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"June 26, 2011, 6:16 pm by dotSUB This is a guest post by Kirti Vashee, VP Enterprise Translation Sales at Asia Online and member of dotSUB's Board of Advisors. You can also read Kirti's blog eMpTy Pages, where he writes about translation technology, localization and collaboration. The phenomena of a crowd or community stepping forward and doing real translation work, often for no direct financial compensation is something that troubles many in the professional translation world. Mostly because they see this activity as work being taken away from legitimate professionals or they see it as a ploy to reduce prices. While in some cases their fears may actually be justified, in the most successful uses of this approach I think it is clear that this is not true.If we look at some of the most successful examples of crowdsourced translation in practice, we can see that they have many if not all of the following elements in common."

Will the FCC stay committed to rural America? The Hill Op-Ed By Former Senator Byron Dorgan Almost every month, a new telecommunications innovation is launched that has a profound impact on our lives. Lately we've seen the impact of these telecommunication changes in ways we never could have imagined. In past months we've witnessed the Egyptian government being toppled by citizens using their cell phones to organize mass rallies and send videos of shocking violence against the demonstrators around the world. And in just recent days we learned it was through sophisticated tracking of a cell phone that led our soldiers to Osama bin Laden's doorstep in Pakistan. In both cases, a broadband wireline network infrastructure transported these important communications and changed history. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/164691-will-the-fcc-stay-committed-to-rural-america

"August 1, 2011, 5:51 pm By Rachel Wiseman College students with very poor vision have had to struggle to see a blackboard and take notes-basic tasks that can hold some back. Now a team of four students from Arizona State University has designed a system, called Note-Taker, that couples a tablet PC and a video camera, and could be a major advance over the small eyeglass-mounted telescopes that many students have had to rely on. It recently won second place in Microsoft's Imagine Cup technology competition. (...) The result was Note-Taker, which connects a tablet PC (a laptop with a screen you can write on) to a high-resolution video camera. Screen commands get the camera to pan and zoom. The video footage, along with audio, can be played in real time on the tablet and are also saved for later reference. Alongside the video is a space for typed or handwritten notes, which students can jot down using a stylus. That should be helpful in math and science courses, says Mr. Hayden, where students need to copy down graphs, charts, and symbols not readily available on a keyboard. (...) But no tool can replace institutional support, says Chris S. Danielsen, director of public relations for the [NFB]. "The university is always going to have to make sure that whatever technology it uses is accessible to blind and low-vision students," he says. (Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.) (...) This entry was posted in Gadgets."

In "(Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.)" the words "in the past" are linked to http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Students-Demand-Access/125695/ , about a Spanish work book inaccessible to blind students, with a reference to the lawsuit against Arizona State U over the adoption of the Kindle. So classifying this post in "Gadgets" is particularly paradoxical: in fact one reason why Arizona State U. was sued over the adoption of the Kindle was that Amazon presented its text-to-speech as a gadget.