The War On Bullshit

iListen is bullshit. There, I said it. The accuracy rate isn’t nearly as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. So, I was determined to get Dragon working under OSx, and not just in virtualization. I wanted Dragon to dictate into Camino, Pages, Adium, etc. This how-to explains how I did it. Please bear with me, this is my first how-to.

Warnings

1. If you are a newbie, you may need help for this. A lot of things can go wrong, and this is not the most detailed how-to.
2. I have tested this on exactly 1 hardware setup: mine. I have an Intel-based Macbook connected via ethernet cable to a router. I am using a USB Logitech headset.
3. I admit, the resulting set up is a little buggy.

What you will need

1. OSx Leopard (this may work in other versions, but I have not tried it)
2. VMware Fusion (I use the full version, not the demo)
3. Windows XP installation disk
4. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 (Again, may work with other versions)
5. Win2VNC
6. At least one gig of RAM

Part one: installing Dragon

0. Turn off Time Machine (under system preferences –> Time Machine)
1. Install VMware Fusion (this should be pretty simple)
2. Create a Windows XP virtual machine inside VMware fusion, and install Windows XP in it. This should be pretty straightforward
3. When the installation is over, shut down the Windows XP OS, but don’t close VMware
4. go to Virtual Machine-> settings-> memory and set the memory allocated to the virtual machine to at least 512 MB. If you only have one gig of RAM, don’t go any higher.
5. Restart the Windows XP virtual machine
6. Plug in your headset. If it is a USB headset, it will show up at the bottom of the VMware window as a little USB connection symbol. Click on the symbol to assign the headset to the VMware window. When the symbol turns blue, the headset is connected.
7. Put the Dragon CD in the drive. (If you have the CD as an ISO, you can mount it in OS X and then access it from within the virtual machine, as long as it’s shared.)
8. double-click ISScript1050.MSI. you need to install this before you install Dragon. When it’s done,
9. double-click Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.MSI (it took me a couple tries to install Dragon, as the installation crashed; however, it picked up where it left off and installed without issue the second time.)
10. go through the Dragon set up. If you have audio quality problems, and you have a USB microphone, make sure it’s plugged directly into the computer. Plugging a USB microphone into a USB hub can increase distortion. If you still have audio quality problems, look around the web for pointers. You’re not the first person, and you won’t be the last.
11. You’ll have to read at least one train story (I think) to get started.
12. Once Dragon is configured, open up WordPad and give it a whirl — if it doesn’t work within the virtual machine, it won’t work outside, so make sure you can dictate within VMware before going on.

Part two: dictating into OSx applications

1. In OSx, go to system preferences –> sharing, and turn on screen sharing
2. Click computer settings, and make sure both boxes are checked - don’t forget to enter a VNC password. Leave the screen sharing panel open
3. In VMware, click on the network icon on the bottom right-hand server, and select the bridge option. This connects your virtual machine directly to your home network, and is necessary to get into Win2VNC working.
4. Install Win2VNC.
5. Start Win2VNC, and copy the server info from the OSx Sharing Panel. Only enter the numbers. E.g., mine read vnc://192.168.0.52/, so I entered 192.168.0.52 into Win2VNC. Press enter
6. It should ask for a password. Enter the password you used in the os x sharing panel.
7. If it connects, a little symbol will appear in the task bar. You can change the settings of Win2VNC by right-clicking this symbol.
8. Start Dragon and turn the mic on (the virtual taskbar mic that is)
9. Move your mouse slowly to the right edge of the screen. When the mouse gets to the edge, it will jump to somewhere on the OS X screen (don’t run VMWare in fullscreen mode)
10. Open your favorite OSX editor and start talking.
11. Turn Time Machine back on, if you must.

Known Bugs

1. While using this setup, I find that the Apple VNC Server is very processor intensive, which I suspect indicates some kind of infinite loop going on.
2. Once you’ve started Win2VNC and moved your mouse back to OSx, you’ll have to disconnect the VNC client (by clicking the icon in the OSx menu bar) to get back to the VMWare window.

Conclusion

If you try this, please let me know (in the comments) how it goes. If you figure out what’s causing the above bugs, or how to fix it, by all means share it with the rest of us.

I dictated this entire tutorial into Camino using Dragon NaturallySpeaking configured as described. Good luck.

It turns out that Facebook’s idea of security is bullshit. Besides all the recent problems with 3rd party apps, you can also bypass photo security be simply deleting one of the URL parameters. Basically, if you look at a picture in an album, and you want to see the other pics in that album, but don’t have permission, you just delete the “&Subj=#########” parameter from the URL. Then you can see the whole album.

I’m not posting this to help all the Facebook stalkers out there. The point is that if everyone finds out about something, Facebook is more likely to fix it. This is not exactly nuanced, expert hacking we’re talking about. It shouldn’t be this easy.

Here is a more comprehensive discussion on the subject.

Do you know someone who has cancer and her treatment isn’t working? Do you know someone on psychiatric meds who is experiencing weird side effects? Do you know a business owner who’s struggling with decisions like whether to invest in high-tech equipment? Doctors are overworked and MBAs are poorly trained. If you want answers you’ve got to read the research yourself. The problem is, half of it is bullshit, and it’s really hard to tell which half.

When a paper is submitted to a good journal, a lot of smart people have at it with the academic equivalent of a howitzer. If it survives to be published, you’d think all the bugs would be worked out. Unfortunately, not all research is peer-reviewed, and reviewers tend to miss or tolerate certain weaknesses. While this is often understood by the scientific community, it can confuse the bejesus out of Joe Average.

