The Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world’s speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial systems to comprehend, translate, and generate them.

Huge text and speech corpora of varying degrees of structure already exist for many of the most widely spoken languages in the world—English is probably the most extensively documented, followed by other majority languages like Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Given some degree of access to these corpora (though many are not publicly accessible), research, education and preservation efforts in the ten languages which represent 50% of the world’s speakers (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese) can be relatively well-resourced.

But what about the other half of the world? The next 290 most widely spoken languages account for another 45% of the population, and the remaining 6,500 or so are spoken by only 5%–this latter group representing the “long tail” of human languages:

Equal documentation of all the world’s languages is an enormous challenge, especially in light of the tremendous quantity and diversity represented by the long tail. The Parallel Speech Corpus Project will take a first step toward universal documentation of all human languages, with the goal of providing documentation of the top 300 and providing a model that can then be extended out to the long tail. Eventually, researchers, educators and engineers alike should have access to every living human language, creating new opportunities for expanding knowledge and technology alike and helping to preserve our threatened diversity.

This project is made possible through the support and sponsorship of speech technology expert James Baker and will be developed in partnership with his ALLOW initiative. We will be putting out a call for volunteers soon. In the meantime, please contact rosetta@longnow.org with questions or suggestions.

“The malaria parasite has been responsible for half of all human deaths since the Stone Age” is the quote that jumped off the page in a recent article by Sonia Shah in the Wall Street Journal.

Entitled “The Tenacious Buzz of Malaria” the article places malaria in a long term perspective:

Malaria has shaped our trade and settlement patterns, and our demographics. Today, it sickens 300 million every year, and kills nearly 1 million, despite the fact that we’ve known how to cure it (with parasite-killing drugs) and prevent it (by avoiding mosquito bites) for over a century. And even as the fight against malaria gains momentum, research reveals that malaria’s tentacles continue to dig ever deeper.

Part of malaria’s wicked genius is that since ancient times, it has fooled us into thinking it is a trivial problem, easily solved. Diseases such as yellow fever, or plague, or polio, have always filled us with dread. But not malaria. Almost all of our attempts to squelch it, from thousands of years ago to today, have treated the disease as a weak foe, allowing malaria to flourish, nearly unchecked, to this day.

From low tech solutions like bed nets to high tech lasers that shoot mosquitoes in mid air, and many international programs against malaria and the development of a vaccine, humans continue to work to fight the disease. But as the article states, “We’ve all been underestimating malaria for millennia.”

Sonia Shah is the author of a newly published book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years.

Photo credit: James Gathany, CDC

The European Space Agency has released an amazing new image of our universe, created by the recently launched Planck mission.  The image above comes from Planck’s first detailed survey of the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s “first light.”

It is the light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.

Before that time, scientists say, the cosmos would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been “coupled” – the Universe would have been opaque.

Planck is funded to create four of these surveys, each more precise than the last:

“We know that eventually as the data get better and better, what you end up getting to are the limitations of what you know about the instrument,” explained Professor Jaffe.

“And so, by running Planck for longer we can learn a lot more about the instrument itself and thereby remove a lot of the contaminating effects that are just because of the way it produces its noise.”

(BBC via Brian Eno)

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Information Pioneers: Ada Lovelace from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.

This is a nice intro to Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer who wrote programs for Babbage’s mechanical computer. While this computer is similar to the binary mechanical computer used in the first 10,000 Year Clock prototype, Babbage’s computers are decimal based.

There’s a great story bouncing around – a shoe was found in an Armenian cave.  Not just any shoe, of course.  It’s about five and a half thousand years old.  It’s the oldest leather shoe ever found, predating Ötzi the Iceman‘s footwear by about 300 years.

It is objects like this that always remind us when doing a lot of research around materials for the Clock, that given the right environment (in this case freezing) just about any material could last 10,000 years.

(via New York Times)

Beer is as old as civilization itself and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is giving you a chance to try some of the oldest known brews.  Scientific American gives us this story on three ancient reconstituted recipes by Dogfish Head.  The unexpected fruit of molecular anthropology, these beer recipes come from chemical analyses of ancient pottery.

If you’ve a taste for vintage, there’s also a beer made with 45 million year old yeast that was harvested from a weevil trapped in fossilized amber!

Since its inception in 01979 programs like the Long Term Ecological Research Network have been selecting and tracking ecological sites to be monitored over the long-term.   The NSF funded LTER network  hopes to codify what usually occurs by accident in science.  For instance the “Keeling Curve“, which was one of the first bits of scientific proof about baseline atmospheric carbon, was not found on purpose.  The Keeling curve was discovered as part of a control for another experiment on volcanism.

However it is only when we do the the same boring non-sexy data collection year after year, that we might see trends that only appear after decades or centuries.  This is difficult science to keep going on an ongoing basis, and it is great to see it getting done.  It is also worth pointing out that other institutions are doing “slow science” like The Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute which has been studying a chunk of Panama for almost 90 continuous years.  We also now have over 50 years of Pan Evaporation Data thanks to the agriculture industry, which is leading to startling new realizations about the global dimming effect.

