My solution to the problem was to look for the person’s name and address in the billing information being sent to me. Obviously writing them an email is impossible. So I wrote one person a nice letter warning them about the issues of fraud and identity theft, asked them to fix their email address records with various companies, and encouraged them to be more careful with their personal information. It worked, all the stuff from one lady no longer appears in my inbox. Unfortunately *someone else* has started to do the same thing, so I’ll need to dust off that letter soon.
You don’t need plates and charts during takeoff and landing. During those periods you should already know exactly where you are and what you’re doing, and tower will provide any extra advice you need. Paper would be stowed at the same time to keep it from bouncing around the cockpit, so stowing the iPad isn’t really any different. Also since it’s a class 1 electronic device it will be turned off during those two critical periods as well. It’s already legal for IFR general aviation to use things like iPads for navigation reference, it’s just that Alaska Airlines is the first commercial airline to do so.
Navigation charts are bigger and more detailed than what could fit on a single screen, so scrolling is necessary anyway. The navigation plates (terminal procedures, approach, departure, etc.) can fit all on a screen and for the US all of them are already available as PDFs. Here’s an example iPad app that Googling produced: http://www.ipadappsdude.com/plates-chart-viewer-navigation/
> Then the interfaces to library catalogs tend to be crap too.
This is mostly because the world of university-level library management systems (a.k.a. integrated library systems) is heavily dominated by Voyager which was from Endeavor Information Systems and now is in the hands of the Ex Libris Group. There are a number of open source alternatives, but you can't seriously expect a big institution to use anything that doesn't require a huge contract for installation and support.
The "Bridge to Nowhere" to Gravina Island wasn't a bridge to nowhere, it was a bridge to the airport. Ketchikan's airport is on a different island than the city because there are very few places with flat land in Southeast Alaska; compare Sitka where the airport is on Japonski Island. Currently there is a ferry from the airport on Gravina Island to the city on Revillagigedo Island, but when the seas are heavy or there are storms then the ferry won't run. That can leave hundreds of people stranded on Gravina Island where there are no services other than the airport -- no hotels, no restaurants, no houses, no nothing. Building the bridge would have a side effect of opening up Pennock Island and Gravina Island to more development, which is important because Ketchikan has basically run out of developable land but continues to grow because of the booming tourism industry. The real reason that there was political kerfluffle about this bridge was because Hurricane Katrina had just hit and politicians saw this as a suitable scapegoat.
The "Bridge to Nowhere" across the Knik Arm from Anchorage was more of a boondoggle. There are basically no residents across the water at Point Mackenzie, and there's no demand to develop the area. But most of Alaska's major politicians own large tracts around the Point Mackenzie area because that bridge has been rumoured for the last thirty years. So those politicians would make out like bandits from development in the area, and that development is contingent on the bridge. Currently there's supposed to be a ferry in the works but it's stalled: the ferry is finished and one port is finished, but the other isn't and it's not being built.
The reason people do this is because the word 'have'and the word 'of' have exactly the same pronunciation when unstressed. They both are realized with a schwa vowel and a voiced labiodental fricative/v/. It's not an arbitrary mistake, and interestingly the merger of the two words in this environment doesn't hamper vocal communication.
Indeed, this is an interesting example of semantic overnegation. It’s tricky because it’s not syntactic overnegation. Since “inversely” and “lack of” are not syntactically negative (they don’t have a phrasal or morphological “not” about them), the poster presumably didn’t notice the triple negative. But “X is inversely proportional to the lack of Y” implies that when values of Y are low then values of X must also be low.
Probably what the poster originally considered here was the phrase “lack of accomplishments”. Then the poster may have chunked this phrase and ceased to consider its internal meaning; perhaps this phrase was pulled right out of their lexicon without thought to the semantics if they had used this phrase frequently enough or recently enough. The next step would then be forming the larger phrase from the template “X is inversely proportional to Y”based on the sense that if one has few accomplishments then one wants to shit on fun. Unfortunately since the “lack of accomplishments” was already chunked as a unitary noun phrase and the poster is no longer thinking about its internal meaning, the poster didn’t consider the semantic interaction between “inversely” and “lack of” when slotting “lack of accomplishments” into the “X is inversely proportional to Y” template. If there were instead a syntactic sign, some explicit indication of negation, then the poster would more likely have noticed this inside of the noun phrase.
I am of course guilty of trying to “look inside the head”of the poster in a sort of mystical way. But I think this is a rather reasonable model of what the poster was doing when they wrote their missive. We could probably refine the model a bit more, but this is just Slashdot where nobody particularly cares about accuracy and reliability.
