| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"James Norris" |
| Date: |
09 Jul 2007 10:40:51 PM |
| Object: |
ignore |
On Jul 9, 4:58 pm, James Norris <JimNorri...@aol.com> wrote:
REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
moderated group talk.cia
This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) for the creation of the
moderated Usenet newsgroup, talk.cia.
NEWSGROUPS LINE: talk.cia
talk.cia Cochlear Implant Awareness. (Moderated)
RATIONALE: talk.cia
There are at present no other usenet groups which cover the intended
topics of discussion. Modern technology has reached a stage where
Cochlear Implants may soon enable deafness to be cured. It is possible
that implantees will soon be able to construct and communicate information
amongst themselves, in the form of datafiles in CI format. The intention
of the talk.cia group is to promote that exchange of information. The
data files can be hosted by the moderator, or by other shared file storage
hosts. It is conceivable that implantees will construct CI datafiles which
only they can understand, that is, a program which converts CI format
sound into standard digitized audio is not necessarily possible.
TRAFFIC ANALYSIS:
Hardly any proper traffic for a couple of years until the interested
parties have done more work. The cia acronym will obviously attract a
certain amount of 'irrelevant' postings, which is why the group must be
moderated.
CHARTER:
talk.cia is a moderated group for the discussion of CI sound datafiles
as currently used in implants for the profoundly deaf.
The main aim is to improve awareness of the issues to the extent that
the potential of cochlear implant technology as a routine cure for
partial deafness can be understood.
A subsidiary aim is to enable the exchange of CI data files amongst
implantees, as an experimental form of 'voice-mail' for deaf cochlear
implantees. To this intent, arrangements for hosting and uploading/
downloading the CI data binaries are to be organised by participating
group members.
Posters are expected to abide by normal Usenet standards of decorum,
and to ignore articles intended to disrupt the group. The usual
suspects are prohibited (spam, direct advertising, etc.)
MODERATION POLICY: talk.cia
In general, to provide a pleasant experience for the users, this will
be flexible as necessary, allowing for more moderators and changes in
policy to cope with demand.
MODERATOR INFO: talk.cia
Moderator: James Norris <JimNorri...@aol.com>
Technical details about moderation: I am intending to use the private
Google newsgroup , to which only the talk.cia
moderators will have access, as the submission address for the
postings to be moderated, and for the group archives. The accepted
posts are to be sent to the receiving talk.cia Usenet newsgroup from
the Google newsgroup, when the moderators OK them.
Article Submissions:
Administrative Contact: TBD
PROCEDURE:
[...]
DISTRIBUTION:
This document has been posted to the following newsgroups:
news.announce.newgroups
news.groups.proposals
comp.dsp
comp.speech.research
PROPONENT:
James Norris <JimNorri...@aol.com>
CHANGE HISTORY:
2006-07-09 1st RFD
To start the ball rolling.
Firstly, I have a technical query. I emailed
with a question about the apparently misconfigured status of Google's
news.groups.proposals newsgroup (it is not moderated), and the guarded
reply suggested that I should change my newsgroup reader software. Is
that strictly necessary? If so, what do you recommend? I use MS
Windows and AoL on my computer, and my first experience of Usenet was
via AoLs newsreader. When AoL stopped supporting it I tried using MS
Outlook Express for a while, but it seemed unnecessarily cumbersome so
I changed to Google.
I received an email from someone who forwarded my RFD to the board,
they kindly wrote:
"It sounds like an interesting topic area.
You must anticipate vigorous discussion of
the name and the likelihood of finding enough
participants to make the group a success."
Taking those issues to begin with.
The topic area is not only interesting, it is also very important.
Cochlear Implants (CIs), commonly thought of as 'articifial ears', are
a new technology. They imply a future cyberspace in which electrical
signals from a computer can be directly connected to nerve fibre
bundles in the human brain.
The current state-of-the-art in CI technology is that the
bioelectrical data sent by a human ear (along the auditory nerve to
the auditory cortex within the brain) is thoroughly understood, to the
extent that a damaged ear can be bypassed by connecting the output
from a computer 'ear simulator' to the auditory nerve. The computer
ear can simulate the bioelectrical signals that the ears of young
adult humans with perfect hearing would produce. The connection can
in theory be adjacent to the auditory cortex, so that a damaged
auditory nerve can also be bypassed, but the medical technology for
that is not yet available to the general public.
The computer signals to the auditory nerve can be very 'clean'.
Unlike a normal listening experience (of music from loudspeakers in a
room, for example) the sound is not degraded because of the audio
reproduction system, and the room and objects in it do not add
unpredictable echoes. Human stereophonic imaging and echo-location
abilities are not as good as those of some mammals, but they are
surprisingly effective nonetheless. It is by no means impossible that
suitably-programmed 'high echo-fidelity information' in cochlear
implants will eventually provide deaf&blind people with the ability to
see, as well as hear, through their ears.
This brings me to the .cia acronym for the group, for which there are
pros and cons. There are two obvious 'cons': it is misleading,
because it suggests a specific country's Central Intelligence Agency,
and it is uninformative, because it doesn't suggest to anyone other
than CI implantees what the group might be about. If the name was
just .CI that might be slightly better. One 'pro' for including the
'a' is to indicate that the group will only be discussing Audio
aspects of CIs, and not Visual aspects (.civ?), or any other
cyberfreak technologies.
The .cia group won't to be overly serious - the .cia name is
intentionally a slight joke (on the paranoia of US citizens who
believe their CIA has implanted listening devices in their ears). The
Usenet talk.* section has 46 entries, several of them are heavy
politics (religions, abortion, euthanasia), and others are lightweight
(.bizarre, .rumors); .cia is aimed midway between the two extremes.
