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Wednesday, May 01, 2019

Study Shows That People Cannot Identify “Fake” Voices Created With Technology


The tragedy of Martin Buber. He had hoped to provide European Jews with a sustaining connection to their tradition. Then most of them were killed  

Study Shows That People Cannot Identify “Fake” Voices Created With Technology


The tech is now so good, it can impersonate voices you know. “The main takeaway is that human brains may not be able to distinguish a speaker’s voice from its morphed version, which means that people would be susceptible to voice impersonation attacks at a fundamental biological level.”  – The Daily Beast

 Three ways to contemplate that life may be bigger than death. (They’re not proofs but hinting analogies which Plato argued have an advantage over proofs: they can expand your sense of reality whilst indicating their truths, rather than just dotting i’s in the reality you already know.)

1. No scientist would write an equation unless maths had power. No composer would write music unless sound held harmony. No painter would paint a picture unless colour had mood. No poet would pen a poem unless words had soul. No person could live a life unless life held meaning.

2. Even though the child wears the parent out, maybe leaves them hateful & desolate, there’s tomorrow. They love again. A good enough parent & child find that love survives it all. So maybe parental reality echoes cosmic reality: nothing, in fact, separates us from life and love.

3. Consider: Cold is a lack of heat, but heat is not a lack of cold. Asymmetry. So, if life is to death as heat is to cold, which makes sense as life is akin to heat, then life seems prior to death. Life is the ground zero, and the mystery is how death arose, that lack of life.

The right side of history


White House Correspondents' Dinner speaker made for a memorable evening.


Author Ron Chernow at his home in New York. (AP Photo/Louis Lanzano, File)

The White House Correspondents Association dinner carried on Saturday night without Trump for the third year in a row. And it went on without anyone from Trump’s administration (he ordered them to stay away), a comedian host and without much celebrity star power or fanfare. But the subdued dinner still managed to point a spotlight on Trump’s absence and his attacks against the media.

Historian Ron Chernow was the keynote speaker. He recognized the accomplishments and importance of journalists, while criticizing Trump’s attacks on the media.

“This glorious tradition — you folks are a part of it,” Chernow said, “and we can’t have politicians trampling on it with impunity.” He added, “When you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy.”

Chernow also talked about how presidents have always had issues with the press, going all the way back to George Washington.

“Like every great president, Washington felt maligned and misunderstood the press,” Chernow said, “but he never generalized that into a vendetta.”  

The New York Times apologizes


The Opinion section ran an anti-Semitic cartoon in its international editions.


The New York Times opinion section has apologized for a cartoon that ran Thursday in its international edition. The cartoon had an apparently blind Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke being led by a dog with a Star of David for a collar and the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a tweet, Times Opinion apologized, saying it was “deeply sorry” and committed to making sure it never happens again. It called such imagery “dangerous” and all the more unacceptable at a time when “anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide.”

The Times said the cartoon ran as a result of a “single editor working without adequate oversight.”  

A stumbling block


A communications director used her body to prevent reporters and TV cameras from collecting footage. Bad call, says a local columnist.


A screenshot from themonitor.com in McAllen, Texas.
Edinburg, Texas, mayor Richard Molina and his wife, Dalia, were arrested last week on voter fraud charges. So why was the city’s director of communications and media, Cary Zayas, shielding the media from shooting video of Dalia as she sat in her car in front of the jail after being released? Zayas, a former TV reporter, said she was at the proceedings in her role with the city, which made her actions all the worse, according to a commentary written by Michael Rodriguez for The (McAllen, Texas) Monitor.

Rodriguez wrote, “This means that when she attempted to restrict our access while covering law enforcement proceedings, which she has no authority over, she did so while on the clock for the city in a position funded by taxpayers.”

Edinburg city manager Juan Guerra was shown the video and said, “The conduct of an employee, especially when it's questionable, is not something that publicly we will state as bad or good. It’s one thing that we will handle internally."  

Top of the food chain


The James Beard Foundation toasted writers, photographers and journalists Friday in New York City.


Tyra Banks at the 2019 James Beard Foundation Media Awards in New York City. (Photo by Demis Maryannakis/STAR MAX/IPx)

The James Beard Foundation media awards — given to the top cookbook authors, culinary broadcast producers and hosts, and food journalists — were handed out Friday night in New York City. Tyra Banks hosted. The big news was that The New York Times was named publication of the year.

The foundation wrote, “The New York Times has shown what can happen when a legacy company invests in its food and drink coverage.”

The Beard Foundation also seemed to acknowledge why it was recognizing the Times this year, as opposed to the past. It wrote:
“Because we’ve been impressed with the ways in which The Times has lately doubled down on both print and online journalism, finding the most effective and appealing ways to present stories, reviews, and recipes for maximum impact and reading (or viewing) pleasure.”

It also pointed out several other commitments the Times made to covering food, including moving columnist and critic Tejal Rao to Los Angeles to cover the West Coast.

The Los Angeles Times recently re-started its food section and is ramping up food coverage, setting up an interesting competition between the L.A. Times and The New York Times in the coming years.

More than three dozen Beard awards were handed out Friday, including best TV program in a studio or fixed locations (“Pati’s Mexican Table — Tijuana: Stories from the Border” on WETA in Washington); outstanding broadcast personality (Marcus Samuelsson from PBS’s “No Passport Required”); and best in column writing (Mari Uyehara from Taste).  

Hot type


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