> On a sidenote, typing Kindergartens feels stupid. Kindergaerten doesn't seem right in English, though. What's the proper plural here?
The “proper” plural is the English regular plural with -s. The word has been completely borrowed into English, resulting in, according to the OED, such derivations as “kindergartening” (1893), “kindergartenize”, “kindergartener” (1889), and “kindergartenism” (1872). Using the German plural would be an affectation, given that the term has been firmly anglicized since the late 19th century. It worked its way into English relatively quickly from German, given that Friedrich Froebel coined the word in 1840. OED gives the first English citation as 1852, and it seems to have been fairly thoroughly ensconced in English by the 1870s or 1880s. You are of course free to use the German plural, but English speakers unfamiliar with German will find it strange and perhaps incomprehensible.
As a real linguist, I feel I should point out that there are dialects of American English which have a “need Verb-ed” construction which is approximated by “need to be Verb-ed” elsewhere. Thus one can say “the dishes need washed” or “the dog needs walked” rather than “the dishes need to be washed“ or “the dog needs to be walked”. This construction is perfectly grammatical in such dialects, and is possibly spreading so that it will become grammatical throughout much of North America in the next few generations. There’s no semantic difference apparently, it’s a purely syntactic distinction.
It *is* however dialectal at this point, and hence should be avoided in most written contexts.
[a. F. crétin (in Encycl. 1754), ad. Swiss patois crestin, creitin - L. Christianum Christian, which in the mod. Romanic langs. (as sometimes dial. in Eng.) means 'human creature' as distinguished from the brutes; the sense being here that these beings are really human, though so deformed physically and mentally. (Cf. natural.) So, according to Hatzfeld and Darmesteter, the Cagots are called in Béarn crestiaas.]
One of a class of dwarfed and specially deformed idiots found in certain valleys of the Alps and elsewhere. Also in weakened sense (esp. in form crétin): a fool, one who behaves stupidly. Also attrib. and transf.
The rest of the entry consists of quotations, with the earliest in 1779.
You are a little confused. Please reread the Wikipedia article on Hanyu Pinyin. It normally uses diacritics - namely macron, acute, hacek ("caron"), and grave - to represent the Mandarin tones other than neutral tone. Numbers have been used by people who lack diacritics on their typewriter or input system, but using numbers is not standard in Hanyu Pinyin, instead it's a kludge.
That said, if your input form doesn't allow some guy to type in his name with tone number suffixes on a US Windows keyboard layout where he lacks access to diacritics, then you're not a very thoughtful programmer.
Also, people who make software with an input fields that accept Unicode but specify a particular font that has a tiny character repertoire suck.
Oh, and Slashdot sucks even more for only supporting ASCII and stripping everything else.
It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable, and 'formally' has an unrhotacized schwa. Since the following syllable begins with an apical consonant that also includes velar articulation, the rhotacized schwa tends to lose its rhotacization due to anticipatory reduction. With this one feature lost, the two words become homophonous. In many (all?) non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc., the two words are already homophonous.
> I once read where some researchers learned to "read" spoken words from printed sound spectragrams, > where frequency (in various shades based on density) is on one axis and time on the other.
Many if not most graduate programs in linguistics have at least one class that covers auditory and acoustic phonetics. A large part of such a class consists of learning to read the distinctive features of human speech in spectrograms, such as the spacing and movement of vowel formants, the length and regular but staccato patterns of sound and silence, the distribution of noise in fricatives and aspiration, the "voice bar" in voiced consonants, and so forth. Professional meetings of phoneticians often include some sort of entertaining contest that involves reading spectrograms of unknown speech and determining the language used, transcribing the utterance, figuring out the sex of the speaker, and other similar challenges.
Once you understand the essentials of how the human vocal apparatus works, it's not very difficult to read spectrograms of languages you know well. Gaining fluency doesn't take too much practice once you understand what to look for.
> This made me wonder whether deaf people couldn't also learn to read them at a near real-time > pace with practice.
Unfortunately, probably not. Part of what makes for fluency in reading spectrograms is the ability to model potential utterances in your head according to what makes sense from the spectrographic data. This requires that you have working knowledge of what vocal speech sounds like and how vocal speech sounds are produced, as well as some knowledge of the language being spoken. People who are deaf from an early age generally lack any sort of mental model of vocal speech, and must go through arduous training to gain even the most basic ability to process or produce vocal speech. The coordination involved in vocal speech production is astonishingly complicated, much more so than playing a piano, so it's not something one can pick up without either instinct (as infants) or extensive effort. So deaf people who never had functional hearing (and hence never experienced vocal speech) would be at an incredible disadvantage in reading spectrograms because they would lack the intuitive sense of the vocal apparatus, and so would probably have just as much trouble with spectrograms as they would with comprehending vocal speech through other means. (BTW, I use the term "vocal speech" to differentiate what most humans do from signed speech used by deaf people, which though a perfectly reasonable form of realtime human linguistic communication, doesn't involved the human vocal or auditory systems. The term "speech" just covers any sort of immediate, non-written linguistic communication, and can include signed speech depending on who you ask.)
