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NPR Labs is Working on Emergency Alerts for the Deaf (Video)
When we think about NPR (National Public Radio) most of us think of A Prairie Home Companion or another favorite radio show. But NPR also has a research component, NPR Labs, that they say "is the nation's only not-for-profit broadcast technology research and development center." The video (below) is an interview with NPR person Maryfran Tyler about their pilot program designed "to demonstrate the delivery of emergency alerts to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing in the Gulf Coast states through local public radio stations and the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS®)." NPR also says, "This is the first effort to deliver real-time accessibility-targeted emergency messages, such as weather alerts, via radio broadcast texts."
Does it look like this?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I can understand how you might not like Garrison Keillor, he has a very Midwestern sensibility that doesn't try to appeal to everybody. It's harder for me to understand how you can hate Wait Wait Don't Tell Me though. That show is a gem.
I read the internet for the articles.
Let me get my translator for the hearing impaired, Garret Morris:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=butZyxI-PRs
Sweet! Now the Republicans have another thing about NPR at they can point and derp on about how much precious, taxpayer-funded taxpayer money from job creators is being "wasted"! Sounds like another week worth of material for the Daily Show and another eight or so years of talking points for slack-jawed yokels to parrot!
As the wikipedia link in the summary points out, Prairie Home Companion is not an NPR production. While it is mostly broadcast on NPR stations (at least, in the US) it is not actually done by NPR.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Wait Wait Don't Tell me is absolutely in the same terrible category as Prairie Home Companion. But This American Life, Radiolab, CarTalk, Planet Money, Marketplace, SciFri, The Moth, Backstory, etc... are excellent. They've got a ton of excellent stuff on NPR.
But this generation wouldn't get it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
PHC always makes me thing of this quote:
"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons." Jim - Blazing Saddles
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Speaking of which, I went to a concert by a Grammy award winning concert pianist playing works Beethoven, Schubert, Griffes and Chopin. The average age was, no exaggeration, well north of 70. I think I was the only person there under 60, except for one ten year-old boy there with his grandma.
This suggests an explanation for why us old folks think Prairie Home Companion is a hoot, but *you* don't get it. We're smarter than you.
Don't feel bad, though; think of growing sophistication as something you can look forward to.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is this thing called television. The deaf can readily get emergency information from it today.
Works only when your TV set is on.
Weather radios have a stand-by mode and battery back-up power.
First off, "A Prairie Home Companion" isn't anyones favorite show... it's a leftist talk show with skits featuring horrible acting, which I wouldn't mind as I do like SNL but I give SNL a pass because it's funny, where as, Prairie Home Companion is about as un-funny as anything I've ever heard. Sadly, most of the shows surrounding it on Sundays are awesome and some of my favorite radio... so I have to spend part of the day enjoying the radio, then screech in horror as I race to turn it off as soon as I hear Garrison Keillors voice, then wait for the show to go off before I switch back.
Secondly, Deaf people don't listen to the radio you morons. I've had several deaf friends over the years and none of them owned a radio that I knew of. They watch TV with subtitles and TV solved the whole "Deaf people alerts" problem long ago by putting the alerts in TEXT on the TV. I believe they even have a little flashy light thing that you can hook up via SAP to alert them should they be in another room.
You guys are slipping.
Seriously, the work on broadcasting done by some of the national broadcasters has been amazing. If you are ever bored, go dig through the R&D archives of the Radiophonic workshop of the BBC. Fascinating stuff. In particular, the British Sound with lots of PRAT.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Car Talk? Are you f***ing kidding me?! Two assholes with abrasive Boston accents sit there laughing like hyenas at everything the other one says? How anyone listens to that garbage I do not know. Every time it's about to come on I have to dive for the radio and switch it off because I can't even stand the sound of "Suppoht foh cah tawk ..." intro, to say nothing of the fingernails-on-a-blackboard country music that follows.
Click: "You know what?"
Clack: "What?"
Click: "I got up early this mohning! Hwahwahwaaaa!"
Clack: "Hwahwahwa! Really?!"
