Westgate Tabernacle Church in Palm Beach County is providing food and shelter for up to 150 people per night. The church provides 500 meals per day of donated food and pays $1000 every month for water. This commendable act should be supported by the county but instead the county is threatening the church with a $1000 per day fine. At issue is a forty-foot by sixty-foot tent the church has erected to help provide shelter for too many homeless men, women and children.

The tent can accommodate a maximum of about seventy five men sleeping on plywood sheets raised a few inches above the ground. Women and small children sleep in two small rooms – 400 square feet and 240 square feet – on collapsible bunk beds. Men fifty-five years old and younger sleep in the tent and everyone else that can be sheltered sleeps in the 2400 square foot sanctuary.

Bishop Avis Hill has been with Westgate Tabernacle for thirteen years and has had opposition from Palm Beach County for seven years. They cannot get a permit for the tent because the code is written only for permanent structures with the required amenities. However, the County Commission could support the church’s efforts by writing them a special exception through the Zoning Board. Any legal help that the county can give should be given because the homeless population is so underserved. The county even sends people to the church that they have no room for. There are other programs but they are inadequate, and the people that do not meet the criteria or there is no room come to Westgate Tabernacle.

The 2007 Annual Report on Homelessness Conditions in Florida released by the Department of Children and Families Office on Homelessness shows that 60,168 homeless were counted in Florida and 1,766 in Palm Beach County. This number was provided by twenty five coalitions throughout the state including the Homeless Coalition of Palm Beach County. In 2006 there were 32,000 beds available to the homeless population from shelters, and transitional and permanent housing. That is an increase of about 2,500 beds since 2003 but still leaves out over 25,000 unsheltered homeless in Florida.

Most of the homeless are men under the age of sixty and nearly half with one or more disabling conditions. About one-quarter of the homeless population can be considered chronically homeless having four or more episodes of homelessness. Two-thirds of homeless people are homeless for more than three months and about forty percent for a year or more. Sixty-eight percent of homeless live in their local communities for more than a year. Most troubling are homeless families with women and children trying to stay together. Thirty-five percent of homeless are female and twenty-one percent are children under the age of eighteen.

Bishop Hill is understandably frustrated with his situation. He said that “this is a heartless generation that cares more for animals than people” and that illegal aliens get better treatment from the state and county than citizens. That is not right – we should be putting our citizens first. Still, there are many people who do care enough to give and get involved and progress is being made. Westgate Tabernacle is located at 1722 Suwanee Drive, West Palm Beach, Florida, 33409, and their phone number is (561) 471-9309.

Since the passage of Proposition 49 a few years ago, school districts throughout California have been scrambling to offer after school programs that incorporate the arts. In my county (Madera) the school district has initiated Club YES, where children can stay until 6 p.m. Twice a week for a month, artists from the Madera County Arts Council PACES program (Presenting the Arts to Children in Elementary Schools) teach two classes, back-to-back.

My first few years were frustrating. I was in multi-purpose rooms with other activities going on, and often lost my voice trying to yell over the noise. Then I learned to ask for what I needed: a classroom. What a difference! Besides the children feeling special because they get to be with the artist, the group is able to focus, listen, write and share their work without competing with wrestling or snacks.

The second I faced was the fact that not all the children stay for my second hour, especially in winter when walkers have to leave before sunset. The first time I was left with three second graders I felt that my time was being wasted, but I soon learned to enjoy the children who were there, and we had a wonderful time writing, drawing, talking.

Ive also learned to engage the helpers, who used to sit idly by monitoring their incessantly annoying walkie-talkies. Now I ask that they turn the volume down and participate in the lesson. At first they were shy but now I get them to write with us and share their poems. This has definitely raised them in the children’s esteem.

Another problem is what to do with the childrens work. In classroom residencies or PTA sponsored After School Writing Clubs I keep all the work until the last day, when students compile it into a book that I hope parents will save forever. But in the regular after school programs I may see one group of children only once or twice. At once school I saved all the work and left it with the supervisor, but it got lost. At another school I saved everything until the last day, only to find that there were two tracks and half the kids where no longer there. So now I let the children take their work with them each time. Some put their poems neatly in their back packs. Some want to give it to me as a gift and others crumple it up or just leave it on the desk altogether. This is when I take a deep breath and remember process not product. Then I grab the poem and stick it in my satchel, feeling like a thief!

Because I live in a rural area, the drive is almost an hour each way. And coupled with the fact that rural area artists are expected to make about one-third of what city poets make, I end up barely covering the cost of gas. True, I do get to listen to audio books and see cows grazing, but still, its discouraging to feel so undervalued.

As in any residency, by the second week, I’m greeted with smiles and waves when I arrive. Because I don’t know which group I’ll get that day I just bring a lot of lesson plans and decide at the last minute which one well do. After the supervisor tells me which group Ill have, I dutifully fall in line and troop toward a classroom.

