Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/happy-87th-birthday-hugh-hefner/
thomas kinkade paintings navy jet crash virginia beach isiah thomas easter recipes live free or die hard carlos pena amanda bynes arrested
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Greece's NBG-Eurobank merger suspended, official says
By Lefteris Papadimas and George Georgiopoulos
ATHENS (Reuters) - National Bank's plan to absorb Eurobank
National acquired 84.3 percent of Eurobank via a share swap in February with a view to absorbing it as part of broader consolidation in the banking industry to cope with fallout from Greece's debt crisis and deep recession.
But the plan raised concerns at the lenders' "troika" - European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund - that a merger would form a bank too big relative to Greece's gross domestic product.
"The final decision on the merger will be taken by the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund (HFSF)," the official, who declined to be named, told reporters.
Together, the two banks need 15.6 billion euros in fresh capital to shore up their solvency ratios to levels set by the central bank after incurring losses from a sovereign debt writedown and impaired loans.
Under a recapitalisation scheme agreed with Greece's international lenders, most of the fresh capital will be provided by the HFSF, a state bank support fund, in exchange for new shares and contingent convertible bonds.
To stay private, banks must ensure that at least 10 percent of their share offerings is taken up by private investors.
"The two banks sent letters to the central bank saying it is unlikely they will be able to raise the 10 percent from the market," the official said.
This means that both banks will fall under the full control of the HFSF bailout fund.
The official also confirmed what two bankers had earlier told Reuters: that the two banks would be recapitalised separately.
After their recapitalisation, the HFSF will decide whether they will go ahead and integrate.
"I do not want to prejudge the HFSF's decision," the official said.
National's current stake in Eurobank will be severely diluted as a result of the recapitalisation and analysts expect the banks' shares to come under heavy selling pressure on Monday.
"The market was partly discounting such an outcome but did not expect decisions like the suspension of the merger to be taken so fast. I expect their shares to plunge on Monday," said Takis Zamanis, a chief trader at Athens-based Beta Securities.
(Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/greeces-nbg-eurobank-merger-suspended-official-says-214430952--finance.html
whitney houston laid to rest daytona bike week mary kay ash tiny houses maya angelou joan of arc tony robbins
7-year-old cancer patient scores touchdown at Nebraska football ...
LINCOLN, Neb. ? 7-year-old cancer patient Jack Hoffman scored a big win at Nebraska?s spring football game at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska on Saturday.
Nebraska running back Rex Burkhead befriended Hoffman last year and is the captain of his support network known as ?Team Jack.?
Hoffman was given a No. 22 Huskers jersey and put on the field. The crowd roared as he sprinted 69 yards with the entire football team running with him.
Hoffman summed up his win with three words: ?It felt awesome.?
Source: http://myfox8.com/2013/04/07/7-year-old-cancer-patient-scores-touchdown-at-nebraska-football-game/
holes ncaa brackets 2012 odd lamar d antoni fashion star andrew bird
Monday, April 8, 2013
Red details Scarlet upgrades and trade-ins: $9,500 for Full Epic-X or Scarlet Dragon
If you're pining for a Dragon Sensor but don't have an Epic-M or Epic-X in your collection, you might be in luck: Red just detailed an upgrade and trade-in path for owners of its entry-level Scarlet camera. By plunking down $9,500 and trading-in your Scarlet, you'll nab a Full Epic-X with its new black body, and have the option upgrade it to a Full Epic Dragon through the standard update process, to boot. If that doesn't strike your fancy, you could send in $9,500 instead and have your grey-bodied cam turned into a Scarlet Dragon, netting you the dynamic range and revamped color of the new sensor, replete with a maximum frame rate of 60 fps at 5k. Ready to move on up to gear that packs a bigger punch? Pre-orders kick off this Thursday, while upgrades are slated to commence in July.
