Grad H: OK , disk backup , et cetera ? Um I spoke with Dave Johnson about putting all the Meeting Recorder stuff on non - backed - up disk to save the overhead of backup and he pretty much said " yeah , you could do that if you want " but he thought it was a bad idea . In fact what he said is doing the manual one , {comment} doing uh NW archive to copy it {comment} is a good idea and we should do that and have it backed up . He w he 's a firm believer in in lots of different modalities of backup . I mean , his point was well taken . This data cannot be recovered .
PhD G: Yeah .
Grad H: And so if a mistake is made and we lose the backup we should have the archive and if then a mistake is made and we lose the archive we should have the backup .
Professor B: Well I guess it is true that even with something that 's backed up it 's not gonna if it 's stationary it 's not going to go through the increment it 's not gonna burden things in the incremental backups .
Grad H: Just just the monthly full .
Postdoc A: Hmm .
Professor B: Yeah , so the monthly full will be a bear but Grad H: Yeah . But he said that that we sh shouldn't worry too much about that , that we 're getting a new backup system and we 're far enough away from saturation on full backups that it 's w probably OK .
Professor B: Really ?
Grad H: And uh , so the only issue here is the timing between getting more disks and uh recording meetings .
Professor B: So I guess the idea is that we would be reserving the non - backed - up space for things that took less than twenty - four hours to recreate or something like that , right ?
Grad H: Things that are recreatable easily and also Yeah , basically things that are recreatable .
Professor B: Yeah . Yeah .
Grad H: The expanded files and things like that .
Professor B: OK .
Grad H: They take up a lot more room anyway .
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: Uh but we do need more disk .
Professor B: So we can get more disk . Yeah . So .
Grad H: Yeah . And I I think I agree with him . I mean his point was well taken that if we lose one of these we cannot get it back .
Professor B: OK .
Grad H: I don't think there was any other et cetera there .
Professor B: Well I was allowing someone else to come up with something related that they had uh PhD E: I thought you guys were gonna burn C Ds ?
Grad H: Um unfortunately we could burn C Ds but first of all it 's a pain .
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad H: Because you have to copy it down to the PC and then burn it and that 's a multi - step procedure . And second of all the the write - once burners as opposed to a professional press don't last .
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad H: So I think burning them for distribution is fine but burning them for backup is not a good idea .
PhD E: I see . OK .
Grad H: Cuz th they they fail after a couple years .
PhD E: Alright .
Postdoc A: I do have uh uh It 's a different topic . Can I add one top topic ? We have time ? I wanted to ask , I know that uh that Thilo you were , um , bringing the Channeltrans interface onto the Windows machine ? And I wanted to know is th
PhD D: Yeah it 's it Basically it 's done ,
Postdoc A: It 's all done ? That 's g wonderful . Great .
PhD D: yeah . Yeah .
Grad H: Yes , since Tcl - TK runs on it , basically things 'll just work .
PhD D: Yeah it Yeah , it was just a problem with the Snack version and the Transcriber version but it 's solved .
Postdoc A: Does and that does that mean , I PhD D: So .
Postdoc A: maybe I should know this but I don't . Does this mean that the that this could be por uh ported to a Think - Pad note or some other type of uh PhD D: Yeah , basically uh I did install it on my laptop and yeah
Postdoc A: Wonderful .
PhD D: it worked .
Postdoc A: Wonderful .
Professor B: Hmm ! Good . CrossPads ? CrossPads ?
Grad H: Uh got an email from uh James Landay who basically said " if you 're not using them , could you return them ? " So he said he doesn't need them , he just periodically w at the end of each term sends out email to everyone who was recorded as having them and asks them if they 're still using them .
Professor B: So we 've never used them .
Postdoc A: We used them once .
Professor B: Once ?
Grad H: We we used them a couple times ,
Postdoc A: Mm - hmm . Couple times .
PhD F: Them ? There 's more than one ?
Grad H: but Postdoc A: Yeah .
Professor B: i
Grad H: Yeah , we have two . Um .
Professor B: But Grad H: My opinion on it is , first , I never take notes anyway so I 'm not gonna use it , um and second , it 's another level of infrastructure that we have to deal with .
Postdoc A: And I have uh so my my feeling on it is that I think in principle it 's a really nice idea , and you have the time tags which makes it better tha than just taking ra raw notes . On the other hand , I the down side for me was that I think the pen is really noisy . So you have ka kaplunk , kaplunk , kaplunk . And I and I don't know if it 's audible on the but I I sort of thought that was a disadvantage . I do take notes , I mean , I could be taking notes on these things and I guess the plus with the CrossPads would be the time markings but I don't know .
