There's a lot of scary things going on in the world today. Here's just a few of those things:
The USA is only 182nd alphabetically as of today, being surpassed by even Afghanistan and Mexico.
Due to the melting of polar ice caps, there has been an upsurge in protesting from evil villians who have been having their secret lairs exposed.
Mass shootings in schools have gotten so had that President Trump has been forced to ban schools.
Scary, right?
If you read through those and believed any of them, then congrats! You just ate the Onion!
For context; The Onion is a satirical news site, that create "news" stories about the most extreme of things, that the rest of the media is afraid to report on. If course, it's all fake as fuck (here's a personal favourite of mine), but it's still a hilarious place to read, made even more hilarious by the people who actually believe it's real.
"Eating the Onion" refers to falling for an article by the Onion (or any satirical news site), believing that it's actually real. Since you'd have to be a complete idiot to believe that stuff, it's no surprise that you find it most often on Facebook. /r/AteTheOnion is a subreddit made to document these monumentally idiotic responses to the articles.
The sub isn't exclusive to The Onion, it can be any satirical site. All that matters is that there's someone eating it up. The sub is filled with screenshots of people reacting rather violently towards these articles. There's a massive amount of these stupid people, even government isn't safe from the stupidity.
Emoticon shortcuts were previously available in Google Hangouts and we’re glad to see Google including them in Android Messages. They allow you to send text-based emoticons with easy-to-remember shortcuts. It’s a little more unique and fun than emoji, which is commonplace and different on every version of Android and other operating systems.
If you’re on your PC, give these shortcuts a try! Type them in at the beginning of a message, because they won’t work after other text. For now, you can’t send these from the mobile app. Here’s the full list:
NVIDIA announced that their SHIELD TV would be getting the Android 8.0 Oreo update last month in a staged rollout. Seeing an update for such an aging device is pretty amazing.
The update, titled SHIELD Upgrade Experience 7.0, brings with it an update user interface and many new features. And now it’s officially rolling out to all users, marking the end of the staged rollout.
If you have an NVIDIA SHIELD TV, head to Settings > About to check for updates and enjoy your new software experience!
Great news – SHIELD Upgrade Experience 7.0 is rolling out today for all users. If you don’t receive a push notification, you can manually check for updates under Settings > About > System Updates. Thank you for your patience! https://t.co/ar6VZcMzDY
Google has finally done what they should’ve done initially: let a group of journalists (two groups actually, one on each coast) actually listen to and participate in live Duplex calls.
For one minute and ten seconds on Tuesday, I worked in a trendy
hummus shop and took a reservation from a guy who punctuated his
sentences with “awesome” and “um.”
“Hi, I’m calling to make a reservation,” the caller said, sounding
a lot like a stereotypical California surfer. Then he came clean:
“I’m Google’s automated booking service, so I’ll record the call.
Um, can I book a table for Saturday?”
The guy was Google Duplex, the AI-assisted assistant that made a
stir in May when CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled it at its Google I/O
developer conference. That demo, shown in a slick video, was so
impressive that some people said it had to be fake.
Not so, says Google, which invited clusters of reporters to Oren’s
Hummus Shop near its campus in Mountain View, for a hands-on
demonstration. Each of us got to field an automated call and test
the system’s limits.
But, regarding the curious recordings played on stage at I/O in early May:
Scott Huffman, the VP of engineering for Google Assistant,
conceded that the demo at I/O in May “maybe made it look a little
too polished.” That’s because Pichai tends to focus on Google’s
grand visions for the future, Huffman said.
Unfortunately, Google would not let us record the live
interactions this week, but it did provide a video we’ve embedded
below. The robo call in the video is, honestly, perfectly
representative of what we experienced. But to allay some of the
skepticism out there, let’s first outline the specifics of how
this demo was set up along with what worked and what didn’t. […]
During the demonstration period, things went much more according
to plan. Over the course of the event, we heard several calls,
start to finish, handled over a live phone system. To start, a
Google rep went around the room and took reservation requirements
from the group, things like “What time should the reservation be
for?” or “How many people?” Our requirements were punched into a
computer, and the phone soon rang. Journalists — err, restaurant
employees — could dictate the direction of the call however they
so choose. Some put in an effort to confuse Duplex and throw it
some curveballs, but this AI worked flawlessly within the very
limited scope of a restaurant reservation.
