Tech Talk Radio
Sponsored by Stratford University
June 3, 2000 Broadcast
Voice Recognition Comes to the PC
Stratford and West Potomac Partnership
Stratford Active Military Scholarships
Internet Performance
Dynamic HTML and XML
   
Top of Page
Voice Recognition Comes to the PC
     Voice recognition software has improved dramatically during the last year. While voice recognition has been used for several years by business for voice activated phone directory and ordering systems, voice activated PC applications have not been widely accepted. The technology initially focused on the recognition of discrete words rather than continuous speech. Such systems demanded that the speaker separate words and speak distinctly. Discrete speech patterns are awkward and not natural.
     Continuous speech recognition technology, using statistical methods, achieved only 90% accuracy by 1998. This meant that one word in ten had to be corrected manually, an unacceptable result. Recent improvements in the technology have pushed this accuracy to the 99% range, making this software a suitable alternative to the keyboard for entering textual data. This technology may help the hearing impaired, the physically disabled, or the non-typing executive.
     Voice recognition software can enter data into most of the common office applications, like Microsoft Office or WordPerfect. The software can operate in both the text input mode and the command mode. The command mode allows the user to open files, save files, insert words, check spelling, open applications, address e-mail, send e-mail, etc. The text input mode allows the speaker to enter text directly into an application. The four dominant speech recognition software packages are:      ViaVoice, Naturally Speaking, and VoiceXPress all have top ratings. FreeSpeech98 was inferior, but FreeSpeech2000 is competitive. Business versions of each have specialized vocabularies (Business, Computer, Chat, Cuisine, Legal, and Medical).
     All packages require training. Both the computer and the speaker need to be trained. Speaker must be deliberate and provide consistent delivery. The initial training period is typically 15 minutes. The software further adapts and learns as additional corrections are entered manually. The software automatically scans document files to add additional words to the local vocabulary. This is particularly useful for those with highly specialized needs.
    Typical voice recognition specifications include the following items.

      It should be noted that Microsoft owns 7% of L&H and that Dragon Systems recently announced its intent to purchase L&H.
Top of Page
Stratford and West Potomac High School Partnership
     Stratford University is pleased to announce that it has entered into a Business Partnership agreement with West Potomac High School. The agreement was signed May 31, 2000 at a ceremony at West Potomac High School. The event was catered by the high school Catering Department and opened by the Junior ROTC Color Guard. Dr. Shelton, the Area 1 Superintendent, was in attendance. The West Potomac program coordinator is Jesse Watson and the Stratford coordinator is Dr. Susan Hill (shill@stratford.edu). The West Potomac principal is Carma Norman.
     As part of the agreement, Stratford will be provide scholarships, teacher training, mentoring, career guidance, catering demos, web contests, and culinary contests. West Potomac will provide artwork, color guards for graduations, strings for special events, and books for the Stratford Library.
Top of Page
Stratford Active Military Scholarship Program
     Recently many of Stratford's students have taken advantage of the Stratford active military scholarship program. Active military personnel who qualify for Tuition Assistance (TA) can receive a $200 scholarship for each course taken at Stratford. Many individuals have enrolled at Stratford a year from their release in order to prepare for the civilian job market. Stratford has been very successful in placing all such graduates. This program has proven to be an excellent outplacement transition strategy.
     For instance, two weeks ago Craig called the radio show to talk about his Stratford experience. Craig is active military and will be released in June 2000. He is nearly finished with the Stratford networking program and has received his MCSE, CNA, CCNA, and A+ certifications. He has already received three very lucrative job offers, starting the day after releasefrom the military.
Top of Page
The Internet Performance
     The Internet is a wide-area network comprised of multiple backbones provided by various telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Sprint, MCI, etc. Packets are directed through this network by routers that are located at each node (a point where two networks interconnect). These routers decide which path a packet takes through the network. The majority of the routers are built by Cisco. These routers and various pathways through the network can become saturated or out of service. It is sometimes useful to measure the performance of the Internet between your computer and the service that you are using, either a web site or an e-mail server.
     Two utilities can be used to check this performance: Ping and Trace Route. Ping stands for Packet Internet Groper. It sends a small echo packet that is received by the target machine and returned immediately. It can be used to measure round trip transit time or server availability. Trace Route (tracert) receives a response from each router along the path to the final destination. It can be used to measure the number of hops (i.e. router transfers) and to determine which router in the pathway is failing in the event that the ping result is negative.
       These utilities can be reached by using the following procedures.       For instance, the average response time to www.stratford.edu on the June 3 was 85ms with 14 hops. The average response to China (actually the Chinese Sybase site, www.sybase.com.cn) was 285ms with 23 hops. It is interesting to note that hop 13 was in Japan. Note that 1 second is equal to 1000 milliseconds (ms).
Top of Page
Dynamic HTML and XML
What is HTML?
     The Internet is limited by the rate that information can be transferred from the web server to the client. Because of this limitation, detailed formatting information, such as that contained in a word processing document, cannot be transferred. In order to overcome this barrier, the Internet browser was invented to render the final formatted page. Rather than send a fully formatted page to the browser, a method of text tagging is employed. This tagged text standard is called HyerText Meta Language (HTML). In HTML, blocks of text are surrounded by tags. The tags contain the formatting information. The browsers reads the tags and the displays the text as directed. For instance, the following statement displays a line of text that is centered, bold, Arial typeface, and two font sizes larger than the browser default size. In this case the displayed text is "Main Title."

