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Introduction to Penn

A Message from Penn President Amy Gutmann.

Welcome to the University of Pennsylvania.

Penn has a proud tradition of translating knowledge into social-minded action that dates back to our founder, Benjamin Franklin. This tradition of active pragmatism, articulated in Franklin’s maxim “well-done is better than well-said,” lives today through the inclusive policies, innovative work, and impactful engagement of our faculty, students, and staff.

Penn President Amy Gutmann

Penn President Amy Gutmann

Scholarship and Learning: Academic life at Penn is unparalleled, with 100 countries and every U.S. state represented in one of the Ivy League’s most diverse student bodies. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Penn enrolls 10,000 undergraduate students and welcomes an additional 10,000 students to our world-renowned graduate and professional schools.

Penn's award-winning educators and scholars encourage students to pursue inquiry and discovery, follow their passions, and address the world’s most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach.

Access and Affordability: Financial need is not a barrier to a Penn education. We admit undergraduate students without regard to need, and offer “all-grant” financial aid packages, substituting grants for loans.

Penn’s undergraduate financial aid budget has grown by 161 percent over the past nine years, meeting the full financial need of students, even during one of the country's most difficult economic periods. In 2015-16, we estimate that the average grant for students receiving aid will be $43,800.

Dynamic and Diverse Community: Penn is committed to creating a community of students, scholars, and staff that reflects the diversity of the world we live in. Towards this end, the University established its Action Plan for Faculty Diversity and Excellence in 2011, leading to a 35 percent increase in minority faculty and a 16 percent increase in female faculty.

Nearly half of our undergraduates self-identify as students of color, more than half are women, 12 percent are among the first in their families to attend college, and 12 percent are international. The spectrum of valuable perspectives and ensuing dialogue are key contributors to educational excellence and an inclusive, dynamic campus environment.

Integrated Knowledge: Solving today's complex problems requires knowledge that crosses traditional boundaries. True to our roots, Penn encourages both intellectual and practical pursuits, and has attracted some of the most eminent interdisciplinary scholars and teachers working today through our Penn Integrates Knowledge program.

$928 million
Research budget

Research Discovery: Penn is one of the world's most powerful research and teaching institutions, with a research budget last year of nearly $1 billion and more than 4,000 active faculty members. The scale and interdisciplinary character of research and teaching sets Penn apart, and our highly ranked Perelman School of Medicine is one of the top recipients of NIH funding in the country.

Beautiful Urban Campus: Expansive college greens and recreational spaces. Landmark architecture. Twelve schools connected on a single campus. Penn's geographical unity is unique among Ivy League schools, fostering our integrated approach to education, scholarship, and research.

In the past decade, our campus has added 5 million square feet of new and renovated space and 25 percent more green space, the latter most visibly represented by Penn Park, a 24-acre expanse of playing fields and open land that connects campus to Center City Philadelphia and surrounding neighborhoods.

Community Engagement: At Penn, civic engagement is an integral part of campus life. Situated near the heart of Philadelphia, our country's only World Heritage City, Penn is a national leader in academically-based community service through our Netter Center for Community Partnerships. Penn continues to deepen its longstanding commitment to the local community in numerous ways, with 13,000 University students, faculty, and staff participating in more than 300 volunteer and community service projects each year.

Thank you for visiting our home on the Web. I invite you to explore the people and programs of Penn.

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Monday, November 30, 2009

Happy Monday

This Monday started off a bit dim, I had to forgo my morning hike which I normally do in the lovely hills of this town, because I had to grab the week by it's horns so to speak and get some errands done first thing (after drop off...but still.) So I speed downtown to: find just the right ribbon to tie up the wrist wrap boxes - navy blue silk, check; to find the elusive jump rings I've been needing to attach brass logo'd tags to clutches and iPhone pouches, check; and finally to buy small plastic bags to put wrist wrap boxes in before going in envelope for delivery, check! Don't you love when you actually find the things you're looking for on errands? Looking brighter already, but wait things get better! Waiting in line to purchase said baggies, I get an email from Rose Apodaca!

If you don't know who the fabulous & clever Rose Apodaca is, Google her. Or just take a look at her bio which I excerpted from her website below just because it's so ridiculously impressive, and I only took half of it:

"Rose Apodaca is a pop culture and style journalist and the co-owner of A+R, the design retail lab based in Los Angeles. She contributes to Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Glamour, Paper, The Los Angeles Times Magazine,, Preen and other publications, and consulted on the launch of Image, The Los Angeles Times newest style section. Her first book, Style A to Zoe: The Art of Fashion, Beauty & Everything Glamour, an all-encompassing lifestyle guide written for celeb stylist Rachel Zoe, is now in paperback and hit The New York Times bestseller list in September 2008. She is currently wrapping up a biography on Fred Hayman, co-founder of Giorgio Beverly Hills and marketing architect of Rodeo Drive, as well as co-authoring a beauty book with neo-burlesque queen and style icon, Dita Von Teese."

And now you too may want to follow her every entry and twitter like I do and you'll understand why I was so happy to get an email from her with the subject line "You've been posted" and the salutation "Happy Monday", yes, indeed.

("rank right up there with oxygen" I'm still floored!!)Other exciting things are going on too, like my first English online boutique, Bodie and Fou is selling Trops like hotcakes! This is fastastic two-fold because 1. I'm selling bags in London! and 2. Bodie and Fou is a gorgeous online store run by Karine Kong and her sister Elodie. I met Karine through this blog (!) and while we've physically never met, if we ever do I'm pretty sure we'll be fast friends. I'm amazed to have made a connection like this.

Lastly, before I get the most out of the few hours of sleep available to me before the early morning hike tomorrow, I wanted to post this: Le mari decided to snap a few pictures himself of the work room filled with wrist wraps and I think they're beautiful:

bonne nuit.

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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Sushi Kiosk, Puri Indah Mall

Sushi Kiosk is a spin-off of Sushi Tei. I actually like the concept of Sushi Kiosk which is "grab and go" where customers can directly choose, pick, pay and eat there or take away.  But with the same average price as Sushi Tei, I still prefer to eat sushi at Sushi Tei.

Sushi in a box - Rp. 47.000
Not really impressed with the sushi.
The rice was mushy and the fish did not really taste fresh.

Besides, I'm also not a fan of wasabi paste in sachet.
 Current currency:
1 USD = Rp. 11.600
Sushi Kiosk
Puri Indah Mall GF#38
Jl. Puri Agung, Puri Indah
West Jakarta
Tel: 5822505

Disclaimer: The review and opinion expressed here are purely according to my personal taste. There's a possibility that the taste of the food might change later on, which could affect the review and opinion here. I also affirm that no monetary or non-monetary compensation has been received from this restaurant for writing this review.

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Speech synthesis

Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous people using speech synthesis to communicate

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.[1]

Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output.[2]

The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written works on a home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1990s.

Overview of a typical TTS system
A synthetic voice announcing an arriving train in Sweden.

Problems playing this file? See .
Microsoft Windows XP's default speech synthesizer voice saying "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 1,234,567,890 times. soi"

Problems playing this file? See .

A text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts:[3] a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer—then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations),[4] which is then imposed on the output speech.

  • History 1
    • Electronic devices 1.1
  • Synthesizer technologies 2
    • Concatenative synthesis 2.1
      • Unit selection synthesis 2.1.1
      • Diphone synthesis 2.1.2
      • Domain-specific synthesis 2.1.3
    • Formant synthesis 2.2
    • Articulatory synthesis 2.3
    • HMM-based synthesis 2.4
  • Challenges 3
    • Text normalization challenges 3.1
    • Text-to-phoneme challenges 3.2
    • Evaluation challenges 3.3
    • Prosodics and emotional content 3.4
  • Dedicated hardware 4
  • Mattel 5
  • SAM 6
    • Atari 6.1
    • Apple 6.2
    • AmigaOS 6.3
    • Microsoft Windows 6.4
    • Android 6.5
    • Internet 6.6
    • Others 6.7
  • Speech synthesis markup languages 7
  • Applications 8
  • APIs 9
  • See also 10
  • References 11
  • External links 12

Long before electronic signal processing was invented, there were those who tried to build machines to create human speech. Some early legends of the existence of "Brazen Heads" involved Pope Silvester II (d. 1003 AD), Albertus Magnus (1198–1280), and Roger Bacon (1214–1294).

