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Living Life in Fast-Forward 342

Posted by michael from the yukkuri-hanashite-kudasai dept.
ctwxman writes "A year and a half ago my boss approached me, asking me to finish some college courses to get certification in what I've been doing for the past 20+ years. The courses are offered by Mississippi State University. Since I live in Connecticut, I am taking my lessons on DVD and videocassette with tests, quizzes and helpful advice from TA's online. It didn't take me long to realize how s-l-o-w the whole lecture process was. But with WinDVD4, I started ramping up the speed. It didn't take long to get to 2x normal speed. Other than the lectures taking half the time, I didn't miss anything. Yes, the speech is a little clipped, but these are college lectures. There are no speed demons delivering at the MSU lectern. I posted my 'discovery' to our online student bulletin board and found many other students were scared of the idea. But, for me wearing headphones (important I think), these hyper lessons are just as good as watching at normal speed. Now, The New York Times (sacrifice of eldest child required) has legitimized my claim with this article showing how and why others are rapidly jumping on the high speed watching bandwagon."
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Living Life in Fast-Forward More

Living Life in Fast-Forward

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  • Did it. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:13AM (#7112716) Homepage Journal

    I did a similar thing at my job.

    When I was hired on here I had to view 2-ish hours of safety videos ("Look at that 1 kilo pipe wrench soar into the bore of that MRI machine from 3 meters away! Fear!!") I don't work in the labs with glass, animals or tissue. Unless one of the SGI Origins becomes self-aware ala Skynet.. you get the idea.. anyhow many of the videos were not applicable to me or my work.

    Fortunately they were on CDs in Quicktime format and the Quicktime viewer had a fast play option for those lulls in the video. (the Flying Wrench O' Death was really cool, it's the highlight of the whole video set that anyone every talks about.)

    • Re:Did it. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dr Caleb ( 121505 )
      the Flying Wrench O' Death was really cool,

      A place I used to work had something similar. It was a 400 tonne mining truck running over a 1/2 ton pickup truck and crushing it deep into the soft ground. Nothing left for rescue crews to recover.

      They also showed the view from the drivers cabin. The driver never saw the pickup, and didn't even notice the little bump the other truck made while going under it's wheels. After seeing that, you stopped at stop signs around the plant.

  • Depends (Score:2, Informative)

    by Shaklee39 ( 694496 )
    Depends on the professor. I have been using the E&M lectures on MIT OCW for the last few weeks and that professor is extremely organized. I do not think it would be possible to understand everything he is saying running at double the speed.

  • No Reg Required (Score:5, Informative)

    by 11223 ( 201561 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:16AM (#7112734)
    Once again, Google News comes to the rescue [nytimes.com].
  • Anyone else think of Lawnmower Man? [imdb.com]

  • Often requested ReplayTV feature... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:19AM (#7112752) Homepage
    As a long-time ReplayTV [replaytv.com] user who is active on the ReplayTV Forum [avsforum.com] of the AVS Forum [www.avsforumcom], I can say that this is a feature that has been often requested. The ability to be able to watch TV recordings at a faster speed with pitch-adjusted audio would be great for watching things like news shows, etc.

    • A similar TiVo feature now (may work w/ RTV) (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:42AM (#7112936) Journal
      A similar, but by no means identical, feature is available for TiVos now, and may work with ReplayTV as well since I don't think TiVo had to explicitly implement it. If you use TiVo at the first fast-forward speed, which IIRC is 3x, the close captioning still works. Thus, if you are watching a close-captioned show and it's bogging down, you can zip things up to 3x, which is a good reading speed, and still know what's going on.

      (There are backdoors to tweak whether it's exactly 3x or not, but I don't know if they are still in the latest TiVo software and use at your own risk. I don't know anything about how they interact with this "feature".)

      It's actually a little faster then my TV can handle it; sometimes the CC starts to lag and you need to slow down to normal speed briefly to allow the TV to catch up. If it happens to you, you'll understand what I mean when you see it.

      I'm sure you can do the math as to how much TV you can watch in an hour at 3x, but more importantly in my experience is zipping through the middle of boring things without actually missing what's being said. (As mentioned in the parent post, I sometimes watch the entire local news, except weather which my wife wants to see, this way though; when the news is dumbed down to an elementary school level accelerating it by 3x is about right. Plus the psychological impact of the continuously and unrepresentatively negative stories is greatly reduced which still transferring the information. I prefer it to reading local newspapers, which is not saying much.)

