I’ve been giving the Antichrist, specifically the car accident variety, a lot of thought today.
On a report one of my coworkers edited today, our speech recognition program had translated a patient’s chief complaint of “I was in a car accident,” as “I was in a car antichrist.”
First question that springs to mind, of course, is “why would a medical program even KNOW the word ‘antichrist?’” I understand that thousands of words were programmed into these systems, and obviously that each individual word could be looked at critically to judge whether it deserved to take up space in the program’s vocabulary--how likely would it be for the word to appear in a medical report? So there will be a lot of superfluous words, words the system “knows” but will never likely use, in its vocabulary, as is true for most of us speakers of a language.
Still . . . . My computer desktop occasionally tells me that there are unused icons on my desktop, do I wish to dispose of them? I would think that, given what I understand to be the fact that speech recognition programs depend on complex mathematical probability models and so forth to make its decisions concerning “le mot juste” in any given context, after producing thousands of documents I would think the program would begin periodically purging itself of the clutter of thousands of words it never, ever uses, or so very rarely that it’s not worth holding onto, if only to avoid embarrassments like calling an accident an antichrist.
We are told that these speech rec systems “learn,” and it’s true, to some degree. But we are also supposedly able to “teach” them. One of my favorites from the medical world is CABG, the acronym for “coronary artery bypass graft.” That particular acronym appears in a significant percentage of reports I transcribe. Speech rec invariably (so far) reproduces it as “cabbage.” The way the system’s “learning” theoretically operates, if “cabbage” gets edited to “CABG” three consecutive times, the system will forget all about cabbage and stick strictly with the bypass. Unless there are a lot of medical transcriptionists out there who REALLY think the heart surgeon is talking about a coleslaw ingredient, the system just cannot grasp acronyms pronounced as words (CABG is pronounced cabbage. Nobody ever says C A B G--if they did, the system doubtlessly would get it).
But I still halfway expect to see, come March 17, a flurry of speech rec produced reports of ER visits all over the country concerning some poor wretch, maybe even the Antichrist, who choked on his “corned beef and CABG.”
Similarly, the same system that invariably spells “Advair Diskus” as “Advair Discus,” come track season or the Summer Olympics, start reproducing lines like, “The spectator unfortunately was hit by a flying Diskus.” “Discus” probably appears in medical reports with approximately the same frequency as “cabbage,” after all.
Getting back to the Antichrist, maybe it’s only that speech rec is developing an ego and wants to autograph its work once in a while.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Sunset maunderings at 1:30 a.m.
Mama always taught us that, if we didn’t have something nice to say, we should not say anything at all. (Is there anybody in the world, outside of politics and the internet, whose mama didn’t teach them the same?)
So for nearly 53 years I’ve mostly tried to avoid commenting on Winter.
Late this afternoon I was standing outside in the mild cold--it wasn’t the “take-your-breath-away” variety, just standard December right-around-freezing--admiring the sunset while Xena the old dog rolled in the grass (she has a thick coat and positively loves the cold) and Cecil, the half-yearling beagle/boxer mix chased Nina, the “middle-aged” part-chow, across the deeply furrowed fall-plowed field west of the house.
I work an odd split shift, most days--11:30 to 3, then 5:30 to 10--and so I grab sunsets whenever I have the chance. Most of the year, that means only on Fridays and Saturdays, my days off; rest of the week, I may steal a fleeting glimpse of the “reverse” sunset, the view to the east, through a crack in the curtains.
Sunset this afternoon wasn’t particularly spectacular. Clouds on the horizon and overhead bore promise that the sun’s fading slanting light could make it spectacular, and that wispy promise kept me out there with my feet turning numb and the (mild) cold starting to seep through the goose-down filling of my coat. Finally I did have to come back inside and thaw out--work beckoned, after all--but the little while I was able to spend out there, hoping for spectacular . . . Well, it’s all about hope, isn’t it?
When winter starts settling in, I dread the cold, of course, but most of all I dread the lack of light. Probably I am no more or less prone to SAD--seasonal affective disorder--than anyone else, but the decrease in hours of light definitely depresses my “inner photographer.”