In 1779, the Danish scientist Christian Kratzenstein, working at the Russian Academy of Sciences, built models of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds (in notation, they are [aː], [eː], [iː], [oː] and [uː]).[5] This was followed by the bellows-operated "acoustic-mechanical speech machine" by Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg, Hungary, described in a 1791 paper.[6] This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in 1857, M. Faber built the "Euphonia". Wheatstone's design was resurrected in 1923 by Paget.[7]

In the 1930s, Bell Labs developed the vocoder, which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tone and resonances. From his work on the vocoder, Homer Dudley developed a keyboard-operated voice synthesizer called The Voder (Voice Demonstrator), which he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

The Pattern playback was built by Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s and completed in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device but only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues were able to discover acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels).

Dominant systems in the 1980s and 1990s were the MITalk system, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, and the Bell Labs system;[8] the latter was one of the first multilingual language-independent systems, making extensive use of natural language processing methods.

Early electronic speech synthesizers sounded robotic and were often barely intelligible. The quality of synthesized speech has steadily improved, but output from contemporary speech synthesis systems is still clearly distinguishable from actual human speech.

As the cost-performance ratio causes speech synthesizers to become cheaper and more accessible to the people, more people will benefit from the use of text-to-speech programs.[9]

Electronic devices

Computer and speech synthesiser housing used by Stephen Hawking in 1999

The first computer-based speech synthesis systems were created in the late 1950s. The first general English text-to-speech system was developed by Noriko Umeda et al. in 1968 at the Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan.[10] In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and colleague Louis Gerstman[11] used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer (vocoder) recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey,[12] where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as it is being put to sleep by astronaut Dave Bowman.[13] Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research is still being conducted into mechanical speech synthesizers.[14]

Handheld electronics featuring speech synthesis began emerging in the 1970s. One of the first was the Telesensory Systems Inc. (TSI) Speech+ portable calculator for the blind in 1976.[15][16] Other devices were produced primarily for educational purposes, such as Speak & Spell, produced by Texas Instruments in 1978.[17] Fidelity released a speaking version of its electronic chess computer in 1979.[18] The first video game to feature speech synthesis was the 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game, Stratovox, from Sun Electronics.[19] Another early example was the arcade version of Berzerk, released that same year. The first multi-player electronic game using voice synthesis was Milton from Milton Bradley Company, which produced the device in 1980.

Synthesizer technologies

The most important qualities of a speech synthesis system are naturalness and intelligibility. Naturalness describes how closely the output sounds like human speech, while intelligibility is the ease with which the output is understood. The ideal speech synthesizer is both natural and intelligible. Speech synthesis systems usually try to maximize both characteristics.

The two primary technologies generating synthetic speech waveforms are concatenative synthesis and formant synthesis. Each technology has strengths and weaknesses, and the intended uses of a synthesis system will typically determine which approach is used.

Concatenative synthesis

Concatenative synthesis is based on the concatenation (or stringing together) of segments of recorded speech. Generally, concatenative synthesis produces the most natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, differences between natural variations in speech and the nature of the automated techniques for segmenting the waveforms sometimes result in audible glitches in the output. There are three main sub-types of concatenative synthesis.

Unit selection synthesis

Unit selection synthesis uses large databases of recorded speech. During database creation, each recorded utterance is segmented into some or all of the following: individual phones, diphones, half-phones, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Typically, the division into segments is done using a specially modified speech recognizer set to a "forced alignment" mode with some manual correction afterward, using visual representations such as the waveform and spectrogram.[20] An index of the units in the speech database is then created based on the segmentation and acoustic parameters like the fundamental frequency (pitch), duration, position in the syllable, and neighboring phones. At run time, the desired target utterance is created by determining the best chain of candidate units from the database (unit selection). This process is typically achieved using a specially weighted decision tree.

Unit selection provides the greatest naturalness, because it applies only a small amount of digital signal processing (DSP) to the recorded speech. DSP often makes recorded speech sound less natural, although some systems use a small amount of signal processing at the point of concatenation to smooth the waveform. The output from the best unit-selection systems is often indistinguishable from real human voices, especially in contexts for which the TTS system has been tuned. However, maximum naturalness typically require unit-selection speech databases to be very large, in some systems ranging into the gigabytes of recorded data, representing dozens of hours of speech.[21] Also, unit selection algorithms have been known to select segments from a place that results in less than ideal synthesis (e.g. minor words become unclear) even when a better choice exists in the database.[22] Recently, researchers have proposed various automated methods to detect unnatural segments in unit-selection speech synthesis systems.[23]

Diphone synthesis

Diphone synthesis uses a minimal speech database containing all the diphones (sound-to-sound transitions) occurring in a language. The number of diphones depends on the phonotactics of the language: for example, Spanish has about 800 diphones, and German about 2500. In diphone synthesis, only one example of each diphone is contained in the speech database. At runtime, the target prosody of a sentence is superimposed on these minimal units by means of digital signal processing techniques such as linear predictive coding, PSOLA[24] or MBROLA.[25] Diphone synthesis suffers from the sonic glitches of concatenative synthesis and the robotic-sounding nature of formant synthesis, and has few of the advantages of either approach other than small size. As such, its use in commercial applications is declining, although it continues to be used in research because there are a number of freely available software implementations.

Domain-specific synthesis

Domain-specific synthesis concatenates prerecorded words and phrases to create complete utterances. It is used in applications where the variety of texts the system will output is limited to a particular domain, like transit schedule announcements or weather reports.[26] The technology is very simple to implement, and has been in commercial use for a long time, in devices like talking clocks and calculators. The level of naturalness of these systems can be very high because the variety of sentence types is limited, and they closely match the prosody and intonation of the original recordings.

Because these systems are limited by the words and phrases in their databases, they are not general-purpose and can only synthesize the combinations of words and phrases with which they have been preprogrammed. The blending of words within naturally spoken language however can still cause problems unless the many variations are taken into account. For example, in non-rhotic dialects of English the "r" in words like "clear" /ˈklɪə/ is usually only pronounced when the following word has a vowel as its first letter (e.g. "clear out" is realized as /ˌklɪəɾˈʌʊt/). Likewise in French, many final consonants become no longer silent if followed by a word that begins with a vowel, an effect called liaison. This alternation cannot be reproduced by a simple word-concatenation system, which would require additional complexity to be context-sensitive.

Formant synthesis

Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an acoustic model (physical modelling synthesis).[27] Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components. Many systems based on formant synthesis technology generate artificial, robotic-sounding speech that would never be mistaken for human speech. However, maximum naturalness is not always the goal of a speech synthesis system, and formant synthesis systems have advantages over concatenative systems. Formant-synthesized speech can be reliably intelligible, even at very high speeds, avoiding the acoustic glitches that commonly plague concatenative systems. High-speed synthesized speech is used by the visually impaired to quickly navigate computers using a screen reader. Formant synthesizers are usually smaller programs than concatenative systems because they do not have a database of speech samples. They can therefore be used in embedded systems, where memory and microprocessor power are especially limited. Because formant-based systems have complete control of all aspects of the output speech, a wide variety of prosodies and intonations can be output, conveying not just questions and statements, but a variety of emotions and tones of voice.

