Voice Recognition Software Yelled At

NEW YORK—Fidelity Financial Services' Gwen Watson, 33, shouted angrily at her IBM ViaVoice Pro USB voice-recognition software, sources close to the human-resources administrator reported Monday. "No, not Gary Friedman! Barry Friedman, you stupid computer. BARRY!" Watson was heard to scream from her cubicle. "Jesus Christ, I could've typed it in a hundredth of the time." After another minute of yelling, Watson was further incensed upon looking at her screen, which read, "Barely Freedman you God ram plucking pizza ship."

Onion

No Offsides Rule - Considered

Rule Changes in Soccer and Hockey:

Soccer (Futbal)

This change eliminates the "Offside Rule". Offside is a law in association football which effectively limits how far forward attacking players may be when involved in play. Broadly, a player cannot gain an advantage by waiting for the ball near the opposing goal when there are fewer than two opponents between him and the goal. We will eliminate this rule. It's that simple.

This rule change radically changes the game. It will significantly alter strategy and have a huge impact on scoring. The game will open up considerably.

Hockey

Here, we will also eliminate the offsides rule. Currently, play is stopped when a player on the attacking team enters the attacking zone before the puck itself enters the zone, whether it is being carried by a teammate or sent into the attacking zone by an attacking player. If a defending player carries, passes, or otherwise intentionally sends the puck into his defensive zone, any attacking player in the zone is not offside. However, if an attacking player is attempting to shoot the puck into the attacking zone and it deflects off a defending player, an offside violation can still occur. We'll eliminate this rule.

This rule change radically changes the game. It will significantly alter strategy and have a huge impact on scoring. The game will open up considerably.

Style revision survey results

• The survey asked; Should TenBucksWorth keep its sight settings and style formats the same or go with a new look?
  .
  
  

The results are in and 75% of responders voted to keep it the same. Some comments were:

• "Don't change a thing. It's perfect. What was the question?"
  
  "You should just leave it. Nobody gives a crap."
  
  "Oh my... Change is not good - no. Agh, no changes."
  
  "My site is better than your site. You stink."
  
  "I would prefer that you use all dark colors and have text rolling over other text making it tricky to read. How about some odd and unfamiliar music that just starts playing with no button to shut it off? If you can't do that, just stay with what you have."
  
  "LQTM."
  
  "Shimtezine myafora fursamempt crumpty chumpt, or keep it the same."

With sentiment overwhelmingly in favor of the status-quo, we'll not feel pressured to make wholesale revisions just because it's a new year. Instead, we'll consider the question again when we feel like considering it again.

Thanks to all who participated.

Pi

This will be on the test.

Pi or π is a mathematical constant that represents the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter, which is the same as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028etc.

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Jim "Ed" Rice deserves to get in

Unless the eligibility rules are changed, this is Jim Rice's last opportunity to get voted into the Hall of Fame. If you were a pitcher facing Rice in his prime (and he had many smoking hot years), you will recall him as one of the the game's most intimidating hitters. He had a lightning fast bat, tremendous power and he played hard all the time. You pitched around Rice. You had nightmares about facing him. You just knew he was going to smoke anything close to a mistake. He wasn't skillfully managed from a PR point of view and he was a much better player than he was a conversationalist. He let the press chatter bother him, and consequently - the press dug at him harder. That's the way it works. If they can get a story by busting your balls, they will. That's not a shot at the press, that's just the way it works. I digress...

In another controversy-worthy decision, I don't get a vote this year. Hardly fair... I would however, offer these brief comments at to why Rice deserves his place.

JIM RICE Highlights:

• One of league's dominating hitters for 12 years, from 1975-1986


• Averaged .304, 29 HR, 106 RBIs during this period


• 4 - 200 hit seasons, 11 - 20 HR seasons, 8 - 100 RBI seasons


• Only player to get 200 hits / 35 HRs 3 consecutive years


• 6 times Top 5 in MVP voting


• 8 time all-star


• 8 time Top 10 slugging, including 5 times in Top 2


• 4 times league leader in Total Bases


• Only AL player since 1937 to have 400+ bases in one season


• Outstanding defensive left fielder


• Career Totals: 2,452 Hits, 382 HR, 1,451 RBI, 79 Triples

Remember: These achievements came in the pre-steroids era when hitting 30 HR a year was a big deal.

