Uni-Media Press

Don’t panic, but we’re running out of internet addresses.

Not domain names — those website names that you see at the top of this page and which always start with some semblance of “http://” and “www.”

We’ve got plenty of those.

But, according to statements from prominent internet thinkers this week, we may run out of internet protocol — or IP — addresses in less than a year.

IP addresses are numbers assigned to all of the devices — computers, phones, cars, wireless sensors, etc. — that log on to the internet.

According to the blog ReadWriteWeb, the internet is changing and evolving so quickly — with so many new types of devices connecting — that we’re running out of numbers to assign to all of these Web-enabled electronics.

“The main reason for the concern? There’s an explosion of data about to happen to the Web thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data,” Richard MacManus writes on that site.

“Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.”

Only 4 billion internet addresses are possible under the current system, and those will all be exhausted in less than a year, John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, told ReadWriteWeb.

In a recent statement on YouTube, internet luminary and Google exec Vinton Cerf makes a similar prediction.

“We are at a cusp, I think, in the IP address space for internet,” he said, noting that, if nothing changes, a “black market” for these internet addresses may develop.

So what should we do about this numbers shortage?

Well, make more numbers for starters.

Our current system for assigning IP addresses, which look like a series of four numbers with periods between them, can only handle 32 bits of data.

But, to accommodate the sprawling nature of the Web, internet researchers are working on a new version of the system — called IPv6, for “version six” — which would allow many more IP addresses, with each holding 128 bits of info.

On The Atlantic’s website, Alexis Madrigal writes that the situation is somewhat similar to what phone companies faced in the 1980s and 1990s: We ran out of new phone numbers, so we had to add digits.

“The problem is essentially the same: you only have so many unique slots, and those slots eventually run out as phone numbers proliferate,” he writes.

But the current situation has proven more technically complicated than that.

Researchers have been working on IPv6 for more than a decade, but according to reports on the matter, adoption has been slow.

Now, some writers are comparing the situation to Y2K. They say we need to act now to shift to the new system or the internet might stop working.

Madrigal, for one, says he’s optimistic the internet won’t break because of a lack of IP address numbers.

“There are undoubtedly a swarm of issues leading to IPv6 underdeployed,” he writes. “But that’s actually good news because it means there will be plenty of ways to fix the problem when everyone swings into action.”

In this tech-saturated world, few things are more annoying than car navigation systems that yell at you for making a wrong turn.

“Re-CALC-ulating,” the system says in that condescending robot voice, as if it is offended by having to rethink the route.

“Turn left at … [sigh] … recalculating …”

Such interactions lead people to think GPS devices are nagging them, said Mark Gretton, chief technology officer of TomTom, a GPS maker.

“The main interaction you have with the device is a series of commands, so that starts the tone of the relationship right from the start,” he said. “It’s ‘Do this, do that, turn right.’ ” And it doesn’t help if the computer sounds snippy, he said.

Despite advances in “text to speech” technology, current computer voices can still be socially tone deaf. Car systems are bossy. E-readers read to us aloud, but they don’t know what they’re reading, so Shakespeare can sound just like a monotone reading of a spreadsheet.

None of them can get intonations, pauses or emotional context quite right.

Farhad Manjoo, a tech columnist at Slate, compared the Amazon Kindle’s reading voice, for example, to “Gilbert Gottfried laid up with a tuberculin cough” and “a dyslexic robot who spent his formative years in Eastern Europe.”

So what gives? With more than a decade of voice research under our belts, why can’t computers speak our language — or at least sound a bit more human?

Well, they’re trying, tech researchers say, but these machines face a striking number of technological hurdles in their efforts to sound un-robotic.

Complex speech patterns

The most obvious reason the computers have trouble is that human speech is almost infinitely complex. There are about 40 phonemes — or basic sounds — in the English language, but there are seemingly limitless combinations.

To try to get computers on the right track, voice technologists record human actors reading all kinds of wacky sentences, which are designed to elicit as many phoneme combinations as possible.

Computers store all these sentences in a database, chop them into sounds, and then remix them to make any possible combination of words.

The result is intelligible, but it’s not quite human.

A super-high-quality computer voice might require 40 hours of voice recordings in order to sound nearly human, said Andy Aaron, a computer speech researcher at IBM.

That’s just for one voice, one accent.

Computing power

Aaron said computers that have lots of voice data to pull from can sound, at times, nearly human.

But the issue is that not every computer has an entire server farm waiting to process every sentence it would like to say.

Mobile phones and GPS devices, in particular, just don’t have enough computing power or storage space to thumb through mountains of voice files in order to sound as realistic as possible with current technology.