Examples of non-real-time but highly accurate intonation control in formant synthesis include the work done in the late 1970s for the Texas Instruments toy Speak & Spell, and in the early 1980s Sega arcade machines[28] and in many Atari, Inc. arcade games[29] using the TMS5220 LPC Chips. Creating proper intonation for these projects was painstaking, and the results have yet to be matched by real-time text-to-speech interfaces.[30]

Articulatory synthesis

Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The first articulatory synthesizer regularly used for laboratory experiments was developed at Haskins Laboratories in the mid-1970s by Philip Rubin, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, known as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues.

Until recently, articulatory synthesis models have not been incorporated into commercial speech synthesis systems. A notable exception is the NeXT-based system originally developed and marketed by Trillium Sound Research, a spin-off company of the University of Calgary, where much of the original research was conducted. Following the demise of the various incarnations of NeXT (started by Steve Jobs in the late 1980s and merged with Apple Computer in 1997), the Trillium software was published under the GNU General Public License, with work continuing as gnuspeech. The system, first marketed in 1994, provides full articulatory-based text-to-speech conversion using a waveguide or transmission-line analog of the human oral and nasal tracts controlled by Carré's "distinctive region model".

HMM-based synthesis

HMM-based synthesis is a synthesis method based on hidden Markov models, also called Statistical Parametric Synthesis. In this system, the frequency spectrum (vocal tract), fundamental frequency (vocal source), and duration (prosody) of speech are modeled simultaneously by HMMs. Speech waveforms are generated from HMMs themselves based on the maximum likelihood criterion.[31]

=== synthesizing speech by replacing the formants (main bands of energy) with pure tone whistles.[32]

Text normalization challenges

The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are full of heteronyms, numbers, and abbreviations that all require expansion into a phonetic representation. There are many spellings in English which are pronounced differently based on context. For example, "My latest project is to learn how to better project my voice" contains two pronunciations of "project".

Most text-to-speech (TTS) systems do not generate semantic representations of their input texts, as processes for doing so are unreliable, poorly understood, and computationally ineffective. As a result, various heuristic techniques are used to guess the proper way to disambiguate homographs, like examining neighboring words and using statistics about frequency of occurrence.

Recently TTS systems have begun to use HMMs (discussed above) to generate "parts of speech" to aid in disambiguating homographs. This technique is quite successful for many cases such as whether "read" should be pronounced as "red" implying past tense, or as "reed" implying present tense. Typical error rates when using HMMs in this fashion are usually below five percent. These techniques also work well for most European languages, although access to required training corpora is frequently difficult in these languages.

Deciding how to convert numbers is another problem that TTS systems have to address. It is a simple programming challenge to convert a number into words (at least in English), like "1325" becoming "one thousand three hundred twenty-five." However, numbers occur in many different contexts; "1325" may also be read as "one three two five", "thirteen twenty-five" or "thirteen hundred and twenty five". A TTS system can often infer how to expand a number based on surrounding words, numbers, and punctuation, and sometimes the system provides a way to specify the context if it is ambiguous.[33] Roman numerals can also be read differently depending on context. For example "Henry VIII" reads as "Henry the Eighth", while "Chapter VIII" reads as "Chapter Eight".

Similarly, abbreviations can be ambiguous. For example, the abbreviation "in" for "inches" must be differentiated from the word "in", and the address "12 St John St." uses the same abbreviation for both "Saint" and "Street". TTS systems with intelligent front ends can make educated guesses about ambiguous abbreviations, while others provide the same result in all cases, resulting in nonsensical (and sometimes comical) outputs, such as "co-operation" being rendered as "company operation".

Text-to-phoneme challenges

Speech synthesis systems use two basic approaches to determine the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling, a process which is often called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (phoneme is the term used by linguists to describe distinctive sounds in a language). The simplest approach to text-to-phoneme conversion is the dictionary-based approach, where a large dictionary containing all the words of a language and their correct pronunciations is stored by the program. Determining the correct pronunciation of each word is a matter of looking up each word in the dictionary and replacing the spelling with the pronunciation specified in the dictionary. The other approach is rule-based, in which pronunciation rules are applied to words to determine their pronunciations based on their spellings. This is similar to the "sounding out", or synthetic phonics, approach to learning reading.

Each approach has advantages and drawbacks. The dictionary-based approach is quick and accurate, but completely fails if it is given a word which is not in its dictionary. As dictionary size grows, so too does the memory space requirements of the synthesis system. On the other hand, the rule-based approach works on any input, but the complexity of the rules grows substantially as the system takes into account irregular spellings or pronunciations. (Consider that the word "of" is very common in English, yet is the only word in which the letter "f" is pronounced [v].) As a result, nearly all speech synthesis systems use a combination of these approaches.

Languages with a phonemic orthography have a very regular writing system, and the prediction of the pronunciation of words based on their spellings is quite successful. Speech synthesis systems for such languages often use the rule-based method extensively, resorting to dictionaries only for those few words, like foreign names and borrowings, whose pronunciations are not obvious from their spellings. On the other hand, speech synthesis systems for languages like English, which have extremely irregular spelling systems, are more likely to rely on dictionaries, and to use rule-based methods only for unusual words, or words that aren't in their dictionaries.

Evaluation challenges

The consistent evaluation of speech synthesis systems may be difficult because of a lack of universally agreed objective evaluation criteria. Different organizations often use different speech data. The quality of speech synthesis systems also depends to a large degree on the quality of the production technique (which may involve analogue or digital recording) and on the facilities used to replay the speech. Evaluating speech synthesis systems has therefore often been compromised by differences between production techniques and replay facilities.

Recently, however, some researchers have started to evaluate speech synthesis systems using a common speech dataset.[34]

Prosodics and emotional content

A study in the journal Speech Communication by Amy Drahota and colleagues at the University of Portsmouth, UK, reported that listeners to voice recordings could determine, at better than chance levels, whether or not the speaker was smiling.[35][36][37] It was suggested that identification of the vocal features that signal emotional content may be used to help make synthesized speech sound more natural. One of the related issues is modification of the pitch contour of the sentence, depending upon whether it is an affirmative, interrogative or exclamatory sentence. One of the techniques for pitch modification[38] uses discrete cosine transform in the source domain (linear prediction residual).

Dedicated hardware

Early Technology (not available anymore)

Current (as of 2013)

  • Magnevation SpeakJet ( TTS256 Hobby and experimenter.
  • Epson S1V30120F01A100 ( IC DECTalk Based voice, Robotic, Eng/Spanish
  • Textspeak TTS-EM ( ICs, Modules and Industrial enclosures in 24 languages. Human sounding, Phoneme based.

The Mattel Intellivision game console, which is a computer that lacks a keyboard, offered the Intellivoice Voice Synthesis module in 1982. It included the SP0256 Narrator speech synthesizer chip on a removable cartridge. The Narrator had 2kB of Read-Only Memory (ROM), and this was utilized to store a database of generic words that could be combined to make phrases in Intellivision games. Since the Orator chip could also accept speech data from external memory, any additional words or phrases needed could be stored inside the cartridge itself. The data consisted of strings of analog-filter coefficients to modify the behavior of the chip's synthetic vocal-tract model, rather than simple digitized samples.

Also released in 1982, Software Automatic Mouth was the first commercial all-software voice synthesis program. It was later used as the basis for Macintalk. The program was available for non-Macintosh Apple computers (including the Apple II, and the Lisa), various Atari models and the Commodore 64. The Apple version preferred additional hardware that contained DACs, although it could instead use the computer's one-bit audio output (with the addition of much distortion) if the card was not present. The Atari made use of the embedded POKEY audio chip. Speech playback on the Atari normally disabled interrupt requests and shut down the ANTIC chip during vocal output. The audible output is extremely distorted speech when the screen is on. The Commodore 64 made use of the 64's embedded SID audio chip.

Arguably, the first speech system integrated into an operating system was the 1400XL/1450XL personal computers designed by Atari, Inc. using the Votrax SC01 chip in 1983. The 1400XL/1450XL computers used a Finite State Machine to enable World English Spelling text-to-speech synthesis.[40] Unfortunately, the 1400XL/1450XL personal computers never shipped in quantity.