    • TiVo + closed captioning (Score:3, Informative)

      by djw ( 3187 )
      With a Tivo, you can watch at the lowest fast-forward speed (2x) with closed captions enabled on your TV. The captions still come through because the Tivo captures them during broadcast and reinserts them into the encoded stream.

  • A rediscovery? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:19AM (#7112764)
    I think you've used technology to rediscover one of the points of good teaching. Probably over a decade ago, there was a study of what qualities make for compelling teaching. I remember one of them was NOT s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g out every comcept in excruciatingly slothish manner so "no child gets left behind". One of the most desired qualities was, in fact, speaking quickly to maintain interest.
    • Benny Hill [vgernet.net] pioneered this technology in the 70s

    • Re:A rediscovery? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by adrianbaugh ( 696007 )
      Well, yes - but that's as in "good teaching of bright kids". If you're teaching thickies you have to go more slowly, if you're teaching clever 'uns you can speed up. I would have thought judging the pace of a lesson to be appropriate to the students you're teaching was rather self-evident.
    • This is fresh in my mind from taking a course that taught training techniques.

      Review, overview, and simple concepts are good places to speed up. New, strange or difficult concepts are good places to slow down.

      Which makes sense in general. Fluctuating stimuli are the most effective at holding people's attention.

      Oh, and make eye contact with the students so you can get some idea whether your packets of information are being acked or dropped.

    • Re:A rediscovery? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pavon ( 30274 )
      Yeah, I agree that it mainly depends on the density of the lecture. Same goes for books. There were some "practical" CS classes I took where it would drive me crazy to do anything other than skim the book because of all the unnecisarry fluff and verbage. On the other hand, there was this one theoretical math class I took (differential geometry), where it would take me over 10 minutes to simply parse a single page, and I would normally have to read the chapter a couple more times before fully understanding t

  • I can relate to this... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jakoz ( 696484 )
    ...having found that double the playtime for twice as many times is of far greater value than half the speed for half the repetitions. It also forms the backbone of many memory fads... an example is the last tape of the Mega Memory course, where, you can hear Kev extoll the values of high speed learning. Personally, I think the best thing a Uni student will ever own is a variable speed notetaker.

  • Am I Stating the Obvious here? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lizard_King ( 149713 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:21AM (#7112775) Journal
    But this is material that you've had 20+ years of experience with. I would hope that you can watch/listen to the lectures at 2x the speed and still follow along. I would also hope that you could skip a few lectures and not be left confused.

    Take a student who has had no experience with the subject matter. You think this approach would still work well?

    I suppose its relative to the complexity of the subject matter and the ability of the student to digest information, but I would argue, that for the most part, lectures at hyper-speed aren't more effective.
    • Take a student who has had no experience with the subject matter. You think this approach would still work well?

      Hell, try doing this with any technology/science oriented class. I'm sure we could all do some English or Philosophy class in fast-forward, but not a class on Operating system design or quantum mechanics.
    • I often wished I could zip through dull parts of lectures at Uni - I'd be sitting there thinking "OKAY OKAY I UNDERSTAND BUFFER SOLUTIONS" and we'd have half an hour to go.

      Allowing me to zip pthrough the easy stuff, and play back repeatedly the hard bits would probably have halved my time spent 'learning' and so doubled (or more) my time spent reinforcing the knowledge through experimentation / further reading and talking shit with some friends and a beer.
    • As was put by my one of my high school history teachers:

      Repetition is the mother of learning.
      Repetition is the mother of learning.
      Repetition is the mother of learning.
      Repetition is the mother of learning.
      Repetition is the mother of learning.

      Getting the concept in lecture is one thing, but actually rememerbing it when you leave is another.

      • Repetition is the mother of learning.
        Repetition is the mother of learning.
        Repetition is the mother of learning.
        Repetition is the mother of learning.
        Repetition is the mother of learning.

        Bullshit
        Bullshit
        Bullshit
        Bullshit
        Bullshit

        Repetition is the mother of rote memorization.

        Comprehension is the mother of learning. Figuring out how this idea connects to that other idea so your brain has a place to grab hold.

        Of course, this is coming from a guy who majored in math because everything else req

    • > lectures at hyper-speed aren't more effective.