Most talk.* groups have not much throughput and/or are full of spam,
and are similar to their almost deserted counterparts in misc.*, but
the successful ones are better than their counterparts in misc.* (and
alt.*). I selected talk.* because the main topics of the proposed
group are communication awareness and CI-format exchanges, and surfers
might find the group if they are interested in cybertalk. There are a
few deaf-oriented groups in the big-8 categories, but these are in
general not interested in discussing CIs in any depth. This is mainly
because CIs are a fringe part of Deaf culture, and perhaps partly
because some implantees have signed contracts with CI manufacturers to
write six testimonials per year, so they can qualify for a reduction
in the initial $40K implant cost. In any case, .cia is not aimed at
people who consider themselves disabled by their deafness.
I don't expect the group to have a large immediate following, and I
shall probably have to do a certain amount of advertising for it in
the next couple of years, with the expectation that it will settle
down after a while and run under its own steam, as a talk service for
implantees. Because of the .cia acronym, a lot of the initial
postings are likely to be anarchist, lunatic or terrorist CIA freaks,
but because the group will be moderated, I should be able to select a
(very) few of these and guide the topics and participants into
relatively sane and sensible audio implant discussions.
I have decided on a backbone topic to seed the group with, which links
CIA paranoia and Cochlear Implant Awareness (cia). Consider a touch-
sensitive surface, such as can be overlayed on a computer monitor, for
example. The air pressure from sound waves, caused by people talking
near their computers, can give rise to what would normally be
considered 'noise' in the touch signals from the surface, but if
analysed correctly, information from these sounds can theoretically be
reconstructed from the 'noise' information. Any touch-sensitive
computer screen might also be an invisible microphone! Perhaps the US
govt. CIA are listening in ... ?! The interesting connection with
cia technology is that the touch-sensitive areas of a screen (perhaps
100*100 elements), which can just about detect positive increases in
air pressure from sound waves, can be understood as very similar to
the haircells of the inner ear, in that they perform a similar
function in translating sound waves to electrical signals. However,
it is very difficult to automatically reconstruct an accurate audio
signal (which can be listened to through loudspeakers or headphones)
from the information given by the touch-screen signals (and similarly
for CI audio files), but it is quite likely that CI implantees could
learn to understand this information relatively easily. In future,
implantees may be able to find work as government spies, listening-in
to the general public swearing at their computers and so on, to help
pay for their expensive implants.
.
|
|
| User: "The Rev Dr. Hugh Jarse NLAHN." |
|
| Title: Re: ignore |
10 Jul 2007 02:47:55 AM |
|
|
On Jul 10, 4:40 am, James Norris <JimNorri...@aol.com> wrote:
On Jul 9, 4:58 pm, James Norris <JimNorri...@aol.com> wrote:
REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
moderated group talk.cia
This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) for the creation of the
moderated Usenet newsgroup, talk.cia.
NEWSGROUPS LINE: talk.cia
talk.cia Cochlear Implant Awareness. (Moderated)
RATIONALE: talk.cia
There are at present no other usenet groups which cover the intended
topics of discussion. Modern technology has reached a stage where
Cochlear Implants may soon enable deafness to be cured. It is possible
that implantees will soon be able to construct and communicate information
amongst themselves, in the form of datafiles in CI format. The intention
of the talk.cia group is to promote that exchange of information. The
data files can be hosted by the moderator, or by other shared file storage
hosts. It is conceivable that implantees will construct CI datafiles which
only they can understand, that is, a program which converts CI format
sound into standard digitized audio is not necessarily possible.
TRAFFIC ANALYSIS:
Hardly any proper traffic for a couple of years until the interested
parties have done more work. The cia acronym will obviously attract a
certain amount of 'irrelevant' postings, which is why the group must be
moderated.
CHARTER:
talk.cia is a moderated group for the discussion of CI sound datafiles
as currently used in implants for the profoundly deaf.
The main aim is to improve awareness of the issues to the extent that
the potential of cochlear implant technology as a routine cure for
partial deafness can be understood.
A subsidiary aim is to enable the exchange of CI data files amongst
implantees, as an experimental form of 'voice-mail' for deaf cochlear
implantees. To this intent, arrangements for hosting and uploading/
downloading the CI data binaries are to be organised by participating
group members.
Posters are expected to abide by normal Usenet standards of decorum,
and to ignore articles intended to disrupt the group. The usual
suspects are prohibited (spam, direct advertising, etc.)
MODERATION POLICY: talk.cia
In general, to provide a pleasant experience for the users, this will
be flexible as necessary, allowing for more moderators and changes in
policy to cope with demand.
MODERATOR INFO: talk.cia
Moderator: James Norris <JimNorri...@aol.com>
Technical details about moderation: I am intending to use the private
Google newsgroup , to which only the talk.cia
moderators will have access, as the submission address for the
postings to be moderated, and for the group archives. The accepted
posts are to be sent to the receiving talk.cia Usenet newsgroup from
the Google newsgroup, when the moderators OK them.
Article Submissions:
Administrative Contact: TBD
PROCEDURE:
[...]
DISTRIBUTION:
This document has been posted to the following newsgroups:
news.announce.newgroups
news.groups.proposals
comp.dsp
comp.speech.research
PROPONENT:
James Norris <JimNorri...@aol.com>
CHANGE HISTORY:
2006-07-09 1st RFD
To start the ball rolling.
Firstly, I have a technical query. I emailed
with a question about the apparently misconfigured status of Google's
news.groups.proposals newsgroup (it is not moderated), and the guarded
reply suggested that I should change my newsgroup reader software. Is
that strictly necessary? If so, what do you recommend?
Win32/Stration. If you like, I'll email you a copy.
.
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