Here’s the video Google has provided. It is indeed an impressive approximation of a human speaking. One thing that stands out, in fact, is the difference between the artificial voice of the Google Assistant on the woman’s phone — no um’s, no ah’s, robotically precise — and the decidedly un-robotic voice of Duplex on the phone call.
Regarding the actual rollout to actual users, some unspecific number of “trusted testers” will get access to Duplex very soon, but only for asking about restaurant hours, not making reservations — and the haircut appointment feature has no delivery date other than “later” and wasn’t demonstrated to the media.
If you’re hoping that means you’ll be able to try it yourself,
sorry: Google is starting with “a set of trusted tester users,”
according to Nick Fox, VP of product and design for the Google
Assistant. It will also be limited to businesses that Google has
partnered with rather than any old restaurant.
The rollout will be phased, in other words. First up will be
calls about holiday hours, then restaurant reservations will come
later this summer, and then finally hair cut appointments will be
last. Those are the only three domains that Google has trained
Duplex on.
Bohn on the speech quality:
The more natural, human-sounding voice wasn’t there in the very
first prototypes that Google built (amusingly, they worked by
setting a literal handset on the speaker on a laptop). According
to VP of engineering for the Google Assistant Scott Huffman, “It
didn’t work. …. we got a lot of hangups, we got a lot of
incompletion of the task. People didn’t deal well with how
unnatural it sounded.”
Part of making it sound natural enough to not trigger an aural
sense of the uncanny valley was adding those ums and ahs, which
Huffman identified as “speech disfluencies.” He emphasized that
they weren’t there to trick anybody, but because those vocal
tics “play a key part in progressing a conversation between
humans.” He says it came from a well-known branch of linguistics
called “pragmatics,” which encompasses all the non-word
communications that happen in human speech: the ums, the ahs,
the hand gestures, etc.
I’m on the fence regarding the issue of whether it is ethical for Duplex to speak in a way that sounds so human-like that the person on the other end of the call might never realize they’re speaking to a bot. What raises a flag are the injected imperfections. If they’re good for Duplex to use while making a call, why doesn’t Google Assistant speak similarly when you, the user, know you’re talking to a bot?
The fact that they started getting fewer hangups when they added these natural-sounding imperfections makes sense. But it’s disingenuous to say they’re not using these um’s and ah’s to trick the person into thinking it’s a human. That’s exactly what they’re doing. The problem is, tricking sounds devious. I’m not sure it is in this case. It’s just making the person on the call more comfortable. We use “tricks” in all of our technology. Motion pictures, to name one example, don’t actually move — they’re just a series of still images played quickly enough to fool our eyes into seeing motion.
With or without Duplex’s involvement, the restaurant is going to get a phone call for the reservation. (Duplex doesn’t make phone calls for restaurants that support online booking through OpenTable — at least not if the device user has an OpenTable account.) Based on these examples, Duplex doesn’t seem to waste the restaurant’s time — the phone calls take about the same time as they would if you, the human, made the call yourself. So neither the restaurant nor the employee who answers the phone lose anything when a call is made by Duplex, whether they realize they’re talking to an AI or not. No one is getting cheated, as in the case with, say, bots that play online poker.
To me, the truly difficult ethical questions are years down the road, when these AI’s get close to passing an open-ended Turing test.
I then asked whether there were any allergies in the group. “OK,
so, 7:30,” the bot said. “No, I can fit you in at 7:45,” I said.
The bot was confused. “7:30,” it said again. I also asked whether
they would need a high chair for any small children. Another voice
eventually interjected, and completed the reservation.
I hung up the phone feeling somewhat triumphant; my stint in
college as a host at a brew house had paid off, and I had asked a
series of questions that a bot, even a good one, couldn’t answer.
It was a win for humans. “In that case, the operator that
completed the call — that wasn’t a human, right?” I asked
Nygaard. No, she said. That was a human who took over the call. I
was stunned; in the end, I was still a human who couldn’t
differentiate between a voice powered by silicon and one born of
flesh and blood.
It’s a shame that Google wouldn’t release the recordings of the calls the journalists answered. Goode’s anecdote above, to me, is the most fascinating of the bunch, and I’d love to hear it. She was able to trip up the logic of Duplex by asking about allergies and high chairs, but was unable to discern when an actual human took over the call. Google’s breakthrough isn’t how smart Duplex is, but how human-like it sounds.
I still think the whole thing feels like a demo of a technology (the human-like speech), not a product. Google claimed this week that Duplex currently succeeds 4 out of 5 times at placing a reservation without a human operator’s intervention. That’s a good batting average for a