Read the Redsox letter to the HOF voters in support of Rice:

http://members.shaw.ca/Rice4HOF/files/Jim%20Rice%20Red%20Sox%20HOF%20Resume.pdf

Steve Martin's Holiday Wish

During the season it's surely worth ten bucks, so I toss it up again.

Steve Martin's Holiday Wish...

If I had one wish that I could wish this holiday season, it would be that all the children to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace.

If I had two wishes I could make this holiday season, the first would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing in the spirit of harmony and peace. And the second would be for 30 million dollars a month to be given to me, tax-free in a Swiss bank account.

You know, if I had three wishes I could make this holiday season, the first, of course, would be for all the children of the world to get together and sing, the second would be for the 30 million dollars every month to me, and the third would be for encompassing power over every living being in the entire universe.

And if I had four wishes that I could make this holiday season, the first would be the crap about the kids definitely, the second would be for the 30 million, the third would be for all the power, and the fourth would be to set aside one month each year to have an extended 31-day orgasm, to be brought out slowly by Rosanna Arquette and that model Paulina-somebody, I can't think of her name.

Of course my lovely wife can come too and she's behind me one hundred percent here, I guarantee it. Wait a minute, maybe the sex thing should be the first wish, so if I made that the first wish, because it could all go boom tomorrow, then what do you got, y'know?

No, no, the kids, the kids singing would be great, that would be nice. But wait a minute, who am I kidding? They're not going to be able to get all those kids together. I mean, the logistics of the thing is impossible, more trouble than it's worth! So -- we reorganize!

Here we go. First, the sex thing. We go with that. Second, the money. No, we go with the power second, then the money. And then the kids. Oh wait, oh jeez, I forgot about revenge against my enemies! Okay, I need revenge against all my enemies, they should die like pigs in hell! That would be my fourth wish. And, of course, my fifth wish would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace.

Thank you everybody and Merry Christmas.

When the due date comes and goes...

When March comes and there is no solution, will Chrysler / Cerberus - having quickly consumed the "loan" - find a way to pay it back?

Put up outside Christmas lights... Check!

It's so perfect. I love this effort.

OddNoggin

John Herman and his friends are on the odd edge. They not only think this odd stuff up, but they actually produce it. It is, for some odd reason - odd enough to be interesting in an odd way.

OddNoggin

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Fitness Ha...

Steve Williams (Tiger's caddy) chirps up some controversy

Not much else happening in the golf world right now, so why not tell the story about how a spectator told Phil Mickelson he had nice tits.

As a marketing machine (with generally flawless execution), Tiger (and his peeps) won't be pleased. It doesn't mean the stories aren't true or that that Tiger doesn't agree, but as a strategy in business, this sort of thing won't go unaddressed.

Nice one Oliver...

787 Cliparts by Oliver Laric

Onion News

Town Fails To Rally Around Adult Trapped In Well
CATONSVILLE, MD—"What's a man that age doing near a well to begin with?" said Janice Peters, who spent the day not praying for the safety of the trapped 38-year-old.

Cranberry Juice Industry Hoping 2009 A Big Year For Urinary Tract Infections
LAKEVILLE, MA—The nation's leading cranberry juice producers announced Monday that they are banking on a record number of Americans...

Manager Achieves Full Mastery Of Pointless Managerial Jargon
CHARLOTTE, NC—Coworkers knew James Atkins had become a virtuoso of business jargon when he asked the group to participate in a "targeted brainstorm by EOD."

Well...and then - there's that.

They say everybody is good at something. You're lucky to discover what it is.

(Human) Brains, Filters, Stubborness, and ...

