Nuance’s Dragon, Version 9: Cloud nine for anyone needing dependable speech recognition software.

Dragon, for those who are not seen it in action, is a speech recognition software. You talk into a microphone connected to your computer and the program transcribes your words into written text.  For those of you who haven’t seen the process of speech recognition before (or those who have only seen earlier versions of voice recognition software), the current version works like magic. 

Who could make good use of speech recognition software?  Anyone who writes.  That probably includes you.  All of you bloggers, take note.  Same for all of you professionals.  For instance, I work as a lawyer and I spend an hour or two each day using Dragon. 

I have worked with Dragon ever since Version 6. It is now up to Version 9.  I use the “Preferred” version of Dragon 9, which costs about $160.  The software comes with a microphone in the box.  The software is loaded with a vast vocabulary of legal and medical terms, something to keep in mind for those of you who might otherwise be tempted to jump to the vastly more expensive Legal or Medical versions of Dragon. For most people, there’s no need to make that jump, in my opinion.

There are millions of people out there who could make good use of voice recognition software. Dragon allows you to give your hands a break, even if you are a proficient typist.  Dragon works so well that it seems like magic. No, I do not own any stock in Nuance …

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Why Waste Money on Space?

I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.

Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.

We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill …

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How does Google really work?

This is the first clear and concise explanation I've ever read.  I didn't realize they did their magic using PC's (pigeon clusters). Page and Brin experimented with numerous avian motivators before settling on a combination of linseed and flax (lin/ax) that not only offered superior performance, but could be gathered…

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