Speakwrite technology today

The novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was written in 1948 by a then very ill George Orwell. The novel has given us “Big Brother”, “Room 101”, “thoughtcrime”, and other frequently quoted names and ideas. One that hasn’t caught on is the speakwrite machine that Winston Smith and others use to enter text rather than typing. Although software that understands human speech is available, there seems a reluctance to use it. Nuance, the people who produce Dragon NaturallySpeaking, have recently addressed some of these ‘myths’.

The first myth they address is people saying: “I don’t like talking to myself”. Their response is to suggest that when voicemail was introduced, people used to comment that they disliked using the system. This was reflected in the brief messages they left. As they got more familiar with voicemail and more relaxed using it, they accepted it as a useful and natural extension to the phone service. This pattern of acceptance was also reflected with the emergence of mobile phones. In the early days, when used in a public or confined space like a train, the mobile user often spoke quietly and terminated the call promptly. Today, with the ubiquity of the mobile phone, users are more relaxed, and often chat at length – sometimes using a Bluetooth headset – with their conversation forming a natural part of our environment and surroundings. Similarly, with desktop speech, you’re not talking to yourself; you’re writing a report, story, invoice, or inventory list, booking a table, dictating a memo or a text. In short, you’re getting on with your daily life using the most natural interface available – your voice!

The second myth they address is: “Speech recognition doesn’t work with my accent”. They answer that by saying that regions are often distinguished by their local accents as much as by their geography. To allow for that, speech recognition is engineered to understand speech even delivered with a heavy regional accent. Desktop speech recognition offers users the option to select the accent type that most accurately matches their own to ensure consistent transcription accuracy when a user is speaking fluidly. Speech solutions from Nuance recognise and understand regional accents and its applications can be optimised for a particular region to improve their accuracy. It programmes its solutions to identify multiple pronunciations of certain words to improve understanding – for example, the Irish accent sometimes pronounces the word “three” as “tree”. Nuance currently recognises 52 different pronunciations of the word “Heathrow” for British Airways to cater for those whose first language isn’t English. Nuance also takes into account that languages and the meanings of words develop over time – while the word “cool” refers to a temperature, it is also a synonym for “yes” – the solutions need to be updated to accommodate the changes. This means the power of desktop speech recognition can be enjoyed across the country, both now and in the future.

Their third myth is from people saying: “I don’t feel comfortable with a headset on”. Nuance suggests that no-one likes to feel like they’re trapped at their desk, whether at home or work. Aesthetically, some people associate cables with clutter, a blight in an otherwise tidy environment. That’s why Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Dragon Dictate for Mac are available with a wireless headset. This helps users unleash their creativity because they can wander around the office, home, or garden and lose no time capturing the creative thoughts that have been encouraged by their mobility. Not being tethered to the PC also means that anyone who suffers discomfort from sitting too long, can stand or move around and exercise without interrupting what they were doing, or losing their chain of thought or ideas. To extend this convenience and flexibility further still, they even provide the option to use your iPhone or Android-based phone as an input device to Dragon.

The fourth myth is one about taking too long to correct. Nuance proudly tells us that Dragon has accuracy rates of up to 99%, which many first time users achieve close to after a brief training process. The longer you use Dragon, the more accurate it becomes, by learning how you speak and optimising its recognition to match your pronunciation. Therefore, you won’t be correcting as many errors compared to when typing. Simple commands like ‘scratch that’ or ‘forget that’, or correct a specified text, makes editing quick and easy for the few times you’ll need it. Furthermore, Dragon will also read a document out loud, to help you further ensure it reads just as you intended.

And the final myth they try to dispel is from people who say: “I tried it a long time ago and I don’t think I need it today”. Nuance responds to this by suggesting that how we live and work has changed, so there’s a greater need for the speed and convenience delivered by speech recognition. Whether multitasking at work or at home, we’re all trying to cram in more of the things we need to do. Dragon frees you up to do these and the things you want to do. It gives students more time to study and research because it takes away the erroneous task of writing lengthy pieces of study or coursework. Busy parents can create essential to-do or shopping lists quickly, leaving them with more family time. For senior users, it opens up a door to all the information, entertainment, and communication capabilities of the Internet-connected PC, without reliance on the keyboard. In the modern competitive workplace, where speed and information exchange are essential, it gives users a powerful way to stay ahead!