Filed under: Cameras
Source: RED
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Por3SJguvwg/
Ledecky Nadia Comaneci Rebecca Soni Snoop Lion London 2012 Table Tennis badminton Dominique Dawes
Online translation on the rise, changing lives
In this April 4, 2013 photograph, the Smith women, from left, mother Niki Smith, GiGi, 3, Macy Jade, 7 and Guan Ya, 14, use Google Translate on the family laptop to "speak" with their new daughter, Guan Ya, in their Rienzi, Miss., home. The Smiths and their children are using the Google Translate program to communicate almost exclusively with Guan Ya, who is deaf. The family uses iPhones, iPods and a laptop, all loaded with the program to write in either English that translates to Chinese or vice-a-versa. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
In this April 4, 2013 photograph, the Smith women, from left, mother Niki Smith, GiGi, 3, Macy Jade, 7 and Guan Ya, 14, use Google Translate on the family laptop to "speak" with their new daughter, Guan Ya, in their Rienzi, Miss., home. The Smiths and their children are using the Google Translate program to communicate almost exclusively with Guan Ya, who is deaf. The family uses iPhones, iPods and a laptop, all loaded with the program to write in either English that translates to Chinese or vice-a-versa. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
In this April 4, 2013 photograph, Colton Smith, 10, left, uses a combination of some basic Chinese and English sign languages with his mother, Niki Smith, center, to communicate with their family's newest member, 14-year-old Guan Ya, in their Rienzi, Miss., home. Although the Smiths and their three other children are using the Google Translate program to communicate almost exclusively with Guan Ya, who is deaf, the children use a variety of signs as well. The family uses iPhones, iPods and a laptop, all loaded with the program to write in either English that translates to Chinese or vice-a-versa. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
In this April 4, 2013 photograph, Niki Smith gives her new daughter, 14-year-old Guan Ya, a kiss in their Rienzi, Miss., home. The Smiths and their three other children are using the Google Translate program to communicate almost exclusively with Guan Ya, who is deaf. The family uses iPhones, iPods and a laptop, all loaded with the program to write in either English that translates to Chinese or vice-a-versa. Smith believes the experience of having to take time to compose messages has brought the family closer together. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
In this April 4, 2013 photograph, Niki Smith jokes with Guan Ya, her 14-year-old adoptive daughter, about using Google Translate to "speak" with at their Rienzi, Miss., home. The two recently prepared a Chinese dish using the program to decipher the and converse. Smith, her husband Phillip and their three other children are using the program to communicate almost exclusively with Guan Ya, who is deaf. The family uses iPhones, iPods and a laptop, all loaded with the program to write in either English that translates to Chinese or vice-a-versa. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
In this April 4, 2013 photograph, Niki Smith watches her new 14-year-old daughter Guan Ya use Google Translate to "speak" with her in their Rienzi, Miss., home. The Smiths and their three other children are using the program to communicate almost exclusively with Guan Ya, who is deaf. The family uses iPhones, iPods and a laptop, all loaded with the program to write in either English that translates to Chinese or vice-a-versa. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) ? You might use Google Translate to read a hard-to-find Manga comic book or to decipher an obscure recipe for authentic Polish blintzes. Or, like Phillip and Niki Smith in rural Mississippi, you could use it to rescue a Chinese orphan and fall in love at the same time.
Google is now doing a record billion translations on any given day, as much text as you'd find in 1 million books for everything from understanding school lunch menus to gathering national security intelligence. It translates in 65 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and can be used on websites, with speech recognition and as an app on mobile phones even if there is no connection.
While the technology is exponentially evolving, Google's translation guru Franz Och's face lit up when he heard that the Smiths and their new daughter, 14-year-old Guan Ya, are settling into their new lives together this month communicating almost exclusively through Google Translate.
"All day long I look at algorithms, algorithms and algorithms," he said. "It is so rewarding to hear that it is touching lives."
In the Smiths' case, it changed theirs forever.
The Smiths, who already have three children, first spotted Guan Ya less than a year ago when Niki Smith was looking at photos of hard to place orphans online, offering simple prayers for them one by one. With three children of her own, including a 3-year-old daughter adopted from China, she had no intention of adding to her family.
