Ashley

On my way home tonight, I remembered something that had to do with speech recognition, which I forgot to bring up in class. I work at a bank, and last Friday someone left a cell phone (I don’t know what kind it was – a Blackberry maybe? It seemed high-tech, anyway!). Well we called the last contact on the phone which happened to be the person’s roommate, and she said she would let him know where his phone was. The next morning when we opened the vault (where we had put the phone the night before for safekeeping with everything else), the phone started beeping. We thought it was a call or a message coming through so didn’t pay attention. But a few minutes later one of my co-workers was on her phone and the phone started beeping again and when she looked at it, it was recording! It was obviously voice-activated and was recording our conversations – it had even recorded some conversations of accounts being opened! Our first thoughts were that someone was casing out the bank, which is a really creepy thought! When my manager got there, however, she did not seem to think it was a big deal. I think it’s because she’s old and does not really know how to use a computer or any sort of new technology. So my question is, can people set cell phones to be voice-activated, or is there another trick to it? Do you have to download some kind of software or is it something that comes automatically programmed? I don’t know, it’s all very strange. Hmmm…

Oblique strategies is a deck of cards that you can look at when you’re in the middle of a problem and do not know how else to go about solving it. I found a neat website that had online oblique strategy cards that you can click through the cards. My favorite one was “repetition is a form of change.” I found this one particularly interesting because it can mean so many different things. For example, if the same sentence is used throughout a story, the sentence is obviously the same each time it is written, but the meaning also changes with each setting in which the sentence is used. And as Dr. C said on the subject tonight, “repetition is a change in changeability.” Another one I found on the site was “emphasize repetitions,” which is pretty much along the same lines as the other one, but it is still interesting to think about, because why would you do that? How does that help you solve the problem? These are some questions that the statements on the cards make you think about, which is great when you are stuck on a problem and trying to look at it in new ways and from all directions.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~rf6t-tyfk/oblique.html

^ Thanks for the new link David! 🙂