The Atari ST computers were sold with "stspeech.tos" on floppy disk.

The first speech system integrated into an operating system that shipped in quantity was Apple Computer's MacInTalk. The software was licensed from 3rd party developers Joseph Katz and Mark Barton (later, SoftVoice, Inc.) and an early version was featured during the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh computer. This January demo, which used speech synthesis based on the Software Automatic Mouth, or SAM software, required 512 kilobytes of RAM memory. As a result, it could not run in the 128 kilobytes of RAM the first Mac actually shipped with.[41] So, the demo was accomplished with a prototype 512k Mac, although those in attendance were not told of this and the synthesis demo created considerable excitement for the Macintosh. In the early 1990s Apple expanded its capabilities offering system wide text-to-speech support. With the introduction of faster PowerPC-based computers they included higher quality voice sampling. Apple also introduced speech recognition into its systems which provided a fluid command set. More recently, Apple has added sample-based voices. Starting as a curiosity, the speech system of Apple Macintosh has evolved into a fully supported program, PlainTalk, for people with vision problems. VoiceOver was for the first time featured in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). During 10.4 (Tiger) & first releases of 10.5 (Leopard) there was only one standard voice shipping with Mac OS X. Starting with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the user can choose out of a wide range list of multiple voices. VoiceOver voices feature the taking of realistic-sounding breaths between sentences, as well as improved clarity at high read rates over PlainTalk. Mac OS X also includes say, a command-line based application that converts text to audible speech. The AppleScript Standard Additions includes a say verb that allows a script to use any of the installed voices and to control the pitch, speaking rate and modulation of the spoken text.

The Apple iOS operating system used on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch uses VoiceOver speech synthesis for accessibility.[42] Some third party applications also provide speech synthesis to facilitate navigating, reading web pages or translating text.

The second operating system to feature advanced speech synthesis capabilities was AmigaOS, introduced in 1985. The voice synthesis was licensed by Commodore International from SoftVoice, Inc., who also developed the original MacinTalk text-to-speech system. It featured a complete system of voice emulation for American English, with both male and female voices and "stress" indicator markers, made possible through the Amiga's audio chipset.[43] The synthesis system was divided into a narrator device, which was responsible for modulating and concatenating phonemes, and a translator library which translated English text to phonemes via a set of rules. AmigaOS also featured a high-level "Speak Handler", which allowed command-line users to redirect text output to speech. Speech synthesis was occasionally used in third-party programs, particularly word processors and educational software. The synthesis software remained largely unchanged from the first AmigaOS release and Commodore eventually removed speech synthesis support from AmigaOS 2.1 onward.

Despite the American English phoneme limitation, an unofficial version with multilingual speech synthesis was developed. This made use of an enhanced version of the translator library which could translate a number of languages, given a set of rules for each language.[44]

Microsoft Windows

Modern Windows desktop systems can use SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 components to support speech synthesis and speech recognition. SAPI 4.0 was available as an optional add-on for Windows 95 and Windows 98. Windows 2000 added Narrator, a text–to–speech utility for people who have visual impairment. Third-party programs such as CoolSpeech, Textaloud and Ultra Hal can perform various text-to-speech tasks such as reading text aloud from a specified website, email account, text document, the Windows clipboard, the user's keyboard typing, etc. Not all programs can use speech synthesis directly.[45] Some programs can use plug-ins, extensions or add-ons to read text aloud. Third-party programs are available that can read text from the system clipboard.

Microsoft Speech Server is a server-based package for voice synthesis and recognition. It is designed for network use with web applications and call centers.

Text-to-Speech (TTS) refers to the ability of computers to read text aloud. A TTS Engine converts written text to a phonemic representation, then converts the phonemic representation to waveforms that can be output as sound. TTS engines with different languages, dialects and specialized vocabularies are available through third-party publishers.[46]

Version 1.6 of Android added support for speech synthesis (TTS).[47]

Currently, there are a number of applications, plugins and gadgets that can read messages directly from an e-mail client and web pages from a web browser or Google Toolbar such as Text-to-voice which is an add-on to Firefox. Some specialized software can narrate RSS-feeds. On one hand, online RSS-narrators simplify information delivery by allowing users to listen to their favourite news sources and to convert them to podcasts. On the other hand, on-line RSS-readers are available on almost any PC connected to the Internet. Users can download generated audio files to portable devices, e.g. with a help of podcast receiver, and listen to them while walking, jogging or commuting to work.

A growing field in Internet based TTS is web-based assistive technology, e.g. 'Browsealoud' from a UK company and Readspeaker. It can deliver TTS functionality to anyone (for reasons of accessibility, convenience, entertainment or information) with access to a web browser. The non-profit project was created in 2006 to provide a similar web-based TTS interface to the WorldHeritage.[48]

Other work is being done in the context of the W3C through the W3C Audio Incubator Group with the involvement of The BBC and Google Inc.

  • Following the commercial failure of the hardware-based Intellivoice, gaming developers sparingly used software synthesis in later games. A famous example is the introductory narration of Nintendo's Super Metroid game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Earlier systems from Atari, such as the Atari 5200 (Baseball) and the Atari 2600 (Quadrun and Open Sesame), also had games utilizing software synthesis.
  • Some e-book readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, Samsung E6, PocketBook eReader Pro, enTourage eDGe, and the Bebook Neo.
  • The BBC Micro incorporated the Texas Instruments TMS5220 speech synthesis chip,
  • Some models of Texas Instruments home computers produced in 1979 and 1981 (Texas Instruments TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A) were capable of text-to-phoneme synthesis or reciting complete words and phrases (text-to-dictionary), using a very popular Speech Synthesizer peripheral. TI used a proprietary codec to embed complete spoken phrases into applications, primarily video games.[49]
  • IBM's OS/2 Warp 4 included VoiceType, a precursor to IBM ViaVoice.
  • Systems that operate on free and open source software systems including Linux are various, and include open-source programs such as the Festival Speech Synthesis System which uses diphone-based synthesis (and can use a limited number of MBROLA voices), and gnuspeech which uses articulatory synthesis[50] from the Free Software Foundation.
  • GPS Navigation units produced by Garmin, Magellan, TomTom and others use speech synthesis for automobile navigation.
  • Yamaha produced a music synthesizer in 1999, the Yamaha FS1R which included a Formant synthesis capability. Sequences of up to 512 individual vowel and consonant formants could be stored and replayed, allowing short vocal phrases to be synthesized.

Speech synthesis markup languages

A number of markup languages have been established for the rendition of text as speech in an XML-compliant format. The most recent is Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), which became a W3C recommendation in 2004. Older speech synthesis markup languages include Java Speech Markup Language (JSML) and SABLE. Although each of these was proposed as a standard, none of them have been widely adopted.

Speech synthesis markup languages are distinguished from dialogue markup languages. VoiceXML, for example, includes tags related to speech recognition, dialogue management and touchtone dialing, in addition to text-to-speech markup.

Speech synthesis has long been a vital assistive technology tool and its application in this area is significant and widespread. It allows environmental barriers to be removed for people with a wide range of disabilities. The longest application has been in the use of screen readers for people with visual impairment, but text-to-speech systems are now commonly used by people with dyslexia and other reading difficulties as well as by pre-literate children. They are also frequently employed to aid those with severe speech impairment usually through a dedicated voice output communication aid.

Speech synthesis techniques are also used in entertainment productions such as games and animations. In 2007, Animo Limited announced the development of a software application package based on its speech synthesis software FineSpeech, explicitly geared towards customers in the entertainment industries, able to generate narration and lines of dialogue according to user specifications.[51] The application reached maturity in 2008, when NEC Biglobe announced a web service that allows users to create phrases from the voices of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2 characters.[52]

In recent years, Text to Speech for disability and handicapped communication aids have become widely deployed in Mass Transit. Text to Speech is also finding new applications outside the disability market. For example, speech synthesis, combined with speech recognition, allows for interaction with mobile devices via natural language processing interfaces.

