Natural Language Books

Some things in this book are very useful, notably the interviews. However, this book is fairly out-of-date, and doesn't reflect the state of the art for speech recognition technology. The section on linguistics is wrong more often than right, and wouldn't add much to the reader's understanding of designing speech interfaces even if the errors were corrected. While I think that the authors' knowledge of user interface design, in general, is solid, their experience with speech is less so. For example, in the interview with Kate Dobroth (which is really the highlight of the book for me) the authors/editors consistenly transcribe the term "n-best" as "end best" pointing to the authors' inexperience with the technology.

This books provides some great ideas of where and how to get started with Speech Interfaces. I found the interviews to be very helpful. The people interviewed within the book share great insights and ideas as to where they see speech technology going in the future. The technology discussed in the book is low cost, and in my opinion, not very high tech. There are better solutions which can handle more robust speech applications, none of which were mentioned here.

I got a chance to see Mary Azarian's new alphabet book yesterday. I think her illustrations are heartwarming and lovely, and have enjoyed them for years in the Cook's Garden catalog and in books like The Plain Reader. I'm also a gardener and a former children's librarian ,and I enjoy seeing gardening depicted in children's books. However, I must say I was sadly disapponted to see no people of color depicted in any of the illustrations in this book. Surely Ms. Azarian must have met a nonwhite gardener at some point in her life; if not, that's sad, and she is welcome to come to my house and meet me before the next book. As a person of color I felt saddened and left out as I looked through the pages; how would a small child (of any ethnicity) feel? Had it not been for this exclusion I would have joyfully given this book five stars.

Mary Azarian was inspired by her own garden and has used the perfect form of illustration - woodcuts - to bring to life the alphabet of a garden.

The perspecives range from above and below the ground and show not only the joys but also hardships that come from creating a garden.

The simple words and strong visuals will be great for children learning about the natural world, but is also a beautiful gift for the gardener or nature lover in your life.

Chambers covers a lot of material in enough detail to promote an understanding of the broad issues involved in natural gas and its relation to an increasingly deregulated electric power market -- but not in so much detail that a reader new to the subject will be lost and confused. Certain topics are treated a bit too roughly, a good example being the discussion of deregulation, which skims the surface of the government's complicity in impeding the NG industry's progress and doesn't frame the issues as clearly as it could. The book's editing is not the best; there are spelling and grammar errors, and some of the graphics are unclear. Chambers' writing, however, is generally concise and lucid, and her topics are on target. The glossary is helpful. Altogether a book that does what it seems intended to do. Now, if Pennwell could just sharpen the editing and bring the price down a bit. . .

Ms. Chambers, the author, was at Pennwell Publishing (natural gas & power industry publisher) at the time of this book's publication. By formal training, she's a journalist.

This book, as I read it, appeared to me to be a mosiac of just snippets and facts that may have been accreted over her publishing career, with perhaps, a most limited appreciation, true feel and understanding of the natural gas and power industry. Translation: not that there has to be a "passion" about this, or any industry, but if she does harbor one, as a genuine interest and concern, regrettably, it did not come across in this book.

My interpretation is as an engineer. But still, and even without such a degree of discerning scrutiny, the author could
have been provided much better checks to copy before it was published. The book's flow is somewhat checkered: It could have been assembled much better with both logic, how it all fits together, full comprehensive scope, and not least - data and charts given. When we look at graphs without telling us what the vertical axis is (no units, but dimensionless numbers of what?), what are we looking at?

For the non-techie, you may get something out of this book. For those that are really not that right-hemisphere and like specifics, keep away; you'll end up somewhat dizzy.

Shame, I expected lots more and it's still a very rich subject area/topic for the right work to pull it all together.

Of all the language courses I have tried over the years not one has exceeded my expectations like Speaking Pain Free Italian. Not only did I learn more from this course than all the others combined, in just a few short weeks I was able to communicate with natives and was understood by them. Best of all, it didn't hurt. I enjoyed this course.

I was not impressed at all with these tapes and booklet. The instructor was either asking the interpreter questions (which took up a lot of time) or reading out of a book. Neither the instructor nor the interpreter followed the outline in the book. It took about 2 minutes for me to become totally lost. The tapes/book teach you a lot of odd sentences, which you will probably never use for example, "What are the days of the week?" and "What are the months of the year." This is not a book/tapes that I would recommend. It now sits on a shelf collecting dust.

