AnalogPackrat
Well-known member
Their biggest self-inflicted wound was failing to be honest and unbiased journalists. If it weren't piped into so many US airport terminals even fewer people would be watching.
Why does this feel like its MY fault
- Thread starter ruffrecords
- Start date
Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:
Yesterday I got a spam robo call saying I was eligible for an up to $26,000 tax refund for every w3 employee I had. (I have zero employees).
There is apparently a real government program ERC (employee retention credit), but ...... The IRS does not call you to give you money.
There are apparently a bunch of sleazy middle men trying to earn fees for helping collect some of that helicopter money dropping from the federal government.
[edit- I've started seeing tv ads for this... I guess when the government teat is leaking milk, it attracts scavengers.
I got another attempted robo call this morning... I don't pick up and they usually hang up. If they keep trying I may disconnect my phone set for a couple days
/edit]
JR
There is apparently a real government program ERC (employee retention credit), but ...... The IRS does not call you to give you money.
There are apparently a bunch of sleazy middle men trying to earn fees for helping collect some of that helicopter money dropping from the federal government.
[edit- I've started seeing tv ads for this... I guess when the government teat is leaking milk, it attracts scavengers.
I got another attempted robo call this morning... I don't pick up and they usually hang up. If they keep trying I may disconnect my phone set for a couple days
/edit]
JR
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AnalogPackrat
Well-known member
There are similar "free government money" ads in regular rotation on YouTube between TikTok and Temu ads.
Good points all around. I just this evening stumbled over this thread, and agree with most observations made herein. In my bailiwick, newspapers did themselves in when they created online Internet editions. While it may have been inevitable, that moved most folks online and subscriptions declined thereafter.
I observe a similar sort of trend in retail sales, especially electronics and computer gear. For example, the local Best-Buy store now has limited stock on hand, perhaps one or two of each of the most popular items. The store manager told me there are oodles and oodles of additional products online which can be shipped to my home at no extra cost. I no longer visit the store. (Although, I never shop Best Buy on line, either.)
As for reading actual books, my eyes are fading, so I use multiple scanners once employed in my legal practice to convert actual books to PDF documents, and convert the images to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I then convert the text to audio with Text-to-Speech applications. In this way, I can follow with my eye while I listen to the computer read the text aloud. It is very accurate and I can process a 300 page book completely from image to audio in less than 6 minutes. This is about the time it takes to pull and consume a shot of espresso. I also do this for a friend who is blind, making audio books and magazines he can hear. I can speed read the result by increasing the speed of the audio playback. It is way cool. (Parenthetically, I DO NOT use Adobe applications for any of this.)
So count me as one of those Luddites who still likes hard print books. Besides, I do not trust storing my data in the cloud.
You guys have struck several sympathetic chords in this thread. James
I observe a similar sort of trend in retail sales, especially electronics and computer gear. For example, the local Best-Buy store now has limited stock on hand, perhaps one or two of each of the most popular items. The store manager told me there are oodles and oodles of additional products online which can be shipped to my home at no extra cost. I no longer visit the store. (Although, I never shop Best Buy on line, either.)
As for reading actual books, my eyes are fading, so I use multiple scanners once employed in my legal practice to convert actual books to PDF documents, and convert the images to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I then convert the text to audio with Text-to-Speech applications. In this way, I can follow with my eye while I listen to the computer read the text aloud. It is very accurate and I can process a 300 page book completely from image to audio in less than 6 minutes. This is about the time it takes to pull and consume a shot of espresso. I also do this for a friend who is blind, making audio books and magazines he can hear. I can speed read the result by increasing the speed of the audio playback. It is way cool. (Parenthetically, I DO NOT use Adobe applications for any of this.)
So count me as one of those Luddites who still likes hard print books. Besides, I do not trust storing my data in the cloud.
You guys have struck several sympathetic chords in this thread. James
user 37518
Well-known member
Great post! May I ask how do you scan your books? I've seen people do it with tray scanners, but it involves destroying the book.
I s
I use a variety of scanners.
If I want to keep a book intact, use an inexpensive, yet handy, I.R.I.S. DeskScan 5 Pro (on sale for a mere mere $130 I think - usually $200). I scan two pages at once, and the software automatically removes the image of my fingers holding the pages flat, while keeping the source intact. I used it, for example, to make an audio book of my blind friend's doctoral thesis. He dictated it thirty years ago, but has never read it, himself, because it was not typed in Braile. You can imagine his thrill to finally "read" and review it for the first time, at no cost and keeping the original bound. This type of scanner is really a "document camera" and they typically cost from $150 to $500 depending on size, features, and software. You WANT (need) software that can erase the image of your fingers and flatten the natural curve of the pages as you work through the source. These features increase OCR accuracy and clean up the scanned page image.
