CART providers are bound by rules of confidentiality not to disclose the names or details of people they've captioned for, but in this case my client graciously allowed me to use her name and link to her information. A few years ago, I captioned several classes (including Latin, one of my all-time favorite subjects) for Navena Chaitoo, an undergraduate at Fordham University up in the Bronx. Now she's graduating, and yesterday she informed me that she won a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to further her education in public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University! From the article she sent me:
“I was diagnosed with a severe-to-profound hearing loss when I was about 5 years old, and at the time, my audiologists relied on the latest medical studies to determine that I would probably never graduate high school,” said the Brooklyn native. “Ultimately, my parents knew better and saw to it that I had all the accommodations necessary to offset my hearing loss, which allowed me to be as successful as I am today.”
[...]
Chaitoo will continue research she began at Fordham on the economic wellbeing of persons with disabilities in the United States, particularly the indirect as well as direct medical costs of persons with disabilities—a topic in which she has been personally invested.
Navena is only one of countless examples demonstrating how important accommodations can be, and how much can be achieved if they're put in place. The communication access came from CART providers like me and the other captioners who've worked with her, but the brilliance, insight, and dedication all came from her. This woman is amazing, and I'm honored to have played a part in her success. I know she'll just keep going up and up from here, and I'll definitely be watching to see the great things she does in the future.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Thresholds and Tolerance
I'm not a fan of starting a blog post by quoting the definition of the topic in question; it's virtually always just a lazy attempt to co-opt some of the dictionary's presumed authority or credibility and doesn't add anything of substance to the author's argument. That said...
"Tolerance is the permissible limit or limits of variation in a measured value or physical property of a material, manufactured object, system, or service. [...] A variation beyond the tolerance [...] is said to be non-compliant, rejected, or exceeding the tolerance."
I'm quoting this definition because it refers to a specific technical meaning of an otherwise well known word. Most people aren't familiar with the word "tolerance" used in this sense, but it's a useful concept not just in mechanical engineering but in the provision of transcription services for Deaf and hard of hearing students and professionals. In my CART Problem Solving series, I addressed the popular misconception that a tolerance of 90% accuracy was acceptable, because most people think of 90 and 100 as rather large numbers that are pretty much equivalent to each other, even though language is such a fine-grained system that 100 words constitutes only about a paragraph of text, and a 90% error rate works out to an error in just about every sentence. I also talked about the ways in which human captioners are able to use lateral context clues to fill in the gaps of non-ideal audio conditions, while outside of a perfectly amplified, perfectly enunciated standard American accent, automated speech recognition systems go from almost adequate to laughably awful perilously quickly.
Tolerance enters the captioning sphere in other cases as well. Speed, for instance; if a professor's average rate of speed is 160 words per minute (quite a bit below the typical rate of speech, which tends to be between 180 and 220 WPM), a stenocaptioner (AKA a CART provider like me) with a speed of 240 words per minute will be able to achieve virtually 100% accuracy, because any errors can be immediately caught and corrected. A text expansion provider (using a system such as C-Print or Typewell) may have a speed of 140 words per minute or so, which means that if the professor's rate stays completely steady all the way through, they will probably be able to capture a good 85% of what's spoken. Since they're human and not just a mindless speech recognition system, they will give preference to writing down important things (names, technical terms, relationships between concepts), and will try to make sure that the remaining 15% of speech that they're too slow to capture consists mainly of "Um", "Uh", "You know", repeated words, irrelevant asides, and inefficient phrasing that can be tightened up and paraphrased to use fewer keystrokes. In some cases, that will be enough. The professor's speed will never rise above 160 WPM throughout the entire class, and there will be plenty of chaff to ignore, leaving enough time to take down the important content, even though the provider's writing speed is lower than the professor's average rate of speech. By contrast, the stenocaptioner will probably choose to leave out the "Um", "Uh", and "You know" sorts of filler words for clarity's sake, but will not omit repeated words or attempt to paraphrase the professor's wording, no matter how inefficient it might be. Stenocaptioners are focused on providing a verbatim realtime stream, only omitting words that add absolutely no value to understanding, while text expansion providers are focused on tightening up whatever they hear so that it can be written in as few keystrokes as possible. So far, so good. This is a case where stenocaptioning and text expansion are more or less equivalent, and the difference lies mostly in whether the client wants the pure, unmediated words of their professors to interpret for themselves, or whether they'd rather have a condensed version of the information delivered in class, more along the lines of the bullet points on a PowerPoint slide.
