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."

Comments

Depends

[Shaklee39]

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.

No Reg Required

[11223]

Once again, Google News comes to the rescue.

I guess if you're taking courses at Miss state

[fw3]

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.

Re:If only

[KDan]

That's the way we do it in Oxford (for some subjects anyway). We have lectures and tutorials, but the lectures are non-compulsory. The tutorials are 1- or 2-on-1 and thus you actually get something out of them.

Daniel

A similar TiVo feature now (may work w/ RTV)

[Jerf]

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.)

TiVo + closed captioning

[djw]

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.

The blind...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Vary the speed

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Re:If only

[arkanes]

Check out MITs OpenCourseWare if that's your thing.

Use mplayer

[asr_br]

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.

You're not alone

[cookd]

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!

Re:Tonnage

[billstewart]

A half-ton pickup truck or van does refer to the carrying capacity, but it's your basic full-sized model. The heavy-duty ones are 3/4 ton. Gross Vehicle Weight (that's including the half-ton of cargo) is about 2800-3300kg, so the truck itself is probably 2300-2800kg. It's still a lot smaller than a 400 ton mining truck.