I can proudly present: Two more international students here in Umea who decided to overwhelm the web with information about staying abroad in northern Sweden. And here they are…

• Whats up in sweden? Marco launched a blog (yeah!) to answer this question. Primarily written in English, the extensive travelogues (are|will be) published in German.
• Christoph launched his Experiment Schweden, a web page including his monthly newsletter and some galleries. Check out the beautiful Northern Lights page! Contents written in German.

Monday, 4:30 pm, workout at the campus sports field. No more excuses.

Just a short post with some links to photo pages and blogs of international students here in Umea… This is what I discovered during the last weeks:

• Marce’s Dagbladet (Marcello’s blog in Italian – Mica’s pics and much content, unfortunately I don’t understand a lot )
• João’s Suécia Photo Blog (Brazilian action, click últimas fotos on the left to see a list of all galleries)
• Aventuras en Suecia of Sebastian & Nicholas (photo page from two Uruguayan students, funnily enough hosted at German Arcor)

Hey guys, I know that there is more of this stuff out there. Show up & post your link!

YOU: Hey Eliza, what’s 45 and 5?
ELIZA: The sum of 45 and 5 is 50.
YOU: And what is the product of 3 and 4?
ELIZA: The product of 3 and 4 is 12.
YOU: Now: What is 2344355 divided by 0???
ELIZA: Well, 2344355 divided by 0 is not defined.

For my current course Speech and Language Processing we are supposed to submit 7 questions over time. For the second task, I decided to implement an ELIZA-like program.

ELIZA is a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the patient’s statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Thus, for example, the response to “My head hurts” might be “Why do you say your head hurts?” The response to “My mother hates me” might be “Who else in your family hates you?”
[…]
Eliza worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people’s tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never put there.
(Wikipedia)

As the program’s domain I chose simple calculations with 2 operands. You can ask questions written in normal English (well, phases that I call English ). The text at the very beginning shows an example output of the program. calcELIZAr heavily uses Regular Expressions to recognize and transform inputs. It’s written in simple JavaScript and is therefore directly available on the web:

You can test calcELIZAr at http://www.2meter3.de/calcelizar/. It’s far away from being bug-free and speaking proper English, but it’s a nice toy, though. calcELIZAr is just a little project for school, but feel free to report flaws and errors.

There are three projects I would like to introduce…

First of all and for the sake of completeness, I want to mention Fabio’s Photoblog. He’s really active and uploaded a lot of pictures and added some notes. Go ahead, Fabio! It’s nice to see that Marta is not the only Brazilian who spends some time here in Umea… BTW: Thanks to Rolf for tracking this site.

Blogs are used more and more beyond the private scope. The departments of informatics, applied physics and electronics at Umea University started a blog to recruit new students. It’s called VadSkaDuBli (What will you become?) and will be run until the 15th of April, the deadline for applications for the next semester.
The entries are written (in Swedish) by regular students who tell about their student lives. I think it’s an interesting experiment, but the results are pretty hard to measure.
At least it draws some attention: I first read about VadSkaDuBli in Västerbottens-Kuriren, later on I discovered the official press release of the university. The Blog Herald and The Local also refer to the project.

The last link is primarily for German-speakers: Steffanie is a Swedish journalist living in Stockholm. She puts a lot of effort into learning German and runs her German weblog “Deutsch für Anfänger – Formulierungen in eine Fremdsprache”. She writes about Sweden + Stockholm, the German language, Blogging and more personal stuff. She also offers a German podcast. It’s really cute to read + listen to her postings. You can fully understand her, but it’s so nice to notice her marginal grammatical mistakes.
I know Steffanie’s site for a couple of months (Martin Röll did a podcast with her after participating in the BlogWalk in Umea last November), but then I lost track of it. Today I retrieved it while surfing the blogosphere. Steffanie also runs a Swedish and an English blog!