We (humans) take in information. Now more now than ever, we’re constantly flooded with information. The ability to quickly and easily go out and look for more specific information (www) takes it to a new level. We react, consider, process and develop conclusions or positions. We might not be conscious of the process that takes us toward conclusions, but it’s working all the time. Our need hierarchy helps us prioritize the messages (data) we accommodate and feeds the need for clarity (more info). We process and sort things out to help build a picture of “what is”. Our conclusion / position may start with something as simple as establishing a feeling, or a sense that something will give us near term pain or pleasure.

Based initially on the severity of the perceived outcome (bad stuff first, and in second place – good stuff), information earns our attention. Another early sort / filter (important concept) for information is relevance. A necessary and useful filter allows us to screen out most noise and let relevant information through. Filtering, sorting or prioritizing is how we manage traffic (sight, sound – data of any kind) in our brains. If it didn’t work this way, we’d all be nuts. Once traffic arrives, we process it accordingly. The way this happens was the subject of great debate for some time, but not any more. Science actually does have a pretty clear picture of how our brains work. There is a ton of material on this subject. There’s little disagreement on the mechanics of the brain – at least down to the level of information processing, storage and retrieval. There are some mystical theories, but I filter them as irrelevant (hmmm…). Here are corroborating (also an important word to remember) excellent reads: Who We Really Are – Robert Wiedermeyer, Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert, This is Your Brain on Music – Daniel J. Levitin, On the Sweet Spot – Richard Keefe, A Whole New Mind – Daniel Pink. I have a dozen more – all agree.

I won’t bog us down with regurgitating the detail, but I will quickly dive into a specific point to which there is little argument among current scientists. Specifically, the brain does not store all data. There is no hard-drive type of system that stores movies of our experience in deeper and deeper layers of memory. This is an extreme over-simplification, but for lack of a simpler way to explain it; the brain saves and arranges fragments of memory as chemical connections upon which traffic travels in our brains (neural pathways). There’s no reason to take an alternate route when our consciousness has a regular commute to deal with. These fragments provide enough foundation data for us to plug in current activity and not have to summon everything in its entirety. The scene in the movie is stored with just enough detail to keep it intact, but everything else is completely gone. Our foundation data is shaped by our experience and prefers to remain essentially intact unless new data is more relevant, comes with vivid new evidence, has great impact (consequence) or repeated often enough to recast the perfectly good, always worked before, set. Once we see reality and truth and “what is” a certain way – based on our experience, it serves us well to keep it that way and use it to process new stuff.

Back to filtering and screening - An old illustration of a relevancy-sort goes like this:

Read the following sentence just once.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT

OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY

COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE

OF MANY YEARS OF EXPERTS.

Now Read it again (just once) and count the number of F’s in the sentence once, then stop. Most people count three F’s in the words Finished, Files and aha… Scientific. How many did you count? Maybe you found more or less. There are actually seven F’s in the sentence. Read through it again, maybe you’ll see more F’s. Do it again once - now, then come back to this.

Hey – there are seven F’s (fact). However, almost no one sees the seven F’s on the first or even second pass. No say… Say. You look, you don’t see. Then you look again and probably still don’t see even though you were told how many were actually there. There is no relevant need to count F’s. This is a silly thing to develop a knack for (another terrific word – “knack”). This knack is virtually useless and resists finding a place in the brain’s wiring. That’s why it’s not unusual to miscount the F’s even after being told how many there were.

Since the word “of” isn’t important or relevant in the meaning of the sentence, our brain creates a type of blind spot. Isn’t it possible, or perhaps likely that we have other blind spots? Some may be useful, some not. By definition, we are blind to the blind spots. This “I don’t see the F’s” thing is an example of relevancy filtering. When something is of value and comes through as relevant, we let it in. Why is it that when you are in a crowded room with lots of chatter and conversation, you effectively block out the noise of the chatter, but when you hear your name spoken from across the room, it finds its way through? We also screen other things for other reasons.