      Well, that's a good point.

      I frequently give presentations, talk with analysts and the press, and speak at conferences, so I've got some experience doing different types of public speaking. I've found that the "fresher" the topic, the slower I must speak.

      I remember once I had to give a presentation on specialized security issues for public networks to a selected group of very experienced, high-level, technology decision makers. Unfortunately, my presentat

  • I'm from Mississippi (Score:4, Funny)

    by boatboy ( 549643 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:21AM (#7112780) Homepage
    I'm from MS, so I can say this. The reason that this works is because we talk half as fast.

  • My mentally handicapped son (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Frans Faase ( 648933 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:23AM (#7112796) Homepage
    It looks like my mentally handicapped son (almost 6) with a P.I.Q. of 50, also has this preference. He always asks us to play his favourite video at twice the normal speed, especially if he already has watched them before.
  • Ok, so I did this in middle school. We had a history teacher that would make us watch so many filmstrips and answer little quizzes about them. It didn't take us long to figure that we could cut the time it took to grind through a 20-minute filmstip by playing the 33rpm record at 45rpm.

    Hey kids: Remember vinyl record? No? Damn, I'm getting old.

  • Speed and Familiarity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:24AM (#7112804)

    ...to get certification in what I've been doing for the past 20+ years.

    I think that one of the reasons why you may have been able to digest the information at this faster speed is because you're already well-experienced in that area. Naturally, anyone who's been working with X for a number of years is already familiar with most of the concepts. Me, I could easily watch most computer-related lectures in double-speed and absorb 99% of the information easily. Change subjects, though, and the increased speed might be more of a hindrance.

  • Accounting at BYU (Score:5, Interesting)

    by amcnabb ( 682951 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:25AM (#7112811) Homepage
    I recently took an introductory accounting class at BYU. The professor had prepared CDROMs with lecture videos. He actually paid licensing fees to a company that produces media speed-up software for Windows, because he wants students to watch the videos at a higher speed (I just used mplayer -speed 2 instead). He repeatedly emphasized how much a better experience it is when you watch the lectures faster.
  • sounds like the old "bliptos" are back. its been so long since i saw an ep. i need to hop on my favorite file sharing program and snag a rip (if any are out there). seeing as the series was set in miami (my home) i can't wait to see what else was true about our future, besides the whole, brainwashing our population and using commercials to do it thing.

    anyone got a good headroom fan site?

    • sounds like the old "bliptos" are back

      You mean "blipverts".
      • yes, u're right, blipverts. but you see the parallel here right? sped up commercials to rivet people into their seats and make sure the information sticks. i don't think anyone's head is going to physically explode, but the power of propaganda is such that this could become a serious issue.

        it is an issue of mind control. i have been mostly TV free for a long time (does football count as network tv?). and can hardly have conversations with some people because they treat charecters like they are real f

  • The brain is a strange thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:26AM (#7112820)
    Fsirt we dvsiceor taht plepoe can urenntdasd wtrtien wdors wehn the idnise lrtetes are all sralmbecd up...

    ...andnowwelearnthattheMicroMachineManwasn'tan
    is olatedphenomenonandthatalmostanyonecanunderstand
    spokenlanguageevenifit'sspedupbeyondallreason.

    Amazing, really. When you think about how much garbage the brain's communication centers are capable of interpreting, it's almost a wonder we got as far as written language at all.
    • Not quite...

      Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr.

      - From this Slashback [slashdot.org]
      • Is that seeing this refutation a week or two back one time was apparently enough to add a new "text parsing" routine to my brain. I didn't have any problem reading this at all this time through, and didn't have to stop and think about which way the letters were scrambled. In addition to parsing jumbled text, I can apparently now read text where the inner contents of the words have been flipped left to right without thinking about it.

        Thank you, slashdot! Maybe if we keep escalating this, we'll all be abl

  • In related news.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by kimota ( 136493 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:26AM (#7112821)
    Network 23 has announced new high speed commercials [techtv.com], aka "blipverts," applying similar technology, albeit with the occasional side effect.