Click: "Yeah! Hwa hwa hwa!!!"
Click and Clack in unison: "Hwa hwa hwa!"
Makes me want to punt the radio into next week.
RadioLab's okay, but the annoying editing is just...uh oh, here it comes ... annoying, like when you're tuning into what someone's saying and his voice starts fading out yadda yadda yadda ... narrator cuts in across the front of him to comment on who he is or what he's talking about. It'd be much easier to listen to without the gimmicky editing.
This American Life is okay, but I find Ira Glass' creaky voice a little hard to listen to sometimes. Sounds like he's constantly nervous.
As for the local announcers here on KQED, some are better than others. There's one guy who shall remain nameless who I have yet to hear complete a sentence without stumbling over himself, and there's a female announcer who's not much better. People like that wouldn't last long on the BBC. Maybe they're dyslexic or something and have a hard time reading what's in front of them, and I have nothing but sympathy, but they shouldn't be on the air.
But in general I find the quality of NPR's production values a lot higher than PBS. I guess it's a lot easier to do a good job on radio than on TV, so you don't need the BBC's massive budget to nail it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Like something small, personal, visual, that can provide vibrations and video that is always on....Like a Smartphone.
Many people like Car Talk, about 1.4% of the US listen to them.
Would it kill you not to be an ass? I mean, it's fine you don't like them, but man you sound like an asshole. Frankly, the Internet has enough of those already.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't know anyone who even has one of these emergency radios. Being HOH myself, I'd never get one, rarely ever even try to listen to standard FM/AM radio broadcasts, and would never try to listen to an emergency broadcast. Be prepared for weather. Know what is expected before the normal comm channels go down. If something is unexpected, most people aren't going to find out via emergency radios, but by word of mouth.
I'll see your SNL and raise you a NTNOCN.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Just as a one-off, you might have subtitled the video.
Just sayin'.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yep, what was wrong with the crawling message at the bottom of the screen telling the deaf that if this had been a real emergency, they would have been instructed to tune their AM radio to 640 or 1240KHz for the details?
Oh wait, I just read the freaking article, and that's exactly what they are using.
The only question I have is "Why is the industry just now getting around to this? With respect to broadcast-FM non-satellite radio, wasn't this technology available in 1997 when the Emergency Alert System replaced the Emergency Broadcast System?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My grandmother had a Weather radio that when it went off it would flash a red strobe so that she could see that there was an alert. she then could call the operator with her TTD and ask them what the alert was. Newer ones should be able to decode the data stream burst that has the same voice alert as text and display it on a scrolling screen.
Everything is already in place for it, The problem is no manufacturers care at all about the Deaf so they dont make an EAS radio for them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I enjoy Beethoven and Chopin (not Schubert and Griffes), but I cringe when I listen to Prairie Home Companion. Prairie Home Companion relies heavily upon a broad nostalgia in its storytelling. Younger generations won't have the same appreciation for it.
Speaking of which, I went to a concert by a Grammy award winning concert pianist... We're smarter than you.
I also has been at concerts by Grammy Award-winning artists so I must be teh smarterer, too.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
that NPR has labs?
Prairie Home Companion comes from American Public Media, not NPR.
from the law offices of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe.
It's just that I don't understand how anyone under 70 can listen to PHC and not want to drive into oncoming traffic.
It sounds like you aren't getting enough Catchup. Catchup contains natural mellowing agents that keep you from making irrational driving decisions and enjoy the small things in life.
> because often assholes will have something interesting to offer to a conversation
Yes, his complaints about the voices of the various hosts was fascinating and illuminating. Really opened my eyes to the situation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
My first wife was a Minnesota farmgirl who said, "Prairie Home Companion? If I wanted to hear people like that I would have stayed on the farm instead of leaving."
If I want to listen to left-wing media, I'll turn to KPFA (here in the San Francisco area, or other Pacifica stations elsewhere, like WBAI in NYC or KPFK in LA), for a mixture of news, culture, interesting music, etc.