Change any of the factors in play, and the results will be very different. For instance, say the professor's average rate of speed is still 160 words per minute, but that's because his rate is 135 when he's writing formulas on the board (about half the class) and 185 when he's explaining what the formulas mean (the other half of the class). Or it's 140 for long stretches at a time, when he's lecturing on the information mandated by the syllabus, but it shoots up to 200 for brief moments, when he gets excited about a particular detail of whatever he's talking about. The stenocaptioner, whose top speed is 240 WPM, is still able to get 100% in all of these situations. The text expansion provider, on the other hand, will be able to handle the 135 WPM formula sections almost perfectly, but will start cutting or condensing words and phrases from the 185 sections, and will be forced to leave out over a quarter of the material from the 200 WPM sections. If this particular professor has a tendency to repeat words, insert lots of filler words, pause between sentences to take a drink of water, or otherwise speak in a lightweight, inefficient way, the text expansion provider might be able to deliver a workable portion of the class's important material, because there will be enough less important stuff they can cut out and still have enough reserve speed to write down the good parts.
If, on the other hand, the professor is an accomplished speaker, who says precisely what she means in precisely the way she means it, if her lectures are a constant stream of dense technical jargon and precise, specific descriptions of how everything fits together, if there's no chaff or filler to cut out and no awkward repetitions to rephrase... The text expansion provider is out to sea. They've got to start cutting important material in favor of leaving in vital material, and that becomes a dangerous guessing game when it comes to the grade of the student they're transcribing for. Text expansion services acknowledge this to a certain extent; they tend to say that CART is recommended when the material is technical or highly precise, such as in the graduate and professional programs that I specialize in. And admittedly, there are some classes and some subjects and some professors where a 140 WPM typing speed, as slow as it is when compared to a stenocaptioner's 240 WPM typing speed, is enough to deliver most important material given in the class.
The question is: How do you tell which situation you're dealing with? If you're a disability director and you're trying to decide between hiring a text expansion provider or a certified CART provider for a given student's schedule of classes, it may seem obvious to choose the former, since text expansion services are cheaper and more widely available. But have you audited the professors in all of the classes in question? Does their average speed always stay under that 160-180 WPM sweet spot? Is there enough extraneous speech to discard and paraphrase without losing important information? Are there ever spikes of higher speeds, and if there are, can you guarantee that none of that high speed material will appear on the test? Have you checked to make sure that there won't be any guest lecturers or student presentations during the course of the semester? Guest experts, since they're not used to speaking for students, tend to speak at 200 to 220 WPM or higher. One that I transcribed a few years ago spoke at 280 WPM, and I found myself starting to do the same sort of paraphrasing and chaff cutting that my text expansion colleagues do as a matter of course. I think I managed a good 90% to 95% of relevant material given in that lecture. But I didn't reach that paraphrasing threshold until I encountered a speaker at the high end of the rate-of-speech bell curve; for text expansion providers, it's their starting point. They don't have any speed in reserve, and if there's nothing extraneous to cut out, they start losing important material very quickly. Give them a 280 WPM speaker, and they're now losing a full 50% of everything that's spoken.
Of course, you could make the argument that most students without hearing loss don't take in 100% of every lecture. They might daydream or nod off, experience a moment of inattention, miss a word or two here or there while skimming through their notes from the class before. Even without getting every word of every lecture, many students do quite well. But where's the cutoff? How many words can you lose and still receive equal access? Which words can you leave out and which must you absolutely leave in? Who do you trust to make that call? It all comes down to tolerance.
"Tolerance is the permissible limit or limits of variation in a measured value or physical property of a material, manufactured object, system, or service. [...] A variation beyond the tolerance [...] is said to be non-compliant, rejected, or exceeding the tolerance."
I'm quoting this definition because it refers to a specific technical meaning of an otherwise well known word. Most people aren't familiar with the word "tolerance" used in this sense, but it's a useful concept not just in mechanical engineering but in the provision of transcription services for Deaf and hard of hearing students and professionals. In my CART Problem Solving series, I addressed the popular misconception that a tolerance of 90% accuracy was acceptable, because most people think of 90 and 100 as rather large numbers that are pretty much equivalent to each other, even though language is such a fine-grained system that 100 words constitutes only about a paragraph of text, and a 90% error rate works out to an error in just about every sentence. I also talked about the ways in which human captioners are able to use lateral context clues to fill in the gaps of non-ideal audio conditions, while outside of a perfectly amplified, perfectly enunciated standard American accent, automated speech recognition systems go from almost adequate to laughably awful perilously quickly.