I’m not suggesting that you rush out and buy Nuance products for one moment – but we’re getting used to automated telephone systems that recognize what we’re saying, so it might be interesting to revisit using voice to input data to a computer, whether that’s just jotting down some notes as you think of them or writing a full-blown report.

Maybe George Orwell’s speakwrite machine will become more of a reality in 2014.

Looking forward to IOD 2013

This year’s Information On Demand conference takes place on November 3-7 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Last year they said “Think Big”. This year it’s “Think Big. Win Big” – with the obvious theme of how Big Data and Analytics is changing the world.

This year, you can build yourself an agenda online by choosing from Business Analytics, Business Leadership, Business partner Summit, Conference General Sessions, Expo Theater, Enterprise Content Management, and Information Management. Let’s suppose you chose Information Management, then you could choose from Data Warehousing and Analytics, Database Servers and Tools, Emerging Big Data Technologies, Information Integration and Governance, and Information Solution Architecture. And just suppose you picked Information Integration and Governance, you could then pick from Data Integration and Quality, Data Lifecycle Management, Data Quality Management, Data Security and Privacy, Information Governance, and Master Data Management. Once you click on the search button, a number of sessions meeting your criteria are displayed.

In fact, you can also find a session by searching by Topic, by Level (Advanced, Intermediate, and Introductory), by Audience, by Keyword, by Activity Type, or by Date/Time. There are also roadmaps. A roadmap is a series of sessions focused on a particular area or topic of interest. There are Roadmap links in the Session Preview Tool so you can see a list of available roadmaps. By clicking on a roadmap, you can see a list of recommended sessions. There are three types of roadmap – Topic roadmaps, Role roadmaps, and Product roadmaps. This makes it easy to maximize the information you can get from your time at IOD.

There are a number of forums to help attendees to get the most important information they need for their business. This year’s forums are Business Analytics, Enterprise Content Management, Information Management, and Business Leadership. My own choice would most likely take me to the Information Management forum, which contains Emerging Big Data Technologies, Database Servers and Tools, Data Warehousing and Analytics, Information Integration and Governance, and Information Solution Architecture. I guess we’re all interested in Big Data at the moment and how we can maximize the benefits of using it with the business-as-usual work of the mainframe. The Database Servers and Tools session includes offerings such as DB2 with BLU Acceleration, DB2 11 for z/OS, IMS 13, DB2 Analytics Accelerator 4, Informix 12.1 and more. I chair the Virtual IMS user group, so this is close to home for me.

Each day (Monday to Wednesday) starts with a general session hosted by Jake Porway. There are keynote speakers for the four forum groups. An Expo (which opens on the Sunday night) boasting the IBM Subscription and Support Hub, Client Reference Lounges for Business Analytics and Information Management, ECM Client Connections Lounge, Demo Rooms and Lounges, Presentation Theaters, a Take 5 Lounge, and a Business Partner Café. There are over 350 organizations exhibiting, and each day there are drop-in labs, hands-on labs, elective sessions, and birds of a feather lunches

And don’t forget the IODHub (http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/IOD/2013). Here you can get the latest updates by forum, tune into the IOD buzz around the Web, and find links to online resources. There are also links to blogs, videos, and RSS feeds.

There’s even an infographic from Tara Dunn, Social Business Manager, showing the top five reasons to attend IOD 2013. You can find that at http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/IOD/2013/blog/infographic-top-five-reasons-attend-information-demand-2013.

All-in-all, I’m definitely looking forward to Information On Demand 2013.

Guide Share Europe annual conference 2013

The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference is taking place on 5-6 November at its regular home in Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.

Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacenter, EMC2, Attachmate Suse, PKWARE, Blenheim Software International Ltd, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Compuware, IntelliMagic, Optica, Oracle, RSM Partners, and Sett. And there will be over 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.

There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, zLinux, Storage Management, TWS (Tivoli Workload Automation), Automation & Monitoring, New Technologies, 101, Application Development, MQ, Workshop: IBM z/OS Explorer, UKCMG, and Workshop: Linux Installation.

There are also keynotes from Tesco’s Tomas Kadlec talking about “Technology the retailers battlefield - z series reports for duty!”, Dr Herbert Daly (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire) talking about “Re-framing the Mainframe: New Generations and Regenerations on System z”, and Trident Service’s Bob Rogers talking about “A Perspective on System z Capacity Delivery - Past and Future”.

