedly happened to real people. In lieu of evidence, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely upon good storytelling and the naming of allegedly trustworthy sources (eg a friend of a friend who swears it is true) to bolster its credibility. Legends tend to arise spontaneously and are rarely traceable to a single point of origin.” No wonder, then, that the once-bitten of Birmingham have since become so publicity-shy. If, that is, they existed in the first place.

heardsaid is a weblog that publishes little statements that may be of fact (but they aren’t checked) and that may be eye-openers:

bq. We see and hear all kinds of things in passing from family, friends, work colleagues, even total strangers; watching tv or movies, listening to the radio, reading books, magazines and newspaper; every now and then we’ll hear something amazing which we want to pass on.

The blog only started recently and is a team effort.

(Via Random Acts of Reality)

The Seattle Times reports that the Secretary of State’s website in Washington state had a machine translation system that wrought havoc with Chinese.

bq. …the Chinese translation was apparently way off. For example, a statement about Secretary of State Sam Reed proposing “statewide mandates to restore public trust” was translated as “Swampy weed suggests whole state order recover open trust,” …

By law, however, certain groups have to be given equal rights to access to election material. Chiense and Korean translations have now been removed from the website. Apparently the MT system is functioning adequately for Russian, Japanese, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

bq. Gachot said people who are “perfectly bilingual” quickly spot any errors in translation and tend to focus on the software’s shortcomings. “This service is for people who don’t speak very much English at all,” he said.

bq. He says the accuracy level is around 75 percent. That can be improved by tweaking the site, Gachot said, but it’s tough to get accurate translations on sites with a wide variety of topics and posted information that changes often.

Debby Hsu, a members of a lobbying group, who criticizes the system, says ‘having no translation is better than having very bad translation’.

(Via Taccuino di Traduzione)

In the entry House of Lords upholds Human Rights Act on December 17 2004, there was some heated discussion in the comments with the few select regular commenters here. I feel somewhat vindicated by today’s article in the Independent, headed Clarke ends terror suspects’ detention without trial. Incidentally, the powers to detain applied only with regard to foreigners.

However, it’s not going to be a tea-party for the ex-detainees:

bq. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke is to introduce “control orders” to curb the activities of suspected terrorists who, for various reasons, cannot be prosecuted, he told MPs.

bq. This would replace detention powers under the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act, 2001, which the Law Lords had ruled were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

bq. He conceded that his plan would be “contentious” in that the new scheme would not include detention in prison, but would include a range of controls restricting movement and association, curfews and/or tagging and in some cases a requirement to remain at their premises.

The announcement was accompanied by the usual remarks about terrorism and how effective the powers have been.

Drool.

You can these headsets for under 30 euros on e-Bay.

(via join-the-dots)