HOUSTON — America has given much to Shaheen Khan. It has taken something, too. Three years ago, she was a nursery school teacher here, a meek woman with a melodic voice who charmed the children with tales from her native Pakistan. Today, Mrs. Khan shares a room in a dreary nursing home on the fringes of Houston, paralyzed from midchest down and tormented by a fateful choice to try to remake her life. Mired in debt and strained by a sometimes difficult marriage, Mrs. Khan signed up in 2004 with the military contracting giant KBR to do laundry for American forces in Iraq, a job that promised to triple the $16,000 a year she was earning at the school. She was assigned to work in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and she convinced herself that she would be safe. Five weeks after arriving in Iraq, she was speeding down a Baghdad highway in a Chevy Tahoe when the driver swerved to avoid a box he feared was a bomb. The vehicle rolled five times, leaving Mrs. Khan unconscious, suspended from her seat belt with a crushed spinal cord. Doctors have told her she will not walk […]
Surprisingly, the summer of 2007 will be remembered for something other than Paris Hilton’s incarceration: It’s also the 10th anniversary of continuous speech recognition (SR) technology for the PC. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 1.0 came out in the summer of 1997, and those who wanted to dictate to their computers no longer had to pause … between … words. Originally, the user had to ‘train’ the software for about 45 minutes by reading it a canned test, and the resulting accuracy of about 75 percent meant you couldn’t finish a short sentence without several glaring errors. Today, having changed hands twice before arriving at version 9.5, training takes only minutes and out-of-the-box accuracy is about 95 percent, meaning you can expect one error per run-on sentence. Dragon’s current vendor, Nuance Communications Inc. of Burlington, MA, reports that sales are booming. Chris Strammiello, a spokesman for Dragon’s current vendor, Nuance Communications Inc. of Burlington, MA, told LiveScience that Dragon did not catch on with the mass market until Version 8.0 came out in June 2004, offering enough accuracy (thanks to improved algorithms and faster computers) to be truly useful. Sales have been increasing by 30 percent per year since then, he […]
FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu — Veu Lesa, a 73-year-old villager in Tuvalu, does not need scientific reports to tell him that the sea is rising. The evidence is all around him. The beaches of his childhood are vanishing. The crops that used to feed his family have been poisoned by salt water. In April he was evacuated when a king tide flooded his home, showering it with rocks and debris. For Tuvalu, a string of nine picturesque atolls and coral islands, global warming is not an abstract danger; it is a daily reality. The tiny South Pacific nation, only 4m above sea level at its highest point, may not exist in a few decades. Its people are already in flight; more than 4,000 live in New Zealand, and many of the remaining 10,500 are planning to join the exodus. Others, though, are determined to stay and try to fight the advancing waves. The outlook is bleak. A tidal gauge on the main atoll, Funafuti, suggests the sea level is climbing by 5.6mm a year, twice the average global rate predicted by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is not enough data yet to […]
BAGHDAD — The U.S. military is weighing new directions in Iraq, including an even bigger troop buildup if President Bush thinks his ‘surge’ strategy needs a further boost, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday. Marine Gen. Peter Pace revealed that he and the chiefs of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force are developing their own assessment of the situation in Iraq, to be presented to Bush in September. That will be separate from the highly anticipated report to Congress that month by Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander for Iraq. The Joint Chiefs are considering a range of actions, including another troop buildup, Pace said without making any predictions. He called it prudent planning to enable the services to be ready for Bush’s decision. The military must ‘be prepared for whatever it’s going to look like two months from now,’ Pace said in an interview with two reporters traveling with him to Iraq from Washington. ‘That way, if we need to plus up or come down’ in numbers of troops in Iraq, the details will have been studied, he said. Pace, on his first visit since U.S. commanders accelerated […]
If anything looked like a sure thing in the new Congress, it was that lawmakers would renew, and probably expand, the popular, decade-old State Children’s Health Insurance Program before it expires this year. But the future of the $5 billion-a-year program, which serves 6.6 million children and has long enjoyed bipartisan support, has become mired in an ideological fight over the proper role of government in health care and in more mundane legislative arm-wrestling over how to fund the effort in a tight budget climate. Key members of the Senate Finance Committee announced a bipartisan deal late last week that would raise the federal excise tax on cigarettes by 61 cents, to $1 a pack, to expand the program by $35 billion over the next five years. That would create total program funding of $60 billion over the period — enough, lawmakers said, to cover 3.3 million additional kids while keeping the focus on children of the working poor. The committee is expected to vote on the plan as early as this week. The program, which will expire on Sept. 30, ‘has helped millions upon millions of low-income, uninsured American kids see doctors when they’re sick,’ Finance […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
