Joel Kehle's Blog

I am getting way to much email. Some of the email I receive is from lists that I subscribed to but cannot unsubscribe from. Oh I try. Some sites claim to unsubscribe me but don’t. Some sites won’t unsubscribe me because I can’t give them the right email address. All of this adds up to way to much email.

Enter my gmail filter. For each unwanted email stream, I click a few buttons and voila! all new emails are delivered to my trash can.

Oh sure – I do feel guilty that I’m wasting precious computing resources but I figure at some point google will get smart and start blocking mail from sites that are filtered in this manner.

At any rate, I am looking forward to less noise in my inbox.

I just downloaded a new voice recognition app to my BlackBerry. It’s called Vlingo and boy was I impressed. Every voice recognition system I have ever used has been terrible. If I am talking to an automated sales agent on the phone I always have to ask to talk to a real person. Now comes Vlingo – an application that I install on my phone.

You use Vlingo like a dictaphone. You press a button, speak and release the button. Vlingo then figures out what you were saying.

To test Vlingo I tried several test. For my first test said “Google World Peace”. Vlingo figured this out correctly. My next try was “Google Whirled Peas”. Ok Vlingo messed up on that one but it got my next request: Google Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” perfectly!

I then went on to test twittering, emailing, texting, creating notes, creating reminders and calling. When I wasn’t trying to trip the system up with Whirled Peas, it worked perfectly.

My only complaint is that in some cases you still have to look at your phone and press a button in order for Vlingo to carry out your commands. This ruls out using the Vlingo when driving but this is still an impressive and useful speech recognition application.

The Blue Brain Project is a project to simulate the human brain using a super computer. This project holds the promise to give us insights into the function and malfunction of the brain. To learn more watch the video.

For more reading, check out this blog post:
Brain Stimulant: Blue Brain Shows Gamma Oscillations