I'm not going to talk about snow...

...hoping it will just go away.



Today, I was reading an article in the January/February 2010 issue of Speech Technology, titled ‘Text-To-Speech’ by Caroline Henton.

The article was about a test used for evaluating the latest text-to-speech (known as TTS) products.

I’m interested in the technology for several reasons; one being my friend Tori_Z uses it to “read” blogs and other web pages. Another reason is my younger brother’s PhD (in Computer Science) thesis was about using computers to parse human language – or machine language recognition – his work dealt with making a computer understand someone, anyone, that spoke to it with an emphasis on the ums, likes, you knows, ahs, and errs and backtracking that people do when they speak naturally.

As I read the article I was struck by how difficult the test was – it consisted of 10 utterances to test TTS performance in pronunciation accuracy, text normalization, pausing, and other aspects of prosody.

Here are the ten utterances – how well can you read and pronounce these phrases? And Tori? I hope your blog reading program doesn’t choke to badly here!

1) McCain called Obama a liberal, and then he insulted him.
2) Jenny gave Peter instructions to follow.
3) I want doors I can shut!
4) Was the red book read or do we have to read it?
5) Bring me a blue towel, and a red one.
6) Cumin, fenugreek, bouillabaisse, rouille, riesling.
7) 124th Avenue, 120 4th Avenue, 100 24th Avenue.
8) Suisun City, Poughkeepsie, Coeur d’Alene, Streatham, Guildford.
9) Barrasso, Boustany, Faleomavaega, Grijalva, Kratovil, Radanovich, Sebelius.
10) Ralph Vaughn Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Nicolas Sarkozy, Nicholas Nickleby, Maria Callas, Black Maria.

I found numbers 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 to be near tongue twisters. Apparently, number 9 is a partial list of current members of Congress. Four vendors submitted their products for evaluation and they actually preformed rather well. I’m amazed by how fast the technology is improving.

The article closed with:

“For future progress in speech synthesis, more attention to general purpose TTS (and less to, say, in-vehicle navigation) and the semantic disambiguation of homographs (read/read; Maria/Maria) would be universally beneficial.”

Uh huh, I umm... yeah... like, I agree with that, for sure.

:)

Expecting Armageddon

Last night I went to the grocery store to get some soap - if you care to know, it was some of that blue-colored Coast deodorant soap - since I swore off Ivory soap many years ago - and I encountered a frenzied mob buying milk and bread, pushing and shoving and long lines at the cash registers.

Not wanting to wait in line for hours - heck, I can bearly wait for minutes - I left the soap where I found it and went home.


From WeatherUnderground.com:

Winter Storm Warning in effect from 6 PM this evening to 7 PM EST Saturday.

Friday

Cloudy. Snow likely with a chance of rain this afternoon. Little or no snow accumulation. Highs in the mid 30s. Light and variable winds becoming west around 5 mph this afternoon. Chance of precipitation 70 percent.

Tonight

Snow. Snow accumulation of 3 to 5 inches. Brisk with lows in the lower 20s. Northeast winds 15 to 20 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.

Saturday

Snow. Total snow accumulation of 8 to 12 inches. Brisk with highs in the upper 20s. North winds 15 to 20 mph with gusts up to 30 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.

Saturday Night

Partly cloudy with a chance of snow showers in the evening, then mostly clear after midnight. Lows around 16. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 40 percent.

And from Weather.com:

Heavy 2-to-locally-4-inch rain stretching from northern Florida into Tidewater Virginia will result in spotty flooding.

But the main event with this storm will be heavy snow in the Mid-Atlantic States. Snow will begin in the Washington area this afternoon and spread northward towards Philadelphia by evening.

Heavy snow will continue into Saturday before winding down by evening. Travel may grind to a halt for a time, especially overnight and Saturday.

By the time the storm ends, many areas in northern Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and southern Pennsylvania will have over a foot of snow. Some places may end up nearly two feet of snow from this storm.

That ought to make a certain snow bunny in Virginia happy, but if you hear whimpering (or smell someone really ripe and in need of a shower), it's coming from me near Philadelphia.