Tolerance enters the captioning sphere in other cases as well. Speed, for instance; if a professor's average rate of speed is 160 words per minute (quite a bit below the typical rate of speech, which tends to be between 180 and 220 WPM), a stenocaptioner (AKA a CART provider like me) with a speed of 240 words per minute will be able to achieve virtually 100% accuracy, because any errors can be immediately caught and corrected. A text expansion provider (using a system such as C-Print or Typewell) may have a speed of 140 words per minute or so, which means that if the professor's rate stays completely steady all the way through, they will probably be able to capture a good 85% of what's spoken. Since they're human and not just a mindless speech recognition system, they will give preference to writing down important things (names, technical terms, relationships between concepts), and will try to make sure that the remaining 15% of speech that they're too slow to capture consists mainly of "Um", "Uh", "You know", repeated words, irrelevant asides, and inefficient phrasing that can be tightened up and paraphrased to use fewer keystrokes. In some cases, that will be enough. The professor's speed will never rise above 160 WPM throughout the entire class, and there will be plenty of chaff to ignore, leaving enough time to take down the important content, even though the provider's writing speed is lower than the professor's average rate of speech. By contrast, the stenocaptioner will probably choose to leave out the "Um", "Uh", and "You know" sorts of filler words for clarity's sake, but will not omit repeated words or attempt to paraphrase the professor's wording, no matter how inefficient it might be. Stenocaptioners are focused on providing a verbatim realtime stream, only omitting words that add absolutely no value to understanding, while text expansion providers are focused on tightening up whatever they hear so that it can be written in as few keystrokes as possible. So far, so good. This is a case where stenocaptioning and text expansion are more or less equivalent, and the difference lies mostly in whether the client wants the pure, unmediated words of their professors to interpret for themselves, or whether they'd rather have a condensed version of the information delivered in class, more along the lines of the bullet points on a PowerPoint slide.
Change any of the factors in play, and the results will be very different. For instance, say the professor's average rate of speed is still 160 words per minute, but that's because his rate is 135 when he's writing formulas on the board (about half the class) and 185 when he's explaining what the formulas mean (the other half of the class). Or it's 140 for long stretches at a time, when he's lecturing on the information mandated by the syllabus, but it shoots up to 200 for brief moments, when he gets excited about a particular detail of whatever he's talking about. The stenocaptioner, whose top speed is 240 WPM, is still able to get 100% in all of these situations. The text expansion provider, on the other hand, will be able to handle the 135 WPM formula sections almost perfectly, but will start cutting or condensing words and phrases from the 185 sections, and will be forced to leave out over a quarter of the material from the 200 WPM sections. If this particular professor has a tendency to repeat words, insert lots of filler words, pause between sentences to take a drink of water, or otherwise speak in a lightweight, inefficient way, the text expansion provider might be able to deliver a workable portion of the class's important material, because there will be enough less important stuff they can cut out and still have enough reserve speed to write down the good parts.
If, on the other hand, the professor is an accomplished speaker, who says precisely what she means in precisely the way she means it, if her lectures are a constant stream of dense technical jargon and precise, specific descriptions of how everything fits together, if there's no chaff or filler to cut out and no awkward repetitions to rephrase... The text expansion provider is out to sea. They've got to start cutting important material in favor of leaving in vital material, and that becomes a dangerous guessing game when it comes to the grade of the student they're transcribing for. Text expansion services acknowledge this to a certain extent; they tend to say that CART is recommended when the material is technical or highly precise, such as in the graduate and professional programs that I specialize in. And admittedly, there are some classes and some subjects and some professors where a 140 WPM typing speed, as slow as it is when compared to a stenocaptioner's 240 WPM typing speed, is enough to deliver most important material given in the class.
