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User: The+Devil's+Avocado

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  1. Re:Not THAT accurate.. :) on Text to Speech Software Copies Any Human Voice · · Score: 2

    Yup, this is a problem linguists have been working on for years. The patterns of language are so complex that, as far as articfical speech production goes, we've still got a very long way to go. There have been numerous papers looking at how a phoneme changes given it's context, and looking at how morphemes and words change is that much more complex. Did you know that when people speak, no word is reproduced exactly as it was a previous time? This is one of the many problems facing such technology- it sounds strange if a word is pronounced exactly the same every time, since that's not how it is in human speech. Another problems is if the phoneme follows a sound which it didn't originally follow, or is placed in a sentence with different stress patterns than the one in which it was orignally spoken. This is a very tricky thing which is being attempted.

  2. Re:Why do we need PVRs to avoid ads? on Personal Video Recorders vs Ads · · Score: 1

    And for those of us who aren't as good at our figuring out how long the break will be, there's always the mute button. With a good book to supplement it.

  3. Re:Not so new, really on A Pill To Stop Female Menstruation · · Score: 2

    A VERY important thing to note, though, is that taking birth control pills all the time to control menstruation greatly increases the likelihood of pregnancy. Also, taking full dose all the time is not at all a good idea for most women- women have periods to flush out the uterine lining. You are simply wrong- girls very much should be menstruating every month. Additionally, it's a good indication to know if you're pregnant. If one is always taking full-strength pills, then one may become pregnant without knowing it because of not noticing skipped periods. This can cause extremely serious damage to the fetus. As always with something like this, CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR before trying anything. Seriously screwing up your reproductive system is not something most people want to do.

  4. What _kind_ of video game? on Are Games Turning Kids Into Jocks? · · Score: 2

    There's definitiely a lot uproar in America about how video games affect kids, and, as the article pointed out, "This rational approach to kids and gaming... stands in jarring contrast to the post-Columbine hysteria still prevalent in America, which holds that gaming commonly leads to addictive, anti-social behavior, even sometimes to violence." But, instead of just saying that video games might actually be beneficial, it would have been helpful to see which kinds of video games were correlated with which effects. It would be worthwhile to analyze the results by the type of video game the kids played, and to see if there was a difference between social behavior in kids who played, for example, violent games vs. racing games vs. puzzle games. This would give a great deal of insight into what these findings can be taken to mean.

  5. Re:interesting idea on Scientists Gearing Up to Publish Unrestricted Journals · · Score: 1

    The other problem, aside from the obscurity of many papers which would make them not of interest to the general public, is the sheer number of papers. Even if this were limited to one field (say psychology, since it's the one I'm in and therefore know most about), you've got, arguably, four or five subfields and then a huge amount of variation within each field. While I think your idea is wonderful, unfortunately the practical questions would render it impossible.