The Spirit of Transportation

Last Friday, my Mom mentioned to me that my dad was restless and wanted to take a train ride - I think he finds the clickety-clack of the train over the rails somehow both, hypnotizing and comforting - Mom also seemed to be a little desirous of some peace and quiet. I think things have gotten back to where they were before my Dad's recent heart attack.

And of course, I'm always up for a train ride to I visited Amtrak's website and mapped out a "quick" trip from Philadelphia to Harrisburg and back.


The train left Philadelphia's 30th Street Station around 1 PM and got back around 5 PM, speeding over roughly 200 miles round trip. My dad and I really enjoyed the train ride - It sped through Lancaster County where the view consists largely of Amish farms, complete with laundry hanging in the snow flurries.

While waiting for my dad to appear at the train station, I wandered about and this caught my eye.


Terra-cotta plaque “Spirit of Transportation” by Karl Bitter
When I got a chance, I looked up some details.

Karl Theodore Francis Bitter (December 6, 1867 in Vienna – April 9, 1915) was an Austrian-born United States sculptor best known for his architectural sculpture, memorials and residential work.

Although Bitter arose out of the Classical/Naturalist styles he was increasingly turning towards a more modern approach to sculpture. Much of the work he did in Buffalo and St. Louis was allegorical in nature.

Where this change of art-form would have taken him will never be known, because he was killed in a tragic accident in 1915 when, while leaving the opera in NYC, a car jumped the curb and struck him down.

Created in 1895, this plaque was originally installed at the Pennsylvania Railroad's Philadelphia Broad Street Station and was moved to the waiting area of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in January 1933.

It depicts the evolution of transportation as a triumphal procession. “Transportation” herself is riding in a canopied chariot in the middle.


I was mildly amused by the little boy (who appears to have a very old man's head) at the far right holding up a dirigible, that is a "lighter-than-air aircraft", which is to represent the "future" of transportation coming after the steam-powered riverboat and steam locomotive train.

Whiter than White!

A good friend of mine, Deanna (I call her Punkn), has been writing a weekly post called "Will I Ever Learn Wednesday" and this week does not disappoint.

For some reason today's post resurfaced in my mind something that happened a long time ago, back in the dark days before Blogger and the possibly even the Al Gore-created Internet.

I was working for a pharmaceutical company called Smithkline And French, that went through a myriad of mergers first with Beckman, and then with Beecham and then GlaxoWellcome. The company is now known as GlaxoSmithKline.

I worked with a bunch of people that did clinical data management - and worked on a state of the art, "mainframe" computer with dumb terminals - Yes, Bucky, I'm that old. They did have e-mail back then - however it only went to people within the company.

Once a week, on Friday, I would send my data-minded, statistically-bent colleagues a little "interdepartmental" blurb that would today, be recognized as a blog entry. I covered any subject that left me thinking "why is that?" or "isn't that odd?" I called it "Friday's Ponderables".

And so it was on one Friday morning, I rushed to work and frantically typed a long-winded, agonized lament about Ivory Soap.


I can remember looking at a fresh bar of Ivory Soap while standing in the shower earlier that morning thinking, "Hmmm, 99 and 44/100 pure? What IS the other stuff? The impure stuff???!? Do I really want to be slathering it all over my body?"

So I wrote in that e-mail that went to about 75 people, all of which were brilliant, many were Ph.D's in biology, biostatistics or computer science, asking, "What, exactly IS the other 66/100th in Ivory Soap?!?"

Imagine my mortification, when a short while after sending that e-mail, which speculated nearly endlessly about just what the "impure stuff" was, I got a reply from my boss with the subject of "Iggy likes things Whiter than White!" that he had send to everyone that got the original e-mail.

He went on to say, "Not only does Iggy overachieve while working on the stickiest of your data-related problems, he likes things whiter than white! Brighter than bright! Newer than new! He, perhaps overreached things with his latest 'Friday's Ponderables" when he was looking for something a bit extra! Being 99 and 44/100th pure means that there is 56/100th (and not 66/100th) of something else in their soap. But we will forgive him, because his heart's in the right place and he is 99 and 44/100th pure (simpleton) himself."

I think about that time, I started to think, perhaps, maybe, it was time to find a new job somewhere else...