On the other hand, it might be very useful for people who lost their hearing later in life. Since they would retain most if not all of the sense of their vocal apparatus and the sounds of vocal speech in their brains, it might not be too hard for them to adapt the perception to a different medium. I'm not a speech-language pathologist nor an audiologist, so I'm not familiar with the literature and can't say for sure, but it sounds plausible from my linguistic perspective.
One other thing I should mention is that the typical spectrogram is not actually representative of what we hear, it's representative of what our microphones and recording equipment measure. We are not exactly sure yet what transformations occur between the tympanic membrane and the auditory nerves, but we know for certain that what we hear is not the same as what we see in spectrograms. Instead, the auditory canal, small bones, and cochlea all function as filters and amplifiers in various frequency ranges, warping the incoming sounds into something rather different from what is detected by microphones. We use cochleagrams (like spectrograms but with the audio signal warped appropriately) to approximate what we think is transmitted from the cochlea to the brain, but there are several competing models and no real consensus yet because of the difficulty of experimenting with such an extremely delicate part of the human body.
If it bothers you, by all means go get your hearing checked. Health insurance in the US usually will cover this. Nearby universities with speech pathology and audiology departments can often offer audiometric exams done by students for free or a small fee.
Whether treatment is necessary or not, it's always nice to have a baseline for later comparison as you age.
Slashdot Mirror
They basically look exactly the same. CT, MRI, none of them have any resolution to show you anything interesting in that context.
My solution to the problem was to look for the person’s name and address in the billing information being sent to me. Obviously writing them an email is impossible. So I wrote one person a nice letter warning them about the issues of fraud and identity theft, asked them to fix their email address records with various companies, and encouraged them to be more careful with their personal information. It worked, all the stuff from one lady no longer appears in my inbox. Unfortunately *someone else* has started to do the same thing, so I’ll need to dust off that letter soon.
You don’t need plates and charts during takeoff and landing. During those periods you should already know exactly where you are and what you’re doing, and tower will provide any extra advice you need. Paper would be stowed at the same time to keep it from bouncing around the cockpit, so stowing the iPad isn’t really any different. Also since it’s a class 1 electronic device it will be turned off during those two critical periods as well. It’s already legal for IFR general aviation to use things like iPads for navigation reference, it’s just that Alaska Airlines is the first commercial airline to do so.
Navigation charts are bigger and more detailed than what could fit on a single screen, so scrolling is necessary anyway. The navigation plates (terminal procedures, approach, departure, etc.) can fit all on a screen and for the US all of them are already available as PDFs. Here’s an example iPad app that Googling produced: http://www.ipadappsdude.com/plates-chart-viewer-navigation/
> Then the interfaces to library catalogs tend to be crap too.
This is mostly because the world of university-level library management systems (a.k.a. integrated library systems) is heavily dominated by Voyager which was from Endeavor Information Systems and now is in the hands of the Ex Libris Group. There are a number of open source alternatives, but you can't seriously expect a big institution to use anything that doesn't require a huge contract for installation and support.
The "Bridge to Nowhere" to Gravina Island wasn't a bridge to nowhere, it was a bridge to the airport. Ketchikan's airport is on a different island than the city because there are very few places with flat land in Southeast Alaska; compare Sitka where the airport is on Japonski Island. Currently there is a ferry from the airport on Gravina Island to the city on Revillagigedo Island, but when the seas are heavy or there are storms then the ferry won't run. That can leave hundreds of people stranded on Gravina Island where there are no services other than the airport -- no hotels, no restaurants, no houses, no nothing. Building the bridge would have a side effect of opening up Pennock Island and Gravina Island to more development, which is important because Ketchikan has basically run out of developable land but continues to grow because of the booming tourism industry. The real reason that there was political kerfluffle about this bridge was because Hurricane Katrina had just hit and politicians saw this as a suitable scapegoat.
