MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

The technology will also open YouTube videos to a wider foreign market and make them more searchable, which will make it easier for Google to profit from them.

While the technology can insert captions only on English-language speech, Google is giving users the choice of using its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages. That could broaden the appeal of YouTube videos to millions of other people who do not speak English but could use the captioning technology to read subtitles in their native language.

The speech recognition technology that Google uses to turn speech into text is not new; Google currently uses it to transcribe voice mail messages for users of its Google Voice service.

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Another November 22 passes, another anniversary of the assassination of J.F.K. It's been 46 years now and after having recently read Oswald and the CIA by John Newman, I decided to start something that Jeff Wells did regarding 9/11/01 http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html and apply it to 11/22/63. This is just a starting point, strictly from Newman's book. But it's amazing how far the coincidences stretch!

We should not trust the claims of Gerald Patrick Hemming: that he met Oswald at the Cuban Consulate in Los Angeles in 1959 and gave Oswald documents while he was stationed at El Toro that year. A 1976 CIA internal memo clearly outed Hemming as a liar for claiming Agency affiliation when in fact there was none. That the same CIA memo stated that Hemming's "long-time cohort" Frank Sturgis of Watergate infamy "also has a long-time record of falsely claiming Agency affiliation" just shows that poseurs like each others company.

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The New York Times rather casually and without fanfare has confirmed a significant event in alligator-in-the-sewers history. The actual teenager who had the confrontation with the over seven-foot-long sewer alligator in 1935 was tracked down, interviewed last week, and verifies it wasn’t just an elaborate newspaper tale.

As you will recall…noted in A. G. Sulzberger’s breaking New York Times article…in an era when several news items told of out-of-place gators being found…

The most widely cited of these was an article in The Times on Feb. 10, 1935, headlined “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer.”

That article described several people — led by a teenager named Salvatore Condoluci — who had caught and ultimately killed a seven- to eight-foot-long alligator they discovered beneath an open manhole on 123rd Street near the Harlem River.

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he rubber Sasquatch head stared with glassy eyes from atop its pedestal. Beneath its gaze, Bigfoot Conference attendees milled about Tyler’s Caldwell Auditorium. Children peeked at the hairy visage from around parents’ legs. A pale man wearing black cowboy boots crossed his arms as a friend snapped a picture with his cell phone. Three teenage boys gave mocking thumbs-ups. Like the elusive or mythical creature that inspired it, the rubber Bigfoot was indifferent to the awe, curiosity and ridicule it provoked.

This was the vendor’s section of the ninth Texas Bigfoot Conference, held annually in the East Texas Piney Woods. Hosted by the nonprofit Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy, the conference is dedicated to the large ape Gigantopethicus that purportedly crossed from Siberia to North America via the Beringia land bridge during the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago. The ape’s descendants—usually described as bipedal, hairy and standing 7 to 9 feet tall…

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When it was revealed that the U.S. resorted to torture to extract information from prisoners, many people my age must have had a very somber thought for the thousands of young Americans who had given their lives on the beaches of Normandy in a brave effort to rid the world of governments that engaged in such shameful practices. Two other thoughts flashed to mind: the stupidity of giving up the high moral ground at a time when the U.S. had earned so much goodwill thanks to its stand on democracy and human rights; and the pointlessness of such interrogations, often stated by our military experts, since the victims will generally admit to anything in order to stop the pain.

My friend, French Résistance leader Jacques Bergier, who was tortured multiple times by the Gestapo, made the ludicrous "confession" that his network planned to invade Corsica. In reality they were looking for heavy water and for Werner von Braun's rocket base.

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On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime's ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat's right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

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Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.

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Scientists make progress reading thoughts from the severely impaired.
By Emily Singer
Technology-assisted mind-reading is inching closer to reality, with advances that could help those unable to communicate on their own. According to research presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week, scientists can determine what vowel and consonants a person is thinking of by recording activity from the surface of the brain. The system, which has about a 50-to-70% accuracy rate, could one day be used as a neural prosthesis for people with severe paralysis, translating their thoughts into actions on a computer or prosthetic limb.