There is also a lot of science being done that would be great to make into slow science.  For instance the many chapters of the Surfrider Foundation collect all kinds of data about the toxicity of ocean water in sites all around the world.  Yet as far as I know they are not saving this data for posterity, as they are primarily concerned with how toxic the water is at a given moment. But just think how fantastic it would be to have that data from 100 or 1000 years ago?

I would love to hear about other “slow science” projects and collect them here.  Either ones that are going on, or data that you would like to see collected over the long-term like the Surfrider example.  So please use the comments field to suggest others.

Listing of Slow Science experiments (thanks for the additions!):

• Pitch Drop Experiment
• Long Term Ecological Research Network
• The Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute
• Pan Evaporation Data
• Keeling CO2 measurements
• (added) Audubon Christmas Bird Count
• (added) Framingham Heart Study
• (added) Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• (added) The Oxford Electric Bell
• (added) Rothamsted crop rotation experiments
• (added) The Beverly Clock
• (added) Up Series (more art than science, but in the same realm)

Anthropologist David Graeber recently sent in his essay on the 5000 year history of debt (orignally published in Mute and Eurozine).  Aside from being an interesting read in general, this effort (which he is just now finishing as a book) is an interesting resource for the Eternal Coin and the Long Finance project.

Debt: The first five thousand years by David Graeber

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

President Barack Obama attends the opening session of the Space Conference at NASA Operations and Checkout Building in Cape Canaveral, Florida, April 15, 2010.

This week President Obama laid out his plan for the future of NASA.  It includes a large budget increase, a push to hand off orbital space flight to private companies, the design of new propulsion systems, and included the long-term goals of landing on an asteroid, going to Mars, and even pushing beyond that.  The national press and political reaction has been interesting to watch from a perspective of long-term thinking.  While there has always been a general agreement that we want to achieve these goals, the administration is taking heat from the press and both sides of the isle for looking “too far out.”

Reaction to President Obama’s plan to kill the space shuttle, scrap moon missions in favor of deep-space travel, and outsource launches to private contractors is falling mostly along partisan lines—but even some Democrats said the proposals could hurt U.S. space interests in the short term. (information week)

See more press through this Google News Search

It was predictable that representatives of all the “space states” like Florida and Texas might get upset. It was a little less predictable to see the right opposing privatization of orbital flight however. But even beyond that, I think this is one of the first cases I have seen a political figure chastised explicitly for thinking too long-term.

The best bit of long-term thinking was actually glossed over in the announcement of an asteroid mission.  An asteroid or comet impact on earth is the only serious threat to human (and nearly all lifes) existence, yet we spend basically no part of NASA’s budget trying figure out how we might avert such a disaster (the little bit of funding for Rusty Schweickart’s program is an exception, but a small one).

Aside from the very important asteroid mission, is the audacious goal of not only going to Mars, but landing humans on it.  This has been talked about for years, and I think that the average person thinks of this as a simple step forward from landing on the moon.  I used to think that.  But in the last year I have had dinner with the director at NASA Ames, given a talk at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and watched a shuttle launch from about as close as humans are allowed to get.  I have learned that going to space is dangerous and difficult.  It also requires a fantastic amount of infrastructure.  Look at the picture below of Kennedy Space Center:

It goes on for miles and miles of some of the largest and most specialized buildings and facilities in the world.  And Kennedy is just the prep and launch facility, the spacecraft and payloads are almost all built with private contractors or at the other 13 huge NASA facilities around the country.  When I had dinner with several NASA scientists at JPL I remember them telling me that with existing technology we might be able to get humans to Mars… and keep them alive for about 45 minutes. Getting Home? forget about getting home…

In order to get to and come back from another planet with gravity like Mars, (unlike the moon and asteroids with little gravity) we will have to package up at least the minimal functionality of Kennedy Space Center, and all the fuel needed for all legs of the trip.  We will have to take that package, launch it into space (now is a good time to remember that for every pound of payload we launch, we use about 95 pounds of fuel), then fly it 300 million miles, land it with little or no recovery infrastructure, unpack it all, re-assemble it, refuel and launch.  Even if some of the plans for making our own fuel, water and oxygen play out, the bare bones infrastructure and ability to prep a spacecraft for flight on another planet is astoundingly difficult.  This is, by definition a long-term plan, and continuing to spend money on the same technology that barely gets us to orbit will not get us there.  If we truly want to send humans beyond the moon, we are going to have to invent a lot of new technology, and invest heavily in education.  Now seems like as good a time as any to get started…

A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis nutricula utilizes a cellular process called transdifferentiation to effectively live forever.  The process tends to be used by animals like salamanders to regenerate lost or injured body parts.  The Turritopsis nutricula, however, can use the process to completely revert themselves into a polyp form, restarting their life-cycle.

Research was published in 2008 showing that this ability has allowed the jellyfish to survive long trips in ballast compartments on cargo ships.  They’ve therefore been able to silently invade the world’s oceans and have been observed in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean.

Harnessing this process would be a boon to Extropianism, a philosophy that includes the hope that humans will one day be able to live indefinitely.  On top of this goal, perhaps their ability to colonize distant seas could be a helpful model in the service of “directed panspermia,” a process Michael Mautner has claimed, in the Journal of Cosmology, to be a moral obligation.