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Living Life in Fast-Forward
ctwxman writes "A year and a half ago my boss approached me, asking me to finish some college courses to get certification in what I've been doing for the past 20+ years. The courses are offered by Mississippi State University. Since I live in Connecticut, I am taking my lessons on DVD and videocassette with tests, quizzes and helpful advice from TA's online. It didn't take me long to realize how s-l-o-w the whole lecture process was. But with WinDVD4, I started ramping up the speed. It didn't take long to get to 2x normal speed. Other than the lectures taking half the time, I didn't miss anything. Yes, the speech is a little clipped, but these are college lectures. There are no speed demons delivering at the MSU lectern. I posted my 'discovery' to our online student bulletin board and found many other students were scared of the idea. But, for me wearing headphones (important I think), these hyper lessons are just as good as watching at normal speed. Now, The New York Times (sacrifice of eldest child required) has legitimized my claim with this article showing how and why others are rapidly jumping on the high speed watching bandwagon."
I did a similar thing at my job.
When I was hired on here I had to view 2-ish hours of safety videos ("Look at that 1 kilo pipe wrench soar into the bore of that MRI machine from 3 meters away! Fear!!") I don't work in the labs with glass, animals or tissue. Unless one of the SGI Origins becomes self-aware ala Skynet.. you get the idea.. anyhow many of the videos were not applicable to me or my work.
Fortunately they were on CDs in Quicktime format and the Quicktime viewer had a fast play option for those lulls in the video. (the Flying Wrench O' Death was really cool, it's the highlight of the whole video set that anyone every talks about.)
Trolling is a art,
When will the madness stop?!?!?
there was a remote control so you could fast-forward professors in the lecture hall. Man they're boring!
Depends on the professor. I have been using the E&M lectures on MIT OCW for the last few weeks and that professor is extremely organized. I do not think it would be possible to understand everything he is saying running at double the speed.
Once again, Google News comes to the rescue.
Anyone else think of Lawnmower Man?
I know Kung-Fu...
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
As a long-time ReplayTV user who is active on the ReplayTV Forum of the AVS Forum, I can say that this is a feature that has been often requested. The ability to be able to watch TV recordings at a faster speed with pitch-adjusted audio would be great for watching things like news shows, etc.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
In Soviet Russia, the messages aren't so subliminal.
Yawn.
... and you'll get "alternative" music ::ducks::
I think you've used technology to rediscover one of the points of good teaching. Probably over a decade ago, there was a study of what qualities make for compelling teaching. I remember one of them was NOT s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g out every comcept in excruciatingly slothish manner so "no child gets left behind". One of the most desired qualities was, in fact, speaking quickly to maintain interest.
...having found that double the playtime for twice as many times is of far greater value than half the speed for half the repetitions. It also forms the backbone of many memory fads... an example is the last tape of the Mega Memory course, where, you can hear Kev extoll the values of high speed learning. Personally, I think the best thing a Uni student will ever own is a variable speed notetaker.
I'm sure this is totally dependent upon the teacher's style. I've had some "we have a lot to cover and time is short" styles, where he bombarded us machine-gun style with facts, and other slow-as-molasses types that left me thinking "just get to the point". Of course, even the machine-gun-style guy has to answer the questions I already know the answer to, a prime time for the fast-forward button.
When I was a wee lad, I thought it would be amusing to put those "Alvin and the Chipmunks" records on the 45 RPM setting. Try keeping a straight face through that.
But this is material that you've had 20+ years of experience with. I would hope that you can watch/listen to the lectures at 2x the speed and still follow along. I would also hope that you could skip a few lectures and not be left confused.
Take a student who has had no experience with the subject matter. You think this approach would still work well?
I suppose its relative to the complexity of the subject matter and the ability of the student to digest information, but I would argue, that for the most part, lectures at hyper-speed aren't more effective.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
in a normal windows session, only a small part of the cpu is taxed, leaving excess processing power to be used scanning for viruses/worms, filtering out smb traffic, or simply entering infinite loops.
I'm from MS, so I can say this. The reason that this works is because we talk half as fast.
I wonder what would happen if you watched a speed-reading course from Evelyn Wood this way. Would you finish before you even started?
It reminds me of the limerick:
There once was a lady named Bright,
Who could travel far faster than light
She set out one day
In a relative way
And came back the previous night
Tim
One step closer to actually knowing a subject forwards and backwards.
yuck
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
It looks like my mentally handicapped son (almost 6) with a P.I.Q. of 50, also has this preference. He always asks us to play his favourite video at twice the normal speed, especially if he already has watched them before.
Ok, so I did this in middle school. We had a history teacher that would make us watch so many filmstrips and answer little quizzes about them. It didn't take us long to figure that we could cut the time it took to grind through a 20-minute filmstip by playing the 33rpm record at 45rpm.
Hey kids: Remember vinyl record? No? Damn, I'm getting old.
I think that one of the reasons why you may have been able to digest the information at this faster speed is because you're already well-experienced in that area. Naturally, anyone who's been working with X for a number of years is already familiar with most of the concepts. Me, I could easily watch most computer-related lectures in double-speed and absorb 99% of the information easily. Change subjects, though, and the increased speed might be more of a hindrance.
I recently took an introductory accounting class at BYU. The professor had prepared CDROMs with lecture videos. He actually paid licensing fees to a company that produces media speed-up software for Windows, because he wants students to watch the videos at a higher speed (I just used mplayer -speed 2 instead). He repeatedly emphasized how much a better experience it is when you watch the lectures faster.
anyone got a good headroom fan site?
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Boss: I want you to get certification in what you've been doing for the past 20+ years.
Me: Fuck off you talentless, ugly jerk. Hire someone better if you want to, it would be a blessing to me. (Me gets back to work)
Fsirt we dvsiceor taht plepoe can urenntdasd wtrtien wdors wehn the idnise lrtetes are all sralmbecd up...
...andnowwelearnthattheMicroMachineManwasn'tans olatedphenomenonandthatalmostanyonecanunderstand
i
spokenlanguageevenifit'sspedupbeyondallreason.
Amazing, really. When you think about how much garbage the brain's communication centers are capable of interpreting, it's almost a wonder we got as far as written language at all.
Network 23 has announced new high speed commercials, aka "blipverts," applying similar technology, albeit with the occasional side effect.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
If you're at say Princeton, Stanford or MIT I daresay the lectures (e.g. 18.01 18.014 18.01a ) are plenty fast enough thanks.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Why do this?
Blar.
A friend of mine who's a professor told me that in order to get something accross you have to repeat it ten times during a lecture or a class, simply because humans have a short attention span and they wander off and on the speech. So it's hardly surprising that one could follow by zipping through it.
Ctwxman, Now if we could only get some of your co-workers to do their bit in fast forward mode....
Don't Tread on Me
This could seriously level the academic playing field for folks who learn better from lectures than from books. In college, I know I certainly had an easier time in many classes than my classmates because I preferred to learn from the textbooks and other reading materials rather than the lectures. Since reading isn't limited by the rate of speech of the author, you can cover more material in a given time from a book. Plus, books are random access; it's much harder to scan through a recorded lecture for something you wanted to hear. However, I know a lot of people who seem to really need the narrative provided by a lecturer to get the material. Given the speeds at which the article claims young adults are capable of comprehending spoken material, that no longer needs to be a disadvantage.
:) )
Now, all schools have to do is make lectures non-mandatory (so that students can save time by listening later at high speed, of course.
Fast Forwarding Video is great!
With eBooks, PDFs, and DOC Palm Ebooks
use FastReader
Anyone know of another one that reads PDFs?
.. because of my superior brain processing power.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The radio industry picked up on this idea a while back, too, as I recall. They would remove the "dead space" between spoken words to get more time in for advertising. Somebody was thinking.