The question is: How do you tell which situation you're dealing with? If you're a disability director and you're trying to decide between hiring a text expansion provider or a certified CART provider for a given student's schedule of classes, it may seem obvious to choose the former, since text expansion services are cheaper and more widely available. But have you audited the professors in all of the classes in question? Does their average speed always stay under that 160-180 WPM sweet spot? Is there enough extraneous speech to discard and paraphrase without losing important information? Are there ever spikes of higher speeds, and if there are, can you guarantee that none of that high speed material will appear on the test? Have you checked to make sure that there won't be any guest lecturers or student presentations during the course of the semester? Guest experts, since they're not used to speaking for students, tend to speak at 200 to 220 WPM or higher. One that I transcribed a few years ago spoke at 280 WPM, and I found myself starting to do the same sort of paraphrasing and chaff cutting that my text expansion colleagues do as a matter of course. I think I managed a good 90% to 95% of relevant material given in that lecture. But I didn't reach that paraphrasing threshold until I encountered a speaker at the high end of the rate-of-speech bell curve; for text expansion providers, it's their starting point. They don't have any speed in reserve, and if there's nothing extraneous to cut out, they start losing important material very quickly. Give them a 280 WPM speaker, and they're now losing a full 50% of everything that's spoken.
Of course, you could make the argument that most students without hearing loss don't take in 100% of every lecture. They might daydream or nod off, experience a moment of inattention, miss a word or two here or there while skimming through their notes from the class before. Even without getting every word of every lecture, many students do quite well. But where's the cutoff? How many words can you lose and still receive equal access? Which words can you leave out and which must you absolutely leave in? Who do you trust to make that call? It all comes down to tolerance.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Word Boundary Error Commentary Track
Word boundary errors! They don't come up as often as you'd think, especially if you have a robust conflict-free dictionary full of prefix and suffix strokes, but when they do, they're baffling and embarrassing in equal measure.
I recently downloaded my entire Twitter archive and then searched for the hashtag "#wordboundaryerrors". It offered up a treasure trove of them, collected over the last several years. Here are some of the best, with my comments on how I can avoid errors like them in the future.
"more tartar" came out "mortar tar". #wordboundaryerrors
I should probably take MOR/TAR out of my dictionary altogether. Eclipse tells me I've written it MORT/*AR 168 times, but MOR/TAR only once: When someone said "more tartar". #facepalm
"sing Hallelujah" came out "Singha lay lieu ya". #wordboundaryerrors #mmmthaibeer
Two ways to keep this from happening again: Redefine SING/HA as S*ING/HA (with the asterisk denoting a proper noun), or just stick to writing "hallelujah" as HAL/LAOU/YA (already defined in my dictionary that way). I'll probably do both, since it's silly to do "Hallelujah" in four strokes.
Conversely, #stenofail of the day: "salivary gland malignancy" came out "salivary grandma lignancy". Not always smart to define misstrokes!
Take out that GLAND/MA -> "grandma" definition! It might have come up as a misstroke that once, but I probably shouldn't have kept it.
"These cisterns" came out "thesis terns". #steno #wordboundaryerrors
I now write "thesis" THAES, so I don't think this will happen again. Alternately, I could use SIFT/*ERNS, but that feels unintuitive to me.
Argh! And "call me Sophia" came out "call miso feia". #wordboundaryerrors #rackinfrackin
This is a tricky one. I think I'll have to redefine "miso" as MIS/JO. (JO is my {^o} suffix stroke). And Sophia should probably have an asterisk, though that makes it tough to distinguish from Sofia. So I might just leave it and concentrate on "miso".
"optically pure lens" came out "optically purulence". #wordboundaryerrors
Simple way to fix this is keep "pure lens" as PAOUR/LENS and redefine "purulence" as PUR/LENS. Not sure why it wasn't that way already. I think it was a legacy entry.
"supplied by lingual nerve" came out "supplied bilingual nerve". Argh! I have a bi- prefix; it was a legacy entry. #wordboundaryerrors
All your masterful prefix and suffix definitions won't help you if you don't weed out your conflict-ridden legacy entries! This one came from either my NYCI dictionary or the Sten Ed dictionary. Tsk-tsk.
"They're mossy fibers" came out "Thermosy fibers". Sigh. #wordboundaryerrors
Change Thermos to THERM/OS to use -os suffix stroke. In general try to avoid using briefs for common words like articles, prepositions, and pronouns as word parts, because the chance of a conflict is just too high.
"key efficacy objectives" came out "Kiev case objectives". #wordboundaryerrors
I had both KAOE/EF and KAOE/*EF defined as "Kiev". Delete the first one! It's not theory-appropriate anyway.
