The Bill of Rights: The First Ten Amendments to the constitution of the United States printed on sturdy, pocket-sized, pieces of metal.

The next time you travel by air, take the Bill of Rights – Security Edition along with you. When asked to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in the plastic bin.

You need to get used to offering up the bill of rights for inspection and government workers enforcing the USAPATRIOT ACT need to get used to deciding if you’ll be allowed to keep the Bill of Rights with you when you travel.

Link. Thanks, Penn Jillette (I cannot remember which podcast exactly).

One of the main problems with attempting to freely transcribe speech is that a lot of words sound like a lot of other words (some words even sound exactly the same — brake vs. break), so even if you have a clear idea of the sounds (or phonemes), it can be difficult to determine the word. What we need is a common sense database. But first, onto existing real world speech recognition.

Existing Real-world Approaches

A word network based system is only designed to recognise a distinct number — generally quite small — of types of phrases. As an example, Voice Commander, a pocket pc application can only recognise these commands:

• Call contact at home/work/mobile
• Show contact
• Digit Dial (which then only recognises digits)
• Start application
• What can I say (which gives this list)
• Goodbye

By limiting the choices the recognition network can make it greatly reduces the effort involved in deciding what each word was.

The other solution to speech recognition, generally employed in automated telephone systems, is keyword spotting. A typical keyword spotting session will start with the automated system prompting you with something like “Please state your problem.” (We’ll assume were in computer technical support here), and the keyword spotting system will attempt to find any predefined keywords in your reply. As an example, if you then said “I am having problems with my Windows machine resetting” it might have spotted Windows and resetting and decided to transfer you to the software support area.

Common Sense

As mentioned earlier, one of the big problems with automatic speech transcription is deciding whether the user said “put the eggs in the basket” or “put the eggs in the casket”. An even harder example might be “put the key in the lock” vs “put the key in the loch”. To decide what was said the automatic system needs to have some idea of what makes sense.

To this end, and as reported in this story in Technology Research News, researchers at MIT have developed the Open Mind Common Sense database. This database is basically just a big list of ‘facts’ in sentence form that have been submitted by users on the web (hence the quotes around ‘facts’). Anybody who registeres can submit their own facts by answering various questions, and can also query the database about facts as well. Additionally the data is available for download as a zip file for research purposes (although it appears to be a bit out of date).

Anyways, lets say we needed to decide on “put the eggs in the basket” vs “.. casket”. A query for “egg basket” gives 9 examples (like “one type of basket holds easter eggs) but a query for “egg casket” doesn’t return anything. So, automated system chooses basket as the word.

But, even if you don’t care about speech recognition it is just fun to query the database and come up with lots of useful facts like You can type on a computer keyboard, You can use a computer in a ranch house. and Computers are used to use up desk space. Have fun!

Lazyweb intro

In my previous post, I wanted to know if anyone out there can help me with a little unix problem. However because I am the only regular reader of my blog, I don’t really expect to get an answer just by putting it up here.

Enter the lazyweb. The idea behind lazyweb is that someone on the internets has the solution to your problem, you just need to find them. A good primer by Clay Shirky is here.

The problem (with Blogger)

Anyway the problem as I see it is that lazyweb.org is implemented using trackbacks, which are not as popular as they used to be, due to spam and other fun gunk. Even worse, Blogger doesn’t ping trackbacks anyway, so I cannot get my lazyweb request up on lazyweb.org.

The solution

The solution is to ping the trackback url manually. So I just had to work out how to do that. So I did: Simpletracks, by Adam Kalsey is a simple web form that allows you to manual ping trackback urls. For example, to post your problem on lazyweb.org put http://www.lazyweb.org/lazywebtb.cgi in the Trackback URL field, and fill out the rest of the fields based on your lazyweb request. Hit Send Ping, and wait. Run on over to lazyweb.org and your request should be up there. Now all you have to do is wait (and wait…).

Option 1: Counting Hard Links

find -type d -links 2

Why I don’t like it: It won’t work if there are any hard links (other than . and ..) to any of the folders.

Option 2: Post-processing using awk

find -type d | awk 'NR == 1 {prev = $0}
    index($0, prev) != 1 { print prev }
    { prev = $0 }
    END { print $prev }'

Why I don’t like it: It’s fugly and long.

Lazyweb, can you help? Or should I just stop being fussy?

UPDATE: Option 1 it is. Because:

1. I don’t have any other hard links to those folders, and
2. I couldn’t make hard links even if I wanted to (see this comment)