It occurred to me today, though, and not for the first time, that the sun setting earlier means I get to enjoy sunsets on a regular basis for at least a few weeks. While I’m still more of a fan of sunrises, I have to call that a “win” for winter.
So, to my mother--I can finally say something “nice” about this godawful frigid miserable useless depressing and generally crappy time of year! You did your job well, Mom.
Here, have a sunset:
So for nearly 53 years I’ve mostly tried to avoid commenting on Winter.
Late this afternoon I was standing outside in the mild cold--it wasn’t the “take-your-breath-away” variety, just standard December right-around-freezing--admiring the sunset while Xena the old dog rolled in the grass (she has a thick coat and positively loves the cold) and Cecil, the half-yearling beagle/boxer mix chased Nina, the “middle-aged” part-chow, across the deeply furrowed fall-plowed field west of the house.
I work an odd split shift, most days--11:30 to 3, then 5:30 to 10--and so I grab sunsets whenever I have the chance. Most of the year, that means only on Fridays and Saturdays, my days off; rest of the week, I may steal a fleeting glimpse of the “reverse” sunset, the view to the east, through a crack in the curtains.
Sunset this afternoon wasn’t particularly spectacular. Clouds on the horizon and overhead bore promise that the sun’s fading slanting light could make it spectacular, and that wispy promise kept me out there with my feet turning numb and the (mild) cold starting to seep through the goose-down filling of my coat. Finally I did have to come back inside and thaw out--work beckoned, after all--but the little while I was able to spend out there, hoping for spectacular . . . Well, it’s all about hope, isn’t it?
When winter starts settling in, I dread the cold, of course, but most of all I dread the lack of light. Probably I am no more or less prone to SAD--seasonal affective disorder--than anyone else, but the decrease in hours of light definitely depresses my “inner photographer.”
It occurred to me today, though, and not for the first time, that the sun setting earlier means I get to enjoy sunsets on a regular basis for at least a few weeks. While I’m still more of a fan of sunrises, I have to call that a “win” for winter.
So, to my mother--I can finally say something “nice” about this godawful frigid miserable useless depressing and generally crappy time of year! You did your job well, Mom.
Here, have a sunset:
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Too lazy and/or brain-dead to write, right now.
From the “if I ever say/write anything that cool, I’m going to shut my mouth forever because I’ll never be able to get there again“ file:
“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Woman Warrior.”
Enough said, for now.
“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Woman Warrior.”
Enough said, for now.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Wondering what the climate is like in Tibet . . .
A woman in a Facebook group for medical transcriptionists/editors on our particular team posted this today: “There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.--Dalai Lama.”
I love the quote, know virtually nothing about Dalai Lama, although of course I know the name, but it got me restarted wondering some things I’ve been wrestling with for a while.
Useless things, mostly: For instance, what if we all just bailed out of the “corporate world,” quit working for them, quit buying their products, etc. Obviously that is an impossible idea--we all have to work, we all have to eat, and our consumption is the driving force of two-thirds or thereabouts of our nation’s economy. It might make us FEEL all “fuck you” and so forth, but we would be shooting ourselves in the foot, or maybe in the heart.
Still . . . .
The notion of simplifying our lives, learning to live inside the temples of our brains and hearts, can be tantalizing. Who wouldn’t want to dispense with all the BS, all the daily rush (or the daily monotony, depending on what you do for a living), the daily nightmare or daily recalcitrant pain of just trying to make it from one day to another?
Life can be so fatiguing, sometimes, and it really shouldn’t be. Exhausting, yes--exhausting can be a good thing. But fatiguing? Whole ‘nother thing. Life should be glorious. And in fact it is.
“Exhausting” is an exhilarating workout; “fatiguing” is a wear-you-down-to-nothing grind.
There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who does not wish, at some point or other, that s/he could simplify his/her life, step off the treadmill, quit simply (or simply quit) worrying so damned day-to-day MUCH about whatever their hearts/minds are really “about.”