"could coexist" came out "cocoa exist" #wordboundaries
Like with "Thermos" above, I shouldn't use KO for both my "could" brief and my "co-" prefix. Usually my "co-" prefix is KOE, but this must have been a misstroke define that bit me later on.
"acyanotic" came out "acai nottic". Yep, I had "cyanotic" and the "a" prefix defined, but "acai" got in there first. #wordboundaries
To be honest, this is a tough one. I could have written "cyanotic" SAON/OT/IK, or just have predefined "acyanotic" so that the problem wouldn't have come up, but I'm cutting myself a little slack on this particular error.
Today "saturated fat was bad" came out "saturated fatwas bad". #boundaryerrors
Inflections of "to be" should never be used in word parts. I should either have written FAT/WA/S or FAT/W*AS, or even FA/TWAS. (Since 'twas is pretty uncommon in modern usage, though I do have it in my dictionary.)
Argh. "cost Coca-Cola" came out "Costco ka cola". #wordboundaryerrors
When brand names collide! I probably should have thrown an asterisk in at least one of these corporations, since they are both proper nouns.
"crazy cat lady" came out "Krazy Kat lady". #wordboundaryerrors
Krazy Kat came up in a History of Comics course. I really should have used an asterisk in that proper noun.
Ha! Funniest boundary error in a while: "big surveillance studies" came out "Big Sur valance studies".
Here too. Especially in proper nouns that are only one syllable long. Nearly all one-syllable words can come up as word parts at some point. That's kind of what syllables are. (':
Stickler Syndrome isn't kicking yourself because "past attendance" came out "pasta tendance". It's a genetic disorder: http://bit.ly/4fPTdj
Another legacy entry! I've written pasta PAFT/A precisely zero times, PAFT/YA 29 times, and PAS/TA 106 times. But of course it had to come up here.
"Broadly correlated" came out "broad liqueurlated". Man, am I glad that was transcription and not CART. How embarrassing. Fixed now.
This is actually a bit of a hole in my current theory. I don't distinguish between the {^ly} suffix and the "li" word part. Boo, hiss. It doesn't come up as often as a lot of other word boundary errors do, but I should still really fix that, and soon. I mostly write "liqueur" LIK/AOUR, but LI/KOR was in there as an alternate stroke.
Tricky boundary error -- "Chris Crosby" came out "criss-crossby".
Easy fix is to redefine KRIS/KROS as KRIS/KR*OS and pray that nobody mentions the short-lived backwards-trouser-wearing '90s rap group Kris Kross. (Or be prepared to fingerspell it!)
Where pharmacology and medieval studies collide: "Fetishistic reliquaries" came out "Fetishist Ikorel wears". Sigh.
Should have kept my medical dictionary turned off during my Medieval studies class! And also should have put an asterisk somewhere in Ikorel, since it is a proper noun.
Worst error so far from tonight's class on Job: "An Israelite" came out "Anise realite".
Probably should start writing "Israel" with an asterisk, since it's a proper noun.
"Per vertebra" came out "pervert bra" #steno #wordboundaryerrors #particularlyunfortunatewordboundaryerrors
Yeah. I got nothing. :'o
Feel free to post samples from your own word boundary rogues gallery, if you like! I promise I won't belittle you for them. No matter how diligent we are, we can never completely avoid every possible word boundary in the universe. We've just got to keep trying to squash them, one word part/suffix overlap at a time.
I recently downloaded my entire Twitter archive and then searched for the hashtag "#wordboundaryerrors". It offered up a treasure trove of them, collected over the last several years. Here are some of the best, with my comments on how I can avoid errors like them in the future.
"more tartar" came out "mortar tar". #wordboundaryerrors
I should probably take MOR/TAR out of my dictionary altogether. Eclipse tells me I've written it MORT/*AR 168 times, but MOR/TAR only once: When someone said "more tartar". #facepalm
"sing Hallelujah" came out "Singha lay lieu ya". #wordboundaryerrors #mmmthaibeer
Two ways to keep this from happening again: Redefine SING/HA as S*ING/HA (with the asterisk denoting a proper noun), or just stick to writing "hallelujah" as HAL/LAOU/YA (already defined in my dictionary that way). I'll probably do both, since it's silly to do "Hallelujah" in four strokes.
Conversely, #stenofail of the day: "salivary gland malignancy" came out "salivary grandma lignancy". Not always smart to define misstrokes!