PhD D: Uh , what is a CrossPad ?
Professor B: So it 's it 's um it 's a regular pad , just a regular pad of paper but there 's this pen which indicates position .
Grad C: Thank you .
Professor B: And so you have time and position stuff stored
PhD D: OK .
Professor B: so that you can you have a record of whatever it is you 've written .
PhD D: OK .
Grad H: And then you can download it and they have OCR and searching and all sorts of things .
PhD D: OK . OK .
Grad H: So i if you take notes it 's a great little device .
Postdoc A: Could Mm - hmm .
Grad H: But I don't take notes ,
Professor B: And one of the reasons that it was brought up originally was because uh we were interested in in higher - level things ,
Grad H: so .
Professor B: not just the , you know , microphone stuff but also summarization and so forth and the question is if you were going to go to some gold standard of what wa what was it that happened in the meeting you know , where would it come from ? And um I think that was one of the things ,
PhD D: Yeah .
PhD G: Yeah .
Grad H: Yep .
Professor B: right ? And so the it seemed like a neat idea . We 'll have a you know , have a scribe , have somebody uh take good notes and then that 's part of the record of the meeting . And then we did it once or twice and we sort of Grad H: Yep , and then just sort of died out .
Professor B: probably chose the wrong scribe but it was  It 's uh PhD G: I mean Grad H: Yeah that 's right .
Postdoc A: Well I did it one time
Grad H: Yep .
Postdoc A: but um Professor B: Yeah .
Postdoc A: u but I guess the the other thing I 'm thinking is if we wanted that kind of thing I wonder if we 'd lose that much by having someone be a scribe by listening to the tape , to the recording afterwards and taking notes in some other interface .
PhD F: I mean we 're transcribing it anyways , why do we need notes ?
Postdoc A: Oh it 's la it 's useful ,
Grad H: Because that 's summary .
Postdoc A: have a summary and high points .
Professor B: Summary .
PhD G: I think there 's also there 's this use that PhD F: Summarize it from the transcription .
PhD G: the Well , what if you 're sitting there and you just wanna make an X and you don't wanna take notes and you 're you just wanna
PhD F: Doodle .
PhD G: get the summary of the transcript from this time location like you know , and and then while you 're bored you don't do anything and once in a while , maybe there 's a joke and you put a X and {comment} But in in other words you can use that just to highlight times in a very simple way . Also with I was thinking and I know Morgan disagrees with me on this but suppose you have a group in here and you wanna let them note whenever they think there might be something later that they might not wanna distribute in terms of content , they could just sort of make an X near that point or a question mark that sort of alerts them that when they get the transcript back they c could get some red flags in that transcript region and they can then look at it . So . I know we haven't been using it but I w I can imagine it being useful just for sort of marking time periods
Grad H: Right .
PhD G: which you then get back in a transcript
Postdoc A: Well .
Professor B: I guess so , you know , what what makes one think i is maybe we should actually schedule some periods where people go over something later
PhD G: so .
Professor B: and and and put some kind of summary or something uh you know , some there 'd be some scribe who would actually listen , w who 'd agreed to actually listen to the whole thing , not transcribe it , but just sort of write down things that struck them as important . But then you don't you don't have the time reference uh that you 'd have if you had it live .
PhD G: Right . And you don't have a lot of other cues that might be useful ,
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD F: How do you synchronize the time in the CrossPad and the time of the recording ?
PhD G: so .
Grad H: I mean that was one of the issues we talked about originally and that that 's w part of the difficulty is that we need an infrastructure for using the time the CrossPads and so that means synchronizing the time PhD G :
Postdoc A: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: You know you want it pretty close and there 's a fair amount of skew because it 's a hand - held unit with a battery
Postdoc A: Well when when I d
Grad H: and so you Postdoc A: OK .
Grad H: so you have to synchronize at the beginning of each meeting all the pads that are being used , so that it 's synchronized with the time on that and then you have to download to an application , and then you have to figure out what the data formats are and convert it over if you wanna do anything with this information .
Postdoc A: w Mm - hmm .
PhD E: Why Grad H: And so there 's a lot of infrastructure which
Postdoc A: There is an alternative .