Good for 2-6 yrs. The problem with alphabet books, is that theyare a dime a dozen. It is a fine book for early readers, or young onesbeing read to. END

As the book's cover indicates, "Darwin Loves You" is inspired by a bumper sticker once seen by the book's author. The bumper sticker is, of course, a play on the platitudinous "God Loves You" bumper sticker. And it is easy to suppose that most who have this latter bumper sticker would never own - or see any truth in - the former. AFter all, Darwinian evolution is generally seen as a cold and caustic theory that dashes hopes in the soul or the reality of those pesky intangible values. No awe here; only dessication.

That is the view that literatre professor George Levine aims to dispel. Darwinian evolution - not "Darwinism," as Darwin is not a deity and evolution, not a religion - does not HAVE TO BE a view hostile to values and devoid of happiness. It can be inspiring; it can be beautiful; it is fully compatible with a world of poetry, music, and meaning.

Firt, though, Levine devotes several chapters to the myriad of ideologies that people have based on Darwinian evolution: Marx claimed Darwinian authority for communism, Spencer for capitalism. Kropotkin claimed Darwinism supported anarchism, while others saw it as a rallying cry to support state intervention.

All of these, says Levin (and Douglas Hofstadter before him), were quite understandable but essentially flawed attempts to bolster the less certain world of philosophy and ideology with hard science. And all of their mistakes can be traced to the pesky dilemma that conflates descriptions of what is with prescrptions of what ought to be. Darwinian evolution does not have any positical indubitable conclusions; any attempt to use it as a moral/political doctrine is to stretch the theory into unnatural areas and force square 'facts' to fit round 'values.' (Yes, lovers of science make this mistake often, but more often, the mistake is made by those who oppose science. They fail to realize that the unfavorable doctrines they point to as showing the evils of 'Darwinism,' there are as many noble ones they can just as easily point towards.)

Levine is perhaps hardest on the ideas of sociobiology and reductionism - the idea that every trait can be explained as an adaptation, and that science will subsume every other way of thinking about our world. These, Levline notes, are beliefs about the supremacy of science that do not themselves utilize the methods of science. They rely on speculation, unjustified faith, and a very faulty inductive logic of the type that science is very careful to ever make. Yes, these beliefs may be true, but they may well NOT be true. They are, like the best religions, treated as tenets of faith held with deifying fervency.

These waters, of course, have been tread before, and I was actually starting to get frustrated with Levine during this portion of the book. Historical recountings and refutations of various Darwin-based philosophies have been done before, and Levine seemed not to realize that what he was doing was recounting what has been recounted.

The next section, though, makes up for that. It is an exploration of Darwin's own writings in order to show that Darwin saw the awe-inspiring nature of his theory. He did not see it as a pessimistic and cold theory, but one that makes nature and the world all the more beautiful. That we - products of evolution - can live in a world of beauty, value, art, and ideas, made all of this seem all the more special. Like any good scientist, Darwin was certainly cognizant that these things made his theory seem less plausible, and was certainly open to the idea that if no evolutionary explanation was capable, his theory may be refuted. (Levine points out that Darwin was no dogmatist; he was always open to refutation.) Even then, Darwin speculated as to how values, ideas, art, etc., were capable of being produced evolutionarily and was right about as much as he was wrong.

With the skill of literary exegesis and interpretation, Levine shows that Darwin was at the same time a product of his culture and an iconoclast. Darwin realized the threat his theory posed to Biblical literalism, but never viewed his theory as the type of "universal acid" that Daniel Dennett would later claim it was. Like Levine, Darwin saw his theory as grand and beautiful, a theory able to highlight the diversity of nature as well as explain it.

This is a book that needed to be written not so much because champions of the theory miss this point, but because critics of the theory almost ALWAYS miss it. Set aside the fact that, contra Dawkins, there is nothing INHERENTLY atheistic about evolution (though it does make the 'seven days' theory quite hard to hold.) Set aside the fact that theistic evolution is a perfectly cogent and plausible idea. Levine adds to this that Darwinian evolution is not the killjoy that creationists often suggest, and that a life full of meaning is fully compatible with Darwinian evolution.