Take out that GLAND/MA -> "grandma" definition! It might have come up as a misstroke that once, but I probably shouldn't have kept it.
"These cisterns" came out "thesis terns". #steno #wordboundaryerrors
I now write "thesis" THAES, so I don't think this will happen again. Alternately, I could use SIFT/*ERNS, but that feels unintuitive to me.
Argh! And "call me Sophia" came out "call miso feia". #wordboundaryerrors #rackinfrackin
This is a tricky one. I think I'll have to redefine "miso" as MIS/JO. (JO is my {^o} suffix stroke). And Sophia should probably have an asterisk, though that makes it tough to distinguish from Sofia. So I might just leave it and concentrate on "miso".
"optically pure lens" came out "optically purulence". #wordboundaryerrors
Simple way to fix this is keep "pure lens" as PAOUR/LENS and redefine "purulence" as PUR/LENS. Not sure why it wasn't that way already. I think it was a legacy entry.
"supplied by lingual nerve" came out "supplied bilingual nerve". Argh! I have a bi- prefix; it was a legacy entry. #wordboundaryerrors
All your masterful prefix and suffix definitions won't help you if you don't weed out your conflict-ridden legacy entries! This one came from either my NYCI dictionary or the Sten Ed dictionary. Tsk-tsk.
"They're mossy fibers" came out "Thermosy fibers". Sigh. #wordboundaryerrors
Change Thermos to THERM/OS to use -os suffix stroke. In general try to avoid using briefs for common words like articles, prepositions, and pronouns as word parts, because the chance of a conflict is just too high.
"key efficacy objectives" came out "Kiev case objectives". #wordboundaryerrors
I had both KAOE/EF and KAOE/*EF defined as "Kiev". Delete the first one! It's not theory-appropriate anyway.
"could coexist" came out "cocoa exist" #wordboundaries
Like with "Thermos" above, I shouldn't use KO for both my "could" brief and my "co-" prefix. Usually my "co-" prefix is KOE, but this must have been a misstroke define that bit me later on.
"acyanotic" came out "acai nottic". Yep, I had "cyanotic" and the "a" prefix defined, but "acai" got in there first. #wordboundaries
To be honest, this is a tough one. I could have written "cyanotic" SAON/OT/IK, or just have predefined "acyanotic" so that the problem wouldn't have come up, but I'm cutting myself a little slack on this particular error.
Today "saturated fat was bad" came out "saturated fatwas bad". #boundaryerrors
Inflections of "to be" should never be used in word parts. I should either have written FAT/WA/S or FAT/W*AS, or even FA/TWAS. (Since 'twas is pretty uncommon in modern usage, though I do have it in my dictionary.)
Argh. "cost Coca-Cola" came out "Costco ka cola". #wordboundaryerrors
When brand names collide! I probably should have thrown an asterisk in at least one of these corporations, since they are both proper nouns.
"crazy cat lady" came out "Krazy Kat lady". #wordboundaryerrors
Krazy Kat came up in a History of Comics course. I really should have used an asterisk in that proper noun.
Ha! Funniest boundary error in a while: "big surveillance studies" came out "Big Sur valance studies".
Here too. Especially in proper nouns that are only one syllable long. Nearly all one-syllable words can come up as word parts at some point. That's kind of what syllables are. (':
Stickler Syndrome isn't kicking yourself because "past attendance" came out "pasta tendance". It's a genetic disorder: http://bit.ly/4fPTdj
Another legacy entry! I've written pasta PAFT/A precisely zero times, PAFT/YA 29 times, and PAS/TA 106 times. But of course it had to come up here.
"Broadly correlated" came out "broad liqueurlated". Man, am I glad that was transcription and not CART. How embarrassing. Fixed now.
This is actually a bit of a hole in my current theory. I don't distinguish between the {^ly} suffix and the "li" word part. Boo, hiss. It doesn't come up as often as a lot of other word boundary errors do, but I should still really fix that, and soon. I mostly write "liqueur" LIK/AOUR, but LI/KOR was in there as an alternate stroke.
Tricky boundary error -- "Chris Crosby" came out "criss-crossby".
Easy fix is to redefine KRIS/KROS as KRIS/KR*OS and pray that nobody mentions the short-lived backwards-trouser-wearing '90s rap group Kris Kross. (Or be prepared to fingerspell it!)
