Google Translate released three new features today that make using the service quicker and easier. While Translate has been able to translate text and web pages between 51 languages for some time now, these features are sure to make a big difference.

Translate Instantly - As text is typed into the dialogue box, a response is formulated as the words are translated at once. Instead of clicking on the now vestigial “Translate” button, the sentence is formed in the target language immediately.

Read and write any language - For languages written in non-Roman letters or characters, the user can still read the translation phonetically. After clicking the “Show romanization” option next to my English to Japanese translation, a pronounceable text by syllable appears.

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Not to say that language used to be boring in its glacial change, but it kind of was.

Compared to now, at least, when anybody, on any blog or in any forum, can potentially change the way language is used by the multitude.

A lot of people resent that language change is accelerating so rapidly with the internet, but what they’re really resisting is that linguistic consensus is given to groups that have not had it in the past, a powerful thing.

Grammar Nazis might not agree, but the Oxford American Dictionary certainly does.

This year the dictionary chose ‘unfriend’ as its Word of the Year, both for the word’s importance in what we do everyday as well as for its unorthodox prefix and root usage. (Prefixes are underrated).

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Most people, I suspect, would say that technology has made their lives better. But what we describe as betterment is really just convenience.

It’s always exciting when any tech is launched that truly betters lives, and today I ran across examples of two of them.

The first is the Telegraph’s report on an app that’s being developed to diagnose respiratory infections. How does it do that?

Users cough into the phone.

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My dad is a hardcore gamer. Before it was common for games to start off with tutorials, each time he got a new game (always an FPS, preferably one set in WWII), somewhere within the first fifteen minutes we’d have this inevitable conversation:

Dad: What do I do?

Me: Did you read the instructions?

Dad: Guys don’t read instructions.

Apparently he’s right. Please inform my mother of this fascinating development.

Maybe not reading the manual is part of the Y chromosome that makes us males. According to customer statistics from Gadget Helpline, 64 percent of men who called the subscription service for help with their gadget had not read the instructions, while only 24 percent of female callers had not.

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While the blogosphere lit up this weekend in response to Paul Carr’s questioning of citizen journalism and whether social networks makes people more egotistical (is it just me, or are more and more high-profile tech journalists getting burnt out on covering, if not using, social networking?), another potential controversy was missed.

Moore’s Law is the true cause of the recession, Quentin Hardy writes in Forbes.

Out a list of all possible contenders, the real culprit is a superconductor paradigm? Why?

To begin: with the continual fall in computing prices, Wall Street practices became more complex.

“Complexity itself became the grail, and the street hired the best statisticians and physicists it could find to set forth even more complex calculations,” Hardy writes.

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Retrevo has just published a smartphone study that’s a little more random than the ones we usually see, but it’s an interesting attempt to capture differences in BlackBerry and iPhone users in categories most surveys never touch.

The study’s sample size is very small, 445 iPhone and BlackBerry users, but its exploration of the self-identities of the major smartphone users raises some eyebrows.

Plus, it’s fun.

An example of the findings: iPhone users find gadget-ownership three times more attractive than a college education in a person (in fact, more than anything else in a person), while the reverse is true for BlackBerry users.

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E-government has fallen from vogue in the year since Obama’s election.

Many commentators are frustrated with e-government initiatives at the national level, as they’ve largely stagnated after showing so much potential only a year ago, while local initiatives, more innovative than things going on at the national level, rarely get the coverage they deserve.

For true innovation, you must look to the local level and outside the regions tech journalists normally cover. The Center for Digital Government highlights the most innovative communities in its Digital Cities annual survey, which it has been running since 2001.

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One of the central tenets of internet criticism – like the criticism of any mass media – is that it reduces social interaction.

While any visit to a Facebook feed filled with extroverts would seem to deny this, most studies show people spending more and more people in front of a screen at the expense of spending it front of other people.

Hold on a second, says Pew, which concludes that social isolation caused by new technologies and media is not the problem we’ve be led to believe.

Pew’s report is in response to an influential 2006 paper claiming that “since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased.”

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ICANN, the international organization responsible for domain names and IP addresses, has approved the use of non-Latin scripts in internet addresses. The Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process will launch on Nov 16.

“The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago,” said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.

“Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

The non-Latin domain names will initially be available only for country codes. For example, a website ending with .kr will now be able to use the Korean script instead of the Latin letters. Eventually, all parts of an internet address will be able to be written in non-Latin scripts.

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Forty-five percent of smokers try to quit every year; and of course, most fail. Scientists in Quebec believe that virtual reality (VR) might help those smokers finally stop.

In a test of smokers enrolled in a smoking-cessation program, smokers who crushed cigarettes in a VR environment (built on the Unreal 2 engine) were significantly more successful in quitting smoking than the control group, who followed the same treatment program but who collected balls in the VR environment instead of crushing cigarettes.

“Crushing cigarettes in a 3D environment with a virtual arm led to decreased nicotine dependence and increased retention of patients in treatment,” the research group concludes.

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