Text-to speech is also used in second language acquisition. Voki, for instance, is an educational tool created by Oddcast that allows users to create their own talking avatar, using different accents. They can be emailed, embedded on websites or shared on social media.

Multiple companies offer TTS APIs to their customers to accelerate development of new applications utilizing TTS technology. Companies offering TTS APIs include AT&T, IVONA, Neospeech, Readspeaker and YAKiToMe!. For mobile app development, Android operating system has been offering text to speech API for a long time. Most recently, with iOS7, Apple started offering an API for text to speech.

See also

  1. ^ Allen, Jonathan; Hunnicutt, M. Sharon; Klatt, Dennis (1987). From Text to Speech: The MITalk system. Cambridge University Press.
  2. ^ Rubin, P.; Baer, T.; Mermelstein, P. (1981). "An articulatory synthesizer for perceptual research". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 70 (2): 321–328.
  3. ^ van Santen, Jan P. H.; Sproat, Richard W.; Olive, Joseph P.; Hirschberg, Julia (1997). Progress in Speech Synthesis. Springer.
  4. ^ Van Santen, J. (April 1994). "Assignment of segmental duration in text-to-speech synthesis". Computer Speech & Language 8 (2): 95–128.
  5. ^ History and Development of Speech Synthesis, Helsinki University of Technology, Retrieved on November 4, 2006
  6. ^ Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst der Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine ("Mechanism of the human speech with description of its speaking machine," J. B. Degen, Wien). (German)
  7. ^ Mattingly, Ignatius G. (1974). Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. "Speech synthesis for phonetic and phonological models". Current Trends in Linguistics (Mouton, The Hague) 12: 2451–2487.
  8. ^ Sproat, Richard W. (1997). Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis: The Bell Labs Approach. Springer.
  9. ^
  10. ^ Klatt, D. (1987) "Review of Text-to-Speech Conversion for English" Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 82(3):737-93
  11. ^ Lambert, Bruce (March 21, 1992). "Louis Gerstman, 61, a Specialist In Speech Disorders and Processes". New York Times.
  12. ^ Arthur C. Clarke Biography at the Wayback Machine (archived December 11, 1997)
  13. ^ "Where "HAL" First Spoke (Bell Labs Speech Synthesis website)". Bell Labs. Retrieved 2010-02-17.
  14. ^ Anthropomorphic Talking Robot Waseda-Talker Series
  15. ^ TSI Speech+ & other speaking calculators
  16. ^ Gevaryahu, Jonathan, "TSI S14001A Speech Synthesizer LSI Integrated Circuit Guide"
  17. ^ Breslow, et al. United States Patent 4326710: "Talking electronic game" April 27, 1982
  18. ^ Voice Chess Challenger
  19. ^ Gaming's Most Important Evolutions, GamesRadar
  20. ^ Alan W. Black, Perfect synthesis for all of the people all of the time. IEEE TTS Workshop 2002.
  21. ^ John Kominek and Alan W. Black. (2003). CMU ARCTIC databases for speech synthesis. CMU-LTI-03-177. Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
  22. ^ Julia Zhang. Language Generation and Speech Synthesis in Dialogues for Language Learning, masters thesis, Section 5.6 on page 54.
  23. ^ William Yang Wang and Kallirroi Georgila. (2011). Automatic Detection of Unnatural Word-Level Segments in Unit-Selection Speech Synthesis, IEEE ASRU 2011.
  24. ^ Pitch-Synchronous Overlap and Add (PSOLA) Synthesis at the Wayback Machine (archived February 22, 2007)
  25. ^ T. Dutoit, V. Pagel, N. Pierret, F. Bataille, O. van der Vrecken. The MBROLA Project: Towards a set of high quality speech synthesizers of use for non commercial purposes. ICSLP Proceedings, 1996.
  26. ^ L.F. Lamel, J.L. Gauvain, B. Prouts, C. Bouhier, R. Boesch. Generation and Synthesis of Broadcast Messages, Proceedings ESCA-NATO Workshop and Applications of Speech Technology, September 1993.
  27. ^ Dartmouth College: Music and Computers, 1993.
  28. ^ Examples include Astro Blaster, Space Fury, and Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator
  29. ^ Examples include Star Wars, Firefox, Return of the Jedi, Road Runner, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 720°, Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, A.P.B., Paperboy, RoadBlasters, Vindicators Part II, Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters.
  30. ^ John Holmes and Wendy Holmes (2001). Speech Synthesis and Recognition (2nd ed.). CRC.
  31. ^ "The HMM-based Speech Synthesis System". Retrieved 2012-02-22.
  32. ^ Remez, R.; Rubin, P.; Pisoni, D.; Carrell, T. (22 May 1981). "Speech perception without traditional speech cues". Science 212 (4497): 947–949.
  33. ^ "Speech synthesis". World Wide Web Organization.
  34. ^ "Blizzard Challenge". Retrieved 2012-02-22.
  35. ^ "Smile -and the world can hear you". University of Portsmouth. January 9, 2008. Archived from the original on 2008-05-17.
  36. ^ "Smile - And The World Can Hear You, Even If You Hide". Science Daily. January 2008.
  37. ^ Drahota, A. (2008). "The vocal communication of different kinds of smile". Speech Communication 50 (4): 278–287.
  38. ^ Muralishankar, R.; Ramakrishnan, A. G.; Prathibha, P. (February 2004). "Modification of pitch using DCT in the source domain". Speech Communication 42 (2): 143 -154.
  39. ^ EE Times. "TI will exit dedicated speech-synthesis chips, transfer products to Sensory." June 14, 2001.
  40. ^ "1400XL/1450XL Speech Handler External Reference Specification" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-02-22.
  41. ^ "It Sure Is Great To Get Out Of That Bag!". Retrieved 2013-03-24.
  42. ^ "iPhone: Configuring accessibility features (Including VoiceOver and Zoom)". Apple. Retrieved 2011-01-29.
  43. ^
  44. ^ Devitt, Francesco (30 June 1995). "Translator Library (Multilingual-speech version)". Retrieved 9 April 2013.
  45. ^ "Accessibility Tutorials for Windows XP: Using Narrator". Microsoft. 2011-01-29. Retrieved 2011-01-29.
  46. ^ "How to configure and use Text-to-Speech in Windows XP and in Windows Vista". Microsoft. 2007-05-07. Retrieved 2010-02-17.
  47. ^ Jean-Michel Trivi (2009-09-23). "An introduction to Text-To-Speech in Android". Retrieved 2010-02-17.
  48. ^ Andreas Bischoff, The Pediaphon - Speech Interface to the free WorldHeritage Encyclopedia for Mobile Phones, PDA's and MP3-Players, Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, Pages: 575-579 ISBN 0-7695-2932-1, 2007
  49. ^ "Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project (SSSHP) 1986-2002". Retrieved 2010-02-17.
  50. ^ "gnuspeech". Retrieved 2010-02-17.
  51. ^ "Speech Synthesis Software for Anime Announced". Anime News Network. 2007-05-02. Retrieved 2010-02-17.
  52. ^ "Code Geass Speech Synthesizer Service Offered in Japan". 2008-09-09. Retrieved 2010-02-17.

External links

  • Tool for Speech Synthesis in the Browser via Google Chrome
  • Text to Speech Synthesis in the Web Browser with JavaScript
  • Speech synthesis at DMOZ
  • Text to Voice or Text to Speech Firefox Addon
  • Dennis Klatt's History of Speech Synthesis
  • Verbose Text-To-Speech.
  • TextSpeak Multi-Lingual Text-To-Speech.
  • RC DecTalk English Text-To-Speech.
  • Simulated singing with the singing robot Pavarobotti or a description from the BBC on how the robot synthesized the singing.
  • 'Klatt's Last Tapes' a BBC Radio 4 programme on the history of speech synthesis with many examples of electronic speech included.
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Crobeg in All Outer Hebrides, The Outer Hebrides

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Crobeg is a charming detached, single-storey cottage just perfect for couples. Situated in the crofting township of Balallan overlooking one of the many Lochans in the area, it’s cosy and welcoming with an open fire in the lounge and beams throughout the living areas. The large mature garden makes it private and secluded. Brown trout fishing is available on Loch na Deasport, 200 yards, and fishing rods can be supplied.

