TOMORROW - OURS IF WE WANT IT

              PAN PACIFIC HOTEL - SATURDAY APRIL 23RD 1994


                               FINAL DRAFT



This evening we are privileged to have as our guest speaker a man with
international experience in many areas of many aspects of litigation
support technology, especially the technological advances of shorthand
reporting and its future directions.  While his name may not be well
known to you, I can guarantee that the results of his work are being
used in your workplace everyday.  He has just returned to Australia
after several years working in the United States for Joe Karlovitz,
acknowledged as the father of advances in the computerisation of
shorthand reporting.  I am sure you are going to hear some incredible
things tonight, so please welcome Mr David Scott.Good evening, Ladies & Gentlemen.  

Thank you for inviting me here
tonight to address the 1994 International Conference of the Australian
Shorthand Reporters Association and the Short Hand Reporters Association
of Australia.  You'd have to agree that it's a somewhat lengthy title
for a shorthand conference.

Before I get started, I am curious...Is this session being captioned? 
No?  I am surprised that you aren't taking the opportunity to provide
demonstrations of some of the products that are available and being
discussed at this forum.   But be that as it may, I hope you all take
the opportunity to engage in a serious investigation of some of the new
products and ideas being presented this weekend.

Shorthand reporting has seen some incredible advances in recent years as
computing power increases and prices drop.  We often take all this for
granted, especially if someone else is footing the bill for the latest
equipment.  So, I want to begin by posing a question that we are often
reluctant to ask.

Where to from here?

This should be the fundamental question asked by shorthand reporters and
others in our industry.  We should be asking it of ourselves, our
colleagues, our superiors and our staff.  Where to from here?

You see, while most of us know where we have been and a few of us know
where we are right now, none of that is important if we have no vision
of the future for our industry.  It has been said that your past always
catches up with you, however, when dealing with technology, the real
fear should be that your past lingers with you, or more to the point,
you linger in your history.

I want to look at how you and I can avoid becoming future residents of a
technological Jurassic Park.  How we can avoid becoming dinosaurs in our
industry, objects of curiosity and the source of amusement behind our
backs.  

Where to from here?

But before we look at the future, it is important to look at our
origins, the path to our present situation.  Just as any industry must
use previous experience to climb higher on the evolutionary ladder, so,
we must take, what can be a painful look at our past.  By looking at the
past, we can move to the present and hence extrapolate to the future.

You may be wondering how I came by this absolutely riveting direction of
thinking.  Well, as ..........said, for the past two and a half years I
have been holed up in historic Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the United
States of America, trying to gaze into the crystal ball of Shorthand
reporting technology.  Tucked away in Pittsburgh on the campus of the
beautiful University of International Sciences is a veritable citadel of
knowledge run by Joe Karlovitz.  No doubt most of you will know of Uncle
Joey (as we called him).  He was the first person to use CAT and real
time in the Supreme Court of the United States and provided captioning
services for Presidential debates, the NBC today show, the Gulf War, The
Clarence Thomas hearings and the CBS This Morning show.  All this
experience, including over 30 years as a reporter has led him to be
regarded as a pioneer in the use of computers in complex situations and
trials.

Being an on old sentimentalist, Joe still enjoys starting each day
working on his original IBM XT with twin 360k floppy drives and a
monochrome screen.  Although he usually lasts about two minutes before
tearing out a little more of his hair and jumping over to his state of
the art '486 notebook.  But that's the kind of guy Joe Karlovitz is.  He
is constantly looking at his past to look into the future, thus staying
on the leading edge of technological breakthroughs that are relevant to
the industry.

In creating an international team to work with him, Uncle Joey selected
five of people from within the industry, each from a different country. 
I was representing Australia, there were also people from Britain,
Nigeria, China and Peru.  As you can imagine, language could have been a
problem, except that we had that common language, a thirst for
knowledge.  The question Joe Karlovitz posed for us was exactly the same
one I put to you.  Where to from here?

Like many of the fundamental questions in life, this one led, rather
than to an answer, to even more complex and demanding questions.  One
question that kept coming up for the team was "Why bother?".  As you can
imagine, it was not what Uncle Joey had in mind and from that point his
paternal attitude hardened somewhat and we had to call him Mr Karlovitz,
of Mr K. for short.

But we did, in fact, make some remarkable discoveries and predictions
about the future, many of which are already being seen to be accurate. 
My plan tonight is to outline some of these innovations and give you
some insight into the future of technology in relation to shorthand
reporting.

I must preface this whole discussion by telling you that I am going to
assume that all of you have sufficient understanding of the basic
concepts of computing so that I don't have to start right at the very
beginning.  I am not going to cover basic issues such as which is the
best method for inputting proceedings, how to ensure consistently high
levels of accuracy or how to get past the guard in Leisure Suit Larry.