When you combine this dead space removal with a cadenced announcer, that's how you come up with SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! AT THE AWESOME CROSS!
The estimated viewing time for this training video is 15.62 minutes.
More than 18 minutes -- Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g. possible unauthorized restroom break).
16-18 minutes -- Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
15.63-16 minutes -- Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
Exactly 15.62 minutes -- Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
14-15.61 minutes -- Employee is an efficient worker, may someteimes miss emportant details.
10-14 minutes -- Keep an eye on this employee; maybe developing slipshod attitude.
6-10 minutes -- Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
Less than 6 minutes -- Disable fast-forward button on the user's video player, re-block Slashdot.org on the company firewall.
Society is moving too fast as it is - and you want to speed it up even more.
Careful thought and consideration is an important aspect of learning critical thinking - not how much you can cram into your brain at one sitting.
I see two things happening:
1. People are quick to jump to incorrect conclusions more than I remember in the past.
2. People don't stop and smell the roses in their relentless pursuit of *?
Reminds me of a parable:
A young bull and an old bull are at the top of a hill, looking down on the herd of cows.
The young bull says to the old bull, "lets run down there a meet a cow!"
The old bull responds, "lets walk down there and meet them all."
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
You must be new here; those are just Soviet Russia "jokes."
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
...Now, The New York Times (sacrifice of eldest child required) has legitimized...
Before I clicked on the link I sacrificed my eldest childing hoping to be able to read the article. but when i got there it just wanted my NYT username and password. I read through the TOS and nowhere did it say anything about Sacrifices. I demand that you pay for your false information. I need a replacement firstborn so the wife doesn't find out!
Do you Gentoo!?
I would be even cooler if my in-class exercises were done in half the time. (my students are fine---but there is only so much email one can hadle in little one minute intervals while simultaneously watching to see where people are stuck)
The first time we had devices in for service it was assumed that someone had touched the speech rate knob while unpacking the thing - as no living thing possible could make any sense of what the synthesis produced at that rate. I guess that it may help that the voice is always the same, though.
- El riesgo siempre vive - Private J. Vasquez
...freshman year, I'd record lectures and sleep through class (yes, I can learn just fine that way thanks), friday afternoon when I had no class I'd dump the tapes to my drive and use Peak to cut the running time by about half. Took a while to actually process (200mhz 603ev!), but by Saturday morning I could roll over, put my headphones on, and catch up a week in about 2 hours. hungover no less!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
1. Tell 'em what you are going to tell 'em.
2. Tell 'em what what you tell 'em.
3.Tell 'em what you have told 'em.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
is that a person can think faster than they can actually speak so that when listening/viewing you are capable of absorbing information much faster than the presenter can deliver. I explored this idea in the late 80's. The undergrad library at Purdue University had a number of lectures on tape (audio only) and had variable speed players available that you could use to play the tapes anywhere from .5x to 4x speed(IIRC). They also had a tone control that would let you tone down the "chipmunk" sound of the accelerated audio.
I've done just this sort of thing. Many cassette based voice recorders and almost every micro-cassette voice recorders have a scan option that plays at something like 2x. Sure the pitch it high, but it works well. You get to know which profs this will work for and which it won't. And of course, YMMV.
So just record that lecture your in and work on something more important like an online cert test, tetris or text messaging.
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
When the U.S. olympic hockey games were on in the middle of the night, I taped them for later viewing. I found that the games were easy to watch and comprehend at 2X. I only kicked it down to normal to check out the goals.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
1. Have a clickable outline of a lecture that lets you skip/repeat/zoom in on the professor's nose, etc...
2. Have the person delivering the lecture be a trained speaker (ie. they don't even have to know the subject - just read the script quickly and clearly).
3. Have a pool of real SMEs (subject matter experts) available via group chat (voice if necessary) to answer questions.
4. Make all of this available online for a fee.
5. profit
A similar, but by no means identical, feature is available for TiVos now, and may work with ReplayTV as well since I don't think TiVo had to explicitly implement it. If you use TiVo at the first fast-forward speed, which IIRC is 3x, the close captioning still works. Thus, if you are watching a close-captioned show and it's bogging down, you can zip things up to 3x, which is a good reading speed, and still know what's going on.
(There are backdoors to tweak whether it's exactly 3x or not, but I don't know if they are still in the latest TiVo software and use at your own risk. I don't know anything about how they interact with this "feature".)
It's actually a little faster then my TV can handle it; sometimes the CC starts to lag and you need to slow down to normal speed briefly to allow the TV to catch up. If it happens to you, you'll understand what I mean when you see it.
I'm sure you can do the math as to how much TV you can watch in an hour at 3x, but more importantly in my experience is zipping through the middle of boring things without actually missing what's being said. (As mentioned in the parent post, I sometimes watch the entire local news, except weather which my wife wants to see, this way though; when the news is dumbed down to an elementary school level accelerating it by 3x is about right. Plus the psychological impact of the continuously and unrepresentatively negative stories is greatly reduced which still transferring the information. I prefer it to reading local newspapers, which is not saying much.)
There was a Tom-Clancy-Type novel called "Full Disclosure" IIRC, where the basic idea of double speed audio was also included.
The plot was: US president gets into office, gets shot and injured, turns blind because of injury.
Nasty politicos around the VP try to have him declared "unfit for office" so that VP can become P.
One of the tricks the president used to overcome his handicap (on the advice of an experienced blind person) was to have documents read to tape, and then played back at 2x or 3x the speed, which approximated the reading speed of a normal adult.
Sorry, can't resist snide comment: If this technique were applied today, the president would probably increase his effective reading speed by 12 times, since he is rumored to read at slightly above 3rd grader speed. Maybe thats why his lips always look funny in the photos, they're constantly dry and cracked.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
It took me 9.4 minutes to read this post. Do you think there's hope for me?
Now, The New York Times (sacrifice of eldest child required)
Should have waited for the Spring for this one.
Who knew the BSoD was one of the Plagues.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
With a Tivo, you can watch at the lowest fast-forward speed (2x) with closed captions enabled on your TV. The captions still come through because the Tivo captures them during broadcast and reinserts them into the encoded stream.
"When I listen to the newspaper, I tend to go as high as 650" words per minute, said Gregory Rosmaita, a Web designer based in Jersey City. Because Mr. Rosmaita is blind, his interface with computers is audio-based...
Maybe you've seen his work like here or here
Have used this technology for decades when replaying audio tapes of lectures, books, etc.
Those analog cassette machines have the ability to pitch correct when playing back.
That, of course, won't keep it from being patented.
It really sucks that even though I PAID for an NYT on-line subscription (yes, I'm kicking my ass now), their fucking advertisements are crashing my browser. So, for those of you who might have similar problems with their web site, I give you the article compliments of Lynx.
---
WE call it the 66-second minute," Laura Gaines said.
Ms. Gaines is the vice president of Prime Image, a maker of devices like the Digital Time Machine that shorten audio and video recordings by up to 12 percent with "no discernible results." Micro-editing, as the process is called, created a stir last year when some broadcasters were reported to be using the technology to squeeze more advertisements into the same block of time.
As it turns out, it was hardly an isolated phenomenon. Creating more time is the impetus behind many new technologies that allow listeners to pick up the pace.
From call centers and intelligence agencies to radio stations and universities, such technology helps listeners try to keep up with the growing number of audio recordings piling up on the air, on the phone and on the Web. Wading though this mountain of words faster than it takes to say them not only saves companies money; it might help people absorb more knowledge.
The new software programs, DVD players and phone services rising to this challenge all take advantage of the human ability to comprehend speech much more quickly than the typical spoken rate of 140 to 180 words a minute. How many times as fast? "I've heard of instances where people go to 4X, and they still want it to go faster," said Blake Erickson of Telex Communications, which makes "talking book" audio players for the educational market.