It is in a very central location just 15 miles from the main town of Stornoway which has much to offer in the way of shopping, restaurants, museums and an art centre. Enjoy days out visiting the historical sites of the Callanish Stones, Carloway Broch, Ness Heritage Centre, Bosta and Great Bernera, Blackhouse Village or just enjoy the pristine sandy beaches on the west coast. The Clisham (the highest mountain in the Western isles) is only a short distance from Crobeg. Boat trips depart from Stornoway, Uig and Great Bernera for whale and dolphin watching and also further afield to the Shiants Isles and St. Kilda. There are a number of popular festivals which take place throughout the year including the Hebridean Celtic Festival, a large music event with many international artists as well as local musicians taking to the stage in July. The Royal National Mod is also another annual event, held in October, which is rich in Scottish Gaelic traditions. Join in the fun and listen to Gaelic poems, traditional bagpipes or watch one of the plays. The area has so much to offer; dramatic landscapes, seascapes, sunsets, dark skies, and even the Northern Lights can be spotted. Pub 2 miles, shops 6 miles and restaurants 2 miles.

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Comcast Launches Enterprise Internet of Things Trial Venture

Collaborating with Semtech to provide LoRa® Technology IoT solutions for enterprises

Camarillo, California - October 05, 2016

PHILADELPHIA – October 5, 2016 – Comcast today announced “machineQ™”, a new business trial venture focused on building business-to-business solutions and a platform for the Internet of Things (IoT). As a part of machineQ, Comcast will work with select commercial partners in proof of concepts to use it’s network to gather, transmit, and analyze data from connected devices distributed throughout their organizations.

Comcast will use Semtech Corporation’s (NASD: SMTC) globally-proven LoRa® Wireless Radio Frequency Technology to deploy network trials in Philadelphia and San Francisco later this year. These trials will focus on enabling use cases such as utility metering, environmental monitoring (e.g., temperature, pollution, noise), and asset tracking through LoRa Technology-enabled devices and network services. Organizations and enterprises interested in participating in trials for LoRa-specific proof of concepts are encouraged to contact Comcast here

According to a 2016 study of the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market by Machina Research, the total number of global M2M connections will grow from 6 billion in 2015 to 27 billion in 2025, with 20 percent of these connections originating in the United States. The global market is estimated to generate $3 trillion in revenue by 2025 with 22 percent ($660 billion) originating in the United States. Machina’s study also indicates that 11 percent of the connections by 2025 will use Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) connections such as LoRa.

"We believe the business-to-business segment of the Internet of Things market is going to expand rapidly over the next decade as businesses look to IoT-based technology to manage their businesses in a more effective and sophisticated manner," said Sam Schwartz, Chief Business Development Officer, Comcast Cable. "Technologies such as LoRa are setting the stage for the era of connected devices, and we think our network potentially has a role to play in connecting the millions of internet-enabled devices deployed within enterprises.”

Comcast has invested tens of billions of dollars to build a network that spans 20 of the nation's top 30 markets. It includes more than 149,000 route miles of fiber optic cable and more than 500,000 miles of HFC plant that is in close proximity to hundreds of thousands of businesses and city locations.

“The decision by Comcast to complement its existing infrastructure with LoRa Technology will enable connected devices, servers and software components to communicate seamlessly and securely on its new LoRaWAN™-based IoT platform,” said Mohan Maheswaran, Semtech’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Semtech is committed to working with Comcast to make LPWAN networks broadly available in the United States. We believe this will foster innovation by enterprises for new IoT solutions that allows us all to benefit from the advantages of our emerging connected world.”

If the initial trials are successful, Comcast intends to commercially deploy LoRaWAN networks and LoRa-related services across its markets, with the goal of completing commercial deployments within the next 18 to 30 months.

About Comcast Cable

Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings. Comcast Corporation (CMCSA) is a global media and technology company. Visit for more information.

About Semtech

Semtech Corporation is a leading supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors for high-end consumer, computing, communications and industrial equipment. Products are designed to benefit the engineering community as well as the global community. The company is dedicated to reducing the impact it, and its products, have on the environment. Internal green programs seek to reduce waste through material and manufacturing control, use of green technology and designing for resource reduction. Publicly traded since 1967, Semtech is listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol SMTC. For more information, visit

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National Numeracy Network > NNN Blog > QR of Equal Pay

QR of Equal Pay

Nathan Grawe
published Mar 14, 2014

Around this time of year, news stories often turn to the "gender pay gap." In part, this is a response to gender-equality activists such as the American Association of University Women who celebrate Equal Pay Day to mark the day at which women make up the gender gap from the previous year. This year's State of the Union address gave us a head start on the conversation.

Given the attention, it seemed useful to apply a little QR to the topic to gain a deeper understanding. If you click the link above, you will quickly learn that the gender gap is 23%. But who is in the sample? It takes a little digging, but you eventually find the answer: "full-time, year-round workers." That's a start, but a student armed with 10 Foundational Quantitative Reasoning Questions would know to press further by wondering how the concept of "full-time" is defined. The answer turns out to be anyone working over 35 hours is employed full-time. That well-prepared student might then wonder what is controlled for in this analysis. The answer is nothing other than full time status–not even hours worked.

A 2009 Labor Department study reports that the wage gap shrinks by 71% (to around 5%) after controlling for well-documented income-altering factors other than sex like hours worked, age, number of children, marital status, union representation, race, education, and fraction of women working in the person's industry and occupation. In other words, the gender pay gap is largely explained by choices.

So, does that mean that we can largely ignore complaints of discrimination? Clearly not. That women and men on the same career path earn the same income does not rule out discrimination that limits work choices. Are there barriers in the education system or in hiring that make it harder for women to end up in higher-paying positions? Does society push women into lower paying life paths? These are hypotheses that cannot be ruled out by the data.

But the tools of QR can help us focus in on the real explanations for an important observation.

QR of Equal Pay -- Discussion

I realize that the difference in pay between the genders is often explained as resulting from life experience differences. Years worked for men longer than women because they drop out for childbirth etc. But the fact that the amounts differ so much for women versus men is hard to get past. Recently the Obama admin was taken to task over this. It would be interesting for them to explain it based on such mitigating factors.

Recently I've been looking at the differences in wages for men versus women. Here in Northfield its not so bad:

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Hard-Pushed Russian Consumers Say No to Further Household Cutbacks

22 March 2017

Whether their incomes continue to fall or not, a new report says Russians won't be trimming their budgets in 2017....Read More

Retailers Look for Windfall in Resurgent Russian Luxury Goods Sector

13 Feb 2017

Currency stabilisation, VAT rebates and stay-at-home spenders all contribute to rise in high-end purchases....Read More

ASEAN in Focus: The Thai Consumer Market

9 Feb 2017

Fuelled by the expanding middle-income class and influx of tourists, expatriates and retirees, the Thai consumer market holds great potential for Hong Kong suppliers. There will be stronger demand for...Read More

Travel Sector Looks to Address Priorities of Mainland Millennials

23 Jan 2017

Although China remains the biggest source of outbound tourists, it was a younger generation of bolder, more independent, digitally savvy holidaymakers that many exhibitors at the recent ITB Asia trave...Read More

Boom in Korean Visitors to Taiwan Helps Mitigate Mainland Shortfall

29 Dec 2016

With a 30% drop in mainland visitor numbers, Taiwan has looked to its northerly neighbour to prop up its tourism sector....Read More

