Tag: HISTORY

A computer scientist at the University of Buffalo has developed a new program capable of taking automated translation beyond the literal. Rohini Srihari began working on her software in the hopes of improving computerized translations of Urdu -- a linguistic blend of Hindi and Persian that is widely spoken in Pakistan, and by many Muslims in India. Urdu is a particularly difficult language ...

As lame as it may be, we occasionally hop on the ol' Google Maps, and meander our ways down scenic city streets from our desks. Paris, New Orleans and Buenos Aires can all be ours, regardless of where we lay our laptops. Thanks to an update from Google, we can now wander off the streets of Rome and into the Colosseum. We'll get some work done next week. ...

Much of the world's history may have been written by the victors, but Louisiana's historical record apparently hinges on the whims of lonely computer nerds. Case in point: the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, where a statue of the state's first governor is accompanied not by an official document or verified biography, but by a printout of the man's Wikipedia page. Yes, a printout -- from ...

Poland is home to a handful of museums at former Nazi concentration camps, but the country's culture minister doesn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about who put them there to begin with. Yesterday, Bogdan Zdrojewski told the Polish news agency PAP that he'd written to the directors of three World War II-era museums in the country, asking them to drop the ".pl" suffix from their URLs. The ...

Thousands of historical photos and documents from the Holocaust are now available online, thanks to a collaborative project from Google and Israel's Yad Vashem memorial. The initiative, which launched yesterday, will allow users to search through 130,000 photos from the Jerusalem-based institute, which houses the world's largest collection of Holocaust documents. With the help of experimental ...

The library honoring John F. Kennedy is about to publish all of its documents online, just days before the 50th anniversary of the late President's inauguration. The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation will formally announce the launch later today, making it the first presidential library to make its entire collection available on the Internet. Today's announcement caps a four-year, $10 million ...

Making its first high-minded and forward-thinking move in recent memory, Universal Music Group has donated 200,000 master recordings to the Library of Congress. A boon to the Library's 3 million-strong collection of recordings, the discs and tapes, from the 20's through the 40's, will be digitized -- many for the first time. We foresee an exhibit at the Smithsonian: "For the Record: The Last Time ...

Google's latest search tool may not be its most widely celebrated, but it could end up having a far greater cultural impact than anything else the company has ever done. The new Google Books Ngram Viewer, which launched last week, collects more than 500 billion words, from over 5.2 million digital books available for free download. Users can search for a specific word or phrase, and the viewer ...

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have discovered a bug that many sites are using to track the browsing behavior of their visitors. The flaw was found on some 485 websites, including YouPorn, Perez Hilton and Wired, and reportedly reveals all of the other sites that each user has previously visited. Of the 485 sites affected by the bug, 63 were found to be copying the data, ...

Yesterday, Google unveiled the latest edition of its Google Earth digital atlas, which the company heralds as "the next generation of realism." The new Google Earth 6 sports a more highly integrated Street View feature, which allows users to zoom in from outer space directly to specific street corners or addresses. Taking a virtual stroll around a particular location is also substantially ...

Blogs didn't exist during the Civil War, but the New York Times certainly did -- and its extensive archives capture just about every phase of the five-year conflict. Now, nearly 150 years after the war broke out, the paper has begun covering the war once again in "real time," on a new blog called 'Disunion.' Each post on the new forum focuses on what was going on in the U.S. on that particular ...

For the past twelve months, our world has been different. Those happy shires where unicorns once fluttered and roses once glittered have, sadly, fallen silent and sparkle-less. Those shining metropolises were known as the "Geocities," and, since their disappearance, their shimmering, spastic, cartoonish denizens have been forced into exile, left to fight for the little remaining space on tweens' ...

The 21st century has ushered the field of archaeology into a revolutionary renaissance period, as technological advances like lasers, infrared mapping and multi-spectral imaging now afford archaeologists with extraordinary methods of discovery and restoration. Science also allows history buffs and amateur bone-diggers -- in similarly unprecedented fashion -- to experience, enjoy and share in that ...

Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. On October 18th, 1985, the Nintendo Entertainment System debuted in New York with a marketing campaign focused on the 8-bit system's Zapper and R.O.B. (robot operating buddy) peripherals. [From: Wired] Minecraft player copyboy, has ported the 'Portal' gameplay experience, ...

Chief software architect at Microsoft Ray Ozzie was digging though his archives when he stumbled across a folder dated November 20th, 1985. Inside was the original press release and related materials for the release of Windows 1.0. The presser includes quotes from the likes of Bill Gates, who proclaims, "Windows provides unprecedented power to users today and a foundation for hardware and ...