If I do not mind bursting the binding, I use a heavy duty Canon DR4010c commercial sheetfed scanner from my office days which pushes something like 40-50 pages per minute (scanning both sides at once) - it is a BEAST which has been a real work horse for nearly 20 years. I don't dare get it serviced ... I believe in the adage: "If you fix something long enough, eventually you will break it."
I retired early because of this software. Consider how could eliminate the secretarial pool simply by using OCR software to re-type any sort of document (contract, lease, pleading, order, will or trust, etc.) and dictate edits and changes in minutes using a speech recognition application. I could produce as much paper working alone as I did with two gals in the typing pool ! (giggle)
Hope this gives you some useful direction. James
I use a variety of scanners.
If I want to keep a book intact, use an inexpensive, yet handy, I.R.I.S. DeskScan 5 Pro (on sale for a mere mere $130 I think - usually $200). I scan two pages at once, and the software automatically removes the image of my fingers holding the pages flat, while keeping the source intact. I used it, for example, to make an audio book of my blind friend's doctoral thesis. He dictated it thirty years ago, but has never read it, himself, because it was not typed in Braile. You can imagine his thrill to finally "read" and review it for the first time, at no cost and keeping the original bound. This type of scanner is really a "document camera" and they typically cost from $150 to $500 depending on size, features, and software. You WANT (need) software that can erase the image of your fingers and flatten the natural curve of the pages as you work through the source. These features increase OCR accuracy and clean up the scanned page image.
If I do not mind bursting the binding, I use a heavy duty Canon DR4010c commercial sheetfed scanner from my office days which pushes something like 40-50 pages per minute (scanning both sides at once) - it is a BEAST which has been a real work horse for nearly 20 years. I don't dare get it serviced ... I believe in the adage: "If you fix something long enough, eventually you will break it."
I retired early because of this software. Consider how could eliminate the secretarial pool simply by using OCR software to re-type any sort of document (contract, lease, pleading, order, will or trust, etc.) and dictate edits and changes in minutes using a speech recognition application. I could produce as much paper working alone as I did with two gals in the typing pool ! (giggle)
Hope this gives you some useful direction. James
AnalogPackrat
Well-known member
The book scanning stuff reminded me of something. When I worked for a small new tech focused division of Xerox in CA back in the mid-90s they had just purchased one of Ray Kurzweil's business ventures, Kurzweil Imaging Systems (based in Taxachussetts).
KIS had developed one of the early OCR algorithms and was starting to do some of the same kind of work we were, namely moving from simple scan->OCR to more robust tracing of page layout including images (think newspapers and magazines) so that the entire document could be sensibly digitized to pdf or to HTML with proper headlines, reintegrated story/paragraph breaks, etc. In the 1990s this was no simple task. Anyway, KIS had a product that was a reader for the blind which integrated a scanner, OCR, and speech synthesizer into one product. That was his application.
KIS had developed one of the early OCR algorithms and was starting to do some of the same kind of work we were, namely moving from simple scan->OCR to more robust tracing of page layout including images (think newspapers and magazines) so that the entire document could be sensibly digitized to pdf or to HTML with proper headlines, reintegrated story/paragraph breaks, etc. In the 1990s this was no simple task. Anyway, KIS had a product that was a reader for the blind which integrated a scanner, OCR, and speech synthesizer into one product. That was his application.
Yup Ray Kurzweil was a famous boy wonder for his reading machine to help the blind.
Later the same boy wonder made a decent synth/keyboard based on higher quality actual sound samples.
Of course he is a futurist with predictions about AI...
JR
Small World Case No 53984
* I was a beta level field tester for Kurzeweil AI speech recognition software starting around 1990, and did that for other companies for 15 years, including IBM, ScanSoft, Nuance, Lernhout&Hauspie, DragonSystems, and Microsoft/
* You did not labor in vain! I used several versions of XEROX TextBridge OCR program with satisfaction. It was one of the first OCR applications to do a decent job maintaining the layout and appearance of the original. Reasonably accurate recognition saved me thousands of dollars in secretarial cost. I was disappointed when XEROX discontinued TextBridge.
Good stuff. James
AnalogPackrat
Well-known member
Ah, yes, ScanSoft was a spin-out from the little division where I worked at Xerox in Palo Alto. I don't recall all of the details, but big Xerox really had trouble figuring out anything that didn't consume paper and toner. Two of the senior members of my little work group, one of whom was my boss, had worked on the Alto and Star systems.
