Me (to coworkers all the time): The “help” button/menu is your friend.
I have gone into tests on computer skills not knowing how to do [thing] in [program] and passed simply by clicking ? And typing [thing] and following the instructions. It seems like magic to some people, though.
The British upper classes would not agree.
In the traditional Army, officers had a male servant to deal with the really important stuff like uniform pressing and boot polishing, and in large houses the male indoor staff reported to the man or the butler and the women reported either to the housekeeper or the mistress. In effect, it is higher status to have male staff pouring the drinks than women.
I can’t speak for the US, but I feel that in general there are two reasons for female robots:
But then we’re back to CP Snow again. By and large, the British upper classes don’t produce technologists, and they’re a tiny percentage of the overall market share. The robots that make the news reflect the conservative and/or libertarian members of the middle class who made them – at least those made outside of Asia. Robots like Honda’s Asimo tend to have more of a cute factor.
That was kind of my point - that the US technology industry seems to have a very sexualised view of…just about everything.
I’ve heard that one reason a woman’s voice is used in certain circumstances is that the frequencies cut through noise better than those of a typical man.
That’s interesting, because those old land line phones were the opposite – they were optimised for men’s voices.
I was thinking of cases where the voice is coming out of a speaker with full bandwidth, but going into the air with a noisy environment, like in a train station.
Really? Could you give a citation, please?
I don’t know how telephone acoustics might have been deliberately evolved in the past century, but I do know I typically heard and understood women’s voices more clearly through wired phones than men’s. Since the frequency band always seemed so high-midrange to trebly, deeper men’s voices always sounded muddier to me over the phone.
The main frequency response of landline phones is 300-3400Hz. The reason for that is purely technical - it was hard to reproduce lower frequencies with the headphones and microphones of past eras, and the upper frequency cutoff was chosen to be as low as possible consistent with getting the maximum signal to noise ratio for speech, as this simplified circuitry. In the days of valves (tubes) it was really hard to design good relay amplifiers, and reducing the bandwidth makes it much easier because the transformers could be smaller. I actually had a stereo valve amp with a 20-20000Hz response. The output transformers each weighed more than the entire rest of each amplifier, including the power supply.
Male voices have a bigger proportion of total energy below 300Hz than do female voices. It’s really as simple as that. Male voices go down to 80Hz or even below. As a result, women’s voices tend to work better with POTS simply because they map better onto available bandwidth. I have been told that in WW2 the UK used female ground staff for to-air communication, partly for this reason. (They also used German speaking aircrew to confuse German open voice communications. Eventually the Germans made the switch to female radio operators, whereupon a whole lot of German-speaking WAAF volunteered to go up in the bombers, but were turned down).
It wasn’t until 1987 that a standard for “wideband” VOIP emerged for audio conferencing. Since the mid-2000s, the performance of the audio channel in mobile phones has improved enormously but the encoding is still limited - to, I think, around 64kbps, which doesn’t directly translate to bandwidth. As a deaf person, mobile phones are much easier for me to understand than POTS because there is less degradation in the phone. Anecdotally I find Sony and LG phones the best for the audio channel. (iPhones are useless because of poor ring volume).
tl;dr: Valve electronics favours female voices!
It is not just millennials, you know.
Back in the 1980s I had an engineer working for me who had spent two years of his spare time designing a 24 bit CPU using bit slice logic. I discovered that he was hoping that if he told Intel about it, they would give him a job and bring it to production.
I had to introduce him very gently to our Unix box with its 32 bit cpu. Shortly after he left. It was a pity, he was a competent engineer but simply couldn’t be bothered to keep up with the subject.
This goes back to the aerospace/arms dealing days of the 70s. The “helper” systems in the single-seat F-15 (-16? -18?) would execute mission profiles according to fuel usage because the planes could burn so much fuel on afterburn that the pilot could lose track of what was left.
“Bingo fuel” in a woman’s voice was thought to be better able to penetrate the thick skull of a distracted pilot. It may be true or maybe just the “bright idea” of a (male) engineer backed up more by an amusing line of justification than hard data.
Millennials is just a placeholder for “current mid-20somethings”. I’ll ask, how old was your engineer at the time?
See also: https://twitter.com/HopeStillFlies/status/919280120921247746
Well, I’m not arguing. The disadvantage of an education which included some old languages is that I translate “millennial” as one born around the end of a thousand year period CE. But on your definition you would be correct - around 28.
Only when it can do brain surgery and grafting. A true Igor would not just be a digital assistant, it would be a base-12 digital assistant.
Thread.
Damn you regional youtube uploaders! Making me go pirate shit like a pirate!
http://ohiofusion.com/hateful-anti-lgbtq-flyer-cleveland-state/
This week, someone stapled a hateful, anti-#LGBTQ flyer on a Cleveland State University (CSU) bulletin board. The flyer includes an illustration of a silhouette hanging from a noose and the text reads, “Follow your fellow faggots,” along with several claims about the frequency of LGBTQ-related suicide attempts.
The words, “fascist solutions” appear at the bottom of the flyer next to a Nazi symbol.