If you’re an average person, and you need to make sense out of scientific papers, this guide is for you. If you are a science journalist and you have fewer than six graduate level research methods courses, maybe you ought to read this as well. Hell, if you got a PhD and didn’t take methods for some reason, here’s hoping this helps.

1. Is the paper in a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal?

If the “research” you have is not in a journal, be very, very wary. Sometimes good research is published in books, but be careful. The kind of research I’m talking about is done by scientists. Journalists and government officials are not scientists. Reports commissioned by government departments are (usually) not scientific.

Coming back to research published in journals, go to the journal’s webpage. Don’t worry if it’s a crappy webpage. Look for the word’s “peer-reviewed” and “acceptance rate.” If the journal is not peer reviewed or has an acceptance rate over 20%, that’s bad. You can also google the Journal’s “impact factor.” Higher is better. If you think it’s a bad journal, don’t even read the paper. If the journal is good, it means most of your work has been done for you; however, a journal’s reviewers tend to miss or tolerant certain kinds of errors that you still have to watch out for.

The same line of reasoning applies to conference proceedings. Since some fields, such as human-computer interaction, publish much of their best work in conferences, these can be excellent sources of research. However, you should only look at good, peer-reviewed conferences with low acceptance rates.

2. Who financed the study?

If whoever financed the study had something to gain from the results, don’t trust it! This is especially important in drug trials because these are often done by the drug companies who are explicitly trying to show that the drug is safe and effective. A single independent study to the contrary should be given just as much weight as all the Big Pharma studies promoting the drug combined.

Sometimes this is more subtle. A lot of research on security and drugs, for instance, is politically motivated. If a government funds a study to show that marijuana is dangerous, and the results show the opposite, things can get hairy.

3. What kind of study is it?

You have to evaluate different kinds of studies differently. Some of the kinds of studies you’re likely to encounter are: experiments, surveys, mathematical models, meta-analysis and qualitative studies. You should evaluate each of these differently.

Experiments

If the article talks about treatment groups and control groups, it’s probably an experiment. Reviewers are very good at checking that the experiment is correctly designed and the results well-interpreted, so you don’t have to worry about that. What you have to really watch out for is who participated in the study. If a drug trial was done on 100 white women, and you are a black man, the results might not apply to you. If you are a professional programmer with 20 years’ experience, the results of a study on 2nd year undergrad computer science students might not apply to you.

Surveys

If the article talks about a large number of people filling out a questionnaire online, on paper, by telephone or in person, it’s probably a survey. Reviewers are very good at making sure that the questionnaire is correctly designed and the analysis is done right, but look out for causality! Usually questionnaires argue that X causes Y, but only show that X is correlated with Y.

For instance, suppose a study claims that, for corporations, acting ethically (X) causes increased profits (Y). The study than gives evidence that a random sample of very profitable companies act more ethically than a random sample of unprofitable companies. That’s nice and all, but how do you know that it’s not the other way around? That being profitable (Y) causes the firm to act more ethically (X) because more people are watching? How about having really smart managers (Z) causes both X and Y?

When evaluating a survey that claims X causes Y, ask yourself if there are alternative explanations that the authors did not rule out.

Mathematical Models

If a paper starts with a set of assumptions and logically (usually with symbols rather than words) or mathematically derives a conclusion, I call it a mathematical model study. The good news is, you don’t have to worry much about the math or logic because the reviewers will be studying that quite closely. What you really have to watch out for are the assumptions, especially hidden assumptions.

Just read over the assumptions and think about them. Do they make sense? My favorite example is rationality. We have enormous evidence that while people may be capable of rationality, they don’t use that capability most of the time. If the paper includes assumptions that don’t hold in your case, there’s no reason to believe the paper’s results will apply to you either.

Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis summarizes the results of many studies. Usually these are a great place to start when you’re new to a field. Unfortunately, they have one serious danger: they’re only as good as the studies they summarize. In a field with a diversity of good and bad studies, the author of a meta-analysis will usually sort out the mess for you. However, some fields, like economics and computer science, suffer from systematic methodological problems. In other words, if the whole field is screwed up, the meta-analysis probably will be as well. My only advice is, don’t just read a meta analysis.

Qualitative Studies

Qualitative research comes in many shapes and sizes. Some is presented in a highly structured way; some is written like a story. A qualitative paper describes a study within a particular context, coming to conclusions about that context, not your context. As you read the study, ask yourself how your context differs from the study’s context. After you’ve read the conclusions, ask yourself if any of the differences matter. For example, if the study is about the decision making process of a clothing retailer, and you’re in the office supplies business, the change of product may not matter.

4. Is it theory building or theory testing

Last thing you have to ask of a paper is, did the paper test a theory or merely propose one? This is usually obvious, but sometimes theory building papers masquerade as theory testing papers. As a general heuristic, put the more faith in theory testing, less faith in “exploratory studies” and very little faith in papers that propose a theory but do not give empirical evidence. While this last type is an important step in the scientific process, it’s like an experimental drug: not yet certified for human consumption.

Concluding Comments

One last thing that confuses many readers (not to mention science journalists) is the difference between “finding no evidence of a relationship” and “finding evidence of no relationship.” Journalists often write things like ‘so-and-so concludes that drug X is not effective.’ This is almost never correct. Very few scientific papers ever conclude that two things are unrelated (e.g., a drug doesn’t work). Experiments and surveys just aren’t set up that way.

I hope this guide helps you make sense of scientific papers.