Asterisk Software Download
Ena Marklund
Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra). An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words.
When a document containing classified information is published, the document may be "sanitized" (redacted) by replacing the classified information with asterisks. For example, the Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report.
In colloquial usage, an asterisk attached to a sporting record indicates that it is somehow tainted. This is because results that have been considered dubious or set aside are recorded in the record books with an asterisk rendering to a footnote explaining the reason or reasons for concern.[12]
The usage of the term in sports arose during the 1961 baseball season in which Roger Maris of the New York Yankees was threatening to break Babe Ruth's 34-year-old single-season home run record. Ruth had amassed 60 home runs in a season with only 154 games, but Maris was playing the first season in the American League's newly expanded 162-game season. Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, a friend of Ruth's during the legendary slugger's lifetime, held a press conference to announce his "ruling" that should Maris take longer than 154 games both records would be acknowledged by Major League Baseball, but that some "distinctive mark" [his term][13] be placed next to Maris', which should be listed alongside Ruth's achievement in the "record books". The asterisk as such a mark was suggested at that time by New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young, not Frick.[13] The reality, however, was that MLB actually had no direct control over any record books until many years later, and it all was merely a suggestion on Frick's part. Within a few years the controversy died down and all prominent baseball record keepers listed Maris as the single-season record holder.[13]
Nevertheless, the stigma of holding a tainted record remained with Maris for many years, and the concept of a real or figurative asterisk denoting less-than-accepted "official" records has become widely used in sports and other competitive endeavors. A 2001 TV movie about Maris's record-breaking season was called 61* (pronounced sixty-one asterisk) in reference to the controversy.
Uproar over the integrity of baseball records and whether or not qualifications should be added to them arose again in the late 1990s, when a steroid-fueled power explosion led to the shattering of Maris' record. Even though it was obvious - and later admitted[14] - by Mark McGwire that he was heavily on steroids when he hit 70 home runs in 1998, ruling authorities did nothing - to the annoyance of many fans and sportswriters. Three years later self-confessed steroid-user Barry Bonds pushed that record out to 73, and fans once again began to call for an asterisk in the sport's record books.
The Houston Astros' 2017 World Series win was marred after an investigation by MLB revealed the team's involvement in a sign-stealing scheme during that season. Fans, appalled by what they perceived to be overly lenient discipline against the Astros players, nicknamed the team the "Houston Asterisks".[16]
During the first decades of the 21st century, the term asterisk to denote a tainted accomplishment[citation needed] caught on in other sports first in North America and then, due in part to North American sports' widespread media exposure, around the world.
In the B programming language and languages that borrow syntax from it, such as C, PHP, Java, or C#, comments in the source code (for information to people, ignored by the compiler) are marked by an asterisk combined with the slash:
Some Pascal-like programming languages, for example, Object Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, and Oberon, as well as several other languages including ML, Wolfram Language (Mathematica), AppleScript, OCaml, Standard ML, and Maple, use an asterisk combined with a parenthesis:
The asterisk was a supported symbol on the IBM 026 Keypunch (introduced in 1949 and used to create punch cards with data for early computer systems).[22] It was also included in the FIELDATA character encoding[23] and the ASCII standard.[24][25][26]
In linguistics, an asterisk may be used for a range of purposes depending on what is being discussed. The symbol is used to indicate reconstructed words of proto-languages (for which there are no records). For modern languages, it may be placed before posited problematic word forms, phrases or sentences to flag that they are hypothetical, ungrammatical, unpronounceable, etc.
In historical linguistics, the asterisk marks words or phrases that are not directly recorded in texts or other media, and that are therefore reconstructed on the basis of other linguistic material by the comparative method.[33]
In other cases, the double asterisk denotes a form that would be expected according to a rule, but is not actually found. That is, it indicates a reconstructed form that is not found or used, and in place of which another form is found in actual usage:
Use of an asterisk to denote forms or sentences that are ungrammatical is often complemented by the use of the question mark (?) to indicate a word, phrase or sentence that is avoided, questionable or strange, but not necessarily outright ungrammatical.[c]
In phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet and similar systems, an asterisk was historically used to denote that the word it preceded was a proper noun.[42][43] See this example from W. Perrett's 1921 transcription of Gottfried Keller's Das Fhnlein der sieben Aufrechten:[44]
In many scientific publications, the asterisk is employed as a shorthand to denote the statistical significance of results when testing hypotheses. When the likelihood that a result occurred by chance alone is below a certain level, one or more asterisks are displayed. Popular significance levels are
The Unicode standard has a variety of asterisk-like characters, compared in the table below. (Characters will display differently in different browsers and fonts.) The reason there are so many is chiefly because of the controversial[citation needed] decision to include in Unicode the entire Zapf Dingbats symbol font.
I just got my asterisk to start learning steno and so far it's great. The only thing that could be better is if there was a way to change the default sensitivity in the firmware as it resets every time the keyboard is plugged in. I'm sure there is a way to do this in the firmware, but that's for someone smarter than me to find out and make a video or something on how to do it.
100% satisfied with purchase. Just now learning steno. Laptop keyboard live at same time as Asterisk keyboard. Touch screen functions perfectly. You can add new definitions on-the-fly. On line courses are very good and there are many. The Discord app has a problem solving and question group. I use Compose key (ctrl-r) within Plover. Plover works good in Linux. If the manufacturer produces another similar keyboard with perhaps a split or perhaps an additional row I will be the first to buy it. Kudos! First class product.
I typically use a Lumi II at work. I got the Asterisk so that I could use embedded steno on my court-issued laptop and impress people. So far, no one has actually noticed, but I do like the board very much. It's not a replacement for a professional machine and I don't think that it purports to be, but since people often ask me "Can I use this for work?", I thought I'd put it out there.
Only thing I'd change is perhaps some tactile reference for vertical boarders between keys. I know I can add those myself as well. I also know that the computer in the middle of all the board requires the vowels to be spaced out and the layout overall to be split and the asterisk key to be split... but I wish they didn't have to be, honestly. I, however, have small hands and find the traditional steno machine layout span to be perfect. I know that many people find the traditional machine experience to be too smooshed; so this layout may be good for others.
I'm still new to steno - still in the 30 WPM range. But I wanted a board that would both be silent and able to translate steno on-board. (I want to use it to take notes in church and in-person meetings.) Lo and behold, this board comes out doing all the above...and it's the least expensive Stenoboard yet! The spacing is tighter than the Georgi, so I'm having to spend some time getting used to it. But it's everything I was hoping for, and I'm quickly getting better with it.
Also, for those thinking about this as a career, I would definitely start off with a keyboard like the Asterisk, $50 instead of $5000. All too often, I see machines on eBay that people have spent a fortune on and decided court reporting was not for them or CART captioning was not their thing.
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