We have a built-in and useful resistance to tearing up previously reinforced pictures. Our efficient brains easily accept the key pieces of data that fit nicely into our established framework (corroboration), but when something doesn’t fit (contradiction), our brains toss up some resistance (at least initially) by ignoring it if possible, or by interpreting it as if it did fit. That’s why we are usually quite happy to go along with a point of view that fits comfortably into our scene. The inclination to accept things that fit and resist things that don’t is something we just do. Things that reinforce out previously held view fly through our screens and things that don't, don't. We can ignore an amazing amount of logic and overwhelming evidence that doesn't fit, and yet give us a little slice of something in-line and "oh boy; "see - see - see, I told you so!" When the weight of evidence is anywhere close to balanced, we have little ability to recognize it.

We burn in our points of view when we go out hunting for information. We might read all the articles on a subject, but we do so with a predisposition to resist points of view that contradict previously accepted well-traveled thoughts. To discount a contradicting point of view, but let a corroborating view pass smoothly home, is a normal and efficient part of the process. We’re constantly checking our old reality against a new one and updating our scene. We should recognize that there is a preference for corroboration and at least a tiny bit of opposition to contradiction. If we’re saturated with evidence in support of our point of view, we might beef up our resistance – a viscous circle (or a virtuous circle – depending on your point of view –, which is in itself is a reinforcing feedback loop… I digress). You see this kind of thing in religion and politics all the time. In spite of what some would argue is overwhelming evidence, some people are convinced that there was an actual Adam and Eve; we’re all descendants, beginning to human existence. The Adam and Eve notion is preposterous to some, while the theory of evolution is unreasonable to others. Some have managed to fit the evidence into an alternate idea that gives them their Adam and Eve, but allows all the rest to happen in an evolutionary way. You get the idea. More republicans watch Bill O’Reilly and Fox News, while more democrats and independents watch Anderson Cooper and CNN. They don’t do so exclusively, but each prefers at least a hint of corroboration.

If we accept that the screening mechanism (natural – no one’s fault) might get in the way of some reward, and we can be open to the possibility that a few new set of well-feed concepts can be established, we can make something happen. It’s a tough assignment (understatement), but if you can develop the ability to shape other people’s filters, you can do some wild stuff.

A practical application:

If you have a struggling business and your employees don't believe that the way your business works is good for your customers, even more specifically - if they don't think the way you do things is a sincere effort to deliver benefit for your customers and employees, or if (say it ain't so) your employees don't trust you - you need to find a way to change how they think. To change a burned-in view of reality, you have to present a consistent and constant message, demonstrate your point often. Make the message about your vision and your unwavering belief an important part of daily life in your company. To close the deal in their minds, you'll have to get past the resistance. It may (will) take more time and effort than you think. If you've been neglectful, selfish or naughty (and they know it), you probably can't get there. You'll need a huge attention getting or disruptive event in order to get past the barriers. It will be worth it, so do it. You will not however, be able to chip away at it with any measurable success. Alternately, you can get new people and start fresh. Also tough.

You may disagree initially, but that would just be you screening.

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The Simple Explanation - "The Bailout"

This is gross over simplification, but so what. People keep asking me, so...


Some people want to let the automakers either sink or swim on their own. No loans, or "Bailouts". Why should a business get saved when it has managed itself into the pooper?

The argument for saving the companies has purely to do with jobs. It has nothing at all to do with saving the reputation of the great American companies or the country's ability to lead the way in manufacturing. No one argues that this battle has been lost. Essentially, there are a lot of folks working for these companies and in the distribution system that goes along with it (dealers etc). It's the jobs, not the companies.

If you are of the mind ~ If the "Bailout" is a loan, and the government will get paid back, why is there a need to micro-manage the detail, plant a car-czar and oust CEOs? When the financial institutions needed loans, they didn't have to go through all this hoopla.

