Karen Nakamura: July 2008 Archives

I'm very pleased to welcome a new guest blogger on Photoethnography.com, Jason C Romero. Many of you have already seen his comments on this blog, or read material that he sent my way. I'm very happy that he agreed to become a guest author and I personally look forward to seeing his posts!

JR gave me a heads up that my FeedBurner subscription broke when I upgraded to MT4.1. It looks like one of the softlinks went stale and FB wasn't getting new data. I've relinked it so it should work now.....

An undergraduate student noted that there weren't many doctoral or masters programs in visual anthropology. The Society for Visual Anthropology has a list that is relatively kept up to date:

• http://www.societyforvisualanthropology.org/programs.html (link broken)

Update 2009.10: It looks like the SVA didn't archive this page before moving their website to a new system. I used the Wayback Machine to grab the 2008 version of the page and include here (after the jump) as a reference. I'll remove it if the SVA wants me to:

I've written about psychiatric service animals before, but this is a new twist.

The New York Times Magazine from last week has a wonderful article about the growing trend of psychiatric medicine for dogs, cats, and other pets. I'd heard of puppy prozac, but there's also meds for doggy OCD and kitty obsesity.

Soon, our psychiatric service animals will need their own psychiatric service attendants!

One of my blog readers recently posed a question by e-mail:

I'm a Mac user with a disability who is debating whether to purchase the MacSpeech VRS. Though I know that Dragon Naturallyspeaking is still superior, I'd much prefer to use software supported on a Mac OS rather than have to switch to Windows. Like Karen I'm somebody who works with Japanese. I understand that MacSpeech does not yet suppose foreign text, particularly non-Roman alphabets. What I'd like to know is your experience writing Japanese names and terms in romanization. I also hear that MacSpeech does not yet have correct as you go or spelling functions. I should imagine this would be a big problem if a lot of the text you are dictating has foreign words in it. I hear that you can upload sample documents for it to analyze, but how useful or efficient is that?

I have to say that I'm disappointed with MacSpeech Dictate. After my initial installation problems (chronicled here), I tried using Dictate in my daily work.

It was fine for composing regular e-mail messages or blog entries such as this one that contained no technical language. However, it was useless for writing any scholarly material as I use Japanese words in my work. Without even the ability to spell out words (N-I-H-O-N-G-O), I'm stuck.

Trying to train it to learn words is an effort in futility, in my experience. There's no way to really train it specifically on your pronunciation so if it doesn't guess Hanako right on the first go, there's nothing you can do it to tell it that Hanako is Hanako.

There haven't been any updates recently and I've sort of lost hope on MacSpeech as a company. I think I'm going to just resort to running Dragon in Windows XP under VMWares Fusion.

MIT has released a new streaming series on Doing Anthropology at: http://techtv.mit.edu/file/663/