  • I guess if you're taking courses at Miss state (Score:3, Informative)

    by fw3 ( 523647 ) * on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:27AM (#7112829) Homepage Journal
    If you're at say Princeton, Stanford or MIT I daresay the lectures (e.g. 18.01 [mit.edu] 18.014 [mit.edu] 18.01a [mit.edu] ) are plenty fast enough thanks.
  • A friend of mine who's a professor told me that in order to get something accross you have to repeat it ten times during a lecture or a class, simply because humans have a short attention span and they wander off and on the speech. So it's hardly surprising that one could follow by zipping through it.
  • Ctwxman, Now if we could only get some of your co-workers to do their bit in fast forward mode....

  • A boon for auditory learners (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PhoenixRising ( 36999 ) <ngroot+slashdot@ ... g ['l.o' in gap]> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:32AM (#7112863) Homepage
    This could seriously level the academic playing field for folks who learn better from lectures than from books. In college, I know I certainly had an easier time in many classes than my classmates because I preferred to learn from the textbooks and other reading materials rather than the lectures. Since reading isn't limited by the rate of speech of the author, you can cover more material in a given time from a book. Plus, books are random access; it's much harder to scan through a recorded lecture for something you wanted to hear. However, I know a lot of people who seem to really need the narrative provided by a lecturer to get the material. Given the speeds at which the article claims young adults are capable of comprehending spoken material, that no longer needs to be a disadvantage.

    Now, all schools have to do is make lectures non-mandatory (so that students can save time by listening later at high speed, of course. :) )

  • I listen to 33RPM records at 45RPM (Score:3, Funny)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:34AM (#7112876) Homepage
    .. because of my superior brain processing power.

  • "Snow Crash", revisited (Score:5, Funny)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:35AM (#7112881)
    The estimated viewing time for this training video is 15.62 minutes.

    More than 18 minutes -- Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g. possible unauthorized restroom break).

    16-18 minutes -- Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.

    15.63-16 minutes -- Asswipe. Not to be trusted.

    Exactly 15.62 minutes -- Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.

    14-15.61 minutes -- Employee is an efficient worker, may someteimes miss emportant details.

    10-14 minutes -- Keep an eye on this employee; maybe developing slipshod attitude.

    6-10 minutes -- Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.

    Less than 6 minutes -- Disable fast-forward button on the user's video player, re-block Slashdot.org on the company firewall.

  • Old bull, young bull... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:35AM (#7112883) Journal
    Society is moving too fast as it is - and you want to speed it up even more.

    Careful thought and consideration is an important aspect of learning critical thinking - not how much you can cram into your brain at one sitting.

    I see two things happening:
    1. People are quick to jump to incorrect conclusions more than I remember in the past.
    2. People don't stop and smell the roses in their relentless pursuit of *?

    Reminds me of a parable:
    A young bull and an old bull are at the top of a hill, looking down on the herd of cows.
    The young bull says to the old bull, "lets run down there a meet a cow!"
    The old bull responds, "lets walk down there and meet them all."

    • ...and silly me, I've now live life in slow-motion (Score:5, Interesting)

      by uptownguy ( 215934 ) <UptownGuyEmail@gmail.com> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:56AM (#7113520)
      People don't stop and smell the roses in their relentless pursuit of *

      I'm not really sure what the end result of all this hurrying and efficiency is really for. While I have no doubt that this sort of "speed learning" might allow one to increase the "breadth" of what they know, it most certainly comes at the expense of depth.

      Let's think of it another way: Did human beings live satisfying lives 25,000 years ago? Now, I'm not talking about comfortable or easy or long, I am talking about satisfying. They didn't have television or the Internet or the Borg Cube TNG DVD boxed set. No video games. No cell phones. No call waiting caller ID. And while it is true that a small fraction of people migrated from time to time, the vast majority of people lived within 50 miles of where they were born their whole life. So there wasn't a lot of traveling going on. There weren't a lot of "new and exciting" people. The pace of change was slower...

      And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying. Why? Because we were living the way we had lived for thousands of generations. Appreciating certain things, wanting to live a certain way ... this is hard-wired into our DNA. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the changes of the past 300 years have been -- when you are working against millions of years of evolution...

      ...you are going to start to get discontent. You are going to start to get masses of people starting to feel disconnected from their family and friends and feel oppressed by their jobs or the ruling class or the amount of email in their inbox every morning or being stuck in traffic or... or something. And it isn't like those types of oppression haven't always existed in some form or other. But they haven't FELT so urgent before because we've been GROUNDED before. But now...? Most people, it feels as though they are on a cart sliding down a very fast hill, out-of-control, with no brakes. And we keep picking up speed. Ask anyone over 80 about how they see the world today. ("Of course -they- will think that everything is moving too quickly. When -they- were growing up the world was..." And, of course, that is exactly the point.)

