聲音的質與量：音響世界之一隅，他們決心去探索、開發

聲音的質與量

這兒的量，指的是範圍，譬如說您聽過台灣的幾種蛙鳴？其實，台灣的青蛙十來種，聲聲不同。
聲音的質，有點難言說，我們用小提琴名家Itzhak Perlman 對於名琴Stradivarius的聲音之說法*：每個音都有如絲般的"火花".....

究竟人們多肯為"仙樂飄飄"的體驗付錢呢？這可以從音響的發燒友現象看得出來。已故近20年的張繼高先生在70年代，就將其雜誌取名為《音與音響》，很清楚看出人們要求音質的趨勢。

研究聲音或音響設備是一大產業，譬如說Boss公司是業界的佼佼者，設有研發部。日本的廠商也是此產業的先端者，譬如說，Sony公司多年前併購音響商，近日並將希望寄託於高音質的Walkman：A $1200 Walkman? Sony Pins Its Hopes on High-Quality Sound**。Sony的主管最後說，他們工程師玩的，只是音響世界之一隅，他們決心去探索、開發： what we do is only a tiny fraction of the vast audio universe,” he said. “And we are committed to explore it.”


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By
TAKASHI MOCHIZUKI

Sony introduced the Walkman NW-ZX2, a digital music player designed to deliver high-quality sound.

 

Takashi Mochizuki

In a world of lossy MP3 audio, Sony Corp.6758.TO +1.33% aims to bring back the tradition of enjoying high-quality sound, both at home and outside.

The electronics and entertainment giant has debuted 10 audio-related products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but the $1,200 Walkman portable music player is the most audacious.

The Walkman NW-ZX2, an updated version of the $700 NW-ZX1, comes in a black-and-gold aluminum body packed with circuitry designed with sound quality in mind, Sony says, though at some expense of size and weight.

Introduced in 1979, the Walkman brand once was Sony’s pride. However, it was overtaken by MP3 players such as Apple Inc.'sAAPL +0.11% iPod, which themselves were supplanted by smartphones.

Sony expects its home entertainment and sound category, the segment that includes the new Walkman models, to post an operating profit of $84 million (in today’s dollars) in the business year ending in March, much lower than the roughly $564 million profit projection for the device unit in charge of image sensors, and that analysts often praise. Analysts have asked the company to shrink, or drop entirely, the Walkman segment as well as the ailing TV business, since those categories no longer turn a large profit.

But Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai said the audio business is central to Sony, and the shrinking industry can be energized by high-resolution audio—a term loosely defined as better-than-CD quality. The device supports high-resolution audio files.

The Tokyo-based conglomerate demonstrated its commitment to the market by staging a large-scale advertising campaign with a slogan “Sony is high-resolution audio,” and it has expanded its Walkman line from the entry-level A series to the high-end ZX models. Its latest Bravia TVs and Xperia smartphones also play with better-than-CD fidelity.

“What I’d like to keep on saying is that Sony’s business will evolve around high-resolution audio,” Ichiro Takagi, Sony’s head of video and audio, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.

High-resolution audio isn’t new. However, earlier formats including DVD-Audio or Super-Audio CD, both of which were delivered on physical discs, failed to gain popularity. High-resolution audio in the form of digital files has a better chance of market success, analysts say, since they can be uploaded and downloaded over the Internet.

Reiji Asakura, author of the book “Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony PlayStation and the Visionaries Who Conquered the World of Video Games,” says hi-res files are especially appealing to younger generations that have grown up with MP3.

“One college student even had a headache because the sound was too rich,” he said. “Everyone wants to listen their favorite tunes with good quality. They just didn’t know what’s good.”

Analysts say Sony lost its position to Apple because the Walkman stuck with its own technology and formats while the iPod embraced widely-used third-party formats. Sony was also overprotective of its own music, causing inconvenience for users. Mr. Takagi said Sony is willing to share the business opportunity with rivals, just like it made a PlayStation network service available on TVs from Samsung Electronics Co.005930.SE 0.00%

A number of record companies and stores also support hi-res formats, including HDtracks, Linn Records and Music.jp. Panasonic Corp.6752.TO -0.14% restarted its legendary high-end Technics audio equipment brand. The key, however, is whether Apple’s iTunes and online streaming services join in, Mr. Asakura said.

In the U.S., however, the Walkman has little visibility as many retail stores devote little space, if any, to portable music players.

Mr. Takagi said Sony first would push wireless speakers to the U.S. market. Its latest such speakers can reproduce nearly hi-res quality using a wireless connection and full hi-res fidelity when wired. In re-introducing the Walkman, Mr. Takagi plans to leverage a relationship with Best Buy BBY -2.68% built through Sony Experience booths at 350 stores in the U.S.

“What I’m telling to our young engineers is that what we know and what we do is only a tiny fraction of the vast audio universe,” he said. “And we are committed to explore it.”
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*On the sound that comes from the Stradivarius: "I can actually see the sound in my head. I can actually see it. It-- it has silk-- God, it's so difficult to describe. But each sound is different so this one has that sparkle, there is a sparkle to the sound." (via 60 Minutes)

Benjamin Voyer on the psychology of teamwork

Quick Study
Benjamin Voyer on the psychology of teamwork

The Economist 

Jan 2nd 2015, 19:19 BY A.C.B.




