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Aug
Nature Clinical Practice: Audio Articles
Here’s a really good idea.
Nature Clinical Practice is testing out the offering of unabridged (”full-text”) articles in .mp3 audio format.
Since the embeddable audio player Nature provided doesn’t work properly for me (perhaps it doesn’t get along with WordPress?), I’ve embedded an audio article below:
Editorial
Lau CS et al. (2007) Rheumatology in the Asia Pacific region—opportunities and challenges. Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology 3: 119
This might be a nice way to catch up on clinical “reading” while driving, exercising, or cooking.
Says Nature’s Helen Jaques:
We are keen to receive feedback and comments on the audio article demos, and have created an online survey so that users can tell us what they think of the concept and whether they think we should make audio articles a regular Nature Clinical Practice service across all eight journals.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=HmrVOCwMYt83SwzyKBzu6w_3d_3d
Respondents to the survey will be entered into a prize draw for a chance to win £100 of Amazon vouchers.
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I heard a very interesting comment from John Halamka a few weeks ago. He said that a new practice is emerging where audio-recordings of lectures are compressed and played back at quicker than normal speeds to maximize the delivery of content per minute to students in online courses. Of course, the playback can’t be too much quicker than the normal cadence of human speech or people won’t be able to understand. But apparently, it is quite easy to shave off 20 minutes from an hour lecture. Students apparently love it. I wonder if these audio articles might benefit as well.
August 1st, 2007 at 10:36 pmText-to-Speech Programs offer another alternative and you actually get to choose the text you want to listen to, i.e. you are not limited to the choice of the editor. I wrote more about it here:
http://casesblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/text-to-speech-programs-and-continuous.html
We just presented a small abstract at the last meeting of the International Association of Medical Science Educators:
August 1st, 2007 at 11:42 pmhttp://www.iamse.org/conf/conf11/abstracts/t5.htm
Hi Ves.
True, but I’d much rather hear the article as read by a literate person with a lovely English accent than the stilted, unnatural inflections still present in even the best TTS software.
August 1st, 2007 at 11:46 pm