Social Network Stats are Wrong Wrong

I caught this InfoGraphic on "how the world uses social networks" off a tweet. Once you read it you notice that it excludes India and China the two worlds largest populations. Those two countries are also Internet giants; especially China. I don't know about India but living in Kunming, China I know and see how people use, the famous QQ (here's the link to the International version). This author: Tony D’Altorio (Investment U Research) does a nice economic analysis on "How Does Renren Compare to Facebook?". One would say that the Chinese versions are not international and if it was would foreigners use it. Tencent does offer QQ in six languages for now. This article: "Will Foreigners Use a Chinese Microblog if the Version is in English?" tells a good story how certain industries can capitalize. I have a QQ account but the problem is that Tencent does not offer a desktop QQ Linux version of the international package yet. Moreover, for me to Weibo (microblog like twitter) I need a Chinese ID number; i.e. for citizens only! These requirements are not barriers to enter Twitter or Facebook.

A nifty way to test Speech-To-Text uncertainties with ITU's Difficulty Percentage measure

In these experiments the LIRNEasia researchers used Freedom Fone Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. First they conducted a survey with known values for the subjects to pick from. These answers were submitted through the IVR. Since the values were known to the human quality testers, this part of the experiment was associated with a speech-to-text trained system (or a speaker-dependent system or voice recognition type system). The second part involved the subjects submitting data that was not based on preset values. They were free to submit answers to questions as they pleased. This was regarded as an untrained or speaker-independent system.

Emulating Speech-To-Text Reliability with ITU Difficulty Scores

"The results show that with a speaker dependent system 95% of the information could be clearly deciphered opposed a speaker independent system that was only 70% clear (blue areas in Figure 1 and Figure 2). It is not surprising, the outcomes are intuitive. In our study reliability had two components, one was efficiency and the other was voice quality. The voice quality also took in to consideration the Mean Opinion Score and the Comparison Categorical Rating. The researchers wish to acknowledge that their may be disagreements in the sample sizes and number of Evaluators. These results are not ideal for drawing a ‘for-all” kind of conclusion. However, at this realize stage of the research it provides a quick and easy method to draw initial conclusions." ...Click to read full article

Interactive voice for a volunteer organization to manage disasters

Crowd sourcing emergency information with Interactive Voice:

"CERT members call one of the four telephone numbers to access Freedom Fone; then press the “reporting” menu item number on their phone keypad to record a “field observation report”. That report is received and stored in the Freedom Fone inbox as an audio file (MP3) at Sarvodaya’s Hazard Information Hub (essentially the data center belonging to the Sarvodaya Community Disaster Management Center). Trained HIH Operators (HIHO) listen to those local language spoken incident field observations, then transform them in to English language text to feed in to the Sahana Eden, Emergency Data Exchange Language Situational Reporting (SITREP) application."
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