richard wojcik // User Search

richard wojcik // User Search

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Ejection identification - Put to TOP of list

Jun 14, 1998, 2:13pm
I hate to be discouraging here, because I'm actually in the language processing
business. Filtering software is an interesting challenge, but it isn't
trivial. What is trivial, as others have pointed out, is figuring out a way to
outsmart the fuucking filters. This is much more of a social problem than a
technical one, and we already have some tools for dealing with nuisances--mute
and eject. Nobody can tell when they are being muted, so why would a silent
filtering method be useful? Are there cases where you want to prevent yourself
from hearing obscenities, but still listen to the rest of the content? Mute
the b*st*rd! If you created a filter that was clever enough to detect all
possible spelling permutations of obscene words, then you would probably have
it blowing holes in text all over the place. It just isn't as easy as you
think.

I once proposed an alternative to the eject mechanism--public mute. Individual
muting is only partially helpful, since not everyone agrees to mute nuisances.
What I've observed in such cases is that you end up hearing people that you
don't mute in argument with people that you do. So the miscreant gets to annoy
you by the proxy of your friends' behavior. Ejection is the only solution
right now, but it forcibly excludes the person. There are cases where you want
to quiet someone down--e.g. public meetings--but not necessarily exclude that
person from the world. Actually, a total public mute would be very helpful
during public events, since chat tends to get so chaotic when there are a lot
of avatars present. Anyway, I don't think that linguistic filtering is going
to be all that helpful in dealing with public nuisances.

[View Quote] > Would you be willing to copy this over to wishlist, maybe even
> worldbuilders where your most excellent idea would be more readily seen by
> the more technologically "endowed" people? Especially try to talk to
> Roland. USER control is absolutely the most sensible and amenable means of
> dealing with what we, each individual, finds offensive.
>
> In article <3582A01C.5D8E at constant.com>, marvin at constant.com says...

Voice

Jun 7, 1998, 1:10pm
I have advocated something a bit simpler in the past. I like the
text-to-speech (tts) capability of Powwow. With a flick of a switch, the
text in the chat window is sent to a tts program. The program mispronounces
words like crazy, but you can follow the conversation without having to look
at the screen. If implemented in AW, tts would allow you to keep the
browser minimized or hidden behind other windows while working on other
things. You would hear it when someone tried to initiate a chat you. Also,
tts, unlike true voice, would not add anything to bandwidth. It would run
totally on the client side.

The Powwow tts is not very good, but it is functional. I wonder if it would
be possible to use Festival, which is a very good tts program. One can get
Festival with the free speech processing Toolkit from the Oregon Graduate
Institute's Center for the Study of Language Understanding (CSLU) at
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/.

[View Quote]

Tutoring, Flash Cards, Quizzes, etc.

Jun 19, 1998, 12:50am
Last week, a few of us were speculating on how best to create interactive true/false
and multiple choice questions with signs. I had proposed the use of two signs for
a "flash card" effect--one in back of the other. After a little more thought and testing,
I arrived at the following technique. Sorry if you've thought of this already, but I
hadn't tried to do this kind of thing before. I have a "wish" at the below, so I am
cross-posting this to wishlist.

The effect you want to create is that of a single sign with a question on it. You click
on it, and the answer pops up in the same sign. In fact, you can create the illusion
of a single sign in which the message changes several times by clicking on it or some
other object (e.g. true/false or multiple choice answers). I don't know any way to
implement this with a single sign. The best you can do is change the text once by
having an 'activate sign "answer"' command in the Action box and the question text in the
Description box. The text changes on a single click, but you have to recreate the object
to get the original text back (e.g. by leaving and coming back).

The trick is to have two or more signs (or picture objects) occupy the same space. All
but one of the objects is created with 'visible off'. All have distinct names, say
'name a1','name a2', etc. All boxes have an 'activate visible off, visible <next sign> on'
command. I have implemented some examples of the technique in AW at 1052N 198W 150.

In theory, you can use this method to create a long series of signs, with true/false
or multiple-choice branches. You are limited by the amount of text permitted in the cell,
but you can just teleport the student-avatar to a new location to continue the quiz.

I'm not sure how useful this technique would really be for teaching purposes. After all, why
not just do the quiz on a web page? But the illusion of changing text and picture content
might come in handy for some purposes.

Here's my wish: It would work much more conveniently if we could change the
syntax of the 'sign' command to allow control of named sign and picture objects. If you could
attach an 'activate sign <name> "Correct!"' to a separate object, then you wouldn't need to put
multiple sign objects with 'visible on/off' actions in the same space to achieve this effect.

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