The "Bridge to Nowhere" across the Knik Arm from Anchorage was more of a boondoggle. There are basically no residents across the water at Point Mackenzie, and there's no demand to develop the area. But most of Alaska's major politicians own large tracts around the Point Mackenzie area because that bridge has been rumoured for the last thirty years. So those politicians would make out like bandits from development in the area, and that development is contingent on the bridge. Currently there's supposed to be a ferry in the works but it's stalled: the ferry is finished and one port is finished, but the other isn't and it's not being built.
And xterm is any better?
The reason people do this is because the word 'have'and the word 'of' have exactly the same pronunciation when unstressed. They both are realized with a schwa vowel and a voiced labiodental fricative /v/. It's not an arbitrary mistake, and interestingly the merger of the two words in this environment doesn't hamper vocal communication.
No, there was crappy programmer art on the Alto.
That was actually real software from SGI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
Whoosh.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Indeed, this is an interesting example of semantic overnegation. It’s tricky because it’s not syntactic overnegation. Since “inversely” and “lack of” are not syntactically negative (they don’t have a phrasal or morphological “not” about them), the poster presumably didn’t notice the triple negative. But “X is inversely proportional to the lack of Y” implies that when values of Y are low then values of X must also be low.
Probably what the poster originally considered here was the phrase “lack of accomplishments”. Then the poster may have chunked this phrase and ceased to consider its internal meaning; perhaps this phrase was pulled right out of their lexicon without thought to the semantics if they had used this phrase frequently enough or recently enough. The next step would then be forming the larger phrase from the template “X is inversely proportional to Y”based on the sense that if one has few accomplishments then one wants to shit on fun. Unfortunately since the “lack of accomplishments” was already chunked as a unitary noun phrase and the poster is no longer thinking about its internal meaning, the poster didn’t consider the semantic interaction between “inversely” and “lack of” when slotting “lack of accomplishments” into the “X is inversely proportional to Y” template. If there were instead a syntactic sign, some explicit indication of negation, then the poster would more likely have noticed this inside of the noun phrase.
I am of course guilty of trying to “look inside the head”of the poster in a sort of mystical way. But I think this is a rather reasonable model of what the poster was doing when they wrote their missive. We could probably refine the model a bit more, but this is just Slashdot where nobody particularly cares about accuracy and reliability.
> On a sidenote, typing Kindergartens feels stupid. Kindergaerten doesn't seem right in English, though. What's the proper plural here?
The “proper” plural is the English regular plural with -s. The word has been completely borrowed into English, resulting in, according to the OED, such derivations as “kindergartening” (1893), “kindergartenize”, “kindergartener” (1889), and “kindergartenism” (1872). Using the German plural would be an affectation, given that the term has been firmly anglicized since the late 19th century. It worked its way into English relatively quickly from German, given that Friedrich Froebel coined the word in 1840. OED gives the first English citation as 1852, and it seems to have been fairly thoroughly ensconced in English by the 1870s or 1880s. You are of course free to use the German plural, but English speakers unfamiliar with German will find it strange and perhaps incomprehensible.
As a real linguist, I feel I should point out that there are dialects of American English which have a “need Verb-ed” construction which is approximated by “need to be Verb-ed” elsewhere. Thus one can say “the dishes need washed” or “the dog needs walked” rather than “the dishes need to be washed“ or “the dog needs to be walked”. This construction is perfectly grammatical in such dialects, and is possibly spreading so that it will become grammatical throughout much of North America in the next few generations. There’s no semantic difference apparently, it’s a purely syntactic distinction.
It *is* however dialectal at this point, and hence should be avoided in most written contexts.
[a. F. crétin (in Encycl. 1754), ad. Swiss patois crestin, creitin - L. Christianum Christian, which in the mod. Romanic langs. (as sometimes dial. in Eng.) means 'human creature' as distinguished from the brutes; the sense being here that these beings are really human, though so deformed physically and mentally. (Cf. natural.) So, according to Hatzfeld and Darmesteter, the Cagots are called in Béarn crestiaas.]
One of a class of dwarfed and specially deformed idiots found in certain valleys of the Alps and elsewhere. Also in weakened sense (esp. in form crétin): a fool, one who behaves stupidly. Also attrib. and transf.
The rest of the entry consists of quotations, with the earliest in 1779.
You are a little confused. Please reread the Wikipedia article on Hanyu Pinyin. It normally uses diacritics - namely macron, acute, hacek ("caron"), and grave - to represent the Mandarin tones other than neutral tone. Numbers have been used by people who lack diacritics on their typewriter or input system, but using numbers is not standard in Hanyu Pinyin, instead it's a kludge.
That said, if your input form doesn't allow some guy to type in his name with tone number suffixes on a US Windows keyboard layout where he lacks access to diacritics, then you're not a very thoughtful programmer.