Where pharmacology and medieval studies collide: "Fetishistic reliquaries" came out "Fetishist Ikorel wears". Sigh.
Should have kept my medical dictionary turned off during my Medieval studies class! And also should have put an asterisk somewhere in Ikorel, since it is a proper noun.
Worst error so far from tonight's class on Job: "An Israelite" came out "Anise realite".
Probably should start writing "Israel" with an asterisk, since it's a proper noun.
"Per vertebra" came out "pervert bra" #steno #wordboundaryerrors #particularlyunfortunatewordboundaryerrors
Yeah. I got nothing. :'o
Feel free to post samples from your own word boundary rogues gallery, if you like! I promise I won't belittle you for them. No matter how diligent we are, we can never completely avoid every possible word boundary in the universe. We've just got to keep trying to squash them, one word part/suffix overlap at a time.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Competition
I'm taking the RMR 260 WPM Q&A again this May. Last time I failed by 11 points, because my everloving nerves took over and made my hands shake. This time I really, really want to get it. I found someone on Facebook who also only has the Q&A left before getting the RMR, who also failed by 11 points last winter. I challenged her to a little competition. First I'll pick one of the five-minute practice tests (actually tests administered in previous years), and give it my best shot. Then I'll transcribe the test verbatim (pausing and rewinding as necessary) to compare my own transcript to. Then I'll do the same with the transcript she sends me. Next round, she'll pick another take, then do the verbatim transcription and grading. The choice of which take to do in the final round will go to whoever is winning after two takes, and the one with the fewest overall errors after all three takes wins the contest. The loser has to find something that can only be purchased in their home city and send it to the winner. I'm hoping this will turn out to be pretty motivating for both of us. I like a little competition to keep things interesting. I'll keep you posted on how it all turns out.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
From the New York Times Classifieds, 1925
Just something fun my partner found while scanning through the New York Times archive. Highlighted portion reads: "Stenographer, 4 years' experience. Refined, accurate, ambitious. $20. G 714 Times Downtown."
That's what I call a bargain!
Friday, March 8, 2013
Survey on CART by CCAC
The Collaborative for Communication Access via Captioning just released the results of their survey on the importance of CART in the lives of people with hearing loss. It's a really good read, and I encourage people especially to look at the testimonials quoted at the bottom of the survey. Some really excellent and eloquent stuff here. A very small sampling:
"It is the single most important thing anyone can do to help aid communication and equally understanding. With both of those things covered everyone benefits and the speaker retains an audience fully."
"I used to stay home rather than pretend to be involved in an event or take a course or seminar. With CART, I can attend, understand, and contribute to a discussion with less fear that I’ve missed a crucial point or even have the topic confused. It gives me more confidence that I’m understanding new information."
"It is the single most important thing anyone can do to help people follow audio communication. Any time it is made available I’ve noticed almost everyone in an audience will make use of it (hearing or deaf), whether they admit to it or not is a different thing."
"I used CART for college. I never realized how much I missed in classes until I started using CART. Now I use it for all training events and classes."
Thanks to the CCAC for conducting the survey. It's so important to listen to the opinions of the people we work for, and really gratifying to learn how dramatic an impact CART can have on a Deaf, deafened, or hard of hearing person's life.
"It is the single most important thing anyone can do to help aid communication and equally understanding. With both of those things covered everyone benefits and the speaker retains an audience fully."
"I used to stay home rather than pretend to be involved in an event or take a course or seminar. With CART, I can attend, understand, and contribute to a discussion with less fear that I’ve missed a crucial point or even have the topic confused. It gives me more confidence that I’m understanding new information."
"It is the single most important thing anyone can do to help people follow audio communication. Any time it is made available I’ve noticed almost everyone in an audience will make use of it (hearing or deaf), whether they admit to it or not is a different thing."
"I used CART for college. I never realized how much I missed in classes until I started using CART. Now I use it for all training events and classes."