This year when I was writing my name on the board for a group of third-graders at Monroe Elementary one of the boys said, I know you! You came to Millview School last year! Youre a poet! Another boy said, Yes, I was there too. We wrote about our favorite food! What a gift, to be remembered a year later by those little boys!

The director of my art council calls these children the left behinds. Im always sad to leave them behind at the end of my residency. When I start to lament that I never completed my degree to become a full-time teacher, I remind myself that Id have worse withdrawals every June when the whole class left me! Then I remind myself that my part-time schedule not only gives me time to write but it enables me to bring the magic of poetry to these hard working children at the end of their long school day.

Mary Lee Gowland, Madera County CA

So you love Google talk and use it as your primary chat app every day. Sure it’s a cool IM tool which let’s you communicate with your friends…in English. Right, English is omnipresent and you’ve never really cared about other languages. But what do you do if you encounter someone who doesn’t speak or understand English and you need to chat with him on Gtalk? Can you do it ?

You bet you can ! So let’s say the other guy only speaks and understands French. You’ll need to add 2 Googlebots to your Gtalk account.

1.  en2fr@bot.talk.google.com - Googlebot which translates English to French

2.  fr2en@bot.talk.google.com -  Googlebot which translates French to English

I’m sure now you know what you need to do. When your friend from France tells you something, copy paste it to fr2en@bot.talk.google.com and get the translation in English. And then use the other bot ( en2fr@bot.talk.google.com )  to get the French translation of your reply and then copy paste that to your friend.

It may not be very accurate but I’m sure the person on the other side would understand it, especially if you let him know that you are using a translation tool. Here are some more Googlebots for this purpose :-

• GERMAN to ENGLISH - de2en@bot.talk.google.com
• ARGENTINA to ENGLISH - ar2en@bot.talk.google.com
• CHINESE to ENGLISH - zh2en@bot.talk.google.com
• SPANISH to ENGLISH - es2en@bot.talk.google.com
• JAPANESE to ENGLISH - ja2en@bot.talk.google.com
• ITALIAN to ENGLISH - it2en@bot.talk.google.com
• NETHERLANDS to ENGLISH - nl2en@bot.talk.google.com
• RUSSIAN to ENGLISH - ru2en@bot.talk.google.com
• KOREAN to ENGLISH - ko2en@bot.talk.google.com

You could get ENGLISH to GERMAN  by en2de@bot.talk.google.com and so on and so forth.

Hope these Googlebots help you in spreading your ideas further in the non-english speaking world.

I believe we mentioned before that Google Translate, while the handy tool for both making rudimentary translations and acting as a proxy workaround (when behind corporate firewalls that are too prohibitive). Now it’s time to put to the test the real supposed use of Google Translate, which is just that–to translate text from one language to another.

But instead of expecting things to go smoothly, let’s rely on good ol’ Murphy’s law that something will screw up in the course of our using Google Translate.

The concept is basic. Key in (or paste) any phrase or paragraph in your native tongue, translate it into a foreign language, and then translate it back to your native tongue. So for instance, we can translate something in English into French, and then back again. Let’s see how accurately Google does it.

Let’s try with something simple first.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Translated into French, it becomes:

Le renard brun rapide saute par-dessus le chien paresseux.

Now back to English.

The fast brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Aha! Notice that “quick” now becomes “fast.” Now how can we test our keyboards for defective keys, then?

Next up, let’s try something closer to home: Google’s “about us” text itself.

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

We translated it into French and back to English, and here’s what we get.

“Googol” is the mathematical term for one 1 follow-up of 100 zeros. The limit was invented by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edouard Kasner, and was popularized in the book, of “mathematics and imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. The play of Google on the limit reflects the mission of company to organize the immense quantity of information available on the Web.

Good enough, except for the substition of “limit” for “term.” Still, this seems satisfactory.

Now it’s usually when you speak expletives when it gets a bit more interesting.

We say,

Die, you son of a _____!

We translate it to French and back, and Google now says:

Stamp, you wire of a _____!

Now we can stop wondering why the French and English went into so many of those wars in the olden times.

Hi! everybody…very unusual eh? Before you guys jump into conclusions let me clear things out. Am Sindhu, a friend of thilak’s, also a occasional author here. Since he left to bangalore, I take over for one post Frankly am not a techie, So you can very well predict that am not going to post something hi-fi.

Am pursuing my graduation in computers since this year. As an addition to my future resume I’ve taken up german language course, I’d rather prefer calling it Deutsch (pronounced as Doish). My teacher Sumanth Premkumar, a jovial lady talks to us in deutsch, just so that we become familiar with its usage, this inspired me to look up the net for more material to expand my vocabulary. And I found some interesting web pages and information.

Top on my list is BBC Languages’s German section. The simplicty of the approach towards learning and presentation of the matter is very appealing. Plus they even offer mp3 format audio files of the phrases taught. BBC also offers Deutsch Plus, a interactive page on basics in spoken german.

