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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,
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Makes you wonder how valuable professors are. What do they say that couldn't be just read from notes? Why not just hand out complete notes with the text, have office hours available and let the students learn that way? Or do students need to be spoon fed?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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
You don't. My wife takes online classes that do just that. She received a book, complete class notes and a CD that contains some lab videos of medical procedures - the autopsy is pretty cool.
The professor doesn't even "teach" anything. She just makes herself available for questions, mostly via email.
The point is, my wife does really well with this approach. The problem is, we are paying just as much for the class as the students that go to the campus and hear the boring lectures and make use of the facilities.
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
I use this sometimes, but it's annoying to have to concentrate on the text instead of watching what's going on, and you miss all the sound cues and nuances. An audio version like the article describes would be much better, IMHO.
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.
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.
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
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.
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