[Wikipedia-l] Dictation

Sat Aug 30 00:54:12 UTC 2003

It is dangerous to ask questions; you may get answers you didn’t expect.
One answer may lead to several questions.
.Why do I dictate? Because dictation is much faster than typing when it
works right. By saying only two words I can print out a letterhead with
my name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address centered at the
top of the page. I can print my handwritten signature with two words. It
can print boilerplate, one or more paragraphs that you use repeatedly.
I started using dictation programs at least five years ago. I use it with
a computer that I built to write magazine articles: a Pentium 4. 2 GHz,
528KB Rambus memory, 8 Gigabit Hard Dr., two floppy disk drives, two
rewritable CD drives, and a 21 in. monitor. It has a card reader to read
the memory cards from my digital cameras. I use a trackball. 
I store my data on floppies or CDs, not on the hard drive. One CD will
hold as much as 450 floppies. I have hundreds of floppies with data.
I e-mail the articles to the editor and never print them on paper. 
I am lazy and will do a lot of work to keep from doing a little. I think
and move so slowly. Perhaps this is because I am anemic. The red blood
cells do not carry enough oxygen , because some of them are defective.
The red blood cells are made in the bone marrow and need iron, folic
acid, and vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin). Folic acid comes from green
vegetables and can be destroyed by cooking. 
Traces of cobalt are found in the soil in most parts of the world. When
ruminant animals such as cattle and sheep eat grass they swallow it into
their first stomach where fermentation takes place that produces large
quantities of methane gas and combines traces of cobalt to form vitamin
B-12. After they regurgitate it and "chew their cud" they swallow it to
the second stomach and it is digested it goes into the meat
People have glands in the stomach that produce an intrinsic factor which
combines with vitamin B12 and when it reaches the ileum of the small
intestine it can be absorbed into the bloodstream and go to the bone
marrow to help produce red blood cells.
When the glands in the stomach fail to make the intrinsic factor it may
be a long time before the vitamin B-12 deficiency is detected because the
liver can store a five-year supply of B-12. The treatment is to inject 1
ml of vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin) into the muscle perhaps at weekly
intervals for a few times and then once a month for life.
I don’t have arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome but I do have pernicious
anemia. My doctor ordered blood tests but two nurses at his office
couldn’t get the blood sample so I had to go to the hospital where two
nurses were doing it on a production line with patients waiting. The
nurse couldn’t get it with a butterfly so used a syringe. She had been
doing it for 20 years.
There is a lot to learn to use a dictation program. You need to learn the
program and the vocabulary and can teach it words that it does not have.
You can train different words. The early dictation programs worked on one
word at a time, but that was no good. The present-day programs work on
phrases or groups of words. When it makes a mistake you can choose from
several phrases or type the correction in from the keyboard.
I have tried to shorten this by omitting many details so it may leave you
with many questions.
Merritt L. Perkins