Also, people who make software with an input fields that accept Unicode but specify a particular font that has a tiny character repertoire suck.
Oh, and Slashdot sucks even more for only supporting ASCII and stripping everything else.
It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable, and 'formally' has an unrhotacized schwa. Since the following syllable begins with an apical consonant that also includes velar articulation, the rhotacized schwa tends to lose its rhotacization due to anticipatory reduction. With this one feature lost, the two words become homophonous. In many (all?) non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc., the two words are already homophonous.
Yes, but the pay is for MS Access DBAs.
No, those are stairs. Food is :.
> I once read where some researchers learned to "read" spoken words from printed sound spectragrams,
> where frequency (in various shades based on density) is on one axis and time on the other.
Many if not most graduate programs in linguistics have at least one class that covers auditory and acoustic phonetics. A large part of such a class consists of learning to read the distinctive features of human speech in spectrograms, such as the spacing and movement of vowel formants, the length and regular but staccato patterns of sound and silence, the distribution of noise in fricatives and aspiration, the "voice bar" in voiced consonants, and so forth. Professional meetings of phoneticians often include some sort of entertaining contest that involves reading spectrograms of unknown speech and determining the language used, transcribing the utterance, figuring out the sex of the speaker, and other similar challenges.
Once you understand the essentials of how the human vocal apparatus works, it's not very difficult to read spectrograms of languages you know well. Gaining fluency doesn't take too much practice once you understand what to look for.
> This made me wonder whether deaf people couldn't also learn to read them at a near real-time
> pace with practice.
Unfortunately, probably not. Part of what makes for fluency in reading spectrograms is the ability to model potential utterances in your head according to what makes sense from the spectrographic data. This requires that you have working knowledge of what vocal speech sounds like and how vocal speech sounds are produced, as well as some knowledge of the language being spoken. People who are deaf from an early age generally lack any sort of mental model of vocal speech, and must go through arduous training to gain even the most basic ability to process or produce vocal speech. The coordination involved in vocal speech production is astonishingly complicated, much more so than playing a piano, so it's not something one can pick up without either instinct (as infants) or extensive effort. So deaf people who never had functional hearing (and hence never experienced vocal speech) would be at an incredible disadvantage in reading spectrograms because they would lack the intuitive sense of the vocal apparatus, and so would probably have just as much trouble with spectrograms as they would with comprehending vocal speech through other means. (BTW, I use the term "vocal speech" to differentiate what most humans do from signed speech used by deaf people, which though a perfectly reasonable form of realtime human linguistic communication, doesn't involved the human vocal or auditory systems. The term "speech" just covers any sort of immediate, non-written linguistic communication, and can include signed speech depending on who you ask.)
On the other hand, it might be very useful for people who lost their hearing later in life. Since they would retain most if not all of the sense of their vocal apparatus and the sounds of vocal speech in their brains, it might not be too hard for them to adapt the perception to a different medium. I'm not a speech-language pathologist nor an audiologist, so I'm not familiar with the literature and can't say for sure, but it sounds plausible from my linguistic perspective.
One other thing I should mention is that the typical spectrogram is not actually representative of what we hear, it's representative of what our microphones and recording equipment measure. We are not exactly sure yet what transformations occur between the tympanic membrane and the auditory nerves, but we know for certain that what we hear is not the same as what we see in spectrograms. Instead, the auditory canal, small bones, and cochlea all function as filters and amplifiers in various frequency ranges, warping the incoming sounds into something rather different from what is detected by microphones. We use cochleagrams (like spectrograms but with the audio signal warped appropriately) to approximate what we think is transmitted from the cochlea to the brain, but there are several competing models and no real consensus yet because of the difficulty of experimenting with such an extremely delicate part of the human body.
> My wife tells me I'm going deaf, but I reckon i'm picking up more noise than normal.
You may a mild auditory processing disorder, if it's always been that way.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/auditory.asp
Another possibility, especially if this is increasing over time, is some kind of auditory neuropathy.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/neuropathy.asp
Or your wife could be right, and it's just a case of age-related hearing loss, also known as "presbycusis".
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/presbycusis.asp
If it bothers you, by all means go get your hearing checked. Health insurance in the US usually will cover this. Nearby universities with speech pathology and audiology departments can often offer audiometric exams done by students for free or a small fee.
Whether treatment is necessary or not, it's always nice to have a baseline for later comparison as you age.
Voice stress analysis is pseudoscientific and the devices are all hoaxes.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1390
Please do not perpetuate the scams.
Because people die, but corporations live forever.
If human beings weren't human ... wait. Nevermind.