Grad H: unless someone Postdoc A: There is an alternative , I mean , it 's still , there 's uh you know , your point stands about there be needing to be an infrastructure , but it doesn't have to be synchronized with the little clock 's timer on it . You c I mean , I when I when I did it I synchronized it by voice , by whispering " one , two , three , four " onto the microphone
Grad H: Hmm .
Postdoc A: and uh , you know .
Grad H: Well , but then there 's the infrastructure at the other end
PhD E: Right .
Grad H: which someone has to listen to that and find that point ,
Postdoc A: Yeah , it 's transcribed . It 's in the transcript .
Grad H: and then mark it .
Postdoc A: Yeah .
Grad H: So .
Postdoc A: Well it 's in the transcript .
PhD G: Well , could we keep one of these things for another year ? Would h I mean is there a big cau
Grad H: We can keep all both of them for the whole whole year .
PhD G: just just in case we Grad H: I mean , it 's just PhD G: even maybe some of the transcribers who might be wanting to annotate uh f just there 's a bunch of things that might be neat to do but I it might not be the case that we can actually synchronize them and then do all the infrastructure but we could at least try it out .
Professor B: Well one thing that we might try um is on some set of meetings , some collection of meetings , maybe EDU is the right one or maybe something else , we we get somebody to buy into the idea of doing this as part of the task . I mean ,
PhD G: Right .
Professor B: uh part of the reason I think part of the reason that Adam was so interested in uh the SpeechCorder sort of f idea from the beginning is he said from the beginning he hated taking notes and Grad H: Yep .
Professor B: and so forth so and and Jane is more into it but eh uh you know I don't know if you wanna really do do this all the time so I think the thing is to to get someone to actually buy into it and have at least some series of meetings where we do it . Um and if so , it 's probably worth having one . The p the the problem with the the more extended view , all these other you know with uh quibbling about particular applications of it is that it looks like it 's hard to get people to um uh routinely use it , I mean it just hasn't happened anyway . But maybe if we can get a person to PhD G: Yeah I don't think it has to be part of a what everybody does in a meeting but it might be a useful , neat part of the project that we can , you know , show off as a mechanism for synchronizing events in time that happen that you just wanna make a note of , like what Jane was talking about with some later browsing , just just as a convenience , even if it 's not a full - blown note taking substitute .
PhD E: Well if you wanted to do that maybe the right architecture for it is to get a PDA with a wireless card . And and that way you can synchronize very easily with the the the meeting because you 'll be synchroni you can synchronize with the the Linux server and uh PhD G: So what kind of input would you be ?
PhD E: so so , I mean , if you 're not worried about Grad H: Buttons .
PhD G: You 'd just be pressing like a a PhD E: Well well you have a PDA and may and you could have the same sort of X interface or whatever , I mean , you 'd have to do a little eh a little bit of coding to do it .
PhD G: Mm - hmm .
PhD E: But you could imagine ,
PhD G: Yeah , that be good .
PhD E: I mean , if if all you really wanted was you didn't want this secondary note - taking channel but just sort of being able to use m markers of some sort , a PDA with a l a wireless card would be the probably the right way to go . I mean even buttons you could do , sort of , I mean , as you said .
Grad H: I mean for what what you 've been describing buttons would be even more convenient than anything else ,
PhD G: M right .
PhD E: Right .
PhD G: That would be fine too .
Grad H: right ? You have the PhD G: I mean , I don't have , you know , grandiose ideas in mind but I 'm just sort of thinking well we 've we 're getting into the next year now and we have a lot of these things worked out at in terms of the speech maybe somebody will be interested in this and Postdoc A: I like this PDA idea . Yeah .
Professor B: Yeah , I do like the idea of having a couple buttons
PhD G: Yeah .
Grad H: Well I 'm sure there would Postdoc A: Yeah .
Professor B: where like one one button was " uh - oh " and then another button was " that 's great " and another button " that 's f "
PhD G: Or like this is my " I 'm supposed to do this " kind of button ,
Postdoc A: Yeah .
PhD G: like " I better remember to "
Grad H: Action item .
PhD G: Yeah something like that or Postdoc A: And then Grad H: I mean I think the CrossPad idea is a good one .
Postdoc A: Uh - huh .
Grad H: It 's just a question of getting people to use it and getting the infrastructure set up in such a way that it 's not a lot of extra work . I mean that 's part of the reason why it hasn't happened is that it 's been a lot of extra work for me
PhD G: Yeah .
Professor B: Right .
Postdoc A: Well , and not just for you .
