WombatNation

I’ll be at SpeechTEK West in San Francisco next week. If anyone reading this will be there, email me or post a comment if you want to meet up. I’ll be in Voxify’s booth on Wednesday. Stop by if you want to hear first hand about the great platform and speech application templates we’ve built, as well as all the cool speech apps we’ve set up for clients. If you’re interested in joining us, bring your resumé, because we’re definitely hiring.

IBM made a couple announcements Tuesday regarding progress on their “superhuman speech recognition initiative”. Their goal is to get performance comparable to human speech recognition in the next five years. Presumably, they have also selected a starting point for the clock to start ticking, as the tired cliche about high quality speech recognition is that it is always five years away.

The main product announcement was Embedded ViaVoice 4.4. The primary example given for thi product was for telematics, where a driver could cause the radio to be tuned to a different frequency by a flexible request. Many telematics applications use a command & control strategy, where the person has utter commands in a fairly rigorous format. VoiceBox is using the new product with Scion automobiles for controlling an XM satellite radio. The advance here is that someone in the car could control the radio with commands that are much closer to what would be considered natiral language.

IBM also announced some products for performing real-time translation between different languages, such as from English to Mandarin Chinese. They also announced a product that monitors Arabic language television stations and provides an English translation that is delayed by a few minutes. With a four minute delay, the accuracy is only about 65%. That seems barely useful to me, but they claim they can get the accuracy up to 80% if the user can tolerate a longer delay. No comment on whether 65% is a higher standard of accuracy for information than is demanded by the current US Administration, but I think it is. Okay, that was a comment.

St. Michael’s church along the Biloxi beach also suffered a violent blow from Hurricane Katrina. While the upper parts of the church, including much of the stained glass windows that go all the way around the building, mostly survived, nearly everything from about eight feet down was washed away.

This bell was near the front of the church.

One of the many tragic outcomes of Hurricane Katrina has been the destruction of the historical treasures of Biloxi. Fortunately, many of these artifacts had been photographed because they were publicly accessible in the Gulf Coast Maritime and Seafood Museum. Of course, being located at the Museum put the artifacts directly in the path of the hurricane, but it’s likely that if they weren’t in the museum, they would have been in nearby buildings or houses that were also destroyed. Hopefully, enough high resolution photos were taken of the exhibits that some can be faithfully recreated, or at least made available via high quality prints.

The above photo makes it clear just how powerful the destructive force of a storm sturge can be. Several squares of concrete full of rebar were ripped up into a big ball as if they had been sheets of paper and thin copper wire.

This metal light pole next to the museum was completely bent over almost from the base. Although it’s possible the wind could have done this, I think it is quite likely the storm sturge knocked it over. Imagine what it would have been like to have tried to ride out a storm of this power after beig washed out of a building. Unfortunately, this was a reality for quite a few people, and many of them did not survive.

My favorite sandwich, and possibly my favorite meal of any kind, is a shrimp po-boy. A proper shrimp po-boy should be made with French bread dressed with shredded lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise (i.e., “dressed”) and overflowing with medium-sized, deep-fried shrimp. The bread should be a long hoagie style roll. Either a chewy roll or a soft French roll that has been pressed works for me, though my absolute favorite is bread from Desporte’s. The batter on the shrimp should have a healthy dose of black pepper to give it a nice kick.

One of my favorite spot’s in Biloxi had been Captain Morgan’s in D’Iberville, but it was wiped out by Katrina. Frotunately, Fayard’s has a meat and sandwich market in the BP service station near my Mom’s house. I had one of their shrimp po-boys when I was in Biloxi in early December, and it was absolutely fantastic. I know I should have taken a picture of it to upload, but that would have meant it would have dropped below the ideal temperature for eating. Sorry about that. Maybe next time.

My brother sent me a link a few weeks ago to yet another cool Google Map mash-up. This one allows you to measure the distance between two points on a map via connected line segments. This is particularly useful to me in estimating the length of a bike ride on a route I haven’t yet ridden, since the routes I take tend to involve lots of curvy roads and several turns at intersections. Once I ride a route, I can get the distance from the computer on my bike, but sometimes it’s nice to know in advance what to expect.

1. Zoom in until you can easily see your starting point.
2. Click the Start Recording button on the top left of the window.
3. Double click on your starting point. You should see a little red flag.
4. Double click at the desired end of the first line segment. A second red flag will appear at the new end point.
5. Double click at the desired end of the second line segment. The second red flag will move to the new endpoint.

As you lay out your path, you can monitor the total length of the line segment as well as the length of the last segment/leg in the top left of the window. If you accidentally double click in the wrong place, click on the “Undo last point” button to go back.

An even cooler feature if you are a bicyclist in a hilly area in the US is that an elevation graph will appear at the bottom of the map if you click on the small or large links to the right of the Elevation: label on the left side of the window. My standard ride starts with a 350 feet climb in the first 3/4 of a mile. At 2 miles, I’ve climbed over 800 feet. No wonder my heart rate reaches the high end of my target range so quickly.