Scientists have long known that people can understand speech at a rate of up to 400 words a minute and beyond. "Speech rate isn't limited by the listener," said Arthur Wingfield, a psychology professor at Brandeis University. "It's limited by the speaker."
In normal conversation, only a small part of the brain is taxed, leaving excess processing power to be used for listening for lurking predators, filtering out background noise or simply daydreaming.
But speeding up speech on analog equipment like cassette decks traditionally led to the dreaded chipmunk effect, making long-term listening untenable. Digital time compression, however, works by discarding tiny segments of repetitive audio (for example, 30 milliseconds of a vowel) and reconnecting the remaining bits, leaving the pitch unaltered.
Simple versions of digital time compression have been available for years in devices like answering machines and hand-held recorders but did not offer much in terms of user control. A confluence of smart software, wider Internet access and inexpensive hardware, however, now enables listeners to choose when to step on the gas.
Auxiliary programs, or plug-ins, that allow digital audio and video recordings to be played faster (or slowed down) at will have recently become available for popular software like RealOne and Windows Media Player. Perhaps the most popular is Enounce's 2XAV plug-in (which works with both Real and Windows players and costs $29.95); the latest version of Windows Media Player offers a proprietary version of this feature. Similar capabilities are finding their way into other hardware - for example, the latest DVD recorders from Panasonic.
"You can watch a two-hour movie on a one-hour flight," said Chris Binace, an Enounce software developer. Yet this kind of software is not generally intended for entertainment listening. So far most end-user applications have involved academia, for example, allowing students to listen to archived audio or video lectures.
Online, the amount of recorded audio is growing at an overwhelming rate, providing a new impetus for speed listening. A spokeswoman for National Public Radio said that demand for NPR audio on the Web was about 50 percent greater in June than it was a year earlier, and now averaged 5.5 to 7 million audio downloads a
once upon a time, i was doing some summer work with a 600-MHz NMR, complete with liquid-helium-cooled superconducting supermagnet - the Red Line (don't cross with anything magnetic unless you don't want to be holding it anymore) was at least 5m away from the instrument. I have several bits of metal in my head, but since I'm smart and buy quality body jewelry, it's all nonmagnetic stainless steel...but this other kid who was working with me, OTOH, went the el-cheapo route and got his at Hot Topic; apparently they don't use non-magnetic ally in their jewelry. So he's walking by the NMR and crosses the line when I hear a loud metallic PING followed immediately by a louder scream...the poor guy had a 16 gauge barbell pulled clean through the hole in his earlobe, fly across the room, and get firmly stuck to the side of the NMR. At least he didn't have a ring in, so it just tore the hole open a little...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Hmm, I'm not sure I have all the details. Could you possibly make your summary any longer?
Also, with synopsis like that it looks like you're well on your way to becoming an MSU prof yourself!
"I put my 20-minute workout tape on twice as fast, so it only took ten minutes." -- Ghostbusters
Some professors deliver their lectures. They pay close attention to pacing, they give students time to take notes, they engage students. I wouldn't recommend listening to these profs at high speed, especially if you're taking notes.
Others just drone. I'd fast forward these anyway.
The question really is: is it about the process or the information? Depends on the teaching style, and so should your approach.
I used to watch all my porn on fast forward. Then I hurt meself.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I do this when watching DiVX on my Win box. With AC97 you can hardware-modify the pitch so that I can watch in 130% speed without actors to sound like having breathed helium.
'Max Headroom' -- Episode 1: Blipverts
A new form of advertising has destructive effects.
To improve ratings, Network 23 creates "Blipverts," high-speed commercials condensed into a few seconds that prevent channel-changing and embed themselves in viewers' minds. Unfortunately, these commercials have one tiny side effect, sometimes they cause viewers to explode. Network 23's star reporter, Edison Carter, is hot on the trail of the blipvert story but gets a little too close and gets thrown through a billboard.
But with WinDVD4, I started ramping up the speed. It didn't take long to get to 2x normal speed.
Does that work with Xine? or VLC?
Mod this up for those who don't want to register:
October 2, 2003
Now Hear This, Quickly
By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER
E call it the 66-second minute," Laura Gaines said.
Ms. Gaines is the vice president of Prime Image, a maker of devices like the Digital Time Machine that shorten audio and video recordings by up to 12 percent with "no discernible results." Micro-editing, as the process is called, created a stir last year when some broadcasters were reported to be using the technology to squeeze more advertisements into the same block of time.
As it turns out, it was hardly an isolated phenomenon. Creating more time is the impetus behind many new technologies that allow listeners to pick up the pace.
From call centers and intelligence agencies to radio stations and universities, such technology helps listeners try to keep up with the growing number of audio recordings piling up on the air, on the phone and on the Web. Wading though this mountain of words faster than it takes to say them not only saves companies money; it might help people absorb more knowledge.
The new software programs, DVD players and phone services rising to this challenge all take advantage of the human ability to comprehend speech much more quickly than the typical spoken rate of 140 to 180 words a minute. How many times as fast? "I've heard of instances where people go to 4X, and they still want it to go faster," said Blake Erickson of Telex Communications, which makes "talking book" audio players for the educational market.
Scientists have long known that people can understand speech at a rate of up to 400 words a minute and beyond. "Speech rate isn't limited by the listener," said Arthur Wingfield, a psychology professor at Brandeis University. "It's limited by the speaker."
In normal conversation, only a small part of the brain is taxed, leaving excess processing power to be used for listening for lurking predators, filtering out background noise or simply daydreaming.
But speeding up speech on analog equipment like cassette decks traditionally led to the dreaded chipmunk effect, making long-term listening untenable. Digital time compression, however, works by discarding tiny segments of repetitive audio (for example, 30 milliseconds of a vowel) and reconnecting the remaining bits, leaving the pitch unaltered.
Simple versions of digital time compression have been available for years in devices like answering machines and hand-held recorders but did not offer much in terms of user control. A confluence of smart software, wider Internet access and inexpensive hardware, however, now enables listeners to choose when to step on the gas.
Auxiliary programs, or plug-ins, that allow digital audio and video recordings to be played faster (or slowed down) at will have recently become available for popular software like RealOne and Windows Media Player. Perhaps the most popular is Enounce's 2XAV plug-in (which works with both Real and Windows players and costs $29.95); the latest version of Windows Media Player offers a proprietary version of this feature. Similar capabilities are finding their way into other hardware - for example, the latest DVD recorders from Panasonic.
"You can watch a two-hour movie on a one-hour flight," said Chris Binace, an Enounce software developer. Yet this kind of software is not generally intended for entertainment listening. So far most end-user applications have involved academia, for example, allowing students to listen to archived audio or video lectures.
Online, the amount of recorded audio is growing at an overwhelming rate, providing a new impetus for speed listening. A spokeswoman for National Public Radio said that demand for NPR audio on the Web was about 50 percent greater in June than it was a year earlier, and now averaged 5.5 to 7 million audio downloads a month.
"You just have oodles of data,'' said Ed Rucinski, a vice president of the Dictaphone Corporation, "and if you can only listen to it in a real-
Ruby on Rails Screencast
now if we could figure out how to speed up teachers.
... 'Round the Twist'? (Kiddies show in Australia.)
Cue reminiscing about old TV shows ("BERK! Feed me!").
Ah, natsukashii yo~.
Benny Hill pioneered this technology in the 70s
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I don't get it.
explain it to me.
thank you.
I hope it's a case of "pat pending" here, otherwise "they-who's-name-must-not-be-spoken" will patent it faster 'n a ferret up a drainpipe. You have been warned
I know kung fu.