Neat! I still have my NIB shrink-wrapped TextBridge OCR from c.1996. From the core OCR and image processing/analysis to UI there were only about 25-30 people involved in development of that product. The group I was in worked hard on efficiency (processing speed). This was in the days of 50-150MHz single core machines.
I moved on to other work in 1997. If anyone remembers the built-in image viewing utility that was in Windows95 through XP, that was built on the imaging library that my group developed at Xerox. The zoom and rotate speed blew away anything else available at the time.
Always good to hear from a satisfied customer, even 25+ years later. LOL.
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AnalogPackrat
Well-known member
I remember that. It was a much cheaper alternative to the Fairlight CMI or Synclavier. Ray was into all sorts of things.
I worked at a studio when the kurzweil keyboard came out. A $12k bargain at the time. An arranger came in and did a very convincing big band arrangement for a project. I was blown away at the time but realized it was now going to be the music and we were not going to record a horn band. The future had arrived and was let’s say, good enough. All of it was done in the control room while the large studio set empty.
I knew a guy who was involved with the sample recordings for the original Kurzweil keyboard program.
He shared anecdotes about the piano samples using extended LF response to capture sounds other than notes/strings like thumps from keys bottoming when played hard, etc.
JR
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I am starting to gain some insights into my chronic late newspaper delivery problem.
It appears that I am the only WSJ customer in my small town. The newspapers are printed in Baton Rouge and bundled by zipcode. My single paper is bundled into a mixed zip code bundle. The less than full zip code bundles get sorted in Jackson, about 50 miles away.
My speculation is that some postal workers (slackers), instead of sorting all the individual papers for local delivery, they just send the entire mixed bundle to one of the several local post offices. When the local PO gets a mixed bundle they pull out the local mail than send the mixed bundle back up the distribution chain.
This why my papers are often several days late from all the extra handling.
JR
It appears that I am the only WSJ customer in my small town. The newspapers are printed in Baton Rouge and bundled by zipcode. My single paper is bundled into a mixed zip code bundle. The less than full zip code bundles get sorted in Jackson, about 50 miles away.
My speculation is that some postal workers (slackers), instead of sorting all the individual papers for local delivery, they just send the entire mixed bundle to one of the several local post offices. When the local PO gets a mixed bundle they pull out the local mail than send the mixed bundle back up the distribution chain.
This why my papers are often several days late from all the extra handling.
JR
Postal service is less than stellar everywhere.
Our post succeeded in losing 60.000 magazines once. The entire run of that monthly magazine. They were never found again. Two truckloads gone up in air.
When the post constructed a new distribution center in Antwerp, a 5 billion € project, the sorting machine they ordered was too tall for the building. This was never corrected. The building remained empty for many years. Now it has been converted into the new police station. Again, costing a bundle.
On one of the last projects I did, if personnel was sick, they needed to get their doctor's attestation in in 24 hours, but were allowed to send it by mail. Snail mail usually takes over a week. Go figure.
When I send a packet, I use the post's website to calculate the amount I need to pay and then take it to the post office. That calculation never seems to be correct. It's always a little less or a little more.
We have a separate distribution of papers and magazines here (it includes distribution to press stores), operating under the post office's supervision. That company can only produce stats for sold/not sold six full months after the first appearance. That makes it very hard to launch a new paper or magazine, since you cannot adjust the number you need to print to follow sales. After six months, unsold paper is returned to the publisher, which produces a mountain of paper to recycle. Unless sales were very good, the publisher needs to stock that mountain as paper recycling companies can't take that pile immediately. This isn't a problem for existing publications, as they already know the numbers and already have recycling contracts. It renders the launch of a new, specialised small run magazine impossible.
Yet, it used to be worse...
Our post succeeded in losing 60.000 magazines once. The entire run of that monthly magazine. They were never found again. Two truckloads gone up in air.
When the post constructed a new distribution center in Antwerp, a 5 billion € project, the sorting machine they ordered was too tall for the building. This was never corrected. The building remained empty for many years. Now it has been converted into the new police station. Again, costing a bundle.
On one of the last projects I did, if personnel was sick, they needed to get their doctor's attestation in in 24 hours, but were allowed to send it by mail. Snail mail usually takes over a week. Go figure.
When I send a packet, I use the post's website to calculate the amount I need to pay and then take it to the post office. That calculation never seems to be correct. It's always a little less or a little more.
