Chris Blow

“Inspired by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Sunlight created Transparency Corps as a new way for people to volunteer to make government transparency a reality,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. “Now, when people ask ‘how can I help?’ Sunlight and future partners can provide micro-tasks that when aggregated, help solve research and data analysis problems when computers alone cannot properly scrutinize government information.” - Chris Blow

The MDG Monitor shows how countries are progressing in their efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). With the 2015 target date fast approaching, it is more important than ever to understand where the goals are on track, and where additional efforts and support are needed, both globally and at the country level. - Chris Blow

The Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM) is a one-of-a-kind Research, Development, and Professional Services facility leveraging Knowledge Visualization to solve real-world problems. - Chris Blow

Microsoft today launched Maren a native windows transliteration that works in all most all windows application without a need for an internet connection. - Chris Blow

Tag keys and values (values other than names) are all in English within the database, and likely to remain that way. Tag data given back by the APIs, and ultimately shown/entered within the editing interfaces are also all in english at the moment. It would be possible to define mappings to mask this, but those technical challenges have not been tackled seriously by anyone as yet. Translation efforts around tagging interpretation have so far focussed on descriptions of what the tags mean within the wiki (see below) - Chris Blow

excellent documentation - Chris Blow

A robust suite of acceptance tests ensures your Rails app stays working giving you extreme freedom to refactor. Unfortunately, traditional full-stack acceptance testing of web-based applications has centered on in-browser solutions like Selenium and Watir that immediately present challenges like speed, timing/waiting and sharing data across processes, all through a relatively clunky API designed without Ruby in mind. Getting started was troublesome, and keeping things running smoothly was a constant concern. - Chris Blow

Khmer Rouge tribunal hears 1st testimony from survivor of deadliest torture center - Chris Blow

Open Translation Tools 09 is a conference organised by Aspiration Tech in collaboration with FLOSS Manuals and translate.org.za. Pictured below is Gunner from Aspiration and the OTT group. - Chris Blow

“They’ve got some of the comments that I’ve made being mistranslated in Iran, suggesting that I’m telling rioters to go out and riot some more,” Mr. Obama said, referring to accounts that the White House said surfaced late last week and over the weekend. - Chris Blow

Arab Techies a gathering umbrella for Arab techies which I am one of its members, has just announced the release of the first outcomes of a four days Arabization Codesprint, which was attended by 15 participants from 8 countries in the Arab World and was held in Swiss Club in Cairo, Egypt between 20 and 23 May 2009. (Read ArabCrunch coverage of the first ArabTechies gathering here. ) - Chris Blow

Using CC0, you can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waivable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data. - Chris Blow

Google Static Maps API lets you embed a Google Maps image on your webpage without requiring JavaScript or any dynamic page loading. - Chris Blow

We are releasing 10 projects including libraries to improve search normalization and indexing of arabic text for PHP, Python and Ruby, Modules and Plugins for Drupal and Wordpress that enhance the user experience of arab speaking users. and a Arabic stemmer and Verb conjugator. - Chris Blow

Golden Shadow was InSTEDD’s first field test of technologies and procedures selected to overcome some of the shortcomings of our current public health and disaster response systems. We also wanted to develop a local test bed for tools we would be using internationally, including in our Mekong Collaboration Program. - Chris Blow

Some programmers would be uncomfortable in those circumstances. Welcome to journalism, folks. - Chris Blow

Lingotek offers full-service translation solutions to global organizations and government agencies. Our network of over 5,000 qualified, native translators around the world allows us to accommodate projects of any size and domain while increasing quality and reducing costs for our clients. - Chris Blow