{"id":153,"date":"2005-11-21T13:33:57","date_gmt":"2005-11-21T17:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/11\/21\/thinking-with-my-lungs-mnemonics-take"},"modified":"2005-11-21T13:33:57","modified_gmt":"2005-11-21T17:33:57","slug":"thinking-with-my-lungs-mnemonics-takes-a-deep-breath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/11\/21\/thinking-with-my-lungs-mnemonics-takes-a-deep-breath\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking with my lungs: mnemonics takes a deep breath"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I subscribe to MIT’s Technology Review<\/a> and have enjoyed many articles and reviews thus far. But today’s issue brought a couple of howlers in two utterly unrelated articles, which, when read together, fit perfectly. First, Finding Podcasts Faster<\/a> is a review of three new products that help users find specific audio material online. The reviewer points to a couple of flaws, however, whereby the search engines transcribe the spoken material in whacky ways:<\/p>\n

To be sure, none of these sites has mastered audio recognition, a notoriously tricky beast. Computers still cannot consistently understand all the innumerable accents, mispronunciations and other nonstandard diction that colors human speech.
\n
\n(…)
\n
\nBlinkx made a geopolitical gaffe by transcribing the following snippet from a Fox News broadcast about a political murder in Lebanon:<\/p>\n

\n“… pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud, citing a cell phone call Lahoud received minutes before the murder.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

as:<\/p>\n

\n“… pro-Syrian President Emile of food citing a cell phone colic who received minutes before the murder.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/i> [More…<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By itself that was already pretty funny (at least if you’re easily amused), but taken with the other article in today’s Technology Review<\/a>, it’s a gem. The second article is called Exercising the Brain; Innovative training software could turn back the clock on aging brains<\/a>, which reviews a company that has been designing brain exercise software. (Yeah, “ugh!” — that’s what I thought, too!) The reviewer also must have been swallowing hard, because, describing the program’s shortcomings in how it focusses on “tricks,” he wrote:<\/p>\n

Today, a typical training program focuses on memory tricks, such as pneumonics.<\/i> [More…<\/a>] <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ahhhh-hee-hee-heee! That made my day!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I subscribe to MIT’s Technology Review and have enjoyed many articles and reviews thus far. But today’s issue brought a couple of howlers in two utterly unrelated articles, which, when read together, fit perfectly. First, Finding Podcasts Faster is a review of three new products that help users find specific audio material online. The reviewer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}