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From the press release…

Have you ever wanted to learn a foreign language so you can travel the world or get that dream job, but were intimidated by the overwhelming task or the cost of pricey software?

Public libraries around the country are making that dream possible by partnering with Mango Languages. Over 35 million people in the United States — and growing — have access to the free Web-based language learning program just by going to their local library.

Mango Languages is the easiest and fastest way to learn to speak a foreign language. Mango has the best foreign language teachers in the world and uses real-life situations and practical conversations to assist you in quickly reaching your language-learning goals.

Mango currently offers nine foreign languages and three English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. The Michigan-based company, launched by four young entrepreneurs less than two years ago, is in the process of developing 16 more language courses.

The death toll in riots in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region rose sharply Monday, with state media saying that 156 people had been killed in what appears to be one of the deadliest episodes of unrest in China in decades.

Police said at least 828 other people were injured in violence that began Sunday in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. Witnesses said the conflicts pitted security forces against demonstrators, and members of the region’s Turkic-speaking Uighur ethnic group against members of the country’s Han Chinese majority. Many among the predominantly Muslim Uighurs have chafed at Chinese government rule.

The official tally of dead and injured increased Monday as more information came out of Urumqi through the state-run Xinhua news agency, although it appeared that most or all of the violence had ended by the early hours of Monday.

This is from last August!!!  How did I miss this???!!!  Click here to watch…  (For the record, his pronunciation is as bad as one would expect, but he’s a TV clown, and he knows it…  He keeps is the poise we have come to expect from Mr. Roker…)

Methodology: kindov creepy…

Results: cool

Remember the Simpsons episode wherein Homer’s older half-brother, Herbert, invents a device that translates baby babble into normal English?  Believe, friends, believe….

In 2005, the artificial intelligence researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab set out to understand how children learn to talk.

“We wanted to understand how minds work and how they develop and how the interplay of innate and environmental influence makes us who we are and how we learn to communicate.”

It was a big task and after years of research, scientists around the world had only begun to scratch the surface of it.

But now, Professor Roy is beginning to get some answers, thanks to an unconventional approach, an accommodating family and a house wired with technology.

And the research may even have kick-backs for everything from robotics to video analysis.

For my fellow cryptology-geeks:

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher — a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society — a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities — and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.