The angst over the loans is based on the fact that no lender would make the loans. The US government is the "lender of last resort". The car makers are stiff. They have lousy credit. Based on their current situation, it doesn't look like they'll make it. The odds are quite good that they'll eat the money and still go down in flames.

The drastic slowing of retail sales has crippled GM. Even if there had been just a slight dip (not a crash), GM would still be in pain. They have been somewhat arrogant and ill prepared. They are the stiffest of the stiffs. I'll note here quickly that while Ford is in the group, they are in a better shape. They have been busy working on what they do for a number of years and are a much better company. They're still in rough shape, clumsy and fat, but not as much as they were ten years ago, and not as much as the others. Chrysler is not going to make it no matter what you do. They are doomed, loans or no loans. Yes, GM is doomed too. Even if things get a bit better in the marketplace, GM is sick. Ford can survive if the general economy gets better.

It probably makes more sense to deal individually with each company, but that's not how it went. We're here now.

The government knows Chrysler is doomed, they strongly suspect that GM is doomed, and they are worried about Ford in the weak economy. Collectively, this group looks like a terrible credit risk. The repayment chances are so slim that loaning money is an obviously lousy idea. You're not likely to get paid and what's worse, you'll be asked to throw more money their way when they burn through this chunk. Still, they have to make loans that are unlikely to get repaid. That's why the deal comes with all this parental intervention. The loans are off the risk map.

Again - this is an over-simplification.

Good one!

Sir's comment: Private Equity's Hayday

Video and the web... Naaaaaaa...

Who would want to watch anything they could imagine at any time they wanted to? Would they use a remote? Too many changes too quickly could make a person twitch you know. Cable TV for $178.54 per month - that's only $2,142.48 a year (includes "most" of the channels), and a DVR are all anyone could ever want.

...or not.

Gift Idea

Make / Take

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From Seth Godin's stuff...


Making vs. Taking

Consider two cereals:

Honey Bunches of Oats, a category creator, a big brand with spin offs and profits and growth.

Fruit Harvest, a generically named cereal that leverages the marketing department's ability to run coupons, grab shelf space and take share.

That's the choice most of us make when we launch a product or service. We can make a market or we can take share from a market.

• "This is just like the Gillette razor, but cheaper."


• "This has a touch screen, too, but you can get it from Verizon."


• "I'm a shiatsu massage therapist, the only one on this block."
  

Those are 'taking' statements. They break a larger market into smaller bits.

Compare to:

• "This is a sugared cereal for adults."


• "Our software enables you to find data and trends that no one else can find."


• "By combining protein and chocolate, we've developed a new food that's both dessert and dinner."
  

These are 'making' statements. Riskier, sure, but they stand for something, they don't just steal share. The Dummies guides made a market, the Idiot's guides took from that market.

You need to be clear with yourself and your team about which one you're after, because they bring different costs, different benefits and different time frames.

Yes indeed.

When the chatter moves the needle

"[Insert name of business] is terrific. They [insert thing done well]. They [insert recognized customer advantage]. They can do it that way because [insert non-tradtional, or newly invented process / edge]. Isn't that neat? You should go there."



When your customers talk about you like this. Even better, when people who are not your customers talk about you like this, you just might be on to something.

The Ten Bucks Worth Fix - Aha!

I changed a set of strings (classical guitar) and discovered that in spite of the fact that I was tying it correctly, the E-string (treble) kept slipping the knot. That's crazy. I looped it three time s and it still slipped. I was using D'Addario Pro Arte EJ50 hard tension black nylons. I've never experienced this slipping before - even after I tossed in an extra loop. However, here's a terrific fix. I thought of it myself (that gives me naming rights). I'll call it "The Ten Bucks Worth Fix". Nice huh?

Try this: Pull out your satchel of rosin that you use on your violin. My violin has metal strings, so the rosin is extra sticky, but any rosin will do. Give the tail of your E-string a rubbadubdub with the rosin and then go ahead and tie it in there. Two loops and no slippage whatsoever. Sweet!

Thank you... Thank you very much.