      Why, why, why, why are we all moving so fast? Hurrying to get to a destination that no one has ever explained to me? Why do I have to pack it all in? Why wolf down when you can savor? Why drive when you can walk? When you are on a first date with someone you really like, do you want to hurry hurry hurry and do everything there is to do in your city right then? Or is there something to just taking a few moments outside of time to stare into each other's eyes? Why can't life be like that?

      (And I am leaving out one of the most terrible costs that this faster pace of life has come at: Large pockets of selectively honed DNA disappearing forever (i.e. going extinct))

      There are circumstances where a person might "need" to learn a large amount of information in a short amount of time. I don't want to take away from the article or the gee-whiz factor. It is fascinating. The brain really is capable of many amazing things. But this hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry fanaticism just makes no sense to me.
      • If we were all so satisfied back then, why was all of this built? At some point a person looked around at a world that extended less than fifty miles from where they were born and said, "Is this really it?" They weren't satisfied, and they weren't willing to sit there and accept it. They built things. They created new technologies to extend their capabilities and reach. They adapted new ways of learning so they could discover more, learn more. Sure, it wasn't all from some great altruistic desire to be bett
      • And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying. Why? Because we were living the way we had lived for thousands of generations.

        Er, so all people everywhere lived exactly the same way for thousands of generations? Not hardly.

        So were they satisfied? Got me, I don't have your time machine, so I can't go ask them. But, at a guess, I don't think any group of humans would choose to work in the fields all day long and die of starvation, exposure, or plague if offered an alt
      • Besides your complete lack of knowledge in the area of history (too much Xena, maybe?) that you demonstrate, I'd have to agree with you. That is, I agree, we put too much emphasis on moving quickly. Otherwise you're way off the wall.

        The only thing is, this is nothing new. People have been driven to work quickly since the beginning of time. Always in the quest for a single thing: comfort.

        Either it was for want of more food, want of a warmer home, the desire to not be beaten by their overlord (yes, most peo

  • Damn you shashdot! Damn you!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Binestar ( 28861 ) * on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:36AM (#7112891) Homepage
    ...Now, The New York Times (sacrifice of eldest child required) has legitimized...

    Before I clicked on the link I sacrificed my eldest childing hoping to be able to read the article. but when i got there it just wanted my NYT username and password. I read through the TOS and nowhere did it say anything about Sacrifices. I demand that you pay for your false information. I need a replacement firstborn so the wife doesn't find out!

  • Blind people are amazing... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by joshua42 ( 103889 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:37AM (#7112905)
    I used to work for a company providing a service they called "spoken paper" to visually impaired. That was originally just news papers read and recorded on to cassettes. Today, however, it is the text content of papers distributed digitally to small devices with build-in speech synthesis. There is a knob on the box to adjust the speech rate. Well, work it out for yourselves. At least to me it is just noise a lot of them listen to.

    The first time we had devices in for service it was assumed that someone had touched the speech rate knob while unpacking the thing - as no living thing possible could make any sense of what the synthesis produced at that rate. I guess that it may help that the voice is always the same, though.

    • Re:Blind people are amazing... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jacobcaz ( 91509 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:10AM (#7113144) Homepage
      • The first time we had devices in for service it was assumed that someone had touched the speech rate knob while unpacking the thing - as no living thing possible could make any sense of what the synthesis produced at that rate. I guess that it may help that the voice is always the same, though.
      I had a blind guy working for me a few years back who had the rate on his screen-resading software turned up so fast that it was just a buzz of noise. I was unable to pick anything out from the voice, but he was able to hear it all an understand it without problems.

      Email was somewhat interesting from him. It contained punctuation, but usually precious little formatting like paragraph breaks (or at times spaces) because his software didn't "read" a paragraph break, he never added them when typing.

      And his ability to recall voices was scary. The first day he was in the office our then sysadmin was introduced and said, "Hi." That's it, just "hi". The blind guy said, "Hey, I know you... You're Rob." At some point several years ago he had spoken briefly on the phone to this guy and was able to recall the voice and pin it to a name. Amazing...

