Farm News 04-15-07
Sunday morning, after chores, 40°, light frost
Whoops
I've had a cold and didn't write anything for Farm News this week. There isn't a lot of news, really, other than a late freeze and light snow. The planet is warming up, so it snows in mid-April in Kansas. It looks like the freeze destroyed any hopes of having apricots, cherries, or peaches this year. The mulberry trees are covered with dead flower buds, so we might not have mulberries, either. The shortage of wild fruit might make life difficult for the orioles, so we bought a large jar of grape jelly to start feeding them. We've never had any luck attracting orioles before, but the experts say that orioles can't resist grape jelly.
Computer Generated Text
Claude Shannon was, in my opinion, a great man. I never met him (he died in 2001) but I wish I had. He spent a good deal of his career at Bell Labs, where he became known as the father of information theory and also did the groundwork for digital circuit design. Shannon was also well-known for riding his unicycle up and down the halls of Bell Labs while juggling items from his lunch sack.
Shannon once noticed a peculiar characteristic of written text, and mentioned it, but never pursued it. Take the text of, let us say, War and Peace, and copy each two character pair found in the text onto a slip of paper. You end up with a large bag of small slips of paper, each carrying a two character pair. Shake up the sack and then start drawing out slips of paper. Read the two character pair on the slip and write it down, placing them in the order in which they are drawn from the bag. The result will be almost sensible, and will clearly show Dostoevsky's style of writing. Computer programs which carry out this process are called travesty generators.
I have long been interested in the problem quadriplegic, dysarthric people have in generating speech. If a person is limited to pressing one switch and has no other way to communicate, carrying on a conversation is very time-consuming. A computer can present a letter, wait a bit, and, if the switch is not pressed, present another letter, until the switch is pressed and the letter selected. Then the same process is repeated for the next letter. Several quadriplegic, dysarthric, adolescent males have told me that the letter at a time process is too slow for a guy trying to make out with a girl. Also, the computer gets in the way.
When I retired I decided that I would devote some time to creating a travesty generator that, guided by a user with a single switch, could rapidly generate text. A heart attack and subsequent open heart surgery did just enough brain damage that I found I could no longer create computer programs. Recently, though, the necessary skills seem to be returning, and I hope to be able to finally pursue my retirement project. There is a problem, though. When I found I couldn't write software any more, I switched to something I could still do. That project, the Neighborhood Network, is on-going and requires quite a bit of time. How did I ever find time to hold down a job?
One of the problems I had in the past when working on travesty generators was finding suitable source text. The program has to read something before it can generate a travesty. Farm News, I have realized, would be a handy source of text. And, in fact, if I had a good travesty generator I could use it to write Farm News on weeks like this, when I had nothing else ready.
My programming skills are still a bit flaky and I would appreciate some co-developers. Anyone interested?
Whoops
I've had a cold and didn't write anything for Farm News this week. There isn't a lot of news, really, other than a late freeze and light snow. The planet is warming up, so it snows in mid-April in Kansas. It looks like the freeze destroyed any hopes of having apricots, cherries, or peaches this year. The mulberry trees are covered with dead flower buds, so we might not have mulberries, either. The shortage of wild fruit might make life difficult for the orioles, so we bought a large jar of grape jelly to start feeding them. We've never had any luck attracting orioles before, but the experts say that orioles can't resist grape jelly.
Computer Generated Text
Claude Shannon was, in my opinion, a great man. I never met him (he died in 2001) but I wish I had. He spent a good deal of his career at Bell Labs, where he became known as the father of information theory and also did the groundwork for digital circuit design. Shannon was also well-known for riding his unicycle up and down the halls of Bell Labs while juggling items from his lunch sack.
Shannon once noticed a peculiar characteristic of written text, and mentioned it, but never pursued it. Take the text of, let us say, War and Peace, and copy each two character pair found in the text onto a slip of paper. You end up with a large bag of small slips of paper, each carrying a two character pair. Shake up the sack and then start drawing out slips of paper. Read the two character pair on the slip and write it down, placing them in the order in which they are drawn from the bag. The result will be almost sensible, and will clearly show Dostoevsky's style of writing. Computer programs which carry out this process are called travesty generators.
I have long been interested in the problem quadriplegic, dysarthric people have in generating speech. If a person is limited to pressing one switch and has no other way to communicate, carrying on a conversation is very time-consuming. A computer can present a letter, wait a bit, and, if the switch is not pressed, present another letter, until the switch is pressed and the letter selected. Then the same process is repeated for the next letter. Several quadriplegic, dysarthric, adolescent males have told me that the letter at a time process is too slow for a guy trying to make out with a girl. Also, the computer gets in the way.
When I retired I decided that I would devote some time to creating a travesty generator that, guided by a user with a single switch, could rapidly generate text. A heart attack and subsequent open heart surgery did just enough brain damage that I found I could no longer create computer programs. Recently, though, the necessary skills seem to be returning, and I hope to be able to finally pursue my retirement project. There is a problem, though. When I found I couldn't write software any more, I switched to something I could still do. That project, the Neighborhood Network, is on-going and requires quite a bit of time. How did I ever find time to hold down a job?
One of the problems I had in the past when working on travesty generators was finding suitable source text. The program has to read something before it can generate a travesty. Farm News, I have realized, would be a handy source of text. And, in fact, if I had a good travesty generator I could use it to write Farm News on weeks like this, when I had nothing else ready.
My programming skills are still a bit flaky and I would appreciate some co-developers. Anyone interested?
Labels: accessibility, farm, frost
posted by The Geezer at 8:26 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home