MIT uses Macs to learn how children gain speech skills

Not only are they assured to get his first few steps on tape, but they're also studying early development and how young children gain the skills to interact with other human beings. In order to do this, they're dealing with huge amounts of audio and video data -- about 250TB. And they're also building an analysis application on the platform called TotalRecall to scan through all the audio and video and pick out interesting parts and patterns (creating the kind of image seen above -- apparently that means something to them).
Of course, there is one thing they do that Apple can't -- when the time came to figure out how to transfer 200GB a day from the home environment to work, they eventually settled on a "sneakernet" approach, packing up the digital tapes in a case and carrying them to work. Here's hoping Apple will announce their own proprietary version of iSneakernet at the next WWDC (with a stylish design and a reasonable pricetag, of course).
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Apple's Science page has a profile up for the folks over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- apparently two MITers, Deb Roy...
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Ah good old sneakernet. Often the quickest way to get ungodly amounts of data across town.
@Quickboy
I think you missed the point. They aren't using the computers to teach children speech skills. They are using the Apples to study HOW speech is learned.
So? Many institutions use PC's to teach children speech skills. In the end, they're still all computers.
I wonder where the unofficial MS blog is on Weblogs.
I was wondering what RuPaul has been up to these days...
May 02 2008 at 7:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThis is old news. It's sad how few stories TUAW actually has that are new or not referring to Engadget.
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