At this year’s conference there will be well over 160 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology – more than last year. This year, there will be 17 streams, many with 11 sessions, plus three keynotes.

There is still time to register, and the organizers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.

The popular 101 sessions give newcomers and those unfamiliar with parts of the mainframe infrastructure a basic understanding of that mainframe technology and how it works.

You can find out more details about the conference at http://tyc.gse.org.uk/.

If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook has been the de facto reference work for IT professionals working with z/OS (and its forerunner) systems since 2005. The Yearbook includes an annual user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section. Each year, the Yearbook is downloaded by around 20,000 mainframe professionals. The current issue is still available at www.arcati.com/newyearbook13.

Very shortly, many mainframe professionals will receive an e-mail telling them that Mark Lillycrop and I have started work on the 2014 edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. If you don’t hear from us, then e-mail arcati@itech-ed.com and I will add you to our mailing list.

As in previous years, we’re inviting mainframe professionals to complete the annual user survey, which will shortly be up and running at www.arcati.com/usersurvey14. The more users who complete the survey, the more accurate and therefore useful the survey report will be. All respondents before Friday 6 December will receive a free PDF copy of the survey results on publication. The identity and company information of all respondents is treated in confidence and will never be divulged to third parties. And any comments made by respondents will be anonymized before publication. If you go to user group meetings, IOD, GSE Europe, etc, or just hang out with mainframers from other sites, please pass on the word about this survey. We’re hoping that this year’s user survey will be the most comprehensive survey ever. Current estimates suggest that there are somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 mainframes in use worldwide.

Anyone reading this who works for a vendor, consultant, or service provider, can ensure their company gets a free entry in the vendor directory section by completing the form, which will be at www.arcati.com/vendorentry. This form can also be used to amend last year’s entry.

Also, as in previous years, there is an opportunity for organizations to sponsor the Yearbook or take out a half-page advertisement. Half-page adverts (5.5in x 8.5in max landscape) cost $810 (UK£500). Sponsors get a full-page advert (11in x 8.5in) in the Yearbook; inclusion of a corporate paper in the Mainframe Strategy section of the Yearbook; a logo/link on the Yearbook download page on the Arcati Web site; and a brief text ad in the Yearbook publicity e-mails sent to users. All this for just $2300 (UK£1400).

To put that cost into perspective: for every dollar you spend on an advert, you reach around 25 mainframe professionals.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014 will be freely available for download early in January next year.

BMC Software’s mainframe user survey

BMC Software, which recently lost a $13 million tax dispute with the US Internal Revenue Service, and which has recently ended its privatization process, has just published the results of its mainframe user survey.

On 25 September, BMC Software released the findings of its 8th Annual Worldwide Survey of Mainframe Users, which revealed that even though Cloud technology is on the march, a majority of companies are planted firmly on the ground with the mainframe.

The survey of nearly 1,300 mainframe users found that that mainframe technology will continue to play a critical role in delivering crucial computing power and take on an increasingly important role in today’s enterprise IT environments. So, that’s got to be good news and the kind of thing that mainframe users like to hear.

Other highlights were:

• 93 percent of respondents consider the mainframe to be a long-term business solution, although just half of all respondents thought it will attract new workloads.
• 85 percent said that keeping IT costs down is their top priority, which is an increase from 69 percent in 2012.
• 76 percent of large shops expect MIPS capacity to grow as they modernize and add applications to address business needs. BMC suggests that this highlights the need for software that exploits specialty engines. I wonder whether they had any products in mind!
• Perhaps not surprisingly, 75 percent of respondents are concerned about the shortage of skilled mainframe staff. Again, BMC concludes that this makes the need for automated, self-learning software greater than ever. If only there were products out there that could do that!
• 46 percent of mainframe budgets are spent on software.
• 66 percent of respondents said availability is a top priority, but 40 percent reported unplanned outage.
• 66 percent said that mainframe will be incorporated into their Big Data or Cloud strategies.