Thanks to the CCAC for conducting the survey. It's so important to listen to the opinions of the people we work for, and really gratifying to learn how dramatic an impact CART can have on a Deaf, deafened, or hard of hearing person's life.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
How CART Helped Me Sneak into STEM
I'm terrible at math. I always have been. Despite coming from a family of engineers and teachers (including at least one math teacher, who gave me what turned out to be one of my favorite books as a kid, though unfortunately it didn't rub off all that well), I've never had a talent for it, and when I was younger I had a tendency not to work hard at anything that didn't come naturally. Hint for any small humans who might be reading this: This is a really bad habit to get into. It will come back to bite you in the butt so many times. Repair those small deficiencies when they're small, no matter how much of a grind it might be. You'll thank me later. Anyway, my dislike for arithmetic in elementary school turned into barely passing algebra in middle school turned into failing physics in high school. When I got to college, I had to take four years of math, but fortunately for me it was "Great Books"-style math, where I had to read Euclid and Ptolemy and Lobachevsky and Einstein and talk about them on an abstract level, but never had to take any actual tests on them. Even so, my math grades in college were not particularly great, and I emerged with a B.A. in Liberal Arts plus a pretty deep-seated math phobia. The frustrating thing is that I think math is pretty interesting, even though I have no aptitude to actually do it. And more than that, I absolutely love science, and so much of science is underpinned by math. Right out of college, I briefly enrolled in a post-baccalaureate science program, with the intention of applying to medical school, but the amount of math involved quickly forced me to give up and put that long-held dream on the shelf. I stuck to what I was good at and applied to an MA program in English, which I eventually turned down so that I could go to steno school. It was only after starting work as a CART provider that I realized what a gift I'd been given. Despite my lousy math scores and dreadful number crunching skills, I'd be able to sit in all sorts of math and science classes that people had sweated bullets to test into. I could absorb as much of the material as my brain would let me, and as long as I wrote the words down correctly, it didn't matter if I didn't grok some of the concepts. I wouldn't have to prove my fitness to be there. No tests, no papers, no chance of being called on. I got to be a fly on the wall, getting paid to help my brilliant clients flex their own math and science muscles while I sat back and marveled. Over the years I've been CARTing, I've worked for future economists, architects, pharmacists, doctors, and dentists. Along the way, I've gotten to take in:
Math for Economists
Financial Instruments
International Taxation
Intro to General Relativity
Economics for Urban Planners
Advanced Statistical Methods
Architectural Structures: Steel and Concrete
Plus a ton of gigs that involved anywhere from a drabble to a torrent of math, such as:
Radiology
Epidemiology
Biochemistry
Anesthesiology
Pharmacotherapeutics
Thermal and Statistical Physics
Meetings of Math for America
Meetings of the American Chemical Society
(You can read the complete list, if you're interested, on my Experience Page.)
Even though I don't think I'd be able to recall more than a small fraction of what I've learned in these classes, it's still way more exposure to these subjects than I ever would have been able to get if I'd done it the old fashioned way. Even getting out of the 101 level courses would have been a struggle, but the graduate and professional school material that I've been exposed to would have been stratospherically above my cognitive pay grade. And yet... There I was, sitting in the classes, absorbing all this cool information about the structures and systems that make up our universe. I've even developed sort of a specialty in captioning technical and scientific material. It's my favorite sort of job to take. All for someone who barely managed to learn her times tables. I'll never be a doctor, and I've made my peace with that, but I still get to swim in this stuff every day. Of all the gifts CART has given me, this might be the one I'm most grateful for.
Math for Economists
Financial Instruments
International Taxation
Intro to General Relativity
Economics for Urban Planners
Advanced Statistical Methods
Architectural Structures: Steel and Concrete
Plus a ton of gigs that involved anywhere from a drabble to a torrent of math, such as:
Radiology
Epidemiology
Biochemistry
Anesthesiology
Pharmacotherapeutics
Thermal and Statistical Physics
Meetings of Math for America
Meetings of the American Chemical Society
(You can read the complete list, if you're interested, on my Experience Page.)
Even though I don't think I'd be able to recall more than a small fraction of what I've learned in these classes, it's still way more exposure to these subjects than I ever would have been able to get if I'd done it the old fashioned way. Even getting out of the 101 level courses would have been a struggle, but the graduate and professional school material that I've been exposed to would have been stratospherically above my cognitive pay grade. And yet... There I was, sitting in the classes, absorbing all this cool information about the structures and systems that make up our universe. I've even developed sort of a specialty in captioning technical and scientific material. It's my favorite sort of job to take. All for someone who barely managed to learn her times tables. I'll never be a doctor, and I've made my peace with that, but I still get to swim in this stuff every day. Of all the gifts CART has given me, this might be the one I'm most grateful for.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)