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Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

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Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#151

Post by hanniabu »

enobrev wrote: post #118
hanniabu wrote: post #116

It'd be great if we could extract subtitles from video and put into a nice text format that's easy to read so it's skimmable. Then when you get to an area of interest, you should be able to click the place where you're interested and a video will pop up and start from there. Then when you've heard what you wanted to hear you can minimize the video and skim the text for the next area of interest and so on.

I imagine there could be an interesting means of moving the playhead along with your skimming, so when you highlight a block of text (as I do, habitually), the video would play through the selection and pause at the end. I'd love to use text as a video controller.

Yes, this is pretty much what I was picturing except without having to select the end, this way it doesn't just cut off when you were still interested in what was being said even though you might not have planned on watching past that particular point.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#152

Post by hanniabu »

trevyn wrote: post #122
enobrev wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine there could be an interesting means of moving the playhead along with your skimming, so when you highlight a block of text (as I do, habitually), the video would play through the selection and pause at the end. I'd love to use text as a video controller.

This is a great idea -- text is much faster to read, but watching a speaker is much more information-dense due to body language and intonation. This would be a fun hack. Looks like the YouTube caption data is available via API: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions/downl...

I can't try this out at the moment, but from looking at the documentation I don't see it say that it returns the timestamp of the caption anywhere.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#153

Post by thaumasiotes »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #148
thaumasiotes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize. They ar…

"Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.

Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is.

But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.

The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#154

Post by thaumasiotes »

tremon wrote: post #149
sandworm101 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There was no point at which brains stopped evolving. Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.

More like five thousand years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A#Chronology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_script#History

Charitably, reading was not "widespread in the population" at that time. sandworm101's comment shows a pretty appalling understanding of evolution -- the selective pressure for reading ability exists as soon as anyone can benefit from learning to read, not when everyone is required to try -- but a somewhat better understanding of history.

Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#155

Post by gliese1337 »

hanniabu wrote: post #116

It'd be great if we could extract subtitles from video and put into a nice text format that's easy to read so it's skimmable. Then when you get to an area of interest, you should be able to click the place where you're interested and a video will pop up and start from there. Then when you've heard what you wanted to hear you can minimize the video and skim the text for the next area of interest and so on.

This is in fact exactly the approach that my lab has been working on for the last several years in developing a media player for language-learning applications (which has actually also been used for teaching linguistics and introductory chemistry, so clearly the pedagogical benefits generalize beyond just language learning).

Being able to switch between text-centric and video-centric views freely has been a goal of my (now-former, because he just retired) boss for a while (and by "a while" I mean he did his dissertation on interactive, text-augmented video technology with applications to education in the 70s), and we're not quite there yet, but we do have the ability to show a transcript that can be synchronized with the playing video (automatically scrolling and with highlighted text to show where the video is), or scrolled freely and searched through to select a specific part of the video to skip to.

You can see an implementation of the technology (including playing around with some of our editing tools) at http://ayamel.byu.edu

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#156

Post by thomasfoster96 »

gumby wrote: post #140
thomasfoster96 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further. It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia). While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Puttin…

Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi. Or even German where spelling is changed to keep up with changes in pronunciation. English is somewhat conservative with spelling, so a lot of words embody their roots in their written form. Teaching kids to spell via phonetics and a huge set of rules makes spelling (and comprehension of new words) harder not easier. Of course you can take this conserva…

> Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi.

It is still somewhat phonetic. If you ignore the vowels that have changed sound over time and the silent letters, you can still sound out a fair chunk of English words.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#157

Post by fuzzfactor »

As a consumer/dependent-based institution which benefits from increased control strives for growth and succeeds, eventually you reach a point where the most benefit to the institution can best be achieved using less literate followers/subjects.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#158

Post by Gravityloss »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #143
Natanael_L wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language. The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.

> So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.

English pronunciation writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste.

For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating.

Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#159

Post by thaumasiotes »

Gravityloss wrote: post #158
thaumasiotes wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.

English pronunciation writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste. For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating. Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.

Finding that common ground would mean switching from our current system of somewhat-arbitrary spelling to a different but very similar system of mostly-arbitrary spelling. It imposes the same memorization burden on everyone and the benefit is slightly more predictable pronunciation within each of a set of officially-blessed dialects. That ground gets lost over time regardless; there is a reason predictable pronunciation is a feature of spelling systems that either (1) are new, or (2) have just undergone reform.

If your biggest problem lies in a circumstance you rarely encounter, arguably fixing it is not a priority.

> for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating

This is a funny example to use, since it fully conforms to the rules I described above -- study uses the STRUT vowel, and student uses the GOOSE vowel. It would be a better example for the complaint that we have more sounds than symbols.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#160

Post by jsemrau »

kofejnik wrote: post #73
toomanythings2 wrote: post #4

Well ... uh ... I think ... I think ... uh ... everyone can hear me? ... I'll wait till the guys in the back ... oh and the girls, too, right hahahahahah ... OK ... let's get started... Sure. I know Facebook wouldn't put out videos like that but it seems 80% of all videos linked to do start out like that and that's the quality you're going to get from anyone worth listening to. Even the polished ones, though, blatter…

At first, I thought 'Yeah me too, text is so much more efficient', but then I realized something. Maybe it's only me, but for learning more complex things video lectures work wonders for me, probably because they force me to slow down and process information calmly and in order; while with text, I tend to hastily jump all over the place, skipping the more boring bits and missing important things.

Opposite anecdotal evidence. I am terrible in following video lectures. But listening to audio books works wonders.
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