93% Surge in Mainlanders Visiting South Africa Follows Visa Overhaul

23 Nov 2016

South Africa repeals disastrous visa requirement regime after visitor numbers tumble throughout the course of 2016....Read More

Taiwan Travel Platform Looks to Woo Southeast Asia's Digital Tourists

26 Oct 2016

Launched in 2014, Kkday – one of Taiwan's fastest-growing destination booking sites – now has wider aspirations....Read More

Repurposing Classic Buildings Proves a Hit with Taiwan Tourists

27 Sept 2016

Heritage sites sensitively reinvented as hotels and high-end outlets emerge as popular visitor attractions....Read More

Hong Kong Seeks Share of Burgeoning Mainland Luxury Cruise Market

23 June 2016

Chinese tourists are embracing cruise holidays as never before, drawn by falling prices and tailored packages. With its own tourism sector suffering as a result of the recent decline in mainland visit...Read More

Drop in Mainland Visitor Numbers Sees Taiwan Tourist Sector Struggle

13 May 2016

An over-supply of hospitality facilities and a fall in mainland visitor levels triggers Taiwan tourism rethink....Read More

Changes to Hainan Duty-Free Rules Opens Door for HK Suppliers

26 April 2016

Expanded purchase opportunities sees Hainan duty-free companies open new premises and increase range of stock....Read More

World Travel Companies Gather in Guangzhou to Woo Mainland Tourists

11 March 2016

The mainland outward bound travel sector is now by far the world's most lucrative, driving many global tourism operators to create bespoke packages and new tailored vacations for this unique and disce...Read More

China Dominates Asia Travel Sector as Destination and Tourism Source

27 Jan 2016

More than 408 million tourists now visit Asia-Pacific destinations every year, with China taking the lead as both the preferred destination and the largest source of outbound tourists. Japan, though, ...Read More

South Africa Looks to Hong Kong for Distribution to ASEAN Markets

4 Dec 2015

With the growing sophistication and internationalisation of tastes in many of the ASEAN countries, South Africa is now looking to Hong Kong as an intermediary in its bid to increase its food and drink...Read More

Greek Economy Shows Grass Roots Rally But Remains Clearly Fragile

1 Dec 2015

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28 Oct 2015

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Cuban Tourism Sector Set to Boom as US Sanctions Come to an End

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Domestic Airbnb Players Emerge as Mainland Embraces Holiday Lets

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"Journeys into the land of fantasy are a search of treasures which I would like to share. Mind is a characteristic factory of dreams opened for the time of creation. Making up monumental compositions is an attempt to exist in the world of imagination, away from the daily life.

The choice I have made in my life seems appropriate to me – painting comes easy to me, but it is difficult for me to part with a painting.

Artistic journeys which I have made in my life have been caused by my passion for painting. Apart from the fact that I paint I am also interested in art in a broad sense. These interests have led me to the track of my own style which I am slowly becoming a slave of ...

Creating my recent works I have had so much time as to become accustomed to the thought that these paintings will be lost for the time of exhibitions and, ultimately, they will become parts of different collections.

But such is a painting’s lot, to travel and change its owners."

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Friday, January 31, 2014

We have a WINNER! $850 @ Sew Crafty Angel

Congratulations Angela Y.  You are the winner of $850 Paypal Cash
1:14pm    Update:  Angela has claimed her winnings and her Paypal Cash has been sent to her.  Congrats Angela!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You have 48 to contact me per the rules of the contest to claim your prize.

Special Thanks to all the wonderful bloggers that helped make this giveaway possible.

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Cthulhu Kitty
Level 3: 173 points
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Last Logged In: March 16th, 2013
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CTRL + Z by Cthulhu Kitty

August 15th, 2010 7:43 AM

INSTRUCTIONS: The law of entropy: a system tends to degenerate over time.

It is easy to shatter glass, but difficult to put it back together.
It is easy to create toast, but almost impossible to turn it back into bread.
It is easy to make mistakes. Destroy relationships. Regret choices.

But we know that time is flexible. Now undo.

A Revision of History

I am sure we have all felt like being able to go back in time and re-do something…maybe something small, like study for a test better or maybe this time not blurting out “I slept with your boyfriend.” As for me, I have found myself contemplating the courses of history many times. I have tortured myself often (and still do periodically) by wondering what I could have been if only things had been different.

Where to begin. The beginning, naturally. I was born to a woman who married and had a child because that was what women did. When I was born, she did not want anything to do with me because she was certain that I did not like her. This was because I cried all the time and never smiled. My sister, on the other hand, born three years later, was a good baby. As we grew older, it was even clearer to my mother that my sister was the good child and I was the bad child. Try as I might, I could not earn the approval that was so easily given to my sister. Much later as an adult, I realized (through the help of extensive therapy) that my mother suffered from borderline personality disorder I could have been the best daughter in the world and still would have been treated the same by her. Unfortunately, by the time I learned it was not my fault, the damage had been done. I had suffered years of emotional, mental, and physical abuse. I saw myself as bad, unlovable, uncapable of doing anything right. I was unable to form a healthy relationship, relate to others in any setting, or keep a job. Yet, I was intelligent and creative and always did well in school. (though since I did not get straight As, I was a bad child for not doing as well as I should have)

What might I have been if only my mother had been kind, loving, and supportive? With my intelligence, I am sure there is nothing I could not have achieved. Could I have found the cure for cancer? Created/discovered a renewable energy source? Become the first female President of the United States? At the very least, I am absolutely convinced that I would have been able to make friends, find and give true love, and have a satisfying, well paying job. In other words, be happy.

But, we can’t just go back to my birth to hit the undo button and turn my mother into someone capable of love. We need to go further back in time. What made her who she was?

She was the tenth child in a family of ten with 12 years between her and her next oldest sibling. She was, as you may guess, not planned. As a result of her birth, her mother refused to talk to her father after that point. (Mexican Roman Catholics do not believe in birth control, or divorce). So, my mother grew up in a household of discontent with her entire family blaming her for that environment. But it gets worse. We do not know the specifics, but borderline personality disorder is most often the result of traumatic abuse as a child, usually of a sexual nature. After her mother cut her father off from any sort of relationship, my sister and I suspect our grandfather of the worst.

How do you hit the undo button in a situation like this? The timing of her birth is what caused the chain of events to follow. Changing that one link would have made her a completely different person, one who, at the very least, would not have gone to college when my father did. In other words, taking the trauma out of her childhood would have caused me not to exist.

The truth is that the horrible abuse she suffered caused me to exist. And in turn, the abuse I suffered caused me to be the person I am today, both good and bad.

At the age of fourty, I realize that I cannot change what happened to me, what happened to her. It does no good to wallow in the what might have been. Regret is the block of cement chained to me dragging me down, holding me back. I cannot undo what happened, but I can undo the results. I cannot unshatter the glass, but I can slowly pick up the pieces and glue them together.

Through therapy and medication I have been able to find and keep a job that I enjoy. With the help of my sister and a wonderful woman who will become my wife this October, I have learned how to experience and give love. In other words, I am happy.

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3 comment(s)

(no subject)
posted by rongo rongo on August 15th, 2010 9:19 PM

Happy wins - glad you're there.

(no subject)
posted by anna one on August 16th, 2010 11:06 PM

I'm so glad.
Glad you're happy, glad you're here.

(no subject)
posted by Kate Saturday on August 18th, 2010 10:07 PM


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The Ultimate Shining Force II Guide
shining force 2: charactersshining force ii: itemsshining force ii: weaponsshining force ii: spellsshining force ii: main guideshining force ii: secretsshining force ii: downloadsshining force ii: fanworkshining force ii: miscellaneousshining force ii: forum FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions
site search
main guide
full walkthrough
tactics & strategies
main game map
land effect guide
instructions manual
experience guide

shining force ii: main guide: frequently asked questions (faqs)
Use the wooden panel at the tree in Ribble...I follow an old man to a room where he says there is a tunnel to Grans Island. When we get there and I kill the monsters, he tells me it's locked. Where do I go from here?

