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Comment: Re:Here's how you fix it (Score 1) 263

by 3p1ph4ny (#39594015) Attached to: On Slashdot Video, We Hear You Loud and Clear

How do you write down names of people or places? Many open source contributors have names which cannot be rendered in ASCII, and many open source confrences are held in locations which can't be, either. And please, don't say "just make it into ASCII, everyone knows what you mean". It's disrespectful to people if you won't even bother to try spell and say their name right. (It's fine if you get it wrong, but you should at least try.)

Crime

Forensic Experts Say Screams Were Not Zimmerman's 1046

Posted by samzenpus
from the hearing-is-believing dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "As the Trayvon Martin controversy splinters into a debate about self-defense, a central question remains: Who was heard crying for help on a 911 call in the moments before the teen was shot? Now the Orlando Sentinel reports that Tom Owen, a leading expert in the field of forensic voice identification sought to answer that question by analyzing the recordings. His result: It was not George Zimmerman who called for help. Owen, forensic consultant for Owen Forensic Services LLC and chair emeritus for the American Board of Recorded Evidence, used voice identification software to rule out Zimmerman. Another expert contacted by the Sentinel, utilizing different techniques, came to the same conclusion. Owen used software called Easy Voice Biometrics to compare Zimmerman's voice to the 911 call screams. 'I took all of the screams and put those together, and cut out everything else,' says Owen. The software compared that audio to Zimmerman's voice and returned a 48 percent match. Owen says to reach a positive match with audio of this quality, he'd expect higher than 90 percent. Owen cannot confirm the voice as Trayvon's, because he didn't have a sample of the teen's voice to compare however 'you can say with reasonable scientific certainty that it's not Zimmerman.'"

Comment: Re:Yes (Score 5, Insightful) 504

But don't waste your time getting another bachelor's degree - go straight to graduate school. My alma mater (UW-Madison, consistently ranked in the top 15 CS grad schools) had lots of people without CS/CE/EE undergrad degrees, and I suspect other good departments are the same. As long as you can code and show you have academic potential (e.g. a peer reviewed paper, even if it's in an unrelated field), you'll be fine.

Another bachelors degree will mostly be a waste of time, given that you already know the stuff. All you'll be doing is checking a box which you arguably don't need checked anyway. The people in your classes will be unmotivated to work harder than to get whatever grade they want, and in some cases clueless. Contrast this with graduate school, where I learned more from my peers than the courses themselves (as a bonus, these people are actually weird and interesting and have extremely diverse backgrounds).

"No job too big; no fee too big!" -- Dr. Peter Venkman, "Ghost-busters"