The result: Corners are cut in the name of workability, and some of the nuances of the spoken language are lost, said Gretton of TomTom.

This will improve as computers continue to get faster and able to store more data, he said.

Parts of computer voices are also generated entirely from equations and models, not actor-read sounds.

Those bits act as filler, and cut down on database sizes, too.

Speak thy heart

Another major problem for talking computers is that it’s somewhat difficult for them to replicate the sound of human emotion and inflection.

This, however, is a major topic of speech research, and the technology appears to have made some strides. People who record the sentences that are the grist for computer speech sometimes are asked to read in different emotional states. Computers can pull from these sounds if they want to flip the pitch of a computer voice up at the end of a sentence, for example, in order to ask a question. Or they pull from higher frequencies to sound happy or excited.

IBM Research has posted a demo of this on its website in order to show the differences between emotive and robotic computer voices.

Take this example sentence:

“These cookies are delicious.”

Listen to that sentence as read by a computer with no emotion.

Here it is again, spoken by a computer using a system called Naxpres, which tries to take emotional cues into account. Notice that the voice perks up at the end, as if the computer is saying the cookies are “de-LISH-ious.”

It makes some difference.

Emotional context

But copying the sounds of human emotion is only half the battle. To really make computers sound more human, the machines have to understand what they’re reading — at least to some degree — so that they know when to inflect.

This part of computer science is much more challenging, said Aaron.

Consider another sample sentence:

“I say tomato, and you say tomato.”

Most people would have heard that line before, and would automatically pronounce “tomato” as “to-mah-toe” the second time, said Aaron, of IBM.

But not a computer.

“How would the computer know that those two words are supposed to be pronounced differently?” Aaron said. “It’s only real-world knowledge that can tell the computer that those two words are supposed to be pronounced differently.”

The same applies to emotions and inflections. It’s difficult for a computer to know how to read a passage of text, and what emotions should apply.

“If you read a passage to somebody, you’re obviously going to read it a way that does justice to the content,” said Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance, a company that develops speech technologies.

“If you’re reading a technical report, you’re probably not going to read it in a way that’s much different from a computer, but if you’re reading a poem, it’s a different kettle of fish,” he said. “You’re really trying to communicate a lot of emotional meaning through the pauses you introduce and through the pacing and such. That really requires a pretty deep understanding” of language.

‘You want to punch them’

As it turns out, the best computer voices may be those that sound exactly like the person who’s listening. If a computer voice matches your mood, your speech patterns, your accent and your tonal range, you’re less likely to be annoyed by it, researchers said.

How well a computer voice matches the listener’s mood is not just a matter of preference — it’s a matter of safety, said Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who studies computer voices.

In a 2005 study, Nass found that these emotional mismatches may actually be dangerous in driving situations. Sad drivers who get instructions from happy computer voices — and happy drivers who listen to sad voices — are more likely to have accidents, he said. The emotionally confused drivers are also less likely to be able to pay attention to the road.

So, if you’re having a groggy sort of morning, instructions from a GPS device that sounds like a caffeinated cheerleader might just push you over the edge.

“If you think about it, when you’re happy, you want to be around happy people. But if you’re sad, do you really want to hang around chirpy, happy people saying, ‘Let’s turn that frown upside down?’” he said. “No. You want to punch them.”

Sejnoha, from Nuance, said his company has developed a prototype computer voice system that listens to a person speak and then tries to mimic it.

Gretton, from TomTom, said his company hasn’t looked into matching drivers’ emotions to the voices of their navigation systems yet.

But one interim solution, he said, gives drivers many options when it comes to the voices of their computerized companions.

TomTom offers a range of downloadable voices — from the fictional Darth Vader and Homer Simpson to celebrities like the rapper Snoop Dogg.

Users can also read a set of test sentences and have their own voices transferred into the GPS — so that they’re, in effect, bossing themselves around.

Perhaps it’s a little less tempting to yell at the computer if the computer sounds exactly like you do — or as close as technology allows.

It is usually the simplest expressions that take off like wildfire. Everyone’s been talking this week about “double rainbows,” based on a goofy home video recorded more than six months ago.

In early January, Paul Vasquez, also known as “Hungry Bear,” spent an hour videotaping, and marveling at, a beautiful double rainbow at Yosemite National Park.

Some 3½ minutes of his “rainbowing” were caught on tape, and it’s Vasquez’s reaction to the rainbows — not the rainbows themselves — that’s drawing viewers.

“Hungry Bear” oohs over the double rainbow, asks existential questions like “what does it mean?” and eventually sounds like he’s going into hysterics — perhaps laughing, perhaps crying, or maybe doing both. Some observers think he sounds orgasmic, or stoned.

