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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    Democracy of language in new Internet dictionary

    LONDON
    Fri Sep 19, 2008 10:15am EDT
    A woman reads a book while sitting inside a display of an oversized book before the official opening of the 2007 book fair in Leipzig. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

    LONDON (Reuters) - Not satisfied with regular updates of printed dictionaries compiled by professionals, a new website has thrown open the definition of words to all comers.

    Technology  |  Lifestyle

    Wordia.com offers everyone the chance to record and upload a video of themselves defining their chosen word in a complete democratization of the language that will have Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the first dictionary, turning in his grave.

    One early offering is the word "bungalow" --"One storey house. Grannies live in it. Often with cats. Originally an Indian word."

    Another offering is "nascent" which suggests that wordia is a nascent technology that "takes something quite dull like a dictionary and makes it not quite as dull".

    The organizers hope their new online audio-visual dictionary will become a living language archive. Time will tell.

    (Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Paul Casciato)
    Technology
    Lifestyle


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