The main downside i can see in this is advertising. There was a flap a few years ago with Rush Limbaugh and something called the "Cash" machine. What his radio station did was to squeeze his normal hour long show down by shortening pauses so that they could add in more radio ads.
All in all, it sounds a lot like This slashdot article which has a link to which is essentially the same thing, but for T.V. I don't have anything against using stepped up speech to learn faster, but dear God... must we listen to 'more' ads in the same amount of time?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Don't forget the oh so important 5 minute last-lecture review. I find in my classes [arrg] that it helps tie together lectures [specially when they are once a week].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
... and end up with J-Pop.
"Runaway!"
Micro-editing, as the process is called, created a stir last year when some broadcasters were reported to be using the technology to squeeze more advertisements into the same block of time.
Wow, deja-deja-vu-vu-vu! {/Max-Headroom}
I have a blind colleague whose sole monitor for his computer is spoken word. I'm sure he listens at more than 4x. Last time I visited him and asked about it, he said that he slows it down when he has visitors because some find it a little disturbing -- I could barely comprehend it at the slowed down rate. I don't think he'd be impressed by the article's 14% increase.
Fark. I'm an idiot.
Replace the noun in the exclamation above with the emphatic form of a verb and a direction/location beginning with "a" and ending with "way".
*Sigh*
At my university (The Technion - Israel's institute of technology) many lectures were taped, the tape library had players where you could adjust the speed. I had to do that to escape the boredom of many lectures, eventually using 2x by default.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Instead of going to an all day class, I rented the DVD from Blockbuster, fast forwarded through the sections and took the test. Of course they time you, so you have to wait an hour between tests, but at least I could surf the web or get some work down around the house while I was waiting.
Do you remember this coming up in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs? They had the advantage that they were watching movies with subtitles....
:-)
Try it again with the subtitles enabled on the DVD and that should get you up to 4x
You have to stand up to attend in person.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
My preference is to skip all classes and read the textbook the night before the exam, compressing months of wasted time into a mere few hours of tea-guzzling, sweat-wiping insanity.
This is fresh in my mind from taking a course that taught training techniques.
Review, overview, and simple concepts are good places to speed up. New, strange or difficult concepts are good places to slow down.
Which makes sense in general. Fluctuating stimuli are the most effective at holding people's attention.
Oh, and make eye contact with the students so you can get some idea whether your packets of information are being acked or dropped.
I took an online course in college because there were no seats left and I needed it to graduate. Eventually you'll realize what the next step after fast-forward is: skip. It saved me many hours of time, and reading the book was much more edifying anyway. Professors usually summarize, leaving out the details that help you finish the homework. Just read the book/notes and do the homework. And yes, I graduated and got a job (as a software engineer).
sometimes i would watch taped movies in fast forward - partly because of an impending return deadline, partly because they can drag.
.. but the damn players all seem to think you don't need subtitles when you're going fast forward!
with foreign movies you could still read the subtitles, so even at 3X or 7X or whatever the FF speed is, comprehension was fine.
dvd has brought subtitles to most native language movies
to me this is the biggest problem with dvd.
Quick! Patent that idea now!
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Drop the lectures and read the books. If the lecture is given at 150 words per minute(wpm) and you play it at 2x, you get 300wpm. A trained speed reader can read 1000wpm with a better comprehension than the 300wpm reader. On top of that, you can stop the book to re-read parts you one to pay more attention to. On a dvd, the pause doesn help you much, you have to rewind up to the point you want to review and listen again.
I went through computer engineering this way and I never attended a lecture. All I did was to get the syllabus at the begining, study the covered concepts in books, do the labs, go to the exams and that it. I saved so much time that I could work fulltime and go to college fulltime.
Furthermore, most of the books i read were not in my native language since computer books available are mostly written in english. But stiil, I saved lots of time.
Learn speed reading and drop television and class attendance, you'll be glad.
An excellent book that focused on a new generalist class of scientist- that was made possible by learning at high speed. Though I still like the Oz method of popping a book pill for learning... ;)
People have been doing that with audio tape for decades. There are audio players which even transpose the pitch back down to nearly normal. There's a fair body of research on time-compressed audio comprehension, and it should be applicable to video since maybe 90% of a video lecture is just a talking head with no real visual content anyway.
:-/
Unfortunately for me, my learning style would work much better with a book than with either electronic medium.
I can watch the 20th anniversary edition of TRON at 2X (admittedly with CC on) and it flows pretty well and is easy to follow. The sound still is audible at 2x, but not any speed above that.
I tried the same thing with Star Trek II - The wrath of Kahn, but that seems to be a little bit harder to understand... It might be all the dialog in that movie. I would be interesting to see which movies play well at 2X. Someone should set up a ranking system on a website....
Policy debaters at both the HS and college levels have for many years been speaking at an accelerated rate. The practice is known as spreading. One spreads in order to get as much information out as possible in an 8 or 9 minute speech(8 for HS, 9 for college). Policy debate relies on the ability of the other side to understand, take notes, and eventually rebut the arguments of the opponent and in my experience spreading has not detracted from the overall experience. A few caveats, at both the HS and college level the policy debate topic is set for an entire year so debaters develop a strong familiarity with the topic area. Second the type of active listening needed for policy debate note taking is called flowing and is definitely an acquired skill.
I've been working at a center for assistive technology for about 2 years now, and one of the things that caught me off guard was that people with visual disabilities who use screen readers speed them up, frequently from 4x to 6x the speed of normal speech. It can sound a little like insects buzzing, depending on your setup.
It was startling because they usually demonstrate the technology at about 1x to people who won't be using it regularly. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, I had just never thought about it. It was one of the things I'd always dreaded about sight-loss: how limiting it would be to have to access information at speech speed rather than reading speed.
What I really want to know is, what the hell does yukkuri-hanashite-kudasai mean?
We really need 20% more explanations...
What, you don't remember who John Moschitta is?
Our favorite media player once again cames to help:
mplayer -speed <value>
The best thing is that you can use float values such as "0.8", "1.5" and so on.
--
The world would be better if Bill Gates decided to finish his course at the university.
Besides, the whole point of a philosophy lecture is to think about what's being said, and maybe even argue about it. Speed-listening, like speed-reading, should be great for rote memorization or absorbing an overview of the subject; but for critical analysis you really need to slow down and think about what you're reading/hearing.
JFK was a highly accelerated speaker, by far the fastest of the recorded presidents- he was also a very fast speed reader, which also improves comprehension when done properly.
High school debate was an interesting forum for both speed reading and speaking, though it often passed into the domain of unintelligibility with certain speakers.
He's like a machine, been at it for hours.
Are you okay?
I know kung fu!
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Back in my regular lecture-listening years, I used to skip the lectures in their entirety for most if not all of the year, instead devoting time to things which actually enhanced my capabilities perceptively. Like hanging out with the professors, talking to them about their research, helping them get the paperwork ready and understanding how they do this whole thing. Gave me an entirely different perspective on what science is and how is it actually done, by the way.
I used to come to the exams on the first day, pilfer lecture notes from those who have already passed, study them overnight and then come in the next day. If they did not notice they see me for the first time in the term, I'd pass with flying colors.
Funny thing is, it often turned out the next year that I know the subject better than most of those who sat through the whole lecture cycle.
In Soviet Russia... RUSSIANS comment on YOU.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I've been watching my porn at 2x speed for years. Outside of some soreness, I have to say it has worked out quite well for me.
I haven't tried this approach, so I can't really criticise it, but...
