By admin , 29 March 2011

Dutch & Flemish Social

Laat effe weten of je komt. Mede georganiseerd met Kristel Deckx (eigenaresse van Uptown)

By admin , 29 March 2011

Dutch conversation night

Hallo Allemaal,

Stop by the Continental Restaurant for een gezellige avond with Dutch speakers. You can have dinner, a snack, or just something to drink terwijl wij nederlands spreken met elkaar.

Look for the Dutch and Belgian flags on our table.

Tot ziens!

Brigitte

By admin , 29 March 2011

March meetup

Beste mensen


De meetup van  maart is gepland op vrijdag 1 april (geen grap!!!). Truce heeft dag en restaurant uitgekozen


Apple Annie's restaurant


2177 NW Military Hwy.


San Antonio 78213


tel.491 0266


 


Hartelijke groet van Cisca en Truce.


By admin , 29 March 2011

Dutch-American Friendship Day

John Adams.April 19th is Dutch-American Friendship Day.

In history
Dutch-American Friendship Day remembers the day in 1782 that John Adams, the second president of the United States, was received by the States General in The Hague and recognized as Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America.

It is also the day that the house John Adams purchased at Fluwelen Burgwal 18 in The Hague became the first American Embassy in the world.

Official recognition

In 1982, two hundred years later, President Reagan proclaimed April 19, 1982, to be Dutch-American Friendship Day (read the text here: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=42385).

Fifteen years later, in 2007, Congress made this a repeating commemoration, and on March 12, 2007 the House of Representative officially established Dutch-American Friendship Day:

"The U.S./Dutch relationship has stood the test of time and has strengthened in the crucible of conflict as the Dutch have stood beside us in times of peace and war. The Dutch supported us in our war for independence. Sixty years ago Dutch and American servicemen stood side by side during World War II and today the Dutch stand by us still in the Global War on Terror.

The debt we owe to our Dutch friends is seen not only in our people, and in the persons of such famous Dutch Americans as Presidents Martin VanBuren, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, but also in our experience as a Nation. Our traditions of religious freedom and tolerance as well as our system of government, all have spiritual and legal roots in our relationship with the Dutch Republic. "

(Read more here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r110:FLD001:H02415)

Popularity

Dutch-American Friendship Day is less well known than its cousin, Dutch-American Heritage Day (in November). Also, in April many Dutch clubs and organization in the States are focused on organizing their Queen's Day celebration (April 30th).

By Guus , 26 March 2011

Photo exhibition

Yesterday evening we went to the opening reception of a photo exhibition in Cary, NC. The exhibition was with works by Saskia Leary and Laura Holley.

Saskia, who was born in the Netherlands, started photographing after her retirement. This exhibition was about spring flowers and the Keukenhof in the Netherlands. Saskia has been to Sofia, Bulgaria and took several nice photo's there also -- yesterday we saw one of them in a restaurant nearby.

We met up with Petra at the exhibition --it was nice to see her-- and when we went for dinner in the evening we saw several other people we know. A small world.

Topic
dailylife
By admin , 24 March 2011

Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted Voice over IP Conversations

Today I read 'Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted Voice over IP Conversations', a very interesting article from the December 2010 issue of ACM Transaction on Information and System Security. (Read the full PDF version here).

The paper details a gap in the security of VBR compressed encrypted VoIP streams. The authors had earlier found that it is possible to determine the language that is spoken on such a VoIP call, based on packet lengths. Now they have expanded their research and show that it's possible to detect entire spoken phrases during a VoIP call. On average, their method achieved recall of 50% and precision of 51% for a wide variety of phrases spoken by a diverse collection of speakers (some phrases are easier to detect than others; the recall various from 0% to 98%, depending on length of the phrase and the speaker).

In other words: they can detect fairly well if a certain phrase is being used in a conversation, even though the VoIP conversation is encrypted!

Fundamentally, this is possible because VoIP packets are compressed using variable bit-rate compression and not typically "padded". Longer phonemes (such as vowels) correspond with longer packets, shorter phonemes (such as fricatives like 's', 'sh' or 'th') use shorter packets -- using sophisticated statistical analysis they can detect whole phrases.

A solution would be to add padding to VoIP packets, but that increases the bandwidth that is needed. Not only does padding increase the bandwidth because of padding itself, but it also negates a big benefit of VBR compression when dealing with quiet periods in a conversation, when one party is listening to another.

A fun read, quite accessible.

Topic
internet