NPR isn't left-wing at all. It's Establishment Media, putting out the government's news as well as cultural programming. Think about any time they've talked about the war - how long was it before you heard anybody on public radio use the term "torture", except for Terry Gross interviewing book authors who use the word? For me it was about 10 years of hearing them say "Enhanced interrogation" or "Harsh interrogation techniques", because that was the language the government wants used. For that matter, how much analysis was there about whether the war was a good idea, as opposed to government-friendly discussions about whether it's going well or not.
Yes, most of the journalists on public radio are probably Democrats, but even so, it's still typically one pro-government talking head vs. another slightly different pro-government talking head.
Now, there were politicians who really hated NPR, and they tended to be Republicans, but it was as much because of NPR's elitist positions on the arts as anything else; Jesse Helms was more a "black velvet paintings of Elvis" kind of guy than a "controversial cutting-edge art" NPR fan.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Oh, Right-WIng Media will happily spend 20 minutes of in-depth coverage on the Left's War On Christmas, or how clean Clean Coal is.
I did once fill out a survey on "where do you get your news" - I checked the "Conservative talk radio" box, and filled in the "Station" box with KQED, which is my local public radio station. It's Establishment Media, which is conservative, as opposed to crazy right-wing media.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wait Wait Don't Tell me is absolutely in the same terrible category as Prairie Home Companion. But This American Life, Radiolab, CarTalk, Planet Money, Marketplace, SciFri, The Moth, Backstory, etc... are excellent. They've got a ton of excellent stuff on NPR.
Please stop, I'm bored.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I'm under 60, and I've been listening to PHC for almost 30 years. And yeah, it's not for everybody, and it takes some attention span and some familiarity with the culture that it's coming from. I'm originally an Easterner, and my family was from the Midwest rather than the North Central area, and none of them were still farmers by the time I was around.
The church I went to in Berkeley in the 70s was about half grad students and about half old-time Swedish immigrant families; Pastor Anderson was from Minnesota, and his accent was about like a typical Lake Wobegone resident, and the potluck dinners would have lots of baked goods and casseroles and the occasional lutefisk. They weren't Lutherans, but you could recognize a lot of Keillor's memes, though of course these were the folks who, after moving South from Sweden to Minnesota, decided that that was enough of that moved somewhere warm.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Fixed that for you. I believe they call it the Woody Allen school of acting.
A couple years ago when I was working at chumby I worked with Rich Rarey at NPR Labs and wrote the code to get the braille device talking to the display device you see at 6:35 (which is an Insignia Infocast, Best Buy's OEM version of the Chumby 8) and also wrote an ActionScript extension module in C++ to allow them to write to the braille printing device and get input from it (via a custom USB protocol) within a Flash/ActionScript3 app, which is what their closed caption software was written in.
Pretty cool project -- glad to see they are still working on this and extending it.
There is a good subset of NPR listeners who seem to dislike anything that is suppose to be entertaining. They are often political junkies, who are under the impression that politics is very important, and their political opponents must be absolutely evil, or stupid. They complain when ever NPR brings up anything slightly entertaining or presented in a funny way. With perhaps Harry Shearer as the exception because his humor is about pointing out the flaws of his political opponents who he portraits as absolutely evil or stupid.
I personally don't like Harry Shearer because other then the random music which is clever, his stuff is monotonous.
Nuclear Power - Bad
Olympics - Bad
Catholics - Bad
News Corp - Bad
The Army Core of Engineers - Really Really Really BAD!
Lets poke some fun of bad grammar from some people adhoc interviews.
And if someone of influence gets in trouble lets get their apology, and make it seem insincere.
However I am under the notion that information can be educational and entertaining at the same time. Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, is fairly good at that. It can poke fun at stuff without being all negative and mean about it. Prairie Home Companion, is mostly just for entertainment, and doesn't mean to hurt people.
The Political Junkies, think in order to be intelligent you need to be negative about it. So shows that don't do that, they get angry at and claim that it is too soft for them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Being able to talk clearly and directly, without the need to shout or use the special effects button all the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.