The vanishing art of shorthand in India

The Greeks and Romans are known to have practised it and, until not so long ago, it was a much sought after skill in India too. But stenography or shorthand writing has all but disappeared now.

Under the impact of IT, shorthand has become a vanishing art in India. Ironically, this has happened at a time when there is a clamour for skilled stenographers from the corporate world.

'This demand can never be met as few people take to learning shorthand, since it is no more a lucrative job,' said S.V. Ramaswamy, president of the Chennai-based Stenographers' Guild of India (SGI).

Ramaswamy, who was in the city to give a lecture to the Ahmedabad Management Association's (AMA) secretarial training programme, said alternatives to shorthand like voice recognition software have not been much of a success.

As a result, at a time when corporate executives at home and abroad are looking for efficient shorthand writers, they are not available.

Ramaswamy said R&D was going on in Canada to develop a shorthand-writing machine. This machine has a capacity to take 40 words per minute, which is not at all adequate, he said.

Efforts are under way to double this speed, yet even at the increased speed it will be nowhere near the speed that human beings have achieved in the art.

But for the virtuosity in stenographic skills, great speeches, debates and landmark judgments would not have been available for posterity, Ramaswamy said.

A stenographer himself, Ramaswamy who rose to become chief manager in a nationalised bank said shorthand writing or more succinctly rapid writing existed in the Greek and Roman era that employed abbreviations. The Greeks particularly used this technique to record Socrates' speeches.

But in modern times, Sir Isaac Pitman developed the most widely used system of shorthand, known as Pitman Shorthand. With his system, speeds of about 300 words a minute are attainable.

VERBATIM REPORTING EXTINCT

Ramaswamy said because of the waning importance of stenography, the concept of verbatim reporting by the media has almost become extinct.

Attempts are now being made to revive shorthand and work is on in full swing to develop a good alternative to shorthand in the US, Canada, Germany, Britain and China. Stenography has been made compulsory in the media courses of the European College of Journalism and the Asian College of Journalism.

Ramaswamy said the mushrooming of call centres and opening up of BPOs that give handsome salaries have weaned away youths to imbibing proficiency in verbal communications.

Further, youths are now focusing on higher education, which in a way is good, he said. SGI has therefore diversified into conducting secretarial training, personality development and improvement of communication skills.

When at its zenith, the guild, established in 1940, was the most important source for high-speed stenographers.

'We have supplied many of them for the Indian parliament, judiciary and the police forces,' Ramaswamy added.

Scholars Use Art to Study Climate Change

The vivid sunsets painted by J.M.W. Turner are revered for their use of color and light and for their influence on the Impressionists. But could they also help global warming experts track climate change?

A group of scientists has studied the colors in more than 500 paintings of sunsets, including many of Turner's 19th-century watercolors and oils, in hopes of gaining insights into the cooling effects caused by major volcanic eruptions.

By better understanding past changes in climate, they hope to improve computer models for future climate change.

Christos Zerefos, who led the research at the National Observatory in Athens, said he believed it was the first scientific study of art for clues to climate variations.

The scientists studied works painted around the times of major volcanic eruptions, such as the cataclysmic explosion of Mount Krakatoa in 1883, to measure how much pollution was pumped into the skies. Contemporary accounts describe brilliant sunsets after Krakatoa erupted.

``The initial idea arose from the fact that we saw an increased reddening of colors in sunsets which followed large volcanic eruptions, particularly Krakatoa,'' Zerefos said.

By measuring the amount of red and green in the paintings, the scientists aimed to calculate the amount of dust in the atmosphere. The greater the pollution, the redder the sunset, Zerefos said.

But Kevin Trenberth, who heads the Climate Analysis Research Center at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and who is not connected to the study, warned that artists and scientists do not necessarily see sunsets the same way.

``Painters are not scientists trying to do an accurate picture of nature,'' he said. ``They are artists trying to make something look good or dramatic.''

And James Hamilton, the curator at the University of Birmingham, who has written books on Turner, said that while Turner claimed to paint what he saw, it's dangerous to put too much weight on an artist's interpretation.

``They (artists) are not making absolutely clear and accurate records of what they can see,'' he said. ``It's very hard to tell when artists are being absolutely accurate and when they're using vivid sky as a platform to more vivid painting.''

John Thorne, a professor of atmospheric meteorology at the University of Birmingham, who is not connected to the study, said that while there can be a worry about painters taking artistic license, the study deals with that by using a cross section of artists.

``Some artists are very true to nature, some are very true to making up their own story,'' Thorne said. ``But they've used a huge cross-section. So rather than a specific artist, they're more showing an average across all artists.''

Hamilton agreed, noting: ``The more artists and more known dates, the better.''

The group examined 554 paintings from 181 artists and categorized 54 of them as ``volcanic sunset paintings'' because they were painted within three years of major volcanic eruptions.

The volcanic group included paintings by 19 artists, including Turner, Claude Lorrain, John Singleton Copley, Friedrich Caspar David, Breton Jules, Edgar Degas, Alexander Cozens and Gustav Klimt.

The scientists measured the color ratio in all the paintings and found that those with the highest red to green ratio were in the volcanic group.

In the study, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Zerefos and his researchers wrote that artists ``appear to have simulated the colors of nature with a remarkable precise coloration.''

That precision could make the paintings useful in tracking environmental pollution over the past few centuries, it said.

``They all may have different ways of painting, but the colors they used were representing the real environment,'' Zerefos said.

Now, computers can appreciate art too!

Washington, November 6: Researchers at the University of Haifa have developed a mathematical program that can enables computers to detect whether or not a piece of art has been created by a particular famous artist, as claimed by its seller.

"The field of computer vision is very complex and multifaceted. We hope that our new development is another step forward in this field," said Prof. Daniel Keren who developed the program.

With the help of their program, the researchers "taught" the computer to identify the artworks of different artists. The program enabled them to do so by turning the drawings of nature, people, flowers and other scenes to a series of mathematical symbols, sines and cosines.

Thereafter, the program enables the computer to master the individual style of each artist, and to identify the artist by looking at other works that it had never been exposed to earlier.

Professor Keren says that the program can identify the works of a specific artist even if they depict different scenes.

"As soon as the computer learns to recognize the clock drawings of Dali, it will recognize his other paintings, even without clocks. As soon as the computer learns to recognize the swirls of Van Gogh, it will recognize them in pictures it has never seen before," he said.

According to him, this new development is a step forward in the field of computer vision.

He, however, admits that the field of computer vision is still inferior to human vision.

"Human vision has undergone evolution of millions of years and our field is only 30 years old. At this stage computers still have difficulty doing things that are very simple for people, for example, recognizing a picture of a human face. A computer has difficulty identifying when a picture is of a human face or how many faces are in a picture. However, computers are very good at simulating and sketching 3 dimensional images like the arteries in the brain or a road network," said Professor Keren.

The researchers say that the new program may be helpful to someone who appreciates art, but not to a real expert in the field.