<center><b><font face="Arial" size="+2">Main Title</font></b></center>

     Note that each start tag has a corresponding end tag. The tags can be viewed as text containers. The browser does not display the tags. It interprets the tags and renders the text between the tags appropriately.
      You can see the actual HTML of any page by using the View Source menu item on the browser. In framed sites, make certain to view the Frame Source.

What are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?
     HTML was a fine solution for awhile. But all formatting tags were determined by the standard and the web page designer had few alternatives to use innovative formatting schemes. In order to get around this limitation, HTML was extended to permit a text tagging system with user definable tags (called styles). Because these tag definitions could be located in a specific tag, in the header of a particular page, or consolidated on a site-wide style sheet, this standard became know know as Cascading Style Sheets. This standard permitted the designer to completely separate content from formatting. By simply assigning different style definitions, the look and feel of the site could be changed quickly and efficiently.

What is Dynamic HTML?
      While cascading styles did give substantial formatting control to the web designer, it was still limited. It did not permit overlapping of text elements through the use of layering that is very commonly employed in desktop publishing programs like PageMaker or QuarkXPress. CCS was therefore expanded to include the ability to create image layers. Each layer could display image objects or text. The layers are stacked by the browser during final rendering. Object positioning on each layer can be precisely specified in the tag. With positioning and layering, HTML was becoming a powerful formatting language.
     The web pages were made dynamic through the use of a scripting language that could change the layering and portioning characteristics of a page without the intervention of the web server. The version of HTML that could be dynamically altered by a scripting language is call Dynamic HTML. The scripting language that is read and executed by the browser is called JavaScript. JavaScript can manipulate nearly all of the HTML tag property items, either in response to a user request or on its own.
      A simple dynamic HTML page is shown here. It was created using the program called Dreamweaver. DreamWeaver wrote the underlying JavaScript-driven timeline. You can view the script using "View Source." The script is between the <script> and </script> tags.

What is XML?
     Dynamic HTML is still limited. While it includes a rich set of formatting methods and tags, it does not address data types. It is not useful in the storing and retrieval of information from databases. To solve that problem, the tagging system was extended to all known datatypes. This new standard is called Extensible Meta Language (XML). It can be used to connect, via the Internet using HTTP, dissimilar databases (like Oracle or MSSQL). It also permits a web page to directly extract and format information from a database. Thus database driven web sites use XML as the underlying meta tagging system. This final development completes the family of meta tags and permits the separation of data classification, content, and formatting.
     And thus we end our "Tale of the Tags."

How Can I Learn This?
     This material is included in the Web track at Stratford University. Our entire programming in Information Technology includes both Programming and Networking Tracks.

Home Page
Top of Page