There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who doesn’t wish that s/he had the luxury of simple time--even just a worry/stress-free hour to spend daydreaming, or watching cats or dogs or bugs or other people. A worry/stress-free hour just to relax.
We spend our lives in a continual state of tension, a continual state of competition, one way or another. Working at home alone, I’m spared some of that, though obviously not all. Most medical transcriptionists, even when employed by companies, are paid by what they produce, not by the time they put in. When you’re an employee, you are in fact limited to 40 hours a week. What this means is that, if you want to make a living at it, every day when you sit down at the keyboard, you have to make every minute count. It’s continual tension because you have to be aware of the “real” cost of every interruption or distraction--a 15-minute chat with a neighbor, for instance, costs you, say, a couple of loaves of bread or a pound of ground chuck. The clock ticks while you chat, and you can never get that time back. (May be a bad example: Sometimes a 15-minute chat with a neighbor is an invaluable break. To pass up the chance is another kind of missed opportunity).
I suppose in some ways tension and competition heighten our awareness, at least in terms of survival. Plus, a life free of tension and competition probably would be BORING.
Would the Garden of Eden really be all that great a place to hang out, every day of our lives, for the rest of our lives?
(I selflessly volunteer to be the first one there!)
I love the quote, know virtually nothing about Dalai Lama, although of course I know the name, but it got me restarted wondering some things I’ve been wrestling with for a while.
Useless things, mostly: For instance, what if we all just bailed out of the “corporate world,” quit working for them, quit buying their products, etc. Obviously that is an impossible idea--we all have to work, we all have to eat, and our consumption is the driving force of two-thirds or thereabouts of our nation’s economy. It might make us FEEL all “fuck you” and so forth, but we would be shooting ourselves in the foot, or maybe in the heart.
Still . . . .
The notion of simplifying our lives, learning to live inside the temples of our brains and hearts, can be tantalizing. Who wouldn’t want to dispense with all the BS, all the daily rush (or the daily monotony, depending on what you do for a living), the daily nightmare or daily recalcitrant pain of just trying to make it from one day to another?
Life can be so fatiguing, sometimes, and it really shouldn’t be. Exhausting, yes--exhausting can be a good thing. But fatiguing? Whole ‘nother thing. Life should be glorious. And in fact it is.
“Exhausting” is an exhilarating workout; “fatiguing” is a wear-you-down-to-nothing grind.
There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who does not wish, at some point or other, that s/he could simplify his/her life, step off the treadmill, quit simply (or simply quit) worrying so damned day-to-day MUCH about whatever their hearts/minds are really “about.”
There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who doesn’t wish that s/he had the luxury of simple time--even just a worry/stress-free hour to spend daydreaming, or watching cats or dogs or bugs or other people. A worry/stress-free hour just to relax.
We spend our lives in a continual state of tension, a continual state of competition, one way or another. Working at home alone, I’m spared some of that, though obviously not all. Most medical transcriptionists, even when employed by companies, are paid by what they produce, not by the time they put in. When you’re an employee, you are in fact limited to 40 hours a week. What this means is that, if you want to make a living at it, every day when you sit down at the keyboard, you have to make every minute count. It’s continual tension because you have to be aware of the “real” cost of every interruption or distraction--a 15-minute chat with a neighbor, for instance, costs you, say, a couple of loaves of bread or a pound of ground chuck. The clock ticks while you chat, and you can never get that time back. (May be a bad example: Sometimes a 15-minute chat with a neighbor is an invaluable break. To pass up the chance is another kind of missed opportunity).
I suppose in some ways tension and competition heighten our awareness, at least in terms of survival. Plus, a life free of tension and competition probably would be BORING.
Would the Garden of Eden really be all that great a place to hang out, every day of our lives, for the rest of our lives?
(I selflessly volunteer to be the first one there!)
Monday, December 5, 2011
Paws
Everything has its advantages and disadvantages, I suppose. Advantage to say, digital photography over film is that it allows you to take virtually unlimited photos without much cost beyond startup for camera, computer, etc. Disadvantage is that it allows you to take, and store, virtually unlimited photos. The most memorable among them can get lost, needle-in-a-haystack style, amidst the ever-growing stack of others that may have been worth saving, but still, not quite so memorable.
