Reply by Richard Owlett●September 22, 20042004-09-22
Rick Lyons wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:32:36 -0400, Jim Thomas <jthomas@bittware.com>
> wrote:
>
> (snipped)
>
> Hi Jim,
> that was a fun post.
>
> There's a radio commercial here in northern California for some sort
> of mortgage company. The company name is Vitech, or Bitech, or
> Ditech. I can't tell.
>
> The commercial ends with, "That's the Vitech with a "V", or it
> could be "That's the Bitech with a "B", or it
> could be "That's the Ditech with a "D". Those knuckled-headed
> adverticisers don't know what they're doing!!
>
> Ha ha,
>
> [-Rick-]
>
It's a Dog Ditech. Arkansas Ozark hillbillies must have better
enunciation than the left coast ( Don't hear that ad, but another ad
nauseam )
The loan ad that gets me is Wells Fargo Home Mortgage advertising their
*interest only* home loan.
Tag line is that they want you as customer for life.
They also claim their mortgages have a shorter term than competitor.
The first is problem of slogan attached to ad without thinking.
Second is actually a punctuation error. But if you are just listening,
you just go "WHAT?!!! ,/
Reply by Rick Lyons●September 22, 20042004-09-22
On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:32:36 -0400, Jim Thomas <jthomas@bittware.com>
wrote:
(snipped)
Hi Jim,
that was a fun post.
There's a radio commercial here in northern California for some sort
of mortgage company. The company name is Vitech, or Bitech, or
Ditech. I can't tell.
The commercial ends with, "That's the Vitech with a "V", or it
could be "That's the Bitech with a "B", or it
could be "That's the Ditech with a "D". Those knuckled-headed
adverticisers don't know what they're doing!!
Ha ha,
[-Rick-]
Reply by Rick Lyons●September 22, 20042004-09-22
On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 15:38:18 -0500, Richard Owlett
<rowlett@atlascomm.net> wrote:
(snipped)
>
>Downloaded Chapter 22. Sub headings relevant to my overall 'problem'.
>Why do i not think my yard will get attention this weekend.]
>
Ha ha. Don't worry.
You can mow the yard next weekend.
If your wife nags you, just tell her that
you're making significant technological
"break-throughs" and can't be bothered
with lawn-mowing right now.
Tell her that "speech processing"
is far far far more important than the
stinkin' grass.
Good Luck,
[-Rick-]
Reply by Richard Owlett●September 21, 20042004-09-21
Martin Blume wrote:
> "Richard Owlett" schrieb
>
>>As "Nyquist" is to "sample rate"
>> "????" is to "sample period/duration/width/?" ?
>
>
> As "sample rate" is "1 / (sample period)"
> "sample period" is to "1/Nyquist"
>
Well, "YES" and "NO" ;)
This and post which mentioned connection between "sample duration (poor
word)" and "frequency resolution" which in a sense I "knew" but has yet
to become intuitive.
I think the responses not only show me how poorly stated my question
was. But give me hints on how to restate.
I'll rethink and repost, probably under a different subject line.
> This may be answer to your question, but not of much help.
>
> I think you are mixing up two domains here: the one of
> strict mathematics and signal processing and the other one
> - much fuzzier - about the human perception of hearing and
> the generation of speech. While human hearing is obviously
> based on the same mathematics and physics of acoustics, there
> are many tricks that evolution has come up with.
Two domains -- quite probably ( though not those mentioned ;)
More like confusing to basis sets that are not related although both may
have a vector with same units of measure.
Downloaded Chapter 22. Sub headings relevant to my overall 'problem'.
Why do i not think my yard will get attention this weekend.]
>
> HTH
> Martin
>
>
>
Reply by Jon Harris●September 21, 20042004-09-21
"Jim Thomas" <jthomas@bittware.com> wrote in message
news:10l0qlrqjnn7h4b@corp.supernews.com...
> Eric Jacobsen wrote:
> > I think you cheated on V and Z, though.
> >
>
> Yup. Suggestions are welcome.
>
> V as in vee
> Z as in zee (or zed)
Z as in zwieback?
Reply by Jim Thomas●September 21, 20042004-09-21
Jim Thomas wrote:
> O as in ofal
Oops! should have been "offal" which is pronounced pretty much the same way as
"awful."
--
Jim Thomas Principal Applications Engineer Bittware, Inc
jthomas@bittware.com http://www.bittware.com (603) 226-0404 x536
Nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse. - Calvin
Reply by Jim Thomas●September 21, 20042004-09-21
Eric Jacobsen wrote:
> I think you cheated on V and Z, though.
>
Yup. Suggestions are welcome.
V as in vee
Z as in zee (or zed)
Any help with R and U would also be appreciated, as this is an incomplete work.
BTW, when one of the old Navy guys in our group sent the military phonetic
alpahbet to the operator, she flew off the handle. He was blackballed, and
could no longer be paged. I wish *I* had done that instead of him, because
paging was WAY overused. Most of the time when I'd answer a page, it would turn
out to be for "Kim Thomas" rather than "Jim Thomas."
I guess over-paging eventually got to the execs too, because they made the rule
that no one could be paged unless it was an "emergency." We got around that by
devising a code. To page someone, all we had to do was tell the operator that
someone left his lights on, describe the pagee's car, and give his
initials+extension-to-dial as the plate number.