Jonathan Adams, general manager of data management at BMC Software said: “The unprecedented pace of technology evolution and the consumerization trend only solidify the need for a platform with superior availability, security, and performance capabilities.”
The full results of BMC Software’s Mainframe Survey can be found at: http://go.bmc.com/forms/MSM_Survey_MCO_MFSurveyResults_BMCcom_EN_Sep2012

Just for completeness, the private investor group is collectively known as the Investor Group, and is led by Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital together with Insight Venture Partners, GIC Special Investments, and Elliott Management.

And that US Tax Court decision stems from 2004’s corporate income tax repatriation holiday. The Court said BMC owes taxes on a portion of its foreign profits brought into the United States under the 2004 tax break, which allowed multinational US companies to bring foreign profits into the US at a 5.25 percent tax rate, rather than the then current 35 percent rate.

Going back to surveys – if you want to have your say about what’s happening on your mainframe, I have some good news. The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014 will be inviting mainframe users to complete its survey towards the end of October.

For vendors, as usual, there will be opportunities to advertise or sponsor the Yearbook. More information will be coming soon.

Tips on giving a presentation - part 2

Last time we were looking at why some presentations and speeches can leave you feeling sad or proud or ready to right some injustice, and other speeches just leave you cold – we were looking at what the Greeks called rhetoric. We looked at those musketeers: logos, pathos, and ethos. And we looked at the components of a successful speech: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. And we even looked at the six parts of arrangement: introduction, narrative, partition, confirmation, refutation, and conclusion.

This time I want to look more at ‘figures of speech’, the ‘tropes’ and ‘schemes’. I want to examine the verbal tricks you can use to have an audience eating out of your hand (or to watch out for if you think someone is using these dark arts against you). It’s amazing that they all have names! Here are a few examples to begin with:

Anthimeria – using a different part of speech to act as another, such as a verb for a noun, or a noun for a verb, or an adjective as a verb, etc, eg “I should cocoa”.
Aporia – talking about not being able to talk about something, eg “I can't tell you how often writers use aporia”.
Aposiopesis – breaking off as if unable to continue, eg “it was so awful, I can’t go on”.
Apostrophe (not the punctuation mark) – this is addressing someone or something that is not physically present, eg “Einstein, you’d be proud of my discovery”.
Catachresis – a completely impossible figure of speech, eg “Nick will have kittens when he sees this”.
Erotema – asking a rhetorical question to the reader, eg “Why should you read this?”.
Hyperbole – over exaggeration, eg “I’ve told you a million times”.
Meiosis – understatement (the opposite of exaggeration), eg “I was a tad concerned when I saw the psychopath advancing with a chainsaw”. Litotes (my favourite) – a type of meiosis which uses a statement in the negative to create the effect, eg “Newton wasn’t bad at physics”,
Metaphor –saying one thing is another thing, eg “my daughter’s room is a disaster area”.
Metonymy – using a physical object to embody a more general idea, eg “the PEN is mightier than the SWORD”.
Onomatapoeia – words that sound like the thing they represent, eg “buzzing of innumerable bees”.
Oxymoron – using a contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense, eg military intelligence.
Personification – giving human qualities to inanimate objects, eg “the brown lawn begged for water”. It’s used a lot in poetry. For real geeks, look out for prosopopoeia. This is a form of personification in which inanimate objects speak! Ecologists might describe things from the point of view of the Amazon rain forest.
Puns – a pun twists the meaning of words, eg “the violinist was as fit as a fiddle”.
Simile – saying something is like something else, eg “her skin was as cold as ice”.
Synaesthesia – this is mixing one type of sensory input with another in an impossible way, such as how a colour sounds, or how a smell looks.
Synecdoche – using a part of a physical object to represent the whole object, eg “have you seen his new wheels”, meaning his new car.
Zeugma – one verb with different objects, eg “I blew my nose and the fuse”.
 
There’s full list of these (schemes and tropes) on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_Speech.

You may like to know, in passing, that all these figures of speech can be grouped into four fundamental operations or categories of change, and they are: addition, omission, transposition, and permutation. 

So, if you have to give a talk or a presentation, or you want to persuade just one person, this is the stuff for you. It’s what media gurus teach their clients – business people and TV execs and politicians. Now you know about it, keep your eyes peeled for it in speeches and adverts and when you buy a second-hand car. But make sure you use it when you give a presentation.

Tips on giving a presentation

Ever wondered why some speeches can leaving you feeling sad or proud or ready to right some injustice, and other speeches just leave you cold – you either give up listening or start to hate the speaker? What’s going on?