Every now and then I check Google for Umea-related search queries to find new web pages of international students (and of course to monitor my own position *g*). Et voila! This time I found the brand new blog of Frenchman Etienne. La vie et les gens ou pas is a very personal site with some handsome and funky pics. Due to my bad French skills I don’t understand the whole gossip, but hey – it’s an Umea international, so it must be good!

Welcome to blogosphere, Ufo-Tinou!
(Damn, these animations in your yesterday’s post are impertinently huge. I hope your deux potes have a fast internet connection…)

Blogs are paid more and more attention. Germany’s most popular news site Spiegel Online compliments in their daily + English (!) category Spiegel Surfs the Net:

When you get bored reading regular media like us, these are great places to waste time without wasting your brain.

Indeed, this is exactly what I have experienced in the last few months. I can spend hours/days/… with reading really interesting stuff. I eventually have to realize that it’s simply impossible to absorb every seemingly juicy blog source. It appears really hard to implement an efficient information filter in my head. Am I a slave of distraction?
But this is actually not a new problem, caused by blogs in particular. Blogs are just the new fashion of publishing information. Attributes: Beyond the scope of mass media, versatile and often straightforward language styles, independent and free in thoughts.

Just one example: I would have never expected that the daily episodes of a German sole trader can be so much of interest to me. His readers get a perfect insight into his profession and the variety of tasks and topics he has to deal with. My respect for this guy has grown dramatically! Still, retailer or even cashier is not the career of my choice, but Der Shopblogger! is a thousand times better than every damn reality show ever.

Also established journals want to use the hype and start blogging: German business paper Handelsblatt launched its blog network Handelsblatt global reporting, where its foreign correspondents write about more personal impressions, encounters and stories. I would really like to know if the reporters required such a platform or if they were forced (or lured by money) to contribute to this fancy medium.
Anyway, the platform also includes the experiences of Swedish correspondent Helmut Steuer. Up to now, he has only published two articles, but I’m looking forward to comparing his point of view to my adventures in northern Sweden.

That’s all I have to say. I hope you don’t mind the German links…

Did you visit Umeå universitetet web page during the last days? Maybe you recognized some well-known people: On behalf of the university, a photo shooting with some international students was carried out last semester. And right now you can gaze at a nice eye-catcher for today’s information day on the university’s home page. I didn’t expect that Kees, Matthieu, Nils and co. become famous so fast…

More pictures of the shooting are used in the current utbildningskatalogen (education catalogue) which can be ordered online. It’s for free and maybe it’s a nice souvenir for you.

(Partly) via: Nils (who did – as always – this nice picture of the catalogue above)

Actually I’m not really interested in cars, high speed and racing. But during my research for the Lapland article I found a couple of interesting web pages I do not want to keep back:

The municipality of Arjeplog (with a population density of 0 inhabitants per km²!) is one of the biggest centres of car testing on snow and ice tracks in the world. Several companies offer their individually prepared tracks and additional services to the big brands in the automotive industry. Apparently you can make a real fortune with that stuff: Some companies launched pretty extensive and well-designed web pages.

“It all started as a coincidence.” I really like that little story about the beginnings of car testing in 1973. The SWTR web page provides a slightly different version.

The huge test circles, handling courses and polished ice tracks remind me of these mysterious crop circles which occasionally attract people’s attention. Watch out the gallery at icemakers.se!

Resources:

• Arjeplog Test Center
• IceMakers
• Cartest
• Colmis AB
• Swedish Winter Test Region

After two hours of Swedish lesson and three and a half hours at IKSU I can proudly present: The first web page of a new international student!

Sara is an Italian girl from my mentor group, and actually I’ve met her only once up to now. Anyway, she started an online gallery and I hope she will go on publishing nice and funny pictures.
Be welcome to the Umea International Students Web Sphere!

I just added two more student’s web pages to the links section: Rolf has launched an interesting weblog and Philipp publishes some pictures from Umea and his trips up north. Don’t hesitate to inform me about your Umea web activities!