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"History is just people doing things" THE
ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 198......May 2012 There’s been a flurry of reports recently about work by a team of
scientists at the University of Cambridge on development of a “laser unprinter” that removes dark stuff (ink… assuming
it’s not light yellow) from the surface of paper on which it has been
printed, without damaging the paper. The energy of the laser is absorbed
by the darker ink, which vanishes in a poof, while the lighter paper reflects
the light. The notion is warmly embraced by those who worry about carbon
footprints and all that, and might
even prove to be useful somehow. The idea isn’t exactly new, of course, and
this gives us a chance to do some name-dropping in a longish anecdote. Back
about 1966 or 1967, Paul Honore and I one day had
three errands to run on the Stanford campus in addition to checking our
company mailbox at the Stanford Post Office. Somehow, this brought us into
separate contact with three Nobel Prize winners. One
errand was to hunt for a useful book in the medical bookstore. We weren’t
in uniform, and the staff didn’t want outsiders rummaging through the
books, especially since we were forbidden to tell anybody what we were
looking for, so they kept pestering us. Paul finally said “I know how to
solve this, we’ll get some lab coats down at Biology Stores in the
basement of the hospital.” We became lost in the labyrinth down there, and asked
directions of a couple of fellows who were arguing at an intersection.
One told us the way, being rather nasty about it. As we left, Paul said, “Do
you realize that was Joshua Lederberg who yelled at us?” No, I hadn’t
spotted that Nobel Prize winner in biology, but I recognized the other guy
as Barney Oliver, a major figure at HP who was then Deputy Secretary of
Defense or some such. We didn’t request directions from just anybody. Later,
we had an appointment with Robert Hofstadter on some matter I can’t
recall. Unlike Oscar winners, who tend to display the statues prominently, he
didn’t flash at us the Nobel medal he’d received for work in particle
physics. After that, for reasons that escape me, we
called on Arthur Schawlow…who wouldn’t get his Nobel Price for another twenty
years or so, but who was eager to demonstrate to visitors the newfangled
lasers that eventually won the prize for him. As we talked about whatever
business had taken us there, it was hard not to notice a large, gaudy,
plastic toy ray gun on his desk. A
thick cable connected it to something under the desk. As we finished
our business, he asked if we’d like to see something interesting.
Sure. He turned to a big old office typewriter, put a piece of paper in it,
and typed: Laser Eraser Laser Eraser Laser Eraser Then
he picked up the ray gun from the desk, pointed it at the paper, and fired
a few laser shots at what he’d typed. With each shot, a letter or two
disappeared from the text, leaving the paper un-charred. He
talked enthusiastically about how much better this was than typewriter
correction fluid, while we cringed nervously for fear of blinding reflections
from chrome-plated parts on the typewriter. For good measure, he took a
shot at a helium balloon bobbing on the ceiling in a far corner of his
office. The clear outer balloon was unaffected, but the blue Mickey Mouse
balloon inside it popped. (The San Francisco Zoo used to sell these
things. He must have been their best customer, buying Mickey Mouse balloons regularly to entertain visitors.) And
that’s the point, at last, the laser unprinter
has been around for some time, probably more entertainingly demonstrated
by Dr, Schawlow than by anyone since. Oh…we
did buy a couple of lab coats, put them on, put ball point pens in the
pockets, and go back to the medical bookstore, where none of the staff
even gave us a second glance as we searched for what we needed. Those
uniforms made us practically invisible.
NELS MUSES Last
month’s Correspo commented on the
fad of printing all text in capital letters, because that’s all that
more-or-less affordable automatic printers could do in the era when personal
computers were new. John Peers added these comments; “…On the subject of typewriters, etc., one item missed by
many UPPER CASE WRITERS is that people
cannot read all upper case letter words anywhere near as quickly as they can
read lower case letter words. ..comprehension …is even worse. An
example: it is one of those ironies that the freeway electronic highway
emergency signs, typically positioned directly above the freeway near where
accidents/ congestion frequently happen, are all in upper case. Worse,
they are also without the normal letter "envelope".
("Bigger letters must be better!") This makes the reading and
comprehension even slower. The result is that at normal highway speeds,
the time available to successfully read the words is quite
insufficient. Naturally, since it must be important (otherwise
the sign would not be on) drivers slow down to give themselves enough time to
read. This promptly causes the very distraction and/or congestion
and/or accidents the sign is supposedly trying to reduce.” A
client was featured in the National
Geographic. Not surprisingly, this is producing a lot of hits on the company’s website and a modest
flow of queries. One piece of mail was from a company that laminates pages of
printed material to handsome plaques with whatever titles and captions are
appropriate. Their letter said, basically, “we see you’ve made it to the National Geographic, and we assume
you’d like to preserve and display the cover and the article. We can put them
on a nice plaque to hang on your wall for a modest price.” We had been
wondering what to do with the story, and this solved our problem neatly
without further ado. Think of it; these fellows look at the print media to
find articles and pix that the people featured in them are excited about, and
undoubtedly want to preserve. They drop them an email note. Talk about
qualified, interested prospects in a targeted
market! Like shooting fish in a barrel. ITEM
FROM THE PAST This item from 1996 (really, referring to
activities a few years earlier) is prompted by recent
discussion of the female voice used (in most countries) to
respond to spoken questions in the Siri
application for iPhones. ANOTHER SURPRISE IN ROBOTRY Conventional
wisdom drives producers of synthetic speech systems to hone and refine their
products until the speech produced by the hardware sounds really like a human
voice. Some manufacturers have even advertised "...experts know
that human voice quality is essential..." Well, client Rio Grande
Robotics is discovering that it ain't necessarily
so. "Our customers seem to
prefer a distinctly artificial voice to the good simulations of human
voices," says Niki Delgado. It isn't
a matter of clarity, which seems to be satisfactory in both
cases. Rather, the artificial voice seems less deceitful; people like to
know what they're dealing with, and don't like to have the machine pretending
to be something it's not. "People always know when the voice is
artificial," says Niki, "and they'll tolerate a lot more from an unpretentious
mechanical voice than from a slick human simulation." The plain
mechanical voice on the Atlanta airport shuttle trains comes to mind
here...good fun. A commentary
by Brandon Griggs of CNN in October of 2011 quotes experts from here and there to make
the case that female voices are usually preferred in
voice-response applications. (well, not just there; we heard long ago that
female voices are used in emergency warning systems in fighter
aircraft, for example.) Griggs’ piece isn’t exactly a scientific
study of the matter, but an intriguing collection of opinions along
with observations that most GPS navigation systems use female
voices. The final opinion in his list is that the voices are often
deliberately given a synthetic flavor, because “that makes you aware of
how high tech your gadget is.” That contrasts interestingly
with Niki’s long-ago observation on the use of artificial
voices. The Correspo has commented more than once on the “uncanny
valley” problem created by CGI representations of human
beings in movies that are so good that people accept them, but
retain a wholesome uneasiness about them, because
something-is-not-quite-right. The classic example people talk about is The Polar Express, in which the characters were all marginally
creepy. The more recent TinTin avoids most of that
problem, apparently by maintaining a cartoonish quality in the
characters, though characters walking through a marketplace in
the film look so real that you have to think consciously
about their unreality. The same problems apply in spades to animatronic figures, many of which are so good they seem like
real, but demented, possibly dangerous people. The uncanny valley problem clearly concerns commercial producers of
voice-response products, and it isn’t just a matter of male/female. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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