Then she saw Guan Ya.
"She was just our daughter," said Smith of that chance Internet encounter nearly a year ago. "There was no doubt about it, from the first time we saw her on the Internet."
There were seemingly impossible obstacles to adopting the girl. Firstly, Guan Ya was months away from turning 14, the age at which Chinese law would make her ineligible for adoption. Not only could Guan Ya not speak English, she didn't speak at all.
Guan Ya is deaf.
Undeterred, the Smiths scrambled through the paperwork and home studies that are inherent to international adoptions. With support from both Chinese and U.S. authorities, they expedited the bureaucracy by running a flurry of emails and forms through online translators. And one day Niki Smith received an email from her daughter-to-be, an unintelligible jumble of Chinese characters.
"Well, I couldn't begin to read this letter," said Smith.
That is where Google Translate came into play. Smith cut and pasted the letter into the empty rectangle for the program in her Internet browser and Guan Ya's thoughts magically appeared.
Thus began their heartwarming virtual conversation of love, family and life.
"The computers and software are tools, but I have no doubt that these tools made our bonding so much easier," said Niki Smith.
Machine translation dates back to the end of World War II, when coders realized that cryptography and deciphering were, in part, math problems. In 1949, influential scientist Warren Weaver laid out a pivotal proposition that paved the way for today's computational linguistics: a theorem could be developed to solve the logical structure of languages.
Yet almost 65 years since Weaver wrote that "it seems likely that the problem of translation can be attacked successfully," machine translation is far from perfect.
A team of South African researchers at the Matieland Language Centre recently published a study comparing documents translated between Afrikaans and English by professional translators and then by Google Translate. The results weren't even close. For the machine-translated writings, "the quality was still below average, and the texts would require extensive post-editing for their function to be met," they found.
"The general public thinks you can stick anything into machine translation and it's going to give you everything you need, but of course that's not the case," says Jamie Lucero, who heads the translation and interpretation program at Bellevue College in Bellevue, Wash.
He said for high quality translations, literature, marketing materials or complex syntax, a human translator is still essential. But machines are helpful, he said, "for people who just want to get a basic message across."
And he said some machine translators are better than others.
While translate.google.com leads the market, Microsoft's www.bing.com/translator offers a similar, free service with 41 languages that users say outperforms Google's when it comes to language used in high tech and software. WorldLingo is emerging as a leading pay-for-use translator with machine and professional translations in more than 140 languages, for people who require accuracy.
But any translation is a huge leap for communication, said Jennifer Uman , who co-authored a children's picture book, "Jemmy Button," with Italian collaborator Valerio Vidali, published this week. They met and then communicated for almost five years on the project almost exclusively through Google Translate.
Initially, she said, the translations were strange. Uman would write, "It looks great," and Vidali would read "I hoist much illusion."
"But over the years Google Translate got better and we got better," she said. "We kind of got the hang of how to use it, and it made it possible for us to collaborate."
Angolan blogger Rosie Alves, who launched a poetic and often racy blog "Sweet Cliche" a year ago, was confused when she saw that one in four readers were in the U.S. She blogs from her hometown Luanda in her native Portuguese, and counts 18,959 visits to date. In an email exchange with The Associated Press, she used Google Translate to answer questions: "I think it's very good although the translation is not 100 percent safe," she wrote. "The best part is knowing that there are people interested in what I write, and use the Google translator to understand my texts."
Nine thousand miles away at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Och said he's hoping to launch translation services for several Indian languages next, including Malayalam, an official language of Kerala state spoken by millions of people. His team consists of computer scientists and programmers, not linguists. And there's not a single Yiddish-speaking babushka, Basque sheepherder or Vatican-trained Latinist onsite to help.
Instead, the ever-improving algorithms detect patterns in texts already translated by humans, so the more "data" that exists in the form of books and documents, the more accurate the translation. When the system gets precise enough, they roll it out to the public.