Why are we just talking about it now? Two words: Jimmy Kimmel. The ABC late-night host tweeted a link to the double rainbow video to his 90,000 followers over the July Fourth weekend. Within a week CBS News and other outlets were interviewing Hungry Bear. The original double rainbow YouTube clip has now racked up more than 4.8 million views.

The sheer speed of this meme is pretty impressive, especially since there is already a double rainbow song available on iTunes. The “DOUBLE RAINBOW SONG!!” is a two-minute, auto-tuned song with the repeated refrain, “It’s a double rainbow. What does it mean?” Its website says all proceeds from the song go to Hungry Bear and Yosemite.

By this time next week, there will definitely be another “double rainbow” parody going viral on the web.

See CNN.com iReporters’ pictures and stories of double rainbows

Apparently, Hungry Bear already had some interesting adventures before he encountered the double rainbow. Urlesque.com has a great history of Hungry Bear’s colorful life, which includes time spent as a cage fighter. It seems like the big guy is both a lover and a fighter.

So what, exactly, can we learn from this “double rainbow” phenomenon?

In pure numbers, it shows that as Twitter, Facebook and other social-networking tools become more ubiquitous, memes like this will grow faster — and, perhaps, die faster, too.

It takes longer to read books on a Kindle 2 or an iPad versus a printed book, Jakob Nielsen of product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group discovered in a recent usability survey.

The study found that reading speeds declined by 6.2 percent on the iPad and 10.7 percent on theKindle compared to print. However, Nielsen conceded that the differences in reading speed between the two devices were not “statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability” — in other words, the study did not prove that the iPad allowed for faster reading than the Kindle.

A total of 24 participants (10 is about average for a usability survey) were given short stories by Ernest Hemingway to read in print and oniPads, Kindles and desktop PCs. Hemingway was chosen because his work utilizes simple language and is “pleasant and engaging to read.”

The narratives took an average of 17 minutes and 20 seconds from start to finish — enough time to get readers fully “immersed” in the stories, Nielsen explained.

After reading, participants filled out a brief comprehension questionnaire to make sure no one had skimmed through a story. Users rated their satisfaction with each device; the iPad, Kindle and printed book scored 5.8, 5.7 and 5.6, on a scale of 7, respectively, while the PC received an average score of 3.6 — due, in part, because reading on a PC reminded readers of work.

Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast.

As Nielsen notes, the satisfaction ratings on the survey are promising for the future of e-readers and tablet devices. However, I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed.

What do you think of the results? Do you prefer to read on an e-reader, tablet or in print — and why?

It’s summertime. Like many people, you may not have enough time for an extended vacation in which to devour a juicy full-length novel.

But, if you can steal a few moments for a mini-vacation, you can find some excellent summer reading material right on your cell phone. And you don’t even need a fancy smartphone with a pricey data plan capable of running an e-reader app (Kindle, Nook, Stanza, etc.) to do it.

These days, more fiction is being published not just electronically, but specifically with small screens and wireless connections in mind. These short works are different from e-books, because they’re meant to be read directly through your phone’s browser or even via text messaging.

This phenomenon started nearly a decade ago in Japan, but it’s now spread to U.S. mobile audiences.

Here are a few options to check out:

CellStories.net: If your cell phone has a web browser, chances are these short works of fiction (about 5 to 10 minutes of reading time each) will display reasonably well on your phone.

This free publishing project by Dan Sinker features works in several genres by several authors — with a fair amount of work that’s offbeat or slightly bizarre. CellStories are specifically not available for computer-based reading; you can access the stories only from a phone.

Sinker explains: “Why would you want to read something amazing while sitting at a desk? Instead, grab a beer and sprawl out on the couch, or take your lunch break under a shady tree, and then read. Much better, right?”

TextNovel.com: This is a rich resource to find, discuss or publish your own serialized English-language cell phone novels via SMS text messaging or e-mail. Novels are free, but text-messaging charges apply. TextNovel.com, founded by literary agent Stan Soper, also runs contests for text novel fiction writers.

Figment.com: This teen-oriented cell phone publishing project has not yet begun, but it sounds interesting.

Co-founder Jacob Lewis recently explained, “Figment will offer a place for teens to engage with peers, with authors, and with content. They can read a serialized novel by a friend down the block or a short story by their favorite author anytime, anywhere on their computer or their mobile phone. They can write a haiku or a 90,000 word novel while riding the bus to school. They can pick and chose, share and exclaim, write and review.”

On Figment.com, you can sign up for projects announcements and a private beta.