Grad H: and Postdoc A: But it 's also , it has this problem of having to go from an analog to a d a digital record too ,
PhD G: W
Postdoc A: doesn't it ? I mean Grad H: Well it 's digital but it 's in a format that is not particularly standard .
Postdoc A: But I mean , say , if i if if you 're writing if you 're writing notes in it does it it can't do handwriting recognition , right ?
Professor B: No , no , but it 's just it 's just storing the pixel informa position information ,
Postdoc A: OK .
Professor B: it 's all digital .
Postdoc A: I I guess what I 'm thinking is that the PDA solution you h you have it already without needing to go from the pixelization to a to a I mean Professor B: Right . You don't have to PhD E: The transfer function is less errorful ,
Postdoc A: Oh , nicely put .
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD E: yes .
PhD G: Yeah , yeah .
Professor B: Yeah . Yeah .
PhD G: Well it also it 's maybe realistic cuz people are supposed to be bringing their P D As to the meeting eventually , right ? That 's why we have this little I don't know what I don't wanna cause more work for anyone but I can imagine some interesting things that you could do with it and so if we don't have to return it and we can keep it for a year I don't know .
Grad H: Well w we don't we certainly don't have to return it , as I said . All all he said is that if you 're not using it could you return it , if you are using it feel free to keep it . The point is that we haven't used it at all and are we going to ?
Professor B: So we have no but uh by I I would suggest you return one . Because we we you know , we we haven't used it at all .
PhD G: Yeah .
Grad H: OK .
PhD G: We c
Professor B: We have some aspirations of using them
PhD G: One would probably be fine .
Professor B: and PhD G: Maybe we could do like a student project , you know , maybe someone who wants to do this as their main like s project for something would be cool .
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: Yep . I mean if we had them out and sitting on the table people might use them a little more
Professor B: Maybe Jeremy could sit in some meetings and press a button when there when when somebody laughed .
Grad H: although there is a little PhD G: Well , I 'm yeah , that 's not a bad Professor B: Yeah , yeah . Yeah .
PhD G: Jeremy 's gonna be an he 's a new student starting on modeling brea breath and laughter , actually , which sounds funny but I think it should be cool ,
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD G: so .
Grad H: Sounds breathy to me .
PhD G: OK . " Ha - ha - ha . "
Grad H: Breath and lau " ha - ha - ha - ha " . " Ha - ha - ha - ha . "
Professor B: Well dear .
Grad H: Um .
Professor B: Hmm .
Grad H: That reminded me of something . Oh well , too late . It slipped out .
Professor B: OK .
PhD G: You 're you 're gonna tease me ?
Grad H: Oh , equipment .
PhD G: OK .
Grad H: Ordered Uh , well I 'm always gonna do that . W uh {comment} We ordered uh more wireless , and so they should be coming in at some point .
PhD G: Great .
Grad H: And then at the same time I 'll probably rewire the room as per Jane 's suggestion so that uh the first N channels are wireless , eh are the m the close - talking and the next N are far - field .
Professor B: You know what he means but isn't that funny sounding ? " We ordered more wireless . " It 's like wires are the things so you 're wiring you 're you 're you we 're we ordered more absence of the thing .
PhD G: That 's a very philosophical statement from Morgan .
Grad H: wired less , wired more .
PhD G: I just it 's sort of a anachronism , I mean it 's like It 's great .
Professor B: Anyway .
Grad H: Should we do digits ? Do we have anything else ?
Professor B: Yeah .
Postdoc A: OK .
Professor B: I mean there 's there 's all this stuff going on uh between uh Andreas and and and Dave and Chuck and others with various kinds of runs uh um recognition runs , trying to figure things out about the features but it 's it 's all sort of in process , so there 's not much to say right now . Uh why don't we start with our our esteemed guest .
PhD E: OK . Alright .
Grad H: So just the transcript number and then the then the PhD E: This is Yes , this is number two for me today .
Professor B: See all you have to do is go away to move way up in the PhD E: Oh .
PhD G: We could do simultaneous . Initiate him .
Professor B: We we could .
Grad H: Should we do simultaneous ?
PhD G: Well , I 'm just thinking , are you gonna try to save the data before this next group comes in ?
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: Yeah , absolutely .
PhD G: Yeah , so we might wanna do it simultaneous .
Grad H: I mean you hav sorta have to .
Professor B: Well OK , so let 's do one of those simultaneous ones .
PhD G: Right , so so we might n we might need to do that actually .
Professor B: That sounds good .
Grad H: OK .