I find that whenever I'm really attentive in class and am learning, that I'm thinking just a little bit ahead of the presentation. What's coming next? Where is he/she going? What about if...oh, yeah. When I'm able to participate in a lecture in this way, I am truly learning the subject. When I'm not, most often I feel lost and frequently tune-out the lecture. (For me this particularly pertains to science and math courses, but other subjects as well.) For me to really be following along like that, various things need to happen. First, the lecturer must be good enough to explain where they are headed every now and then, and take time to relate things, form connections. The pacing must be right -- uh oh, high-speed viewers! And I must be prepared and mentally willing to engage.
I would guess that watching a lecture at high speed would not allow one to mentally engage in the lecture in this way. And, for me anyway, simple passive listening is almost completely ineffective by comparison, and really is a waste of time. If that's all a student is doing anyway, then I'm sure speeding it up helps because it demands paying more attention, and wastes that much less of their time (assuming the time would otherwise be spent thinking and learning).
Of course, I live in Mississippi, so I can understand how speeding up some of our native lecturers might actually make them sound like someone from the Northeast instead of a chipmunk ;-)
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I recall reading many years ago of an experiment done with a tape player with a settable speed adjustment. The research indicated that the majority of people would set the tape speed to something faster than real time play back. I don't remember very many details at all, if this was as far back as I recall it'd have been an segment in Discover, OMNI or Scientific American.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
I feel like I should have thought of this in college. I'm great at focusing, and can learn alot from lectures - for about 20 minutes that is. Lectures tended to be 50 or 65 minutes long, though - this would have been perfect.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
People don't stop and smell the roses in their relentless pursuit of *
... this is hard-wired into our DNA. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the changes of the past 300 years have been -- when you are working against millions of years of evolution...
...you are going to start to get discontent. You are going to start to get masses of people starting to feel disconnected from their family and friends and feel oppressed by their jobs or the ruling class or the amount of email in their inbox every morning or being stuck in traffic or... or something. And it isn't like those types of oppression haven't always existed in some form or other. But they haven't FELT so urgent before because we've been GROUNDED before. But now...? Most people, it feels as though they are on a cart sliding down a very fast hill, out-of-control, with no brakes. And we keep picking up speed. Ask anyone over 80 about how they see the world today. ("Of course -they- will think that everything is moving too quickly. When -they- were growing up the world was..." And, of course, that is exactly the point.)
I'm not really sure what the end result of all this hurrying and efficiency is really for. While I have no doubt that this sort of "speed learning" might allow one to increase the "breadth" of what they know, it most certainly comes at the expense of depth.
Let's think of it another way: Did human beings live satisfying lives 25,000 years ago? Now, I'm not talking about comfortable or easy or long, I am talking about satisfying. They didn't have television or the Internet or the Borg Cube TNG DVD boxed set. No video games. No cell phones. No call waiting caller ID. And while it is true that a small fraction of people migrated from time to time, the vast majority of people lived within 50 miles of where they were born their whole life. So there wasn't a lot of traveling going on. There weren't a lot of "new and exciting" people. The pace of change was slower...
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying. Why? Because we were living the way we had lived for thousands of generations. Appreciating certain things, wanting to live a certain way
Why, why, why, why are we all moving so fast? Hurrying to get to a destination that no one has ever explained to me? Why do I have to pack it all in? Why wolf down when you can savor? Why drive when you can walk? When you are on a first date with someone you really like, do you want to hurry hurry hurry and do everything there is to do in your city right then? Or is there something to just taking a few moments outside of time to stare into each other's eyes? Why can't life be like that?
(And I am leaving out one of the most terrible costs that this faster pace of life has come at: Large pockets of selectively honed DNA disappearing forever (i.e. going extinct))
There are circumstances where a person might "need" to learn a large amount of information in a short amount of time. I don't want to take away from the article or the gee-whiz factor. It is fascinating. The brain really is capable of many amazing things. But this hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry fanaticism just makes no sense to me.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Sure, you can use fast playback to go through the different takes and find the best one, but you still have to do the same number of cuts, and the same amount of work producing titles and logos. I've done a lot of post-production editing, am I missing something?
Speak before you think
It never ceases to amaze me that Betamax (video tape format) was able to do something as convient as play the audio while playing at x2 speed. But yet all the other formats think that you don't want to hear the audio when playing x2. They could at least have an option for it.
One of the Mississippi universities, I think it was MSU in 60s wanted to improve their academic rankings amongst other universities and decided that they could appear to be a harder school if they just started flunking students. This, as you would think, didn't work out very well.
Colonel Sandurz: Much to early. Prepare to fast-forward.
Tech: Preparing to fast-forward.
Colonel Sandurz: Fast-forward.
Tech: Fast-forwarding sir.
{The screen on the radar shows Dark Helmet running into the control panel}
Dark Helmet: No no past this part. Go past this part. In fact never play this again.
Colonel Sandurz: Try here. Stop. {screen shows them}
Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Colonel Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now sir. Everything that is happening now is happening now.
Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
Colonel Sandurz: We passed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We're at now now.
Dark Helmet: Go back to then.
Colonel Sandurz: When?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: Now?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: I can't.
Dark Helmet: Why?
Colonel Sandurz: We missed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now.
Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Colonel Sandurz: Soon.
Dark Helmet: How soon?
Tech: Sir.
Dark Helmet: What?
Tech: I've located their position.
Colonel Sandurz: Where?
Tech: It's the moon of Vega.
Colonel Sandurz: Good work. Set the course and prepare for our arrival.
Dark Helmet: When?
Tech: 1900 hours sir.
Colonel Sandurz: By high noon tomorrow they will be our prisoners.
Dark Helmet: WHO??? {face mask falls}
I'm pretty sure that I've seen catalogs for years from gee-whiz electronic gadget stores like Dak selling cassette decks that offered the ability to double-speed-play and downpitch recordings, claiming that this had been proven to make studying easier. Looks like someone's reinvented the wheel.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I remember reading some years ago that the military was researching this ... can't remember whether it was for non-combat training, or for combat use. I don't know the original reference.. can anyone help me out here?
I don't know about lectures, but I've been watching baseball games at 3x speed (and skipping commercials) for a while now. I watch the dramatic situations (like most of last nights Boston/Oakland game) in full speed to fully appreciate the tension, but I find I can easily watch a whole game in like 45-60 minutes, without missing anything (except the inane banter).
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
Every freshman at my school was required to take a tour of the library. Basically, you'd go to an office, they would give you a walkman, and you would listen to a tape that would tell you where to go and what everything was for.
I discovered that I could hold down the fast forward and play button to get "chipmonk speed". I finished the tour well ahead of theose who picked up their tapes at the same time.
Of course, the office people thought there was no way I would pass the little test at the end because I obviously had not taken the whole tour. Well, they were wrong.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
At Stanford 90% of the CS classes (and a bunch of others) are broadcast live, then cached online. But they use .asf files in Windows Media Player. (Hate It)
Now that they changed the codec they were using so I could HEAR the lectures I watch on my Powerbook, I'm wondering if there's any way to speed 'em up - this sounds like a great idea!
Perhaps a rip to local, transcode, then speed up
I figure I'll need to track down a pc to do half of this - give me all your reccomendations
Fatty
One of my favorite things I ever heard on this topic was from Red on the "Red Green Show". He was doing one of his asides counseling the viewing audience at large about why everyone wants to rush through life. His punchline was that the older people like himself knew that there was a brickwall we would all run into at some point and it's just a matter of how fast you want to be going when you hit it.
I'm not surprised that this works so well for a Northerner listening to a Southerner. I'm not so sure that someone from the South would understand a Northerner played in FF. Freshman year I brought my GF from Southern VA home to NY and she found it hard to keep up with the conversation of everyone at full speed. (no she wasn't just stupid although she was blonde).
-LL
No, I'm New Here
that when I call the bank I still get: for... check... ing... in... for... ma... tion... please... press... one... for... sav... ings... in... for... ma... tion... please... press... two...