  • I was doing this in 1997... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by caveat ( 26803 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:38AM (#7112907)
    ...freshman year, I'd record lectures and sleep through class (yes, I can learn just fine that way thanks), friday afternoon when I had no class I'd dump the tapes to my drive and use Peak to cut the running time by about half. Took a while to actually process (200mhz 603ev!), but by Saturday morning I could roll over, put my headphones on, and catch up a week in about 2 hours. hungover no less!
  • Now, The New York Times (sacrifice of eldest child required)

    Should have waited for the Spring for this one.

    Who knew the BSoD was one of the Plagues.
  • "When I listen to the newspaper, I tend to go as high as 650" words per minute, said Gregory Rosmaita, a Web designer based in Jersey City. Because Mr. Rosmaita is blind, his interface with computers is audio-based...

    Maybe you've seen his work like here [worldsfastestclown.com] or here [tripod.com]

  • Rick Moranis said it best (Score:3, Funny)

    by Squideye ( 37826 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:53AM (#7112996) Homepage Journal
    "I put my 20-minute workout tape on twice as fast, so it only took ten minutes." -- Ghostbusters

    Some professors deliver their lectures. They pay close attention to pacing, they give students time to take notes, they engage students. I wouldn't recommend listening to these profs at high speed, especially if you're taking notes.

    Others just drone. I'd fast forward these anyway.

    The question really is: is it about the process or the information? Depends on the teaching style, and so should your approach.
  • I used to watch all my porn on fast forward. Then I hurt meself.

  • But with WinDVD4, I started ramping up the speed. It didn't take long to get to 2x normal speed.

    Does that work with Xine? or VLC?

  • Mod this up for those who don't want to register:

    October 2, 2003
    Now Hear This, Quickly
    By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER

    E call it the 66-second minute," Laura Gaines said.

    Ms. Gaines is the vice president of Prime Image, a maker of devices like the Digital Time Machine that shorten audio and video recordings by up to 12 percent with "no discernible results." Micro-editing, as the process is called, created a stir last year when some broadcasters were reported to be using the technology to squeeze more advertisements

  • Done that (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mericet ( 550554 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:08AM (#7113127) Homepage
    At my university (The Technion - Israel's institute of technology) many lectures were taped, the tape library had players where you could adjust the speed. I had to do that to escape the boredom of many lectures, eventually using 2x by default.

  • Quick! (Score:3, Funny)

    by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:30AM (#7113289) Journal
    Quick! Patent that idea now!
  • People have been doing that with audio tape for decades. There are audio players which even transpose the pitch back down to nearly normal. There's a fair body of research on time-compressed audio comprehension, and it should be applicable to video since maybe 90% of a video lecture is just a talking head with no real visual content anyway.

    Unfortunately for me, my learning style would work much better with a book than with either electronic medium. :-/
  • I can watch the 20th anniversary edition of TRON at 2X (admittedly with CC on) and it flows pretty well and is easy to follow. The sound still is audible at 2x, but not any speed above that.
    I tried the same thing with Star Trek II - The wrath of Kahn, but that seems to be a little bit harder to understand... It might be all the dialog in that movie. I would be interesting to see which movies play well at 2X. Someone should set up a ranking system on a website....
  • What, you don't remember who John Moschitta [wasteoftechnology.com] is?

  • Use mplayer (Score:3, Informative)

    by asr_br ( 143523 ) <[gro.rameda] [ta] [rameda]> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:37AM (#7113345) Homepage
    Our favorite media player once again cames to help:

    mplayer -speed <value>

    The best thing is that you can use float values such as "0.8", "1.5" and so on.

    --
    The world would be better if Bill Gates decided to finish his course at the university.
  • He's like a machine, been at it for hours.

    Are you okay?

    I know kung fu!

  • I haven't tried this approach, so I can't really criticise it, but...

    I find that whenever I'm really attentive in class and am learning, that I'm thinking just a little bit ahead of the presentation. What's coming next? Where is he/she going? What about if...oh, yeah. When I'm able to participate in a lecture in this way, I am truly learning the subject. When I'm not, most often I feel lost and frequently tune-out the lecture. (For me this particularly pertains to science and math courses, but other
  • ... "back in the day," my students routinely audio-taped my lectures. A fair number would listen to it on high speed & other than having to put up with me sounding like Alvin & the Chipmunks, they liked being able to listen to a lecture a couple of times on the drive home or whatever.