BENJAMIN VOYER is a marketing and psychology professor at ESCP Europe Business School in London and the London School of Economics. He is an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society and writes widely on teamwork, particularly with respect to health care.

How would you describe the psychology of teamwork?

The study of teamwork began with the emergence of social psychology and an interest in how groups behave, particularly as against another group. This is the idea of having an “in group” that you’re a member of and that becomes part of your social identity, and then the “out group” against which you discriminate and define yourself. It has developed into its own field of organisational psychology.

We’ve looked at how groups form against each other and what happens to an individual voice in the team. We wonder how we make a team more efficient and also what the risks are of having teams. Teams don’t always do better than individuals, but there is a Helen Keller quote I particularly like: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” This summarises the trade-off. You can’t do a lot alone, but you are more in control. You can do less of your own thing in a bigger team, but you can achieve more.

But things can go wrong?

Yes. Power plays a big role. In health care there are two big priorities—quality and safety. When you look at incidents in teams they are usually caused by problems in the team and not with people’s clinical skills. You can attribute most of what goes wrong in medical units to dysfunction in the team.

For example?

A surgeon asks for a medical tool and the assistant misunderstands because he’s just been transferred from another team. You need to develop a team mind. Teams all need the three Cs: collaboration, co-ordination, communication. Collaboration is the shared perspective you need for a shared understanding of what you have to do. Doctors, because of their higher status, think they know better, even in day-to-day treatment that nurses, in fact, know better. So close collaboration is key: understanding that everyone’s perspective is important. Co-ordination is simply the idea that you need to co-ordinate the work that needs to be done. In the 70s and 80s there were studies done of autonomous teams, teams that are self-managing, maybe without an official leader. The finding was that a natural leader would emerge. You need someone to co-ordinate the team and facilitate the different tasks.

So someone always leads a team?

Yes. There are basically two styles of leadership—democratic and autocratic. In health care my studies reveal two types of self-construal, the independent and the interdependent. My survey shows that doctors have an independent view of themselves. They don’t look for input from others but think their perspective is the right one. Nurses, for many reasons, primarily the fact that until recently they used not to be too specialised and would be performing multiple and varied activities, are much more interdependent in self-construal.

Is there a gender issue?

Yes. All the studies done on gender differences in leadership suggest that women have a more democratic style of leadership and men a more autocratic style. It has to do with the way we socialise and educate people. It’s to do with stereotyping. However, the work I’ve done suggests that attaining power within an organisation can change the way we see ourselves. No matter whether you are a man or a woman you feel more independent, more unique, the more power you have.

So you’re less likely to be a good team player?

Possibly. For both men and women power increases independent self-construal. But power also increases interdependent self-construal for women whereas it decreases that for men. So, men will be more autocratic (this does not mean bullying here). Depending on what kind of team you want, you will look at different styles of team players and bosses. If you need a leader giving a lot of direction you will want a more autocratic leader.

What makes things go wrong?

There are two big phenomena. One is “group think”—when the group develops its own mind, so that group members stop being critical. The Challenger disaster is a good example of this. The issues were all dealt with at a group level and most of the information should have led any group member to say, “We have a problem and should not launch the shuttle.” It was a mixture of being part of an organisation where you didn’t want to voice your concerns and a very hierarchical organisation that meant that the people closest to the problems had no access to higher levels of command.

The other thing that can go wrong is “group polarisation” or “group shift”. Sometimes when you put people in a team they take a more extreme decision than they would have taken individually, either more conservative or more adventurous. A lot of decisions are based on this group phenomenon, one that produces a distorted perception of reality. When you stop thinking in terms or “I” and start thinking “we” things can change dramatically.

Is that because people feel less culpable if the culpability is spread?

There is a diffusion of responsibility, yes. The optimal number of people in a team is five. If you have large teams of 10 or 12, people don’t have the same impression of accountability. Everybody—and therefore nobody—is responsible. You also get “social loafing” where you think everyone else will do the job.

What about the group turning a blind eye, as with the BBC and Jimmy Saville?

This is a problem of bigger, modern organisations. Everyone wants to be in charge, a director of something, but nobody wants to be responsible. When something goes wrong in teams the “we” goes and the “I” comes back as people try to save their own face. Very few people try to save the whole team’s face.

Doesn’t that mean you were never part of the team anyway—you were just serving your own advantage?

There are cross-cultural differences. In the West the default is the individual, but in China or Japan the group is the default unit. When Japanese car manufacturers were accounting for error, they would know whose team worked on what and the whole team would take the blame. In Europe and the US you would find the individual in charge when the incident was located. In the individualist world people join groups because it serves their own purpose, yes.

So how do you form a good team?

Well, it should be as small as possible, the team should have clear boundaries about membership, members should be chosen for their task skills and interpersonal skills and you have to choose a team with a high probability of developing cohesion.

Easy.