So are there any better windows based solutions other than Windows Media Player? I couldn't find anything while searching.
All the research says video-taped lectures in online courses are about the worst thing you can do pedagogically. Lectures frankly are boring and useless in an online environment since you can't ask questions etc...
I watched Caligula in fast forward with some friends at a party. Much better use of time :)
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
If we were all so satisfied back then, why was all of this built? At some point a person looked around at a world that extended less than fifty miles from where they were born and said, "Is this really it?" They weren't satisfied, and they weren't willing to sit there and accept it. They built things. They created new technologies to extend their capabilities and reach. They adapted new ways of learning so they could discover more, learn more. Sure, it wasn't all from some great altruistic desire to be better. Some sought conquest, others money, but all of it came from a deep underlying lack of satisfaction with the status quo.
I don't want to be content in the way you describe. I like having a fire to learn more, to solve problems, to push the barriers. Sure, a moment or two to savor a new love is a good thing, but so much the better if I can have that time because I was able to learn four times as much in half the time.
Haven't secretaries been using this for years? I remember seeing one device that had a pedal on the floor attached to the audio playback. The transcriptionist could control the speed of playback to match the rate at which she was typing. Not only does this work in both directions easily (try THAT with fastforward / rewind) but is more interactive because she can use her foot and thus not even stop what she's doing to control her speed.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Yeah I do that at school currently. Some of my classes offer instruction on CDROM, and an old program sped the program up (without increasing pitch or tone) so you can get the listening done in 1/2 the time. Windows Media Player (and I'm sure some linux MP's) allow you to speed up the audio/video as well.
it takes getting used to, but after a week or so, the average person doesn't have problems with it.
Try it, it's the only way to see.
I can download a 3-hour stream of talk radio and hear it in about 1:20 when I speed it up and skip commercials and one or two uninteresting parts. I have to constantly monitor the speed because some callers have a motormouth, and certain topics are too deep to be listened to quickly. The only problem is I can't find a free stream ripper for which you can set automatic start and stop times.
Is that seeing this refutation a week or two back one time was apparently enough to add a new "text parsing" routine to my brain. I didn't have any problem reading this at all this time through, and didn't have to stop and think about which way the letters were scrambled. In addition to parsing jumbled text, I can apparently now read text where the inner contents of the words have been flipped left to right without thinking about it.
Thank you, slashdot! Maybe if we keep escalating this, we'll all be able to read high-order encryption without even blinking.
Now when the new TV viewing stats come up, the average adult will be listed as watching 3.5 days of television/movies per week, while children will average 10 days per week. This in turn will lead to a new variation of the old joke, "115% of all statistics are made up."
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Play those lecture DVDs at 64X speed, inputted into a port on the back of your head.... and we're set....
Tank... load the linear algebra program...... woah, I know matrix factorization..... show me... this is a 3 hour exam program.... some rules can be bent, others can be broken.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
in alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks this is pretty much the norm... double speed or even 2.5 is normal. It takes undivided attention at first, but after a while you are able to concentrate on it while doing other things.
Some students get interested in a subject more because of the way it is taught rather than what is being taught. While the technology optimises what is being taught, it may be difficult to optimise the way.
You've read his manifesto, right?
Yes yes, i should have labeled it OT, but come on, just laugh and move on, i'm certainly not damaging the clear, high s/n environment of slashdot :P
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael (and sequels); sounds right up your alley. He explains very well how we came to be where we are today, and why that isn't necessarily good for us.
What?
Be careful now! While you're listing to 8x speed lectures, those predetors could be sneaking up on you! :)
Sure the lecturers talk a little slow, but this gives you a chance to try and think ahead of what they are about to say and challenge yourself. I usually use the lecture slow time, or when people ask questions to try to take the material and see what applications or extensions to it I can imagine. It's kind of fun and I think it helps work out my brain a bit more than just hearing the information rush past me, although I have no proof of that.
May be completely OT but...
Doesn't the "1/2 ton" part of a truck's name refer to its carrying capacity? Seeing as how even a Honda Civic weighs about 2500 lbs I can't presume they managed to build a pickup that weighs less than half as much.
Just a minor gripe but I see people refering to that as the weight of the truck all the time. Or perhaps using it to suggest an erroneous comparison as above. God, I'm anal...
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
I work with some professors at BYU who produce similar courses-on-CD. These CDs are bundled with a 4-month (one semester) license to Enounce 2xAV for exactly the reasons you mention. Our system has explicit support for allowing the student to adjust the rate of delivery.
Of course (obligatory Slashdot dissing of Microsoft), if Microsoft had enabled the speed control feature of Media Player (pretty cool feature) on all operating systems that support Media Player 9 instead of just XP and beyond, we wouldn't even have to bundle Enounce. I suppose this is one case where Microsoft is helping smaller businesses!
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
When you think about how much garbage the brain's communication centers are capable of interpreting, it's almost a wonder we got as far as written language at all.
Have you ever tried to read garbled handwriting? You know, the kind people used to have on notes, letters, sketches and whatever before they started writing everything on typewriter/PC and SMS with their phone? It's garbage interpretation training as good as any...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Especially if you've got some knowledge of the material, there are some parts you'll want to listen to on fast forward, some at more normal speeds, and some you'll want to back over a couple of times on instant replay slo-mo. Do the codecs you're using give you an easy way to adjust the speed dynamically, or is it one of those "wade through a menu and play it from the top" kinds of interfaces?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I had to watch a lot of French movies in college. I eventually found out that I could read the subtitles if I just put the VCR on fast-forward. It was kind of like watching Max Headroom blipverts, but I got the gist of the movie. I'd guess that I was watching them way faster than a speed where one could understand the audio.
Thing is, most dvd players I've seen won't show subtitles in fast forward.
And now I have trouble telling the difference between Goddard and Benny Hill.
Friend of mine from Kentucky said that the reason Southerners talk slow is that they used to all be farmers, and when you went over to visit somebody, you had to go some distance and it took a while, and you were gonna be there all day and hang out, so no point in hurrying to say everything in the first five minutes and then run out of things to say. Not like New Yorkers who want to get in a whole conversation while they're walking down the stairs to the subway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but the hand-held microcassette recorders usually had a 2X playback option. I guess it has been known about for quite a while.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
They also have voice to text stenography machines, and stenography to standard wrtiing machines.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
That combined with occasional bursts of fast forwarding means I can watch an hour program in I've held plenty of conversations with people about the programs afterwards and never seem to have missed things they mention.
I actually discovered the process by accident when a neighbour loaned me one to watch and the old video used for playback wasn't capable of long play.
This really works! I just tried it. At 4x speed, "The English Patient" actually held my interest!
OK, I'm off to try this on "Four Feathers".. I'll be back in 45min with the results...
We live in a capitalist society... some or most of the stuff that we have today that wasn't here yesterday is simply here for...
Profit.
No, not yours or mine. Ours. Or theirs. (depending on whether you feel part of the establishment or not).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
We do not have dubbing here in Finland, we have subtitles. The subtitles are not only the reason for the high literacy rate in Finland, but also enable 9x fast forward for viewing this kind of quality entertainment.
-- Imperial units must die --
Just last night I was thinking about the how and why of what makes games useful for learning(not just the video kind, but in a natural sense; predators learning hunting skills for example). I came to the conclusion that it's because games can accelerate learning by a huge factor. The act of playing demands the repetition of various tasks with great frequency, and good games both allow for a wide range of challenge, and expand to allow players to include other methods of learning(memorization, critical thinking, analysis) in the pursuit of improving their play. While the games humans play don't always directly improve their abilities, they offer a chance to stimulate the mind/body by going through the process of learning. (Though many video games seem to do a good job at causing people to zombify themselves by being too easy...)