    Of course, I live in Mississippi, so I can understand how speeding up some of our native lecturers might actually make them sound like someone from the Northeast instead of a chipmunk ;-)

  • I recall reading many years ago of an experiment done with a tape player with a settable speed adjustment. The research indicated that the majority of people would set the tape speed to something faster than real time play back. I don't remember very many details at all, if this was as far back as I recall it'd have been an segment in Discover, OMNI or Scientific American.
  • I feel like I should have thought of this in college. I'm great at focusing, and can learn alot from lectures - for about 20 minutes that is. Lectures tended to be 50 or 65 minutes long, though - this would have been perfect.
  • From the article:

    In advertising, where costly post-production of commercials can take longer than the production itself, the potential savings are vast. "To edit a 30-second spot can take half a day," said Ms. Gaines of Prime Image, but takes just minutes with the company's technology.

    I fail to see how this could be true. The commercial is still the same length, it's just played back faster (ie, a 30second spot is played back in 20 seconds). That means there's still 30 seconds of footage to edit.

    Sure,

  • Remember dictaphones? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dmorin ( 25609 ) <dmorin@@@gmail...com> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @11:46AM (#7114070) Homepage Journal
    Haven't secretaries been using this for years? I remember seeing one device that had a pedal on the floor attached to the audio playback. The transcriptionist could control the speed of playback to match the rate at which she was typing. Not only does this work in both directions easily (try THAT with fastforward / rewind) but is more interactive because she can use her foot and thus not even stop what she's doing to control her speed.

  • You're not alone (Score:3, Informative)

    by cookd ( 72933 ) <.moc.onuj. .ta. .koocsalguod.> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @01:00PM (#7114809) Journal
    I work with some professors at BYU who produce similar courses-on-CD. These CDs are bundled with a 4-month (one semester) license to Enounce 2xAV for exactly the reasons you mention. Our system has explicit support for allowing the student to adjust the rate of delivery.

    Of course (obligatory Slashdot dissing of Microsoft), if Microsoft had enabled the speed control feature of Media Player (pretty cool feature) on all operating systems that support Media Player 9 instead of just XP and beyond, we wouldn't even have to bundle Enounce. I suppose this is one case where Microsoft is helping smaller businesses!

  • Get in line, buddy.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MeddlesomeKids ( 537431 ) * <(moc.balaidem) (ta) (snikrepc)> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @02:49PM (#7116077)
    When my youngest brother was about 4 years old, every day he'd wake up and watch at least one of the Star Wars trilogy in the morning which one of my other brothers had gotten on VHS.

    Soon, he had them each memorized, and would speak the lines along with the characters and jump around like he was in the movie.

    But this took a lot of time, and being a busy four year old, he, like our OP, started watching them in play-fastforward. And he'd jump around yelling out the every line in the movie at double speed.

    To entertain guests me or my brothers would feed him a couple lines from those movies and he'd take off and start performing - double speed theater.

    He rarely missed a line, and even had much of the Jabba-the-Hut sounds memorized correctly.

    He's a teenager now, and when I last asked him about this, he says he's forgotten and can't remember any of the lines.
    But I'm pretty sure he's lying...

  • Hearing faster, seeing more and smelling better (Score:3)

    by deathcloset ( 626704 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @04:50PM (#7117532) Journal
    When I was studying for my MCSE I took the compiled html version of my textbook, copied and pasted it into a speech synthesis program (text aloud mp3 [nextup.com]) and played it back at 200 words per minute.
    It was remarkable how easy it was to digest the knowledge, even at that speed. I think that perhaps the synthetic voices allowed a bit more clairity than an actual human voice; as the synthisized voice does not use contractions like we're and you're (fairly Commander Data-esqe).
    To augment the process I would read-along in my book with the voice and discovered that by stimulating more of my sensory input (and in my theory getting more regions of my brain active [psycheducation.org]) I was able to plow through my books like a troop landing craft through a river.
    perhaps this method of study, using both my eyes and ears (ocipital and temporal lobe) was so succesful because humans are supposed to learn, not just via one medium, but through as many sensory inputs as possible.
    I remember hearing that smell can trigger very strong memories [macalester.edu] (makes sense since food is first smelt before consumed to verify it is healthy and unlikely to kill), perhaps by using scents along with lessons, learning can be further augmented.

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