Next really informative site is Dw-world, has news and clippings about everything and anything Deutsch! Plus, they have their own Dw-radio station. On the same line is German Culture, a more homely sort of site expertising in german cusine and beer. And of course our own wikipedia has all we could ask for here.

The german embassy page had the usual boring political news, but a cute feature they offered was the page for Germany for Kids and of course everyone as well the pages are simple and colorful with easy to read short informative text. the subpages explaining how is a everyday german life are the best. To see how much germany has influenced our world is truly amazing!

I saved up the best for the last, Facts about Germany. Yet again a easy to navigate site, with very well written articles. They talk about all things german under the sun.

Some other pages :

A potpourri of German related Links

German Course Newsletter

A Pictoral Dictionary of German words

Breif list of Holocaust Literature

A Collection of pictures from post World War 1

-by Sindhu

If you’re someone who does lots of traveling, then you’ve probably come across lots of languages as well. Learning foreign languages can be hard, mainly because they take time and money. Mango is a new web application which enables you to learn new languages at the comforts of your home, without spending a penny.

They offer variety of languages, including lessons from Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. After signing up and choosing the appropriate language course, you’ll hear conversations in both languages. In case, you want to hear the phrase again, just click the sound icon. You can move forward and backward through the lessons using the slide buttons.

Mango is a free beta service, and doesn’t contain advertisements yet. I’m pretty confused about their revenue model. They might probably be going towards advertisement based or subscription based model (if prefer the first one). I do like Mango, it’s very intuitive and makes learning more fun.

[Via: Mashable]

Windows Live Translator is the newest member of Microsoft’s Live Services fleet. It’s pretty similar to Google’s Translator Tool, where you can enter a block of text and translate it into variety of languages like - German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional. Or you can enter the URL and get the entire web page translated.

Translating the URL in Google’s Translation Tool will show you the translated page in fullscreen view, but Windows Live Translator gives you an option to view the translated page in four different views. You can choose between side-by-side layout, which shows you the original and translated page side-by-side, or Top / Bottom layout, which shows one page on the top or another. You can also see the page with hover translation view, in which you’ll have to either hover your mouse over original text to see the translated text or translated text to see the original text.

Both Google’s Translator Tool and Windows Live Translator use the same Systran engine to translate the text. Machine translations are not always accurate, but it can give you a rough idea of what you are reading. I think Windows Live Translator’s side-by-side view or hover translation proves to be a great tool for those who are attempting to learning new languages. Of course, there are downsides like no fullscreen view, and it doesn’t translate text within inline frames.

Most services offered by Google are stuck-up in labs, even after months or years of being functional. Google Labs is actually a showcase of ideas which are not yet ready for prime time. Google prefers telling that a service is “labs” instead of telling that it’s in “beta” (Gmail is an exception here). Occasionally, we’ve seen some service come out of labs, but it’s a very rare thing to happen. Surprisingly, Google put two new services out of Google Labs: Google Reader and GOOG-411.

Google Reader Team posted on their blog that they are breaking up with labs. You can no longer see the labs label in their logo. They’ve also made Google Reader multilingual. Prior to this, Google Reader was only available in English, but now they support French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, English (UK), Japanese, and Korean.

Another service to graduate from Google Labs is GOOG-411. It is a toll-free number, which can be used to search local business for free. Previously, the service was called GOOG-411 Experimental, but now they’ve shortened it to just GOOG-411.

Google Labs lists 16 projects which are yet to be graduated. I expect Google Trends and Google Page Creator to be next!

Yesterday, Flickr announced a new mapping feature which will help in find photos based on location. This new feature, named "Places", will enable users to explorer countries, cities, regions and thousands of other location in a better way.

Flickr has picked more than 10,000 geographical locations and given them their own pages to display photos. They’ll also provide location information such as maps, weather and current time on that location. For instance, if you want to check out photos from Mumbai, you can visit the Place page for that city and see a collection of photos.

Flickr Places look as if it uses the tradition geo-tagging feature in addition with tags, but instead of those pink dots, we’ll see hot tags with a stream of photos in the ribbon at the bottom. This feature will be extremely valuable for travelers who wish to see the location before actually going there.

Flickr Places will be available in 8 languages - English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean and traditional Chinese. Flickr Places will keep growing by 3000 – 5000 new pages each week.

[Via: Reuters]

Lately we have seen that a lot of designers have adopted the strategy of incorporating a big brand name in their product to get free marketing.

Satya Paul has done quite the same in making the Google Saree. Saree is a popular traditional desi wear (particularly famous in India, Pakistan etc) which makes one look quite glamorous and appealing.

High-five to Keith for digging this up. If only I could somehow purchase this Saree online, it would have been the perfect gift to give to my girlfriend on her birthday