Given that, I don't think it's huge news that anyone can watch a lecture at twice the speed and get the same amount out of it. Talking is generally a pretty slow way to communicate.
More now attitude makes lots of sense to me. If I'm lucky, I'll be dead in 30 years and the last 10 years will suck ass due to physical aliments. I want to cram as much enjoyment into my life before I go. Useless crap like work, sleep and sex have to go, so I'll have more time for books, music and computers.
Fast talk, crossfading two sentences, and not letting the consumer think, not even for a moment, are known manipulation methods used for example in tv commercials. Perhaps you are removing some important criticism processes by speed learning. If I need to keep a presentation, I try to place delays in suitable places to let the audience find things out by themselves.
-- Imperial units must die --
Our university had variable speed vcr's in the library. This was a trivial hack. I can't see why it qualifies as "news" or "stuff that matters" in any sense.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Ms. Gaines is the vice president of Prime Image, a maker of devices like the Digital Time Machine that shorten audio and video recordings by up to 12 percent with "no discernible results."
No discernible results? And people are paying for this?
Towards the Singularity.
That's the way it's done in the US system in public schools and the majority of private schools so kids get trained to learn that way by default.
That proves nothing, except that it's a tradition. Literacy rates of people who are put through the traditional system are falling. Sure, there are new social pressures, the family unit has been dismantled, etc. So could it be that the traditional ways have overstayed their welcome? Possibly. I'm not sure. But if new methods of teaching can increase the level of literacy, knowledge, and success in students, then I think we should very strongly question the "traditions".
There is a very entrenched system in place that employs large numbers of (sometimes unionized) people who have it in their best interest to continue the "traditional" way. Even if they have the students' best interests at heart, changes in the system are a potential threat to their employment. These people may tell you that the "traditional" way is the best way, even if it's not. You think unemployment is scary for a 22-year old IT hack? Try staring at the unemployment line when you're a 45-year old social studies teacher.
It's a scary thought to think that the way we learned and our parents learned and their parents learned -might- not be the best way. I think we need to consider it though.
Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) to Dana Barrett: I was just exercising. I taped a 20-minute workout and played it back at high speed so it only took ten minutes. I got a great workout.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This reminds me of something that Camille Paglia said about how she prefers the company of newspaper reporters over the company of university professors.
:)
The newsies that she knows (or perhaps in general) typically talk very fast and excitedly. University professors on the other hand, are pretentiously thoughtful in her experience, and speak slowly in order to attain this image.
When I was in college though, my best instructors were the ones trying to impart as much information as fast as possible.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
ukkuri hanashite kudasai = "Please speak more slowly" (Japanese)
That Ghostbusters quote was so good that someone else got it in first. And I didn't check... (Yep, the parent is mine. Sorry folks..)
When my youngest brother was about 4 years old, every day he'd wake up and watch at least one of the Star Wars trilogy in the morning which one of my other brothers had gotten on VHS.
Soon, he had them each memorized, and would speak the lines along with the characters and jump around like he was in the movie.
But this took a lot of time, and being a busy four year old, he, like our OP, started watching them in play-fastforward. And he'd jump around yelling out the every line in the movie at double speed.
To entertain guests me or my brothers would feed him a couple lines from those movies and he'd take off and start performing - double speed theater.
He rarely missed a line, and even had much of the Jabba-the-Hut sounds memorized correctly.
He's a teenager now, and when I last asked him about this, he says he's forgotten and can't remember any of the lines.
But I'm pretty sure he's lying...
The department for this article, "yukkuri hanashite kudasai," is Japanese for "Please speak slowly."
Ignorance is bliss and I'm suicidal.
Sometimes the hurry is for its own sake. For myself, I'm an acknowledged information junkie. If my senses & brain are not stimulated to a minimum threshhold value, I inevitably get sleepy and go into "zombie" mode, where I am not very alert & not feeling very much emotionally.
So, unless I'm deliberately looking for ways to relax, I look at ways to stimulate myself as much as possible (listening to music while coding, etc). Heck, even my relaxation methods usually involve finding a nice natural environment, and opening up all my senses to the environment as much as possible (but trying to shut off my thinking processes).
I've got a short lifetime to enjoy everything, and I intend to enjoy everything that I possibly can to its fullest. I can go slow when I'm dead.
Ooo...you clever troll you...it's not a single worded answer.
Nikola didn't develop AC for profit. (AC is only what is allowing you to view these very words and propel us into this age.) I'm not sure how anyone could deny "electricity" (I understand the many implications of that word) was the single best innovation in history.
It's shit, really, to declare such a man only cared about the little green men in his pocket.
You know what he did? Westinghouse came to him and said something like;
Westinghouse: "Hey, you know those royalties we have to pay you? Well with all the strains of the business, and the capitalist asshole Edison sending out all this poor stigma(*) about our product, we can't keep the business afloat without not having to pay them."
Tesla: "Is that so? Well, if you can continue to bring AC to the masses all is kosher."
So Tesla tore up the contract that granted him $2.50/horsepower of electrical capacity sold.
I'm so sick of hearing I am another cog in the wheel. Believe it or not, there are people in this world that give a shit. Just because there is a majority, doesn't mean it applies to everyone and there is no escape. Greed has it's niche, but it's not an overly prevalent attribute in EVERYONE...jeezers.
* Edison would display public demonstrations of electrocuting animals (mostly pets) using AC. He also successfully had a criminal electrocuted by AC, thus the term, Westinghoused. Keep in mind after it was inevitable AC was clearly the dominant system, Edison became a convert.
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying. Why? Because we were living the way we had lived for thousands of generations.
... this is hard-wired into our DNA. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the changes of the past 300 years have been -- when you are working against millions of years of evolution...
Er, so all people everywhere lived exactly the same way for thousands of generations? Not hardly.
So were they satisfied? Got me, I don't have your time machine, so I can't go ask them. But, at a guess, I don't think any group of humans would choose to work in the fields all day long and die of starvation, exposure, or plague if offered an alternative. Would you?
Appreciating certain things, wanting to live a certain way
No, we're not "working against millions of years of evolution". We're fulfilling it. The same genetic code that gives humans the unprecidented intelligence and adapatibility to survive also hardwires the desire to do it better.
Subsistence farmers got tired of being hunter-gatherers. They figured out the advantages of living together in towns and cities, working together instead of living in mutual fear. And somewhere along the way, someone realized that pounding grain into flour all day with a rock was a stupid waste of their time, so they built a machine to do it for them. And a couple thousand years later, someone came to the same conclusion about walking all day long to get anywhere, and they did the same thing. The rest, as they say, is history.
You are going to start to get masses of people starting to feel disconnected from their family and friends and feel oppressed by their jobs or the ruling class or the amount of email in their inbox every morning or being stuck in traffic or... or something. And it isn't like those types of oppression haven't always existed in some form or other. But they haven't FELT so urgent before because we've been GROUNDED before.
Oh, nothing urgent at all, I'm sure. "Well, our daughters were raped and killed by the tribe over the hill, and our crops failed, and our life expectancy is about 40 years, and everyone we know is dying covered with weeping pustules, and none of us are allowed to read or write. But thank God we aren't forced to sit in traffic jams and contemplate the state of our inboxes."
But hey, I'm not GROUNDED like they were, so what do I know?
But now...? Most people, it feels as though they are on a cart sliding down a very fast hill, out-of-control, with no brakes.
Speak for yourself. We've never had it so good.
And we keep picking up speed. Ask anyone over 80 about how they see the world today. ("Of course -they- will think that everything is moving too quickly. When -they- were growing up the world was..." And, of course, that is exactly the point.)
