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Tag: Laos

  • Brenda Song Goes Shopping with Mom and Younger Brother

    Brenda Song Goes Shopping with Mom and Younger Brother

    Brenda Song was recently spotted shopping in Los Angeles with her mom Mai and younger brother Nathan.

    The trio hit a mall in the trendy Woodland Hills neighborhood on Friday. Onlookers said Song and her mother bought beauty products at the MAC store.

    Song, 26, appears close to her family, with photos of them peppered throughout her Instagram feed.

    The actress was born in the Sacramento, CA suburb of Carmichael. Her parents met in Sacramento, but were both born in Asia.

    Her father is Hmong and was raised in a tribe that traveled the mountains of Thailand and Laos. Song’s mother was born Thai, but adopted into a Hmong family.

    Song has said that her father insisted that she and younger brothers Timmy and Nathan speak Hmong growing up so they could communicate with their grandparents and retain a piece of Hmong culture.

    Song’s favorite part of that culture is the food:

    “There’s a chicken drumstick dish where they stuff it with noodles … It’s my favorite dish.”

    Song’s father was in the military and at one point the family lived on an army base in Germany. They traveled extensively throughout Europe while he was stationed there. Song did professional theater on the American base.

    When the family returned stateside, she told her mother she wanted to become a full time actress.

    “My imagination, as a child, was huge,” she recalls. “It’s all I wanted to do.”

    Song landed her first big role in Disney’s The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. After appearing in every episode of the show’s three-season run, she moved on to the spin-off The Suite Life on Deck, which also ran three seasons, from 2008 to 2011.

    From there Song went on to appear in more grown up roles on series such as New Girl and Scandal. In 2013 and 2014 she starred in Fox’s sitcom Dads opposite Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi. In May the network announced it had canceled the show after just one season.


    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Laos Plane Crash Kills All Passengers On Board

    Tragedy hit Laos airlines and numerous families today as a flight from Vientiane to the southern town of Pakse crashed, killing all the passengers and employees aboard the airplane. There were 44 confirmed deaths, according to the Thai foreign ministry. According to various reports from many foreign ministries and representatives, among those killed were five Thai people, three South Korean officials, and seven French citizens. Pakse is a very popular tourist destination, especially for international visitors.

    The flight took off from Vientiane around 2:45 PM, and was only supposed to last about one hour. According to the Bangkok Post, an English paper published in Thailand, the plane was found crashed into the Mekong River, where it allegedly wound up because of an attempt to land in the Pakse Airport during a spout of bad weather. The crash allegedly occurred around 4:00 PM. Thai television sources showed pictures of the small plane, submerged in the river water, with what appeared to be dead bodies littering the banks.

    Many foreign ministries are responding quickly to the tragedy. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was quoted as saying, “My first thoughts are with the families and friends of the victims,” going on to say that special operatives had been dispatched to comfort the grieving families. Other embassy officials are being sent to the site of the plane crash, as well.

    The state-run news agency KPL was quoted as saying on the topic of the crash, “The plane was about to land but appeared to be hit by a strong wind, causing its head to ascend and pushing it away from the airport area and out of reach of the air traffic control radar.” Other reports have described the weather as “extreme,” and site it as the main cause for the terrible and destructive crash.

    This writer’s thoughts and sentiments go to the families who must now suffer and grieve over the loss of their loved ones.

    [Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]

  • Google Adds Its 65th Language To Google Translate With Lao

    Google announced today that it has added Lao to its Google Translate repertoire, making it the 65th language the service supports.

    Lao, sometimes called Laotion, is spoken in Laos, Thailand, the U.S., France, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina. In Laos, it is the official language. As of 2006, there were a reported 5.22 million native speakers.

    Google is keeping the “alpha” tag on Lao for the time being, as it’s not quite where the company wants it to be. Google Translate Associate Product Manager Minqi Jiang says in a post on the Google Translate blog:

    The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic translations, both for languages that have been available for some time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter; changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future.

    Support for Lao meets our launch standards, but translation quality is at the lower end compared to that of other languages we offer. We therefore designate Lao with an “alpha” status until we can make further improvements. While our Lao translations will be usable in some situations, like providing an English reader with the gist of an article written in Lao, they will fail in other situations where more precise translations are needed. We need your feedback in order to improve the quality of Lao translations.

    Google is calling upon users to help improve its translation of the language by providing alternate translations (by clicking on words or phrases of the translated sentence) or using the Google Translator Toolkit to upload translations.

    Last month, Google added some new camera functionality to Google Translate for Android, making the service all the more helpful in travel situations. Now, you can take a picture of a sign that is written in an unfamiliar language, and get it translated.