If anyone asks me "where to from here", the answer I always give is
"Multimedia".  Since this is not such a basic issue, I will give some,
information to those unfamiliar with it.  Multimedia is, as the name
implies, essentially the combining of various forms of media so that 
information can be stored and then retrieved with all relevant items
directly related.  For example, I referred earlier to Jurassic Park.  I
am sure most of you know the basic idea, that of a theme park based on
dinosaurs cloned from prehistoric DNA.  If I was the person setting up a
real Jurassic Park, I would use multimedia in the information area to
pass on either essential or informative facts to people.  If a person
was interested in knowing more about a Tyrannosaurus Rex, by simply
touching the appropriate section of the screen, the data that is in the
system would be called to memory and the appropriate parts displayed. 
In this case, it might be a picture of the animal, some narrative
dialogue, and a recording of its mating call.  Then, by touching various
other areas on the screen more detailed and related information could be
retrieved about the animals' diet, climactic conditions and most
importantly, how to behave if a T-Rex is looking at you when it makes
its mating call.  All this information would ideally be stored within
the unit itself or on a very fast live link to a cental data storage
server.  I am sure you are already having an idea of how this can be
incorporated into real-time.

Until recently, the problems associated with multimedia have ensured
that it has had a slow acceptance.  Initially, speed was a major factor. 
Early examples of multimedia made dinosaurs look like really modern
creatures.  It would seem to take forever to retrieve the information
and even then the ideal situation was if you were viewing something no
more complicated than a still picture with some written text.  The
effect of any attempts at animation, real-time viewing, or instantaneous
translation into another language would be slow and jerky as the next
piece of data was retrieved and processed in turn by the comparatively
slow processors of recent times.  It all worked really well on a fast
mainframe, but the effects when using multimedia on a node of a network
was frustrating and not one encouraging approval.

But there is a solution on the horizon that will rectify a problem where
most of our offices look something like this: A computer on or under our
desk, linked by cables to the network.  Somewhere there will be a laser
printer, a modem, a CD-ROM drive and a mouse.  If you are already into
multimedia, you will have a sound card and some speakers to amplify the
digitised sounds.  You can't forget the fax or the answering machine,
and of course, there is the charger for the mobile phone also taking up
some space.  As you can imagine, it is starting to get a little
difficult to fit a steno machine into the room with all this electronic
gadgetry in it as well.  To take the analogy a bit further, this is what
the internals of computers have been like until recently.  You needed
the CPU over here, the drive card over there, some extra memory for the
video packed in, don't forget the genlock card and the LAN CARD, of
course there is also the interface to allow you to plug in your writing
device, no matter which one you use.  The box was getting bigger and
bigger or more and more crowded and inevitably hotter and hotter.  Now
imagine your office with all that electronic gadgetry incorporated into
one electronic unit that was smaller than any of the individual
components.

This is basically what has happened and continues to happen with
computer chips.  Engineers have been making components smaller and
smaller and packing them tighter and tighter so that in the new
generation of Intel chips that Mr Karlovitz was advising on, the 80586,
known as the Pentium, due out later this year can easily be described as
a complete multimedia computer on a chip.  All that will be needed is
the electronics to connect with the outside world, such as a writing
device that is CAT compatible, a video, a mouse, keyboard, storage
device and speakers and away it goes.  In fact, I am reminded of the
joke about the computer miniaturisation company that was so successful,
they moved to smaller premises.  It may have been a joke once, but who
can tell any more?

Speaking of miniaturisation, did you see recently that there is now a
mobile phone available in the United States that will actually fit on
your wrist like a watch.  Who knows where it will all end!  Actually, I
must tell you a story ging around the courtrooms of Pennsylvania. It
seems a lawyer was indulging in a little, shall we call it, "horizontal
folk dancing" at his client's house one afternoon.  They heard her
husband's car pull unexpectedly into the driveway.  Since they were both 
naked it would have looked a bit silly to act as though they were
discussing a case, especially divorce.  So, just like in the movies, he
grabbed his clothes and beat a rapid retreat into the cupboard.  It
seemed as though he was going to get away with it, until, you guessed
it, his mobile phone started ringing.  A lawyer to the end, when the
door was flung open, he said, "It's for you".  It didn't work.

I'm sorry, I digress.  Where is all this multimedia going to lead in
relation to shorthand reporting?  The next buzz word you will be using,
the next piece of jargon to start slipping into your conversations as
though you know what it means, and I don't mind if you write it down, is
"imagising".  No doubt some of you are already using this word in an
attempt to appear intelligent and bamboozle others, because we all know
how important it is to constantly remain in touch with the latest jargon
so that we appear to know what is happening at the leading edge.  

Imagising can loosely be described as converting human communications
from the physical world to the magnetic bit.  Whether this information
is a spoken, written or whatever, it can be safely and permanently
stored and retrieved in real time as often as is necessary using this
method.

Imagine, if you will, how useful it will be to have digital storage of
courtroom proceedings, hand-written letters, interviews, memos, photos
of evidence, extracts from previous judgements, all available on request
and able to be integrated smoothly into the current transcript.  Of
course, retrieving the information is not as easy as just pushing a
button.  It takes considerable training for an operator to be able to
manipulate a data base effectively and thus draw out the appropriate
data without missing any currently developing crucial information and at
the same time, keeping the search narrow enough so that the data
retrieved is instantly useful and not bloated by misleading and
irrelevant facts.

