Aaron Train

Having just watched Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s hymn for the planet, titled HOME – an ode to the planet’s beauty and its delicate harmony, it triggered some thinking on what’s going on in the world.

HOME is more than a documentary with a message, it is a magnificent movie in its own right and has an impact on anyone who sees it. It awakens in us the awareness that is needed to change the way we see the world. It embraces the major ecological issues that confront us and shows how everything on our planet is interconnected. Everything is interconnected.

How can we take this means of awakening, interconnection and global consanguinity to bring everyone together on the web? Can we accelerate an integrated worldview towards critical mass by opening a medium where people can see what happens when they are empowered by each other?

We all want to live in a better world, and many among us are working to make that world a possibility. Improvement is achieved through ideation, innovation, cultivation and application of solutions to problems. However, due to the blindingly complex nature of the problems we currently face, equally sophisticated solutions are required. These solutions are beyond the realm of any one person or small group of people. It is the globe that faces these problems and thus it is the global mind that must develop matching solutions.

There are now more links, websites, documents and files on the internet than there are synapses in a single human brain. Having reached into every attribute of human life, it is now steering the course of history.

It is estimated that over 1.5 billion individuals have access to the internet with user growth ever increasing in the developing world. Classified as the most capable and sophisticated tool ever developed by mankind, the internet represents the pinnacle of thousands of years of technological development.

Accelerating at rapid growth at blazing speeds in development, it affirms rather than conflicts with human identify. In essence, it connects us in real and personal ways to other human beings. With higher potential beginning to reveal itself, an opportunity is presented to forge a network which interconnects those who improve our world. We now have the means and the wisdom to implement a system that fosters world-changing collaboration amongst the people of this planet.

We are, without question, living in the most exciting time in human history. Human potential is expanding as technology continues to bring awareness to the great realm of our knowledge and understanding, the populace of our planet are beginning to awaken, en masse, to our true inner nature and our integrated relationship with the world around us.

As the world wakens to its indissoluble oneness, we still see an escalating disarray. Fears of governmental paranoia and terrorism run amok, global economic collapse looms, and of course the earth herself is exhibiting the symptoms of feeble health.

We are now at a crossroads. Despite all the incalculable knowledge available at our fingertips, we are unable to predict the days forthcoming. There comes a point when every new and competing idea is put to a test. If that idea is to be successful it must reach a critical mass.

How can Mozilla and the internet of tomorrow work to accelerate an integrated worldview towards critical mass by opening a medium where people can see what happens when they are empowered by each other?

- AaronMT

Ever stop and think about how much we rely on our hands to manifest and transcribe our intricate thoughts to actual code? Much like the inner workings of a compiler taking language and spitting out machine code, and a musical composer in an symphony hall , there is a profound relationship.

One’s first path of assistance would venture down the realm of speech-to-text, but really how viable is this solution?

Nuance’s Dragon software line is the epitome of speech-to-text software. They have legal, medical and various other industry customized solutions, but what about a software line that was tailored to Microsoft’s Visual Studio?

Imagine a customized solution for such an IDE. It could leverage Intellisense to work through the various commands as you go and when you want to use a variable (something that is NOT a predefined word in the intellisense dictionary that Dragon could use to match all words against) you could give a command like ‘UDV – variable’sName’ either spelled out or trained.

Being able to bind to Intellisense for all possible voice commands would seem to make it a much easier task and then with break words that you would say first then followed by an IDE command like “Compile – No Debug”, etc…

I can’t see why this isn’t possible.

For the sake of comedy, look at this for programming with voice recognition that exists today:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyLqUf4cdwc]

In my opinion, speech-to-text as a solution for programmers who are physically disabled has a long way to go. With the delicate syntax of languages and the perfection of the software interpreter taking our voice and transcribing it as intended is an aspiration. Simply put, as the video above demonstrates – what should be simple, becomes a tedious ache.

Surely there must be folks out there considering the necessity to expand, improve and work to solution. If so, please reply, I’d be interested in the results.

As for the open source helping hand, one project I have stumbled upon is CMUSphinx: The Carnegie Mellon Sphinx Group Open Source Speech Recognition Engine.

This group of individuals are working together in an open environment in order to stimulate the creation of speech-using tools and applications, and to advance the state of the art both directly in speech recognition, as well as in related areas including dialog systems and speech synthesis.

It would be interesting to see the world of open source development work first hand on such a huge issue since we have yet to see any big-name speech-to-text companies provide a viable solution.

Cheers,
– Aaron

Taking a break from my studies of the fresh new semester, I wanted to address something I recently [consciously] took notice about my habits when using Firefox. Revealed are funny details that of  an irregular, perhaps awkward user interface usability habit I frequently employ in Firefox.

Lets examine the top of our browser, i.e, Figure 1.

Firefox comes with a our standard address bar as well as a search bar in the top right of the browser.

Figure 1.

Every day, I visit my search engine of choice – Google as do most of the web.

How does one get to Google from within Firefox?

• Search from the address bar, i.e., ‘south Indian soup recipes’
• Type google.com and land on the Google main page
• Search from the top right search box that is there for you. It begs for your input.

Now of those three, I most frequently type into the address bar, google.com and begin my searches directly from landing on the search engines main page.

Personally, I believe this is an interesting look at user usability habits as this habit of mine seems to be the most difficult, if not awkward way to search in a modern browser. Rather than employ new easier methods I am performing actions redundantly. Perhaps it’s a habit I continue to employ from the stone age of internet browsers.

In addition, to land on the address bar I use the shortcut  Ctrl-l, which invokes the minimal amount of effort required to get to the address bar. Instead of hitting tab once one more time to land into the embedded browser search box, I  invoke more keystrokes, google.com just to begin my searching. Weird. With this habit, I am completely ignoring the intended use of the search box by employing a compltely different method to accomplish the exact same task.

Obviously there is nothing wrong with this method, as it works. That’s the beauty of the browser, there is no one way to accomplish a common task.

We all have our habits.  This makes me curious as to what other habits people have when using Firefox. What are yours?