As a team member you need to develop the ability to see the perspective of the other. In some of the work I do with doctors and nurses I ask them to write diaries— how a nurse might think about it, how a doctor might think about it. You need to be aware of what can go wrong in the team too. If you’re aware that “group think” happens you can reflect back and see if you’ve been affected. When building a team you need to pay attention to the different types of profile you want in that team. In some industries where you have a high concentration of likeminded individuals, like in investment banking, there is not enough diversity of profiles. That can create more harm than good, resulting in confrontational perspective, intra-team conflict and intra-team competition.

Yearly homicide count a complicated tally

Washington Post

The reported number excludes some violence, and sometimes includes violence from previous years. Here's what is and is not included in your city's homicide count.

How many homicides occurred last year? The answer's more complicated than you'd think

The count is often used as a measure of safety, but it doesn’t...

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Crime
Yearly homicide count a complicated tally

By Peter Hermann January 2 at 5:10 PM  

On the morning of the last day of 2014, the District’s homicide count stood at 106. By nightfall, it was 105.

Anthony Cornell Jones, who was shot in Southeast in September, was taken off the list.

For three months, the 39-year-old stood as last year’s 81st homicide victim. But authorities ultimately concluded that the person who shot him was acting in self-defense, making the shooting legally justified. Jones, along with two others during the course of 2014, were added, then removed, from the grim tally that chronicles the pulse of killings in the District.

The case shows how a jurisdiction’s homicide count — commonly seen as a measure of violence in cities and counties across the country — is not a precise measure of the number of killings in a calendar year. It excludes some violence, and it sometimes includes violence from previous years.

A city’s homicide count can be used to judge the success of a mayor or police chief. It can stain a city as lost to despair — the way Detroit is now, the way Washington used to be. The FBI publishes a comprehensive list of homicides every year and immediately warns not to compare cities, followed almost immediately with lists comparing cities. The media and politicians are equally guilty of using that one statistic to declare their city safe or dangerous.

VIEW GRAPHIC 

Mapping homicides in the District and the surrounding suburbs since 2000.

The homicide number is widely believed to be the most reliable crime statistic, even though it represents a minuscule percentage of any big city’s overall crime. In the District, fewer than 2 percent of last year’s violent crimes were criminal homicides. New York recorded 321 killings in 2014, out of 104,000 felonies, less than one-half of 1 percent.

A homicide is technically a killing of one person by another, which include accidents and those justified by self-defense. But the police generally count only the deaths being investigated at that moment as crimes. Thus, initially, three fatal shootings in the District went on the list, under the belief the acts were criminal, and were removed after investigators proved otherwise. A robber killed by a man who wrestled away a shotgun from him and fired never made the list, as it seemed justified from the start. Same for the killing of a 13-year-old boy whom police said was accidentally shot by his best friend. All involved one person taking the life of another.

All were ruled homicides. Police said none was a crime.

Fatal shootings by police — there were at least two in the District last year — are usually kept off and added later if the shooting comes back as unjustified, though that is rare.

The list also doesn’t always reflect the number of killings within a jurisdiction, but rather the number of killings investigated by the police agency that keeps the list.

For instance, Prince George’s County police recorded 54 homicides in 2014. That does not include Laurel and Greenbelt, which have their own departments, and each one investigated a single slaying last year. Similarly in Virginia, Loudoun County’s tally of three did not count a killing in Leesburg.

Another quagmire is how the dead show up on the list in the first place. It’s often not when a person is shot, and not even when the person dies. It is when the medical examiner rules the person’s death a homicide. It’s then up to authorities to decide whether to investigate that homicide as a crime.

That’s how month-old Hakeem Brown and hours-old Baby John Doe Alvarado died in 2013 and ended up as the District’s second and 10th homicides of 2014. It’s how 53-year-old Carmen Payne could be strangled in October 2013 and become homicide No. 34 in April 2014. And it’s how James S. Brady, shot in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, became the District’s 70th homicide of 2014. A medical examiner ruled that the decades-old bullet caused his death.

Cases are recorded this way so numbers from previous years don’t keep changing. But the list is used to measure a city’s safety and well-being, and violence that occurred in the previous year, or the previous generation, perhaps speaks better to conditions when the guns were fired than when the victim succumbed to the wounds.

Similar arguments are taking place as cities grapple with how to count murders. Those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York don’t show up on the police department’s homicide list. The FBI created a separate category. Boston didn’t include the three people killed in the 2013 marathon bombings because it was a terrorist attack, not a typical street crime. The District included the 12 killed at the Navy Yard in 2013.

In 2013, Baltimore police reported 235 homicides to the public but 233 to the FBI. The deaths of two young children — one left in a hot car, the other asphyxiated when her mother rolled over on her in bed — fit Baltimore’s definition but not the FBI’s, according to a department spokesman. Suspects in both cases were charged with manslaughter.

In the District, Tonya Reaves, 53, was killed in September while riding a bicycle in Northwest. Police charged the driver with second-degree murder, but Reaves is not among the 105 homicide victims of 2014.

The explanation from D.C. police: Victims in traffic fatality cases are never listed on the homicide chart.