By using a variegated and analytical methodology in actualising an
enhanced logic-based intelligence retrieval procedure, based on
inherently fundamental and precise parameters relating to the overall
context underlying the predisposition of conversely occurring paradigms. 
Verbal resolution statistics offer consistent encouragement thwarting
unsuspected technical embargoes concomitant with underlying algorithms
presented ostensibly as factual elements of the construction of the
search parameters.  In other words, if all else fails, read the
instructions.

But before the data even exists, it must be created by entering the
proceedings or in some way inputting the documents.  In this era of
real-time, total access and the American Disabilities Act all
interlinked with the latest advances in audio inputting, it is becoming
more and more possible to automate the input process as long as the
material has been suitably prepared prior to the encoding sequence. 
Allow me to elaborate on some of the latest technologies that are
emerging from laboratories such as Bell, IBM, and Xerox.  Since Xerox
came up with the concept of a simple user interface as seen on the Apple
Macintosh, designers of other operating systems such as DOS, Unix or
Xenix have tried their hardest to completely confuse the average user by
making their systems more and more complex and as far removed from
natural English as possible.  To complicate matters more, try to take a
transcript from one operating system and copy it to a computer using
another and you are guaranteed to have a nervous breakdown quicker than
you can say "The 1994 International Conference of the Australian
Shorthand Reporters Association and the Short Hand Reporters Association
of Australia."

But now I am delighted to report on a new product that will no doubt
revolutionise the method in which transcripts are written.  In an
incredible breakthrough, a senior research psychologist at the
University of International Sciences has succeeded in mapping key areas
of our thought processes and then developing a method of converting the
impulses into electrical energy that can be interpreted by an innovative
parallel processing writing device control unit and used to input data. 
In short, this device can read your thoughts and then convert them into
a form a computer can understand.  That's right, you just think what you
want to the computer to do or write and it will be done automatically. 
Now I must emphasise that the process is still in its infancy and most
likely won't be available commercially for two or three years, but I
have seen it work.  I have actually operated it and it is the new wave
of computing that will take computer technology beyond virtual reality.

I was hoping to be able to demonstrate the system this evening, however
the equipment was deemed so sensitive in the security sense, that I was
prevented from taking a unit out of the United States until it has been
declassified by the Pentagon, but I can talk about it.

Obviously, there are going to be some initial drawbacks to anything that
probes so deeply into the human psyche and it is this area that is being
researched at the moment.  What we discovered is that if you are going
to be allowing the electronics to interpret your thoughts, you are also
going to have to be cautious of what you are thinking about.   

Since the system involves your mind being read by a machine, it is vital
that your thoughts be clear, focussed and most importantly, above the
waist.  One needs to be in complete control of one's mind for this to
work and if you buy the system, the training will include a complete
brainwashing session.  This course, designed and run by members of the
KGB is guaranteed to focus your mind in one direction and keep it there. 
The down side is, you have to enjoy wearing the colour red and have an
urge to stand in long lines for bread.  I can also guarantee that none
will be there to transcribe your screams.

However, despite not having the hardware at my disposal, I can give a
demonstration of how malleable the human mind is and how it can work.  I
plan to show you just how one individual can control the minds of many
in a simple exercise that will have you thinking more deeply about the
possibilities of mental manipulation.   First I must get my own mind
under control....Ohhhhhhmmmmmm  OK, I am now in a deep trance.  I am
completely focussed on my task, and I am ready to begin the test.  I ask
you all to relax and open your minds to me.
For this to work I need your cooperation and your silence.  Please do
not discuss this with your neighbour.  I want you all to think of a
number from two to nine, inclusive.  Those are the numbers 2, 3, 4, 5,
6, 7, 8 or 9.  Now, I want you to multiply that number by nine.  You can
use a calculator if you need to.  You should all have a two digit number
in your mind.  I want you to take that number and add the two digits
together.  We'll wait for the people with calculators.  Now subtract 5
from your answer.  You should have a number in your mind.  OK I WANT YOU
TO ASSociate that number with the corresponding letter of the alphabet. 
If your number is one, remember "A", number 2 "B" number 3 "C" number 4
"D" number 5 "E" number 6 "F" number 7  "G" number 8 "H" number 9 "I". 
Now, you have a letter, I want you all to think of a country starting
with that letter.  No sir, you can't use your calculator for this part. 
Now, take the second letter of the country and think of a big animal
starting with that letter.  So, how many of you are thinking of
Elephants in Denmark!!!  The power of the human mind!!!

The point I am trying to make is that the power of the human mind is
extraordinary and we are about to tap into it and link it with computers
so that the user interface will be mentally inspired.  Imagine the
possibilities.  By linking mental reality with virtual reality, we can
achieve a virtually mental realistic process that achieves all the
necessary requirements of data input.  You will be able to simply read a
portion of text and have it be entered into a computer.  You can think
"The Judge then farted" and it will instantly be included in the
transcript.  Hopefully multimedia will never include odours as well. 
The wild card in all this of course, as mentioned earlier, is
controlling the mind.  I would like to demonstrate further how we can
control the mind.

MIND READING TRICK PART ONE

I think I'll come back to that...

Typical.  I've had a rotten day.... GO INTO COMEDY ACT