As a former boss of mine used to say, “our strengths are also our weaknesses.”
Individual photographs, like individual or isolated memories, get lost--not irretrievably, they’re still stored in our minds or on our hard drive or Flickr or Photobucket accounts, and sometimes we can recapture them when somebody else happens across them, bringing them instantly back for us.
After work tonight I wandered over to my Flickr account, just to see what, if anything in my photo stream, other people had wandered across today, and I found this:
You may not be able to tell, but the photograph is of one cat’s paw, one dog’s paw, comfortably touching each other as their respective owners slept in the sun.
The dog and cat are both gone now--Sally the cat, an adventurous soul, hitched a ride somewhere in the undercarriage of a pickup truck; Bubba, the dog, loved to run, and particularly loved to run AFTER things, for instance, cars. He could run forever, swift as Secretariat--until he misjudged a car’s speed one day and tried to cross the highway ahead of it.
It is too long a story for OS, but Bubba started out life blind as a puppy, never began to see--or realize that he COULD see, I’m not sure--didn’t begin to be able to sort out images filtering into his brain until he was close to 4 months old. By that time he had been with us for nearly 2 months. All the cats more or less adopted him, but Sally also befriended him, and they spent a lot of time just wrestling and wandering around together and even simply dozing together on the lawn.
That somebody came across this particular photo, paws pausing together, brought the photo, the memory, back to me.
“These are the memories that make me a wealthy soul.” Bob Seger again (I’m sure I’ll quote and re-quote that line at least 1,438 times over the course of however long I keep posting here.)
Happy Monday to all, and to all, a good night.
As a former boss of mine used to say, “our strengths are also our weaknesses.”
Individual photographs, like individual or isolated memories, get lost--not irretrievably, they’re still stored in our minds or on our hard drive or Flickr or Photobucket accounts, and sometimes we can recapture them when somebody else happens across them, bringing them instantly back for us.
After work tonight I wandered over to my Flickr account, just to see what, if anything in my photo stream, other people had wandered across today, and I found this:
You may not be able to tell, but the photograph is of one cat’s paw, one dog’s paw, comfortably touching each other as their respective owners slept in the sun.
The dog and cat are both gone now--Sally the cat, an adventurous soul, hitched a ride somewhere in the undercarriage of a pickup truck; Bubba, the dog, loved to run, and particularly loved to run AFTER things, for instance, cars. He could run forever, swift as Secretariat--until he misjudged a car’s speed one day and tried to cross the highway ahead of it.
It is too long a story for OS, but Bubba started out life blind as a puppy, never began to see--or realize that he COULD see, I’m not sure--didn’t begin to be able to sort out images filtering into his brain until he was close to 4 months old. By that time he had been with us for nearly 2 months. All the cats more or less adopted him, but Sally also befriended him, and they spent a lot of time just wrestling and wandering around together and even simply dozing together on the lawn.
That somebody came across this particular photo, paws pausing together, brought the photo, the memory, back to me.
“These are the memories that make me a wealthy soul.” Bob Seger again (I’m sure I’ll quote and re-quote that line at least 1,438 times over the course of however long I keep posting here.)
Happy Monday to all, and to all, a good night.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Conspiracy Theory, Sheeple and Other Stuff
I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, nor have I ever placed much stock in the occasionally even measured ranting of those who encourage us “sheeple” to “wake up” to the way we’re being “played,” by the liberal media or whomever (side note about “sheeple:” Those who direct the term disparagingly at others generally fit the definition--"those who follow blindly”--pretty neatly themselves; most of them follow blindly and continually reiterate the positions/opinions of their own leaders, whether they be Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or whomever).
Still, watching the “non-OWS believers” demonize the Occupiers as “unwashed, unemployed, lazy privileged college students,” etc., I wonder. Reading what the “53 percenters”--those who pay taxes--which admittedly hasn’t been much, lately, that I’ve seen, I wonder who convinced the 53% that, not only are they NOT part of the 99%, by virtue of their opposition to same, they somehow belong more in the 1%.
