61–70 of 87 posts
I wonder how difficult it'd be to write OCR-style software for Gregg. It'd have to be more sophisticated; character recognition alone wouldn't be enough, you'd have to do a bit of Markov modelling with most probable sentences/words too. I guess it's so niche no one will ever do it, but it sounds like a fun project.
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I guess I was thinking in the context of the author using this particular pen for shorthand - it records audio, so even if he's just writing shorthand, it's still recording. Really good points though, it didn't occur to me that someone would be willing to go "on the record" but not be actually recorded. There are some other solutions that use keyboards that wouldn't be as intrusive as a keyboard or tablet (and may be…
Yeah, it's kind of weird that people would go "on the record" but not want to be recorded. But there's something about pulling out a tape recorder (or in my case, an iPhone with a recording app) that freaks people out. I think part of this fear stems from the age we live in, with the 24 hour news cycle and "gotcha" journalism. People half suspect you're going to use something they said against them, as if it's a poli…
(Simple method: when speaking of tricky matters, twist your grammar and pepper with adjectives and adverbs. Always follow with a pullquote you'd like used. Use variations on your favoured quote a few times.)
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I always thought journalists were hopeless at reporting precise details, but when you compress your notes using such a lossy technique as this, it's not surprising that the facts can get skewed.
There are different types of shorthand. Some are phonetic; some are spelling based. Journalists should be learning teeline which is spelling based. Journalists should not be losing details and if they are that's their failure to take correct notes, but not an expected feature of using shorthand. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8356000/8356176.... http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand
In my experience, when I'm quoted, issues I have aren't so much that "I didn't say that" but that I said something longer and more nuanced which wasn't captured in the quote in question. It's one of the reasons you learn when giving short interviews to hit your key points precisely in a way that doesn't depend on a lot of context.
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I always thought journalists were hopeless at reporting precise details, but when you compress your notes using such a lossy technique as this, it's not surprising that the facts can get skewed.
There are different types of shorthand. Some are phonetic; some are spelling based. Journalists should be learning teeline which is spelling based. Journalists should not be losing details and if they are that's their failure to take correct notes, but not an expected feature of using shorthand. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8356000/8356176.... http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand
In my experience, when I'm quoted, issues I have aren't so much that "I didn't say that" but that I said something longer and more nuanced which wasn't captured in the quote in question. It's one of the reasons you learn when giving short interviews to hit your key points precisely in a way that doesn't depend on a lot of context.
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srsly?
As a non-native speaker, I never really tried to reason about what letters are silent or not. It's all seemingly nonsensical, anyway, so I might as well just take it at face value.
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I used to have a palm pilot and I LOVED the 'graffiti' input mode with the stylus. You had an alphabet of simplified shapes and it made it very easy to enter something quickly without needing to ‘hunt and peck' on a miniature keyboard for the shift key or using shift keys to change modes. I wondered why nobody brought gesture-based inout to iOS this way. I don't care about 'handwriting recognition' of my own writing,…
I think an excellent input method for mobiles is Swiftkey. It has incredible accuracy, and it learns really fast as to what and how you type. Its intelligence beat all other keyboards that I tried, and I'm able to peak at over 60 WPM using SK with two fingers, and 40 WPM with 1 finger and flow. However, it gets tricky as soon as you get sloppy or start writing technical stuff, so I tend to stick with the traditional…
I got so excited when he said that it really was possible to write at 100 words a minute but then he said that it's nearly impossible to actually learn Gregg, I wonder if there's a website somewhere.... About the Livescribe: it's an okay pen but difficult to hold. and somewhat awkward because of the camera at the tip, but it could depend on the way you hold pens.
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My understanding is that it was not generally expected that notes taken by one person would be interpretable by another. This is what I've been told by my mother, who learned and used Pitman shorthand. She says she never had to read anyone else's notes, nor did anyone else ever have a need to read hers.
This is largely why note taking is a two pass process for me. The first is the pen and paper notes taken while speaking with someone else. The second is the process of transcribing and editing those notes onto some digital medium. I end up with a really nicely fleshed out document covering much more information, much more thoroughly. For example, for a more complex point in a discussion I may add an additional paragr…
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At least for me - a native German speaker with English as a self taught second language - I find that the `y` in bay actually makes it easier to figure out the correct pronunciation. Since `a` is pronounced as `ah` in German, just having `ba` would make the `a` sound like the one in `bra`, which would make it hard to distinguish between `ba(y)` and `ba(h)` when first learning the language. Removing the y's would also…
I'm a native english speaker I'd make the same assumptions about "ba" as you would. I'm not sure what accent "ba" would be pronounced "bay" in.
But yeah, the extreme form of gregg shorthand definitely seems, from the OP, to rely on lots of contextual knowledge for it's concision. That seems to be it's strategy, eliminate letters where contextual knowledge will suffice to reconstruct them.
I don't see the utility of shorthand anymore. If you're just taking short notes, you don't need to write 225wpm...and if you've recorded everything, then you can listen to the recording later and take notes or type up a transcript verbatim. It would seem better to learn a stenography system so you don't waste time inputting actual text, which surely you would need to do anyway? (How is the time the author saves writi…