Gerwin Schalk and colleagues at the Wadsworth Center, in Albany, NY, used a technology called electrocorticography (ECoG), in which a sheet of electrodes is laid directly on the surface of a patient's brain. The procedure is currently used to locate the source of seizures in patients with severe epilepsy that is resistant to drugs.

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Coalition for Freedom of Information (CFi). Mission: Achieving scientific, congressional and media credibility for the study of unexplained aerial phenomena while working for the release of official information and physical evidence. Goals – The Coalition for Freedom of Information will promote: For far too long, the scientific community has stigmatized and discouraged research into the question of unexplained aerial phenomena. CFi supports efforts to promote discussions within the scientific community on the issues of interstellar travel and anomalous flying objects. CFi hopes to foster a more open and rational environment in which scientific research into these phenomena can be conducted and published in professional journals without censure or other negative repercussions. * Congressional Interest and Action – CFi is working to urge Members of Congress and policy makers to support a serious, independent scientific research effort and to…

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A camera would be an obvious choice; a sound recorder could also be essential. But what about the range of esoteric gadgets that have become almost de rigeur for the paranormal investigator – the EMF meters, infrared motion sensors, gaussmeters, digital thermometers, anenoameters? It all looks very serious, scientific and foolproof. But is any of it really going to detect anomalous phenomena?

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In 1924, Earth saw its closest Mars opposition in over a century, and some thought our Martian neighbors might use the event to attempt contact. So for one night, US Naval and Army stations scanned the skies for extraterrestrial transmissions.

On August 22, 1924, the Earth was 55,777,566 km from the Red Planet during the Mars opposition, offering ideal conditions for receiving radio signals from Mars — if anyone happened to be sending them. Amherst College professor David Todd persuaded both the US Army and Navy to listen for messages from Mars. In the telegram above, Edward W. Eberle, the Chief of US Naval Operations, informs Naval stations of the possibility of Martian communications, and instructs them to report any unusual phenomena. For three days, the stations listened for unusual transmissions, but came up empty handed.

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Many are claiming to see spirits from the spirit world. There are those who believe some spirits do not know to cross over, as in either not knowing they are dead, or some spirits are lost. Some claim that there are evil spirits.

You also have those who use tools to 'prove', it's a spirit, a ghost or the paranormal, all words meaning the same.

Now that is all fine and dandy, but here is something to think about.

What if it is a test? I know you're thinking 'A Test?' Yep – a test..

You see my 'internal feelings' and thoughts have always gone along with our Amy's internal ' feeling' and knowledge. I have named Amy our Psychic Feeler due to her gifted abilities and spiritual background that have come about due to her spiritual experiences as a child.

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How can anything so repulsive and so repugnant in appearance be real? And how can there possibly be any spiritual connection with it?

No doubt this is the first reaction of intelligent, rational people who come across old photos in books about paranormal phenomena of a substance referred to as ectoplasm. The photos usually show a seemingly thick foamy or slimy substance – sometimes looking like vomitus, other times like shaving soap, and still at other times more like cheesecloth – flowing from one of the orifices of a so-called "medium" in an entranced state – from the nostrils, mouth, ears, vagina, and even the pores. Some of the photos show what are claimed to be materialized human forms – occasionally just a face or an arm – forming within the ectoplasm.

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Oregon caves yield evidence of continent's first inhabitants. By Rex Dalton.

Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.

The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago, says archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon in Eugene.

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Watching this episode of UFO Hunters ("Dark Presence") about the orange orb UFOs seen in recent months was an intensely personal experience for me because of my own orange orb sighting.

It seems that witnesses have been seeing orange (and sometimes green or other colored) orb UFOs. These are not orbs as in spirit orbs, which are very different, but spheres — round objects — that are craft, or machine, or something "nuts and bolts."

These sightings are occurring now, but go back a ways as well. One woman who appeared on the program, her identity disguised, saw one of these orbs when she was a child. My own sighting took place over twenty-five years ago in Eugene, Oregon.

There are many parallels to my orange orb sighting — and the sighting that started me on my path of exploration into UFOs — and the ones discussed in the UFO Hunters episode. Many witnesses reported feelings of dread, of fear, though some had experienced feelings of elation, upon seeing these orbs.

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