So, if we see the first half of the book for what it is - a rehashing of what has been rehashed and what should have been obvious if it had not been - the second half of the book repays us. Hopefully, this book will dispel some of the myths we commonly hear about the "morally corrupt" Darwinism that fuctions as a "universal acid" to destroy things like value and beauty.

Many articles in this 2. edition are just reprints of articles from the 1 edition. It is a real problem that the articles are not dated or have otherwise been indicated whether they are new in this edition (from 2003) or have just been reprinted without updating from the first edition which was published in 73 volumes from 1968 until 2003. (Vol 1-33 A-Z; Vol. 34+35 = Index; Vol 36-73 = supplements)

For example, the article "Philosophy of Science" was pubished in 1977. It is reprinted in the 2nd edition without any changes in content (only typographical changes such as two columns). In the 2nd edition we are misinformed that this entry is "Print Published: 05/20/2003 | Online Published: 06/23/2003". The readers are thus misled concerning what they are reading. This is tru for many articles, I guess much more than 50%.

The only way you can tell whether the article is revised or updated is by looking at the references and see if new references are included - in most cases they are not (alternatively, of course compare the articles in the two editions page by page).

Both the first edition and the second edition have a heavy emphazis on specific libraries in specific countries and is weak in theoretical and conceptual issues.

When this is said, it should be said that there are many important articles in this work and it is an obvious advantage that it is available online and the papers available as pdf-files. I have now read usefull articles that I would not have read if I had to make paper copies from the old edition.

As a graduate student of historical linguistics, I often find myself asked to explain aspects of contemporary language change or the reconstruction of proto-languages to interested friends or family. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a gift of simplifying the field for average people, and I've longed for a simple introduction that I could recommend. I was very happy to discover John McWhorter's THE POWER OF BABEL: A Natural History of Language, which introduces historical linguistics, squashes myths about language change all too common among the public, and shows the wonderful diversity of human tongues all in an easily approachable way. McWhorter's book often succeeds, but I was troubled by some errors. This review is mainly meant towards fellow professionals also looking for a book they may give to interested acquaintances.

McWhorter's book consists of seven chapters and an epilogue. The first, "The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones", explains sound change and grammaticalization, the key processes of language evolution, mainly using French and English examples. In chapter 2, "The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages", McWhorter introduces the concept of "dialects", showing that within any given speech community there is a wealth of variants, mutually intelligible but excitingly diverse. Chapter 3, "The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another" discusses lexical borrowing, while Chapter 4, "Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" is about the most extreme case of language mixing, pidgins and creoles. Here the example pidgin is Russenorsk, that curious mix of Russian and Norwegian that don't deserve the obscurity into which it has fallen.

Chapter 5, "The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Developed Far Beyond the Call of Duty" is important. Here McWhorter explains the seemingly unnecessary features languages may take on, such as grammatical gender and complicated verbal inflections. He makes the important point that the shape of a language says nothing about the intelligence of the people who speak it, that a language serves its community perfectly well. Chapter 6, "Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen" is about the rise of standard languages out of writing. The final chapter is the most depressing, for "Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct" is about language death.

An epilogue, "Extra, extra! The Language of Adam and Eve" attempts to debunk the notions that a Proto-World can be constructed, which tend to appeal to the general public even though they lack any scientific basis. McWhorter devastatingly dismisses the work of e.g. Merrit Ruhlen and, in his darker hours, Joseph Greenberg, to the great applause of this reader.

Many readers have found fault with two aspects of McWhorter's book. The first is the humourous tone he adopted in trying to make the heady details of historical linguistics appealing for those without training. He makes reference to a massive amount of sitcoms and comic books, sometimes makes use of McDonald's advertising as an example of international language contact, and likes to phrase things in a clever manner. I found this unobjectionable, for McWhorter has a very similar sense of humour to my own. However, what is objectionable are the factual errors that pop up in the book. Other reviewers have mentioned some, but for the one I found most annoying, I'll throw in McWhorter's claim that Russian has borrowed from Old Church Slavonic, "based on Bulgarian". Well, Old Church Slavonic was based on the Slavonic dialect of Thessaloniki, outside the Kingdom of Bulgaria (and some notable OCS manuscripts have no connection at all to Bulgaria), and furthermore Russian didn't borrow from OCS, but rather from a later language called Church Slavonic (I don't see any yers in these borrowed words, do you?). One wonders if the book was reviewed by other members of the linguistics community before publication, or if the publisher just assumed that with a popular audience it could just throw it out there.

