The Age of Scrutiny
“In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam.”
“We are (now) in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media,” Ogle said. “The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond.”
— Interface by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (1994)
First Lady Michelle Obama
Deepgram finds speech with A.I.
“Searching through recordings is really difficult. In terms of workflow, usually the raw audio is transcribed into text, which is then fed into a search tool. If you transcribe using human transcription, it’s too time consuming and expensive. If you try to do it with automatic speech-to-text then search accuracy is the problem. […] Deepgram is an artificial intelligence tool that makes searching for keywords in speeches, private conversations and phone calls faster, cheaper and easier than the old way of doing things. Deepgram indexes audio files in more than half the time of a human transcriber, and costs only 75¢ per hour of audio.”
Amazing. Try it for yourself and see if it doesn’t blow your panties off.
Learfield sells for $1.2B
“Providence Equity Partners is set to make $425 million on the sale of sports marketing company Learfield Communications Inc. to Atairos Group Inc., according to an investor letter obtained by The Wall Street Journal.”
The Apple of TV new
Watched my (the) first installment of Vice Nightly News last night. And loved it. But not sure I can describe it. But I’ll try.
- Different look and feel. Black and white graphics. And big. More web-like than TV’ish. Faster pacing.
- No anchor. At least no “talking head” anchor. Just a normal (female) voice over the video and graphics. And the package reporters were normal people as well. Looked like real people and talked like real people. You’ll have to watch this to get what I’m trying to describe.
- Natural writing style. I noticed this immediately. Sharp contrast (for me) to the “news speak” we get from the networks and cable news.
- Watching debate #2 with Glenn Beck. One of the longer segments. A bit like a serious Stephen Colbert interview.
- No ads. Thank you, HBO. Didn’t realize how a dozen adult diapers and Flomax ads trash up a news program.
The producers didn’t just take the ancient evening news format we’ve been watching for 60 years and tweak it. They started fresh. Your grandpa ain’t gonna like Vice Nightly News. But I ain’t your grandpa.
UPDATE: Music critic Bob Lefsetz says Vice News Tonight is “the real thing.”
“The hosts were a cornucopia of sexes and ethnicities. They looked like America. Where everybody is just not an old white man. […] The networks think it’s about slickness. The local stations are a joke, peopled by bimbos, both male and female, it’s a caricature of the news. […] They humanized Glenn Beck, a seeming impossibility.”
Destin in October
Animation by Kevin Weir
Bad Lip Reading: Debate Night!
DSL Repair
Been having problems with my DSL service (losing connection, slow speed) and the phone company sent a tech this morning. (Second time someone has been out in the last week or so) He could see there was a problem with the line, somewhere upstream, and — to save time — called the tech who came out previously since it was recent enough he might remember the call. He did and provide useful info.
I asked Mike (the tech who came out this morning) if he could access records from the previous call. From his reply I gathered only the barest minimum of information is recorded. Not surprising because who wants to write up a report once the problem is fixed.
But would it really be that difficult? Take out your smartphone, dictate brief summary of the call, save it as PDF and upload it to the company cloud where it can be accessed by the next service tech if needed. And by the customer.
My physician does this routinely. Within 24 hours of a visit. It’s readily available, along with my lab and test results.