Do British Courts still require a Stenographer using stenographic/stenomask machine?

Peter Brooks said:

Can we increase text transmission speeds through the internet using coding similar to that used by a stenographer?

Did you ever come across "quinkey" keyboards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter

   - Andy.

Hello Andy:

No I have never heard about the Microwriter.

I have been waiting to expand my original thread into two directions.

One relates to the introduction of technology into the office - as we moved from big typing pools with the top bosses demanding personal secretaries with shorthand/steno capabilities, up to today, where most people create their own letters and reports, using personal PC's.

Personal secretaries have just become gate keepers outside the big boss's door.

The other direction relates to the creation of applications for 6G .

The IEEE recently published in their "Proceeding" magazine, research work on improved encoding/decoding of data sent through a wireless channel 

At the present time the internet is used as a straight funnel for the information (outside of creating packets).

These encoding/decoding schemes would then increase throughput.

Thus my original question was an example of old technology being used to capture data at higher and higher rates.

Peter Brooks 

Palm Bay  

My experience of the first item is that personal secretaries are now a rare thing. We have a few administration assistants, but those are a shared resource for multiple people rather then being dedicated and they sit in the same area as the rest of us (as do most the senior managers).

We are probably a special case as we don't have any personal offices. Only meeting rooms. I would imagine there are still other organisations where the directors and CEO have personal offices with an assistant nearby (but likely shared).

On the second item, you may want to research something called "HTTP compression". Most websites (including the IETs) support compression of the data (usually gzip). I would expect there is still development ongoing in this field to find better and more efficient compression algorithms.

The current algorithms do not provide any real saving for content that is already compressed. So it is really only the text that is being compressed. The question here is, would stenography be able to make the transmission of digitised speech more efficient? I suspect not  due to the method of digitisation.

the most efficient way of encoding speech is the AMR/ambiwave type  codec,that breaks the signal down into near vocal elements - at the other end in effect a speech synthesizer puts it back together - all that is sent is the co-ordinates of that  vowel type for example, in a sense you are not really hearing the person, more of a synthesis of them. This is what happens on a GSM or 3g voice call - 4g is more complex as even voice goes as IP .

There are codecs of greater or lesser intelligibility  for  more or less bandwidth, and in military use, ones optimized for male or female speech.


The penalty is that for any other sort of sound such as music, its pretty rubbish.

Mike.

In the late 1960's the BBC developed a variation of the stenographers keyboard for typing directly on-screen as a means of real-time subtitling.  I worked quite well but as far as subtitling went it was ahead of it's time, live subtitles had a relatively low priority then.

Hello Mark:

The first UK factory I worked in employed about 3,000 people and had an upper management section which was called "Mahogany Row" for a good reason- it was "off limits" to just about everybody.

As one progressed up the company ladder, at one point you got a key to the "executive" Restroom.

Have you ever seen the Rosetta Stone? To me the interesting thing was the space taken up by the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (picture) was about the same as ancient Greek.

I had a learning experience when i visited Prague a few years back and I tried to use the Hotel Computer to send a message back to the US. The Hotel staff quickly told me it would not work unless I converted the Keyboard to English.

Previous whenever I took company related trips from the US to Asia (like Korea) I took my work PC computer with me and had no problems .

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

Things have changed quite a bit.

The first company I worked for was mostly cubicles with managers getting a larger area to themselves. If you were lucky you would get a VT320 terminal on your desk. if you were really lucky you might get a VT420. We had some PCs, but those were all in shared areas.

I've no recollection on where the senior management and directors were and don't recall ever going there. So it was quite possibly in an off-limits zone. I recall the directors had their own canteen which we were not allowed in.

The companies I worked for after that had office environments that were more open plan. The directors and senior managers had offices around the outside of those open plan areas. Managers were penned with the rest of us.

I recall working for one senior manager and he had been offered an office, but decided to sit with his engineers instead. He kept the office for any private discussions.

I also recall one senior manager who didn't have a office but was very loud on the telephone, so you could hear him from the other side of the office, about 50m away. Maybe that was a ploy to get a private office.

My current office is open plan, but would benefit being cubes as its very densely packed and very noisy. But there is no room for the directors to hide in individual offices. They have to sit with the rest of us.

Technically senior management sits on the top floor, but there is absolutely nothing to stop me booking a desk on that floor if I wished. So no "mahogany row".

"Mahogany rows" often come from the misconception that directors are important. In general, they are not more important, they just have more responsibility. The exception is when the director is also the owner.

But for many companies I've worked for, there have been certain engineering specialists that would be more difficult to replace then some of our directors and would have had more of an impact if they left.

Progressing up the ladder seems to get you more responsibility, more stress, more hours and the need to deal with office politics. Yes, you get paid more. But there are no other real perks.

Hello Mark:

Another item was that we (men) all had to wear ties. However as I had to frequently work around rotating machinery  i was advised to wear "clip on" versions for safety reasons.

At another sub plant of the same UK company all engineers had to wear white coats- like doctors, when out in the factory 

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

From my perspective, fortunately the need to wear ties disappeared in the early 2010's.

Wearing a tie when visiting the client still very much required.

The other daily event in the same UK factory was the playing of military type music by a brass band over the intercom system for about a half an hour once in the morning and once in the afternoon during "slump" times (say 10.00 am and 2.00 pm) called "Music while you work"  

The other daily event in the same UK factory was the playing of military type music by a brass band over the intercom system for about a half an hour once in the morning and once in the afternoon during "slump" times (say 10.00 am and 2.00 pm) called "Music while you work"