THE POWER OF BABEL is, as far as I know, the only book that gently explains concepts of historical linguistics to the laymen, at the same time debunking various myths of language superiority or great Eskimo vocabularies. It's worth checking out, in spite of its faults.

i just bought DNS9 Medical for my primary care practice.

the program itself is incredibly improved from older versions. the other doc in my office tried it *without* doing any of the training, and had 100% accuracy in word recognition straight out of the box. now, she's a believer.

this book seems aimed more at a medical transcriptionist than at physicians. that said, i did find some parts useful. however, the chapter on "history of speech recognition" didn't do a lot for me, and much of the other info was available in the "help" files of the program.

also, there were a number of annoying errors: for example, the chapter on "improving recognition accuracy" talks about "the four tenants (sic) of voice recognition." there were quite a few mistakes in other areas: for example, illustrations in which the text was supposed to be changed to all caps was shown in bold italic.

still, this book would do very well if i wanted to train a transcriptionist to listen to my dictation and then dictate it into DNS.

if you're new to DNS, i'd spend a few days playing with the program first, paying attention to the help menus and especially to how much you can do with "add new command." it's trivially easy to add new boilerplate, greatly increasing the speed of dictation (especially normals).

As the name suggests , it is a fast paced book with lots of code in it.Skimming through most of the pages will find you looking at code that is being generated by the IDE.There are some good example programs though..I don't recommend this book for beginners but for VC++ programmers who have to brush up their skills for project delivery the following Monday!!!

The book spends a lot of time covering very specific examples, but fails to explain how they can be ported to very general applications. I picked it up hoping I could learn to produce a charting application. Indeed, I learned to generate and save graphics.

Unfortunately, the book teaches me to save them in an obscure format that neither Jasc Paintshop Pro, Adobe Photoshop, nor any other graphics package will touch.

This book is a very easy read, and it can be done in one day if you devote all your time to it.

You have to stay on your toes with this book. The author covers things precisely once. When it comes time to do it again, you are expected to have learned it. This isn't so bad, since you can just flip back, and it serves as a mini-test.

At the end of each chapter, there is an "Are you up to speed?" page, with a list of things you should have learned. Unfortunately, these are not test questions -- It just tells you what you should have learned, and expects you to know whether you really learned it or not.

It's good for the bare fundamentals. Nothing more.

Well, I loved this book, Actually it is excellent for programmers who are familiar with the old C/C++ and want to catch up with the basics of Visual C++. The author's style is excellent because it makes you rely on yourself to remember the techniques learnt in pervious examples.. But I don't recommend it for professional programmers.

There definitely isn't 604 pages' worth of solid data in the book. Over half of the book is dedicated to code dumps, much of which is wizard-generated. However, his is the only book I've seen yet that explained why the MFC wizard generated the files that appeared after I created an MFC project, and what each class' function was. It also was the only book that gave me reasons for why I should code what I did, and where I should put it, instead of merely telling me to type this here and that there, almost without explanation.

This is a great starting book for people who know how to do OOP in C++, but don't know how to do Windows coding using Visual C++. After reading this, I went on to other, more comprehensive books and understood what those authors were discussing.

I should have borrowed this from the library, because although it was helpful, it's not really all that great a reference to use in the future.

There's a lot more to Windows programming and to Visual C++ than the MFC wizard, but understanding that limited topic is a great starting point.

This book pretends to teach Visual C++ by leading you through a serieis of examples. However it seems to be targeting an audience that has little programming experience and in this task it would surely fail. Only an experienced programmer would appreciate the under-pinnings of interrupt pramming and other topics which are never explained in this text. Someone approaching Visual C++ would usually have programming experience and some familiarity with C and C++. If the book had targeted a more experienced audience, the author could have presented the material in a more sucinct style rather than the tedious style that was used.