You don't need that tunnel. Take the wooden panel you find in the room to Ribble, and use it on the tree there (note: you must use the A button to select to use the item. Pressing C will only search the tree). Under the tree you'll find the Achilles Sword, which you can then take to Rohde in Hassan. He'll then go with you to the Taros Shrine, who you may now fight (note: only the Achilles Sword can harm the Taros). Once the Taros is defeated you can use the Caravan to travel along the dried-up river and get to Devils Tail (west Parmecia) to see Creed.

(c) 1996-2010 Lady Moogie Goddess of all things Shining - | full disclaimer/copyright notice
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San Mateo Event Center
APRIL 5 - 9, 2017

Buy Tickets Online | Nursery Outlets | Gala Tickets

Garden Designer: David Sauter & Foothill College Students
Garden Creators: Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, CA

Garden Creator's Award

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Garden Creator's Award

Step through the doors of your indoor world, into the boundless realm of the rooftop.  No longer the domain of condensers and clutter, the skyline lives again.  Feel the sun, the breeze, the rain.  Step with the seasons.  Delight in the color.  Constructed of common materials and sustainability planted, the Foothill College rooftop garden is designed with modular pieces that will fit even the smallest of spaces.  As practical as it is beautiful, it invites you to rediscover a forgotten province of your home.  A room above the hustle and bustle, beyond the ordinary.  A space beyond and above.

  • People's Choice Award – Favorite garden as voted by the public. Recipient additionally receives a rotating trophy.
  • Garden Creator's Award – Garden voted the most accomplished by previous Garden Creators.


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Friday, February 24, 2012

Share the wealth

In my opinion, anyone in America that believes in “Share the wealth” concept of redistribution, is not only a simpleton, but should go live in another country, especially the first family. In an article in the Washington Post, (To about 300 supporters wealthy enough to pay $300-$10,000 to attend the mid-day event) the first lady said, "If a family in this country is struggling, we cannot be satisfied with our own families' good fortune." Well then, why is the First family spending oodles of money on vacations? Because they really don't care about the average person. They want to stay in power and keep the poor still poor and the middle class paying for most of the redistribution and help the rich when they can, without anyone else knowing they do.

“She also rapped the rich, as has her husband. "Who do we want to be?" Obama asked. "Will we be a country where success is limited to the few at the top?  This country is strongest when we are all better off." She doesn't get it. She is this stupid. No Michelle, we are all better off if we have the opportunity to get to where we want to be with that chance of hope. Not your stupid handouts.

The “Obamination” spreading our country like a plague, is people thinking they can get something and not work for it. Yes, the entitled ones that love the fact that the government is giving them the “Redistribution” that someone else worked for. Problem with this is, like a marriage where a spouse gets used to living at a certain level, there will be at some point in time the spouse demands more to live on. How much more do we dig for the people that have grown enslaved to the “free” government check, just because you have a pulse, syndrome? How fair do we need to be?

So, we get to a place where we need to “Redistribute” more money and this leads to MORE taxation and MORE power that the government need to exert since more regulation is coming. Why anyone would think that this is the American way, is just beyond all comprehension of common sense. Allen West could not have said it better! "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else.” Also, by taking this handout, you enslave most, because they will be happy with the monies they get and not try to “Make it” like their predecessors used to when they first came to America. You have just given them the check that will dissipate their motivation to acceptance rather than eagerness. As for the ones that have the drive and motivation, theirs is also now tempered to a stagnation that America hasn't seen. Why do I have work my but off for them? For you to thrive, you must pay OVER your fair share for the ones that get that check.

I also wanted to explain my point of helping the rich when no one else sees it. The Keystone XL pipeline, by far, will put America on the map for oil recovery and production if it is routed to Texas, like proposed. Obama killed this attempt to pass this because he claims he only had a few weeks to study this proposal. That being a blatant lie aside, there is another aspect to this story. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. owns Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC, which is among the railroads that would transport oil produced in western Canada if the pipeline isn’t built. So he is also making the rich, richer. Would people get rich if the pipeline was built? I would think so. But why would you want all that redirection of all the synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen not to go to the U.S.?

There is a dangerous precedent being forged in the Obamination camp of lies, deception and a downright power takeover. If he gets his way, he will have the U.S. as his slaves to the government that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all encompassing. I think that has been his “Modus operandi” ever since he took office. This is not the American way and hopefully soon, this will be corrected in the upcoming election, later this year.


text:
Available Now! (click cover)

America's Counter-Revolution
The Constitution Revisited

From the back cover:

This book challenges the assumption that the Constitution was a landmark in the struggle for liberty. Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America’s break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of “power, consequence, and grandeur.” America’s Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Why Not, Indeed!

 If all our emails, however personal, are to become subject to the scrutiny of the government, why shouldn’t all the government’s emails, however sensitive, become subject to the scrutiny of us? If we can’t plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament without their knowledge, why can they and Saudi Arabia plot to blow up Iran without ours?

Allan Baker

Kettering, Northamptonshire

Published in the Guardian.

HT: Jim Bovard

N. Joseph Potts said...

Plot to blow up Iran, hell!

What about plot to get us blown up?

coach outlet said...

I greatly benefit from your articles every time I read one.Thank you for your sharing,your post let me know a lot of information and knowledge.


text:
formal email

در حال بارگذاری پخش کننده ...

operator shenoto

1 نفر این پادکست صوتی را پسندیدند
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formal email

Dear Dr.

I don't know if you'll remember me, but I
introduced myself to you after your keynote at last week's conference.
As I mentioned to you, I have read all of your journal papers and I am a
great admirer of your research. Your article in the top journal
Language Learning was groundbreaking.

The reason I am contacting you is that I would like
to come to your university to study with you. I met some of your students at
the conference and they couldn't stop singing your praises as a
professor and as an advisor. I don't know if you are accepting any new students
for the next year, but if so, I hope you will consider me.

I have included two attachments to this
email. I am sending a copy of my CV , and I am also including a research
paper I completed this year. I hope that these will give you an idea of my
qualifications and experience. Please let me know if you need more
information or more samples of my academic work.

It was a pleasure and a privilege to meet you at
the conference and I hope to hear more about your research at a future

Lucy Hocevar

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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Rhythm Roll!

I wanted a different way to drill rhythm and since I have so many "active" games for doing this, I wanted to come up with a calmer version.  I also wanted to use my new Googly-eye dice, so I put together what I'm calling...Rhythm Roll!
The game is a "bingo" style game requiring the player to get 5 across diagonally, horizontially or vertically.  And...this game takes a bit of strategy!

In addition to the game boards (there are 6), the game requires 1 standard die (or fun googly eye die!), 2 rhythm dice and tokens.  The rhythm dice have a whole note, half note, dotted half note, quarter note, two connected eighth notes, and a quarter rest on each.  I bought mine, but you certainly could easily make them.
At the beginning of a turn, the player must decide whether to use the google die or one or two of the rhythm dice.  In order to cover the numbers on the game board, they must roll one or two rhythm dice, add up the total beats and then place a token on the matching number.   If they are looking to cover a lower number, they may want to choose only one die, whereas a higher number, such as 8, may require rolling both.
The standard die or googly-eye die is used to cover the note values.  If they roll a six, the player can cover the note values that add up to 6 beats.
Once a player is close to 5 across, it will certainly narrow down their decision as to which die to use!

This is sure to be a hit!  If you would like to use this game in your studio, you can download the game board and instructions here!

Tish said...

Great ideas. Thanks so much for sharing your talent of creating ideas. I love them

Sheryl said...

You're quite welcome, Tish! I hope you can make use of them!

Anonymous said...

Where did you buy the rhythm dice?

Sheryl said...

I purchased the dice here:

There are about 30 dice and a book of games which are great for 5 minute games during a lesson.