Posts by Matthew Poole
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The iPad has a 1GHz processor, though only 256MB RAM. So it's not that far off. And Android phones of similar spec do voice recognition for search. The hardware is not the problem. The problem is that the accuracy of voice recognition is not high enough for general use.
Recognising a couple of words (and that poorly enough, from what I've seen, even with the artificial manner of speaking one adopts when talking to a telephone's internal directory) and searching a predefined list is a far, far cry from working with general dictation. Even at 100wpm, which is quite a lot slower than most people talk, that's still a lot of looking-up and comparing.
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Kyle, the point is that the keyboard is "an effective interface with the computing systems we use". It's about as effective as we're likely to get within my lifetime, unless someone makes some seriously astounding breakthrough in neural network design and programming.
Take away the keyboard, ignore voice, and what's left?
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I think lack of keyboard on a machine is an indication about how we've failed to communicate properly with our machines. It's somewhat bizarre that we learn a special skill simply to convert our thoughts to letters on a computer when we can all talk fine
And you've never had problems understanding spoken word from another person, right? Or had difficulty being understood?
Computers simply don't work the same way our brains do. They're pretty shit at pattern recognition, which is what understanding speech is all about, and even highly-specialised software such as Dragon is imperfect. It's also limited to a handful of Latin-alphabet languages: English, French, German and Italian. So if you're from South America, or most of Africa, or Asia, you're not going to have much luck talking to your computer. An iPad also doesn't have the guts to run dictation software at any level of performance (Dragon for Windows requires a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, as a bare minimum, and I doubt the Mac version is much different). So no keyboard, no built-in USB ports and no hope in hell of running dictation software.The failing is that we don't understand the human brain well enough to create computers that can mimic its capabilities in anything like a portable form, plus the physical limitations in how we do try that imitation. Hell, the state-of-the-art is the size of a basketball court and about equal to half of 10% of a mouse's cognitive processing capability. Keep that in mind when you say that we've failed in how we communicate with computers.
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Sacha, don't forget that we're overtaxed and that's affecting productivity, as well as making it hard to retain talent. Never mind that we've got the second-lowest tax burden in the OECD, and despite B'linglish slashing them further we're right on the verge of having more people emigrate than immigrate. The net gain was 70 in June. Cutting taxes was going to stop the brain-drain and make us a destination for the global highly-mobile workforce, wannit?
Just while we're on the topic of breathless recital of right-wing articles-of-faith, of course.
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They'd had a tip there was a P lab operating. My neighbour was extremely indignant about this, on the basis that he'd only been homebaking heroin.
Well, really, are you surprised? Heroin's got nothing like the reputational problem of P. Were I inclined to make my own Class A narcotics, I'd probably also feel a little put-upon to be accused of producing a societal scourge in my kitchen.
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My favourite noisy neighbours story came from a former flatmate. After enduring many nights of music blaring until the wee small hours, the neighbourhood got together and arranged to all put their stereo speakers out the windows pointed toward the offenders' house at 8 on a Sunday morning. Volume up loud. Funnily enough, the problem stopped.
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And as a friend who resides in Aus has just inadvertently pointed out, $60k is below our top tax bracket!
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I found it telling, and tragic, that NZ defines a high-income household as "those with an income of $60,000 or more". So we've got a PM who says that $50,000 is the average wage, but an official definition of high-income household as only 20% greater than that.
That's pathetic. If $60k is high-income, we're not just a low-wage economy we're a no-wage economy! -
and possibly Treasury getting its GST predictions wrong
Que? Haven't heard about that one.
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On the sick leave thing, has anyone pointed National to section 68 of the Holidays Act 2003? More precisely the bit that allows employers to demand proof that a sick leave claim is legitimate if they have "reasonable grounds" to believe otherwise, even if it's less than three consecutive days of illness. The section even requires the employer to pay the employee's costs.
What this looks like is an attack on the use of sick leave. "If you're not dying, you'd better be at work." This is directly contrary to evidence that it's better not to have unwell people at work, in order to get them back to peak-productivity faster and reduce the risk of cross-infection.
How does this improve productivity, exactly? Appears pretty counter-productive to me.