Then I listen to the welfare-bashers, who seem to believe that the “welfare” of today’s world is the same as it was prior to Reagan and his “Welfare Queen” or even further reforms during the Clinton years. Somehow they have the idea that we the taxpayers are subsidizing a bunch of drug-addicted freeloaders who should just go get jobs.
Again, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but even from where I sit out here in the proverbial boondocks, it looks like we’re being played, as if our strings are being pulled by a puppeteer or puppeteers that we cannot even see.
I look at the way the poor are being demonized, for instance, and see a “divide and conquer” thing going on--if we the working people can be made to focus on the poor as the real enemy to our national prosperity, maybe we won’t notice the “real” enemy, the politicians and the corporations who own them.
In a way it reminds me of what Hitler did to the Jews--he created a scapegoat against which all good Germans could unite against. Obviously we don’t have death camps, and I certainly do not intend to trivialize in any way the Holocaust. In a very general way, however, our demonizing of the poor is the same kind of identification of an essentially powerless group as a national enemy.
Maybe we are not truly being “played,” though. Even scarier is the thought that it may simply be human nature: When we’re under siege, militarily or economically, we look for an enemy; because we sense our own essential powerlessness, we look for someone even more powerless than ourselves--it is easier to victimize someone weaker than ourselves, obviously. Most of us lack the courage (or insanity) to go chest-to-chest with a tank.
Next time we get righteously indignant when we’re behind someone in a grocery store checkout line who is using a “free” EBT card, maybe it would be better if we wondered who truly caused that person’s situation. Is the person really useless and lazy--or was it that her job got shipped to India? Maybe it’s just that her minimum-wage retail job doesn’t pay enough to allow her to pay rent, much less for food for her 2.3 kids.
It might even help if we considered for just a moment that tomorrow, WE could be the ones depending on an EBT card.
Still, watching the “non-OWS believers” demonize the Occupiers as “unwashed, unemployed, lazy privileged college students,” etc., I wonder. Reading what the “53 percenters”--those who pay taxes--which admittedly hasn’t been much, lately, that I’ve seen, I wonder who convinced the 53% that, not only are they NOT part of the 99%, by virtue of their opposition to same, they somehow belong more in the 1%.
Then I listen to the welfare-bashers, who seem to believe that the “welfare” of today’s world is the same as it was prior to Reagan and his “Welfare Queen” or even further reforms during the Clinton years. Somehow they have the idea that we the taxpayers are subsidizing a bunch of drug-addicted freeloaders who should just go get jobs.
Again, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but even from where I sit out here in the proverbial boondocks, it looks like we’re being played, as if our strings are being pulled by a puppeteer or puppeteers that we cannot even see.
I look at the way the poor are being demonized, for instance, and see a “divide and conquer” thing going on--if we the working people can be made to focus on the poor as the real enemy to our national prosperity, maybe we won’t notice the “real” enemy, the politicians and the corporations who own them.
In a way it reminds me of what Hitler did to the Jews--he created a scapegoat against which all good Germans could unite against. Obviously we don’t have death camps, and I certainly do not intend to trivialize in any way the Holocaust. In a very general way, however, our demonizing of the poor is the same kind of identification of an essentially powerless group as a national enemy.
Maybe we are not truly being “played,” though. Even scarier is the thought that it may simply be human nature: When we’re under siege, militarily or economically, we look for an enemy; because we sense our own essential powerlessness, we look for someone even more powerless than ourselves--it is easier to victimize someone weaker than ourselves, obviously. Most of us lack the courage (or insanity) to go chest-to-chest with a tank.
Next time we get righteously indignant when we’re behind someone in a grocery store checkout line who is using a “free” EBT card, maybe it would be better if we wondered who truly caused that person’s situation. Is the person really useless and lazy--or was it that her job got shipped to India? Maybe it’s just that her minimum-wage retail job doesn’t pay enough to allow her to pay rent, much less for food for her 2.3 kids.
It might even help if we considered for just a moment that tomorrow, WE could be the ones depending on an EBT card.
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