We have a separate distribution of papers and magazines here (it includes distribution to press stores), operating under the post office's supervision. That company can only produce stats for sold/not sold six full months after the first appearance. That makes it very hard to launch a new paper or magazine, since you cannot adjust the number you need to print to follow sales. After six months, unsold paper is returned to the publisher, which produces a mountain of paper to recycle. Unless sales were very good, the publisher needs to stock that mountain as paper recycling companies can't take that pile immediately. This isn't a problem for existing publications, as they already know the numbers and already have recycling contracts. It renders the launch of a new, specialised small run magazine impossible.
Yet, it used to be worse...
I am still working on my late daily newspaper delivery problem. FWIW today's paper arrived on time.
===
I have tracked the problem to the sorting center in Jackson about 60 miles away. My first thought as a business man is to use economic incentives/disincentives to improve individual worker accuracy. Apparently the USPS scans everything even the misrouted mail items when they get returned upstream for resorting. My local postmaster shared that she gets as many as 50 misrouted items daily.
If that sorting hub got charged back for every piece misrouted they might be motivated to improve. BUT I have little expectation that I could ever get USPS management to listen to me (kind of like here). Doing some research to see who in congress is responsible for USPS oversight, I read about an ongoing program within the USPS to consolidate mail delivery into fewer super sorting centers. Suggesting that my local PO will probably go away, and Jackson will get turned into a super sorting center. If they modernize and convert to using machine sorting that may fix my spurious delivery issues just maybe not in my lifetime.
JR
It appears you are something of a dreamer, Old Man. Who would you charge? Considering the Postal Service is not like a real business, and operates under unique economic ground rules, such fiscal incentives would ultimately prove ineffective. The whole outfit is subsidized and lacks a typical revenue stream or profit margin, insulating the whole enterprise from normal fiscal constraints and accountability. Postal workers have a union, so nobody can be fired and or personally charged for any errors. The paperwork and grievance hearings will take years to process. And, Management is as insulated from personal responsibility as the bargaining unit by multiple layers of Civil Service rules and regulations. (I am NOT knocking anyone or anything, just stating facts - I cut my professional teeth in labor relations representing both unions and management in the public sector.)
Um ... Not likely, as that would be a good idea and cost substantial, folding money.
In any case, the proposal would fail for lapse of time, as it would consume YEARS, if not DECADES to complete all of the required feasibility and environmental impact studies, and move the Legislature to allocate the required funds, which will be inherently inadequate because inflation will surely drive the cost of the project several times higher than the original proposal by the time it gets out of Committee and reaches the Floor of the House of Representatives, also assuming the politicians will shut up long enough to vote on the matter. (And it also assumes Murphy stays away ...)
Nah ... it would never happen in our lifetimes - especially if it is a good idea. James
(Disclaimer - Ahem ... Nothing serious going on here - I do NOT intend to start a political range war over any thing, just poke a little fun along the way!) JHR
I bet you do something as simple as track the number of mistakes a work area makes over time, they might be motivated to do better.
An unwritten rule about business management is that things you measure tend to get better just from paying attention.
maybe non monetary positive/negative feedback.... or maybe I am dreaming?The whole outfit is subsidized and lacks a typical revenue stream or profit margin, insulating the whole enterprise from normal fiscal constraints and accountability. Postal workers have a union, so nobody can be fired and or personally charged for any errors. The paperwork and grievance hearings will take years to process. And, Management is as insulated from personal responsibility as the bargaining unit by multiple layers of Civil Service rules and regulations. (I am NOT knocking anyone or anything, just stating facts - I cut my professional teeth in labor relations representing both unions and management in the public sector.)
The USPS is already undergoing a massive consolidation trying to become more competitive for package delivery. Their "cash cow" monopoly on first class mail has already become moot....Um ... Not likely, as that would be a good idea and cost substantial, folding money.
In any case, the proposal would fail for lapse of time, as it would consume YEARS, if not DECADES to complete all of the required feasibility and environmental impact studies, and move the Legislature to allocate the required funds, which will be inherently inadequate because inflation will surely drive the cost of the project several times higher than the original proposal by the time it gets out of Committee and reaches the Floor of the House of Representatives, also assuming the politicians will shut up long enough to vote on the matter. (And it also assumes Murphy stays away ...)
Nah ... it would never happen in our lifetimes - especially if it is a good idea. James
I realize the odds against getting the USPS to change even a little. I haven't even tried that. I did look at who in congress is doing oversight (somebody from MI) and they are debating how many $Bs to spend on new super sorting centers.
JR
