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Cindy Smart Knows Better Than To Say Naughty Words
D'Sphitz writes "Cindy Smart, the first doll in the world to be able to read, tell the time and do sums.
Cindy Smart 'sees' via a camera located under a bee on her overalls and has a computer 'brain' that can recognise more than 600 words and objects, although she refuses to recite certain 4-letter words. 'We don't say those kind of words,' she shrills, refusing to even spell obscenities. 'That's a bad word.'" Sounds like a good candidate for a personality transplant.
The caterpiller is Alphabet Pal. My daughter has one. First time one of my friends saw it he tried to do make it curse. It just laughs instead most of the time, but there are a couple more words that they missed.
Note to moderators: parent comment is not "interesting" or "insightful", but "funny" - note the date of the "PicoGUI ported to Furby" announcement.
Actually, older versions of that Catapillar did say naughty words when in letter pronounciation mode and presented with "f" and "k" in quick succession.
The new version just laughs and says that it tickles.
But then again, I could be wrong.
First of all, it was Bobby Brown Second, if you are going to try to act smart (or intelligent) by making linguistic arguments about big words like prerogative you should at least learn to spell.
The word "perogative" lost all its dignity when Will Smith explained it to the masses.
:-)
The word prerogative lost all its dignity when everyone started pronouncing it "perogative".
Maybe Cindy Smart didn't pass the child play test. I found it discounted from the original $150 MSRP down to only $29.21 at hsn.com.
Or better, you can try it online http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/ in English, French, Spanish and German.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
It's because the words 'shit' and 'smart' are used much more commonly (which in turn may be because they're from Old English). They're words you've known since you were a kid, you're more familiar with them, they're more mundane. Using the "fancy" words is putting on a mask of unfamiliarity, you soften the message because people's brain use the time they would've been shocked/unimpressed by (ever so slightly) decoding.
"I always do what teddy says" Harry Harrison, 1963.
"I Always Do What Teddy Says (1963) is set in a utopia where mechanical teddy bears are used to condition children against anti-social behaviour: The Times reported on 1st April 1998 that, "Teddy bears...will soon be fitted with tiny cameras to spy on families across Britain.""
Hope this helps.
Lemon curry?
Please don't have kids. The truth is great and all, but the world needs fewer emotionally disturbed children. Children raise in the manner you describe almost always form a negative opinion of themself (how could they not), develop a low self-esteem, and become failures in life as part of some sick, self-fulfilling prophecy. So if that's the way you really think kids should be raised, I beg of you to do this world a favor and not have kids.
found from Froogle:x ?pfid=6564 62
http://www.hsn.com/cnt/prod/default.asp
Nice thing about froogle. I'd normally never look at places like HSN, but when they were dumping Zaurus's for under $200...
No Zen is good zen
As a simple Google search for "Chevy Nova Spanish" reveals, this never happened.
The first link revealed by Google debunks this myth:
The second linkprovided by Google is slightly better.
My favorite quote from the article:
The article also points out the fact that you can't market a car in Spanish-speaking countries without Spanish-speaking people finding out about it. GM dealers in South America would be stupid to sit idly by while GM asked them to sell a car whose very name implied that it was unable to move.
But, I guess it's easier to assume that GM's entire marketing team didn't know enough to realize that people on a different continent speaking another language might have another interpretation for the name of a product, and that everyone in Mexico and South America involved in marketing and selling the car would be too lazy and drunk to mention anything to their regional managers if the name actually was likely to kill sales.
As both articles point out, the Nova actually sold quite well in South America, exceeding GM's expectations.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
For example, my daughter has an Alpha Bug (it's not exactly like that, but really close.) One of the first things adults do with this sort of thing is see what kind of bad words you can make it say ... but it won't do it. It'll go F ... U ... ohhh that tickles!
We mentioned this to a friend of ours who also had an Alpha Bug, and he must have had an earlier version -- while it looked identical, it *would* let you make bad word sounds. Oddly enough, as soon as we mentioned that we had an alpha bug, he immediately picked it up and starting showing us how it can say bad words (even before we got to that part. So obviously we're not alone in this :)
And yesterday, I bought some other Leap Frog toy for my daughter at a garage sale. It's a cylindrical thing that you can rotate the sides to pick letters, and it apparantly knows every 3 letter word, and even has recordings of somebody saying each and every one (it's not just speech synthesis.) If it doesn't know the word, it will spell out the sounds, but if it does it'll say it perfectly. (Pretty impressive for $2!) (It's very similar to this but not quite identical.)
In any event, it won't even spell out things that sound like a bad word -- it says `F ... U ... pick another word!'. (Oddly enough, even `JAP' is a bad word according to it. :)
In any event, if you have friends with young kids, but they're not really good friends, you buy them stuff like this -- stuff that makes noise. Very annoying :)
I spent some time in college studying Natural Language Processing. Amazing stuff. One of the coolest things about _all_ languages is that the frequencies of "tokens" (generally words) is mathematically predictable. If I remember correctly, the break down follows Zipf's Law, and is something like 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc...
Obviously the most common words occur much more often, but as the corpus (i.e. set of words you know) grows, you get rapidly dimishing returns. 500 words is a pretty good set of words if they are the most common words in the language. To lineraly increase the likelyhood of the doll knowing a random word the makers would have to add memory at a much greater than linear rate.
And all this so it won't say "shit, fart, damn, fuck". Ahhh science. I feel safer already.
Cindy sounds American...
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