Some stuff » recognition

good, bad, and ugly of windows 7

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:41:21 +0000

I went ahead and installed it. Windows 7 is compelling, but still, it has been overhyped.

Good:

I get the impression that most reviews became enamored with the new task bar, which, while compelling and does save a lot of time, is not entirely critical to me.
If the tablet functions of Vista were its only must-have features, then the alternate input improvements are the key selling points of Windows 7 for me. Here we have much improved Chinese handwriting recognition and speech recognition (in particular, dictation) in multiple languages. These have passed the critical threshold of being useable and indeed I can say they are better than keyboard input. That is no small feat.
Math input panel, as mentioned previously, is not quite up to par yet, but I can see a lot of potential. While it is faster than typing straight LaTeX, it is not faster than LyX. But for labeling figures, this is perhaps useful.
PowerShell, i.e. Monad, is beautiful.
The volume controller has been restored to usefulness, with audio loopback for devices now possible.
Libraries could be a very useful feature, but seems to be lacking something that helps ease their management.
Per-file versioning (from system restore) should be very helpful.

Bad:

Windows Media Player 12 is a piece of crap and a step backwards. It supposedly can stream media to another machine, but this comes at the cost of a fragmented UI, losing the “Now Playing” auto-playlist, and losing the Advanced Tag Editor.
The old Sound Recorder is still gone, as it was in Vista. Its replacement is still a piece of crap.
Kerberos integrated logon doesn’t work any more. This isn’t a strictly OS issue, I suppose.
Lack of serious support for single-touch input. You’d think there would be at least something to help with zooming and scrolling, but no… Alternatively, at least a virtual driver could be written that combined multiple input devices to simulate the effect (touch + pen, or pen + mouse).
Windows Media Center: still stagnating at the stage of focusing on over-the-air TV. The internet stream offerings are poor and unimaginative.
Not fast(er than Vista) in starting anything, I’m almost certain of that. However, it is very fast in (visually) shutting down programs, which, as an obvious UI illusion, beggars belief for only being implemented now.

Ugly:

With the exception of the task bar, most UI elements have gotten uglier.
The start menu is butt ugly. Look at the search box and the shutdown button (on the left), as compared to Vista (on the right). I don’t know what these UI designers were thinking.

Speaking of old systems, look at this circa 2000. It starts and shuts down in tens of seconds and uses 42MB of memory when the system is unloaded. 42MB!

Detecting true perfect pitch

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:58:11 +0000

This article (also this) proposes that there are two types of perfect pitch, “ability to perceptually encode” and “heightened tonal memory”. And these groups perform differently on a tonal matching test. I take the first to mean the ability to match any tone whatsoever precisely, while the second one to mean the ability to have long-term memory of certain heard tones.

It is interesting to consider what kinds of test actually measure perfect pitch. Usually there are two abilities under consideration, one is the ability to recognize heard tones by their names, the other to generate tones upon calling their names. The proposed article seems to say these two in themselves are rather symptoms of either APE or HTM or even something else as manifested in an association task. Indeed, the recognition task (hear a tone, call a name) is not strict enough to identify either APE or HTM. A piano player may have tactile or visual idenfication of heard tone with position on keyboard, and mediated by this association, know the name of the note — although this is usually not the case. Same goes for all the tests involving reproducing a note on an instrument or using vocal chord position, etc. These are cases of a “hidden” external reference. The mediating step is not seen. The generation task is more interesting, as it must involve at least tonal memory in the form of an internal reference. If it can be done accurately then it could be either APE or HTM but it would not be able to distinguish between the two.

The test proposed by the article solves some of these problems by requiring generation, and by using distraction after the short target tone is produced. The point is to move on from the target tone faster than consultation with hidden external references can take place. If recognition is not immediate, then one must first hold the note in short-term memory, then after the distraction, compare it to internal reference pitches from tonal memory. This is not accurate since short-term tonal memory itself is not stable, being influenced by distraction. So for some small number of tones (could be all of the chromatic scale), HTM could do well, depending on the person, but maybe performance is not even…, and HTM should never be able to match lesser-heard (e.g. non-standard) pitches well… However, if recognition is by APE, then any tone can be immediately recognized into an abstract form and as something distinct, and easily matched later in the abstract forms.

Under this regime, it would seem that most people who recognize and generate tones upon request probably just have varying degrees of HTM and have developed a quick lookup table as internal reference, which would seem to be malleable by training as with other kinds of memory (for people with good associative memory anyway). APE, however, probably cannot be learned — it’s a kind of idiot savant skill like people who know large number multiplications in one second — it just cannot be done with a lookup table.

P.S., here is a highly enlightening thought experiment by somebody trying to learn perfect pitch, and I must say it expresses almost perfectly my thoughts on the subject.

What’s up with AT&T?

admin — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:09:08 +0000

Old news but news to me.

Cingular, which just a year or two ago acquired AT&T Wireless and changed everything to the orange color scheme, will change everything back to AT&T again.

What?

The newly reborn AT&T, fresh off of digesting BellSouth, plans to turn off the lights on their Cingular Wireless brand by next year and name it AT&T Wireless.

What?

Cingular originally was unconnected to AT&T; it was a joint venture between SBC and BellSouth.

Subsequently, AT&T sold its wireless assets to Cingular; AT&T proper remained a separate company, and “AT&T Wireless” ceased to exist.

Last year, SBC acquired what was left of AT&T, but they adopted the AT&T corporate name (due to its much stronger brand recognition). This made Cingular a joint venture of AT&T and BellSouth.

Now AT&T intends to acquire BellSouth. Once again, the AT&T brand will survive the takeover, meaning that AT&T will own 100% of Cingular.

What??

Thirty-odd years after the break-up of AT&T, it is piecing itself back together… hoho, the regulators of the 70s must be rolling in their graves… or wheelchairs, whatever.