No, the point is that this is normal. The way it's always been. Today's pace only seems faster and less manageable to some because they're alive now and experiencing it, rather than romanticizing the past. Stop imagining that happy time when everyone was "satisfied", before all this evil ol' civilzation and technology came along and screwed stuff up. It never existed, and, short of St Peter's Pearly Gates, it never will.
I can attest to this! One of the professors at my college naturally speaks at probably 2x normal speech or higher. Generally speaking, the eyes and ears in the room are riveted on her lecture.
Even with that and the Indian (I think) accent, she's still pretty easy to understand.
Go Suresh!
Blipverts - here we come!
Besides your complete lack of knowledge in the area of history (too much Xena, maybe?) that you demonstrate, I'd have to agree with you. That is, I agree, we put too much emphasis on moving quickly. Otherwise you're way off the wall.
The only thing is, this is nothing new. People have been driven to work quickly since the beginning of time. Always in the quest for a single thing: comfort.
Either it was for want of more food, want of a warmer home, the desire to not be beaten by their overlord (yes, most peoples have been unliberated and used for labor throughout history), or some other facet of comfort. Comfort is why all these lovely inventions such as computers abound around you - people want to make their lives more comfortable.
You must be some version of a predetermination evolutionist, if there is such a thing. So our DNA tells us what to do, now? That sounds even more rediculous than religion. No, we all have choice. You choose in the morning whether you want to get up at 5 to drive two hours into the city. If not that morning, you chose that fate months ago when you'd accepted the job. You have an option (that is, choice) when you could go golfing with the boss and chat business, spend a couple hours in traffic, or head up to the mountains for a 3-day weekend of solitude and meditation.
The world of living on the back burner isn't dead to you. I know a construction worker from Jersey that lives just about as contented and slow paced a life as you could ask for: work construction season, then take off and see the world. Spends a week upstate NY and just communes with nature. If a construction worker can do it, anyone can do it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This thread is long, probably nobody will read this any more, but let's try: What are the best linux applications to compress speechs without modifying the pitch? It'd be good to remove empty spaces and speed the voice correcting the pitch? Is there any option for this, instead of just accelerating the speed of your favorite video/audio player?
Old long boring lecture and math...boy that brought back an old memory of mine. I was taking my last calculus class at Iowa State University and had this absolutely ancient prof. I was curious and looked him up on the faculty website, and he had been at ISU since the mid-1940's (I took his class in 1997). He was the sllllooooowwwwwwwwweeeeessssstttttttttttt lecturer I have ever heard of, even when they make fun of them on TV or in the movies. When he'd work his way down to the bottom of the blackboard, he'd draw a vertical line and then start at again at the top and over to the left. Only it took soo long that people would make the "falling bomb" whistle and "boom" noises as he slowly drew the line. A friend of mine took the same class a year later and recorded a lecture one day. When we put the VCR on fast forward he was moving at normal speed.
please stop linking to the New York Times, I don't want to sign up.
This is a very timely artical. I just started taking a course online through Stanford's SCPD program. Last night I was dying with the slow pace of the lecturer, wondering if I could make it through a whole year like this.
They stream out video at 128 kbits for Windows media player. The NYT artical mentioned enounce 2x as a plugin for WMP that will let you speed things up. I tried it, but apparently SCPD's servers don't dole out the data fast enough and enounce catches up to the end of WMP's cache, pauses, refills the cache, then goes again at double time, only to hurry up and wait again.
I've fiddled with performance settings for 30 minutes to no avail and am about ready to give up.
Anyone used anything better to speed up WMP streams?
When I was studying for my MCSE I took the compiled html version of my textbook, copied and pasted it into a speech synthesis program (text aloud mp3) and played it back at 200 words per minute.
It was remarkable how easy it was to digest the knowledge, even at that speed. I think that perhaps the synthetic voices allowed a bit more clairity than an actual human voice; as the synthisized voice does not use contractions like we're and you're (fairly Commander Data-esqe).
To augment the process I would read-along in my book with the voice and discovered that by stimulating more of my sensory input (and in my theory getting more regions of my brain active) I was able to plow through my books like a troop landing craft through a river.
perhaps this method of study, using both my eyes and ears (ocipital and temporal lobe) was so succesful because humans are supposed to learn, not just via one medium, but through as many sensory inputs as possible.
I remember hearing that smell can trigger very strong memories (makes sense since food is first smelt before consumed to verify it is healthy and unlikely to kill), perhaps by using scents along with lessons, learning can be further augmented.
The fact that you have master level skills is the only relevant thing, a piece of paper that takes much time and money to aquire is pointless. And the fact that you have job experience means that you don't need a piece of paper to 'break in'.
Whenever there is a skill that becomes valuable, it seems that companies crop up to bilk the already knowlegeable out of their hard earned cash by offering 'certifications' in it. While it is true that structured teaching can be valuable - some hand holding can make learning faster, it is by far not the only way to learn. Once the data in question has been assimilated, it's in there and deserves respect no matter how it was aquired.
Eat at Joe's.
that you're following the Teletubbies plan of learning. Show the same information the same way twice in once (half-?)hour long block, albeit at a slower speed, for better comprehension of the information. Maybe this means the Teletubby babies really will become smarter than non-Teletubby babies as they get older, or at least have a better aptitude for learning. My first post to /. and I just had to reference Teletubbies, gah :/
Ok this is way too eerily reminiscent of Job/Jobe(sp?) in Lawnmower Man who eventually processed whole CDs of encylopedias in seconds.
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying.
By what means, exactly, do you know the deep feelings of those who lived 25,000 years ago? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying no one alive today has any idea.
People tend to think that the generations before them were wiser, happier, nobler, etc. It's just how we're wired.
I have a week before test to learn the calculus class that i was skiping or sleeping on the whole year, so mabe if i forward the books fast anough...
Subsistence farmers got tired of being hunter-gatherers
I'd like to point out that agriciulture is about 10,000 years old, at most. So, again, on the time scale that we are talking about, human beings have spent less than 1% of their history even farming. Take the long view -- the view that shaped our genes -- and again, you'll start to see a disconnect in the way we are living.
No, the point is that this is normal. The way it's always been.
See above. People lived the same way for 99% of our history. This is most certainly not the way it has "always been".
But, at a guess, I don't think any group of humans would choose to work in the fields all day long and die of starvation, exposure, or plague if offered an alternative. Would you?
Finally, something we agree on. I couldn't agree more. If a way of living led to any animal constantly starving or being "exposed" or prone to plague, something isn't working. If you saw a population of ducks or lions or fish experiencing this, you would say that they were unhealthy. Same thing for humans. But again, I'd ask you if this was really the way it "always was" for people. Consider how many hours a day were spent gathering the 1000-1200 calories a day that are needed to sustain a gatherer's diet. The number that is thrown around a lot is roughly two. That is two hours of work a day. How many are you working?
I used the word "sustainable" above. I'm certainly not suggesting we can all forage for food for a living. Nor do I think the planet can sustain 6 billion humans foraging for food. But I am giving some food for thought...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
this can usually be stretched out to 10-15 minutes, with care....(heh)
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Ah! The 5 minute confusion period where evryone, inlusing the lecturer[,] tries to recall where they got to last timee.... ;*>
I see you were particularly successful with this tactic during your English classes.
There are circumstances where a person might "need" to learn a large amount of information in a short amount of time.
I'm glad you said this. Actually having the ability to learn something faster might help to slow down if used properly. Let's say there is some amount of information that I need to acquire, either for my work or personal satisfaction, or whatever. If I can spend 2 hours instead of 6 absorbing it, I will have 4 hours spending on stuff I wouldn't normally have time to. Including doing the "slow" stuff.
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
Ak! Thrrrrrrppp! Pass the zzzzzzzzzzz...
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.