Thinking with my lungs: mnemonics takes a deep breath

I subscribe to MIT’s Technology Review and have enjoyed many articles and reviews thus far. But today’s issue brought a couple of howlers in two utterly unrelated articles, which, when read together, fit perfectly. First, Finding Podcasts Faster is a review of three new products that help users find specific audio material online. The reviewer points to a couple of flaws, however, whereby the search engines transcribe the spoken material in whacky ways:

To be sure, none of these sites has mastered audio recognition, a notoriously tricky beast. Computers still cannot consistently understand all the innumerable accents, mispronunciations and other nonstandard diction that colors human speech.

(…)

Blinkx made a geopolitical gaffe by transcribing the following snippet from a Fox News broadcast about a political murder in Lebanon:

“… pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud, citing a cell phone call Lahoud received minutes before the murder.”

as:

“… pro-Syrian President Emile of food citing a cell phone colic who received minutes before the murder.”

[More…]

By itself that was already pretty funny (at least if you’re easily amused), but taken with the other article in today’s Technology Review, it’s a gem. The second article is called Exercising the Brain; Innovative training software could turn back the clock on aging brains, which reviews a company that has been designing brain exercise software. (Yeah, “ugh!” — that’s what I thought, too!) The reviewer also must have been swallowing hard, because, describing the program’s shortcomings in how it focusses on “tricks,” he wrote:

Today, a typical training program focuses on memory tricks, such as pneumonics. [More…]

Ahhhh-hee-hee-heee! That made my day!