We used it exactly once to try it out (and it worked). But we never needed to
page one another, so the no-paging-except-in-an-emergency rule was actually
quite nice.
--
Jim Thomas Principal Applications Engineer Bittware, Inc
jthomas@bittware.com http://www.bittware.com (603) 226-0404 x536
Nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse. - Calvin
Reply by Jon Harris●September 21, 20042004-09-21
"Rick Lyons" <r.lyons@_BOGUS_ieee.org> wrote in message
news:414ffd9c.470654359@news.sf.sbcglobal.net...
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:30:42 -0700, "Jon Harris"
> <goldentully@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >"Rick Lyons" <r.lyons@_BOGUS_ieee.org> wrote in message
> >news:414ed4b6.394648093@news.sf.sbcglobal.net...
> >> On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 14:53:26 -0500, Richard Owlett
> >> <rowlett@atlascomm.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Back to sampling human speech: As it turns out,
> >> for good fidelity a human voice signal should
> >> have a wider bandwidth than 4 kHz. But to reduce the
> >> cost of telephone systems (so they can process as many
> >> simultaneous speech signals as possible) early
> >> telephone designers realized that you could limit a
> >> human speech signal to a bandwidth as low as
> >> (roughly) 4 kHz and people (their brains) could
> >> still understand the speech signal.
> >
> >Right. On the phone, it is generally quite easy to understand normal
> >conversation speech even with the limited frequency response. However, if
> >someone tries to read a string of random letters, it is quite a bit more
> >difficult to understand them on the other end. Losing those high frequencies
> >makes consonants difficult to differentiate. The brain normally does a good
job
> >of compensating for the loss of high frequencies by using context clues. But
> >since very few context clues exist with a string of random letters, it
becomes
> >difficult to understand.
> >
> >So saying that a 4 kHz bandwidth is adequate for speech is a bit misleading.
> >Consonant sounds have some frequency content up to close to 20kHz, though
there
> >is limited benefit to increasing to anything more than 10kHz IMO.
>
> Yes yes. You're right! I hadn't thought
> about the consonants.
>
> That's why, over the phone to say "FFT",
> we'd say "foxtrot" "foxtrot" "tango".
Exactly! The military phonetic alphabet is designed to minimize ambiguity with
a poor quality communication link (unlike the fun ones we've been posting here).
Reply by Jon Harris●September 21, 20042004-09-21
One time, I overhead someone spelling something over the phone saying "C as at
cat, M as in mat, and B as in bat". I got a good chuckle out of that, as did
they when I explained how the phonetics chosen didn't really help much! :-)
"Eric Jacobsen" <eric.jacobsen@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:415043c5.502019890@news.west.cox.net...
> Cute. I've done similar things, and I like that you overloaded the
> "new" and "eye" sounds, which completely defeats the purpose of a
> phonetic alphabet. ;)
>
> Overloading similar sounds works, too, like B = boy and T = toy. A
> low SNR connection creates ambiguities. So I used to work on rhyming
> phonetic alphabets that were similarly useless.
Reply by Eric Jacobsen●September 21, 20042004-09-21
Cute. I've done similar things, and I like that you overloaded the
"new" and "eye" sounds, which completely defeats the purpose of a
phonetic alphabet. ;)
Overloading similar sounds works, too, like B = boy and T = toy. A
low SNR connection creates ambiguities. So I used to work on rhyming
phonetic alphabets that were similarly useless.
I think you cheated on V and Z, though.
On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:32:36 -0400, Jim Thomas <jthomas@bittware.com>
wrote:
>Rick Lyons wrote:
>> That's why, over the phone to say "FFT",
>> we'd say "foxtrot" "foxtrot" "tango".
>>
>
>When I was at Raytheon, we had an operator/receptionist who made up her own
>phonetic alphabet. She used it to announce license plate numbers when a driver
>forgot to turn off the headlights.
>
>She generally made up her phonetic alphabet on the spot as needed. My favorite
>was "F as in Fun. L as in Love. And N as in... NEVER!" She sounded a lot like
>Aretha Franklin in the Blues Brothers.
>
>One day she paged a license plate by saying "Y as in You." That threw everyone
>for a loop, because we all heard it as "Y as in U."
>
>She inspired my coworkers and I to formualate a phonetic alphabet whose purpose
>was to obfuscate rather than clarify. We favored the names of letters,
>homophones that start with different letters (gnu, knew, new), names that didn't
>add information (T as in tea), or words that sound like they start with a
>different letter than they really do.
>
>A as in aye
>B as in bdellium
>C as in cue
>D as in Djibouti
>E as in eye
>F as in Fun (a nod to our operator)
>G as in gnu
>H as in hour
>I as in inn
>J as in jalapeno
>K as in knew
>L as in llama
>M as in Mneumonic
>N as in new
>O as in ofal
>P as in pea
>Q as in Quay
>R as in ... never found a good one for R
>S as in sea
>T as in tea
>U as in ... oops. forgot that one
>V as in vee
>W as in why
>Y as in you
>Z as in zee (or zed)
>
>--
>Jim Thomas Principal Applications Engineer Bittware, Inc
>jthomas@bittware.com http://www.bittware.com (603) 226-0404 x536
>Nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse. - Calvin
Eric Jacobsen
Minister of Algorithms, Intel Corp.
My opinions may not be Intel's opinions.
http://www.ericjacobsen.org