There have been a few early releases, said Och. When Iran sank rapidly into an election crisis in 2009, Google released a Persian translator, noting the program was "a work in progress." And just days after a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, they launched a buggy Haitian Creole translator that, despite glitches, was widely used by rescuers and relief workers.
Last week in a supermarket in Rienzi, Miss., a mother and daughter hovered over an iPhone, passing it back and forth as they strolled the aisles, chatting about what they wanted to cook for dinner. It was just a few short weeks since they'd met in person, since Guan Ya had emailed her family-to-be: "No, I have never been shopping. You do not need to bring me anything. I do not know the things I like. I guess I like chocolate. Have you come to China yet? I will not be afraid. I am very happy."
When they met, she told her parents that more than anything, she wants to hear. And already doctors in Mississippi are suggesting that hearing aids and possibly a surgically implanted cochlear implant may help.
"So many things had to fall in place on both sides that it is amazing to see how God worked to get her home!" said her mom.
In those early emails, and on this day, the two typed back and forth the three English words, eight simple letters, and the three Chinese characters, a series of strokes and slashes, that mattered the most: "I love you!"
___
Follow AP National Writer Martha Mendoza at http://www.twitter.com/mendozamartha
Associated Presscnn debate equatorial guinea marine helicopter crash chicago weather star jones photo of whitney houston in casket carrot top
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Minnesota GOP meets to choose leader
Former Rep. Keith Downey of Edina, Minn., shown in a June 2011 file photo, is considered the frontrunner in the race to lead the Minnesota Republican Party. (MPR Photo/Tim Pugmire)
April 6, 2013
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. (AP) -- Minnesota Republicans are meeting to elect a new party chairman.
The party's central committee meets Saturday in Bloomington to choose their new leader. The four candidates are Keith Downey, Bill Paulsen, Bonn Clayton and Don Allen, with former state representative Downey viewed as the frontrunner.
The new chairman will take over party that's still struggling financially and politically. The party remains in debt to the tune of about $1 million after problems with financial mismanagement under a previous chairman. And Republicans haven't won a statewide race in Minnesota since former Gov. Tim Pawlenty was narrowly re-elected in 2006.
The meeting will also be a chance for potential candidates against Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton and U.S. Sen. Al Franken next year to make an impression on party activists.
Source: http://feeds.mpr.org/~r/MPR_Politics/~3/yEajodYMc6c/minn-gop-electing-chairman
masters par 3 gwen stefani overeem laron landry mary j blige burger king islands 2013 nissan altima
Kerry in Turkey, eyes new bid for talks in Mideast
ISTANBUL (AP) ? U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Turkey early Sunday on the first leg of a 10-day trip to Europe and Asia that would also seek to unlock long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Kerry was expected to encourage Turkish leaders to continue improving ties with Israel. The two countries were once allies, but relations spiraled downward after Israel's 2010 raid on a Turkish flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip. Eight Turks and one Turkish-American died.
Hopes for rapprochement improved after Obama brokered a telephone conversation between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while President Barack Obama was in Israel last month.
Kerry also will coordinate with Erdogan and other Turkish officials on efforts to halt the violence in neighboring Syria.
Kerry planned to fly from Turkey to Jerusalem for meetings with the presidents and prime ministers of both Israel and the Palestinians. He had accompanied Obama there and made a solo trip to Israel shortly after.
Though expectations are low for any breakthrough on Kerry's trip, his diplomacy represents some of the Obama administration's most sustained efforts for ending more than six decades of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Kerry probably will seek confidence-building measures between the two sides. Negotiators and observers see little chance right now for immediate progress on the big stumbling blocks toward a two-state peace agreement.
Kerry will also visit Britain and then South Korea, China and Japan, where talks will focus on North Korea's nuclear program and escalating threats against the U.S. and its allies.
He is scheduled to return to Washington on April 15.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kerry-turkey-eyes-bid-talks-mideast-003347638--politics.html
George McGovern braxton miller braxton miller Whitney Heichel Tippi Hedren Big Tex Sweetest Day
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)