Smart Talk: Speech-enabled apps deliver bottom-line benefits – Computerworld
Discusses some aspects of speech technologies (Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech) in business contexts. Bank transactions and similar operations have been the most common applications of SR and TTS but there’s room for a lot more. Speech might come of age soon.

DesMoinesRegister.com: Montreal is Magnifique
On dirait qu’ils ont apprécié… 😉
Assez réaliste, quoique peut-être trop enthousiaste.

Montreal City Weblog: L’Autre Montréal, Heritage Montreal
Les visites guidées, c’est pas seulement pour les touristes…

Babies detect unfamiliar music rhythms easier than adults
Some potentially fascinating ideas from this research. Mentions of language acquisition and the notion, dear to culturalists throughout the history of anthropology, that enculturation is a selection process from a large set of possibles. The latter notion runs a little bit like the fact that infants are able to reproduce any speech sound at a certain point in their development but that they then learn to restrict their production to those sounds that are present in their native languages.
IMVHO, the type of research this item describes would be much more relevant to most music research than efforts to localize “music processing” in the brain.

Wired News: Move Over Pyramids, Wynn’s Here

‘We will keep getting bigger, keep getting bolder in Las Vegas,’ he says. ‘It’s what makes this city great, it’s why people want to come here.’

Only in Vegas.

Molson construira à Moncton l’une des brasseries les plus modernes au monde
En partie grâce à l’appui du provincial. Sachant que Pumphouse et Picaroons ont gagné des prix nationaux, qu’ils sont des représentants plus adéquats du monde brassicole néo-brunswickois et que leur financement est minime, pourquoi ne pas les soutenir plutôt qu’enrichir Molson et Moosehead?

Playlist: Fiona’s Extraordinary Machine, retail rebounds?

fans and interested parties were given perhaps the most famous album preview in the history of recorded music

Actually an interesting practice, even though industry executives weren’t “in on it,” More clueful than most current practices…

Drinking outside the box

“If nothing else convinced meof the counterproductive effects of American drinking laws on college life,” he writes in Binge, “my experience at McGill University in Montreal did.”

And McGill’s probably much closer to the US model in drinking than UQÀM and UdeM or even Concordia. At least, that’s the main impression you get from people.

Binge drinking is a huge problem at Indiana University Bloomington and the administration is applying even stricter rules, which is exactly the strategy to make it worse. Isn’t it ironic that Ruth Engs is over there at IUB?