Well, the answer is verbal trickery – or, to give it its Greek name, rhetoric. Since the time of the Greeks, people have spent ages studying why some talks persuade you to take action and some leave you completely indifferent. They have even named these tricks – and there are lots of them – and some of those names we use every day without thinking about it (like paraphrase and parenthesis, like analogy and anecdote, like hyperbole and innuendo).

We talk about ‘figures of speech’, and, although we don’t say ‘tropes’, which is Greek for ‘turn’, we do say ‘turn of phrase’ and ‘twists in the plot’. The third member of this family of tricksters is called schemes. It’s not a forgotten art, it’s something that we all do quite naturally – almost without noticing it. But if you’re hoping to persuade someone, or a group of people, of something, it’s worth using some of these techniques. Or, if you’re listening to a political speech or an advert or someone else’s presentation, you might want to spot the techniques they are using to cynically manipulate us.

Rhetoric has nothing (necessarily) to do with the truth. There’s nothing for Mr Spock in rhetoric. It’s all about how the speaker can make us feel – it’s an emotional response. If you can get the rhetoric right, you can make a crowd of people (I nearly said mob) feel that any action is the ‘right’ one to take. Powerful stuff eh?

Let’s take an historical perspective for a moment. Medieval universities taught three subjects (called the trivium), and they were grammar, logic, and rhetoric. This study prepared students for the quadrivium – geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. No media studies in those days. And it was Aristotle who identified three ways of appealing to an audience, which he called logos, pathos, and ethos (and which everyone thinks must be the names of the three musketeers!). You’ll notice, yet again, that the word ‘truth’ doesn’t appear in the list.

Ethos is where you show the audience how qualified you are to give your opinion on the matter. Think of Troy McClure in the Simpsons, who started every advert by saying: “Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such films/TV shows/etc as…” This, although done for humorous effect – and bad rhetoric is painfully funny – illustrates an appeal to a higher authority.

Pathos is an appeal to the emotions of your audience. You talk about kittens, puppies, very young children having dreadful things done to them – surely we can’t let that happen? And you use the language of the people – you’re one of them – make them empathize.

Logos is the snake in the grass because you think this must be the logical reasoned argument. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s the ‘nine out of ten doctors agree that’ approach. You had to search far and wide to find those ‘nine’. I’m not saying it’s untrue – I’m just saying that logos allows facts to be spun, whichever way you want, to make your argument seem truthful and logical. Remember Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal? He had his own special definition of what was meant by the word ‘sex’. That’s the use of logos.

By the time of the Romans, the design for a successful speech or PowerPoint presentation had been set out. There are five components and they’re called: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery (although they were given Latin names at the time!).

Invention is finding arguments that support your case and arguments to knock down your opponents. Arrangement is pretty much how you would have been taught to write an essay at school – although they may not have used the names. This comes in six parts: introduction, narrative, partition, confirmation, refutation, and conclusion. We’ll come back to these.

Style is how you use words, structure your sentences, and what figures of speech you use (going the extra mile, moving the goal posts, etc). You need to choose between the plain style for instructing an audience, the middle style for moving an audience, and the high style for pleasing an audience. And you can dodge around a bit during your speech to include all three.

Memory includes tricks to help you remember what you plan to say. Nowadays our PowerPoint slides do the work for us. Delivery refers to the management of the voice and the gestures we use. It’s the theatrical part, and it really is the most important part. Great speakers need to have great delivery or else everything else is pretty much a waste of time. Appropriate jokes are good. If someone is laughing with you, you’ve got them on your side. This is the part that many presenters (you know who you are!) need to work on. And remember, audiences read your body language too.

For those of you still awake at the back, let’s pick up on those six parts of arrangement. The introduction (exordium) should draw in listeners and introduce the topic. The narrative provides background information. The partition tells the audience which parts from the narrative will be discussed further. The confirmation gives reasons to agree with the speaker. The refutation shows why you shouldn’t disagree with the speaker. And the conclusion (peroration) pulls all these arguments together. If it’s done properly, you not only agree with the speaker, you want to do something about it!

Next time we’ll have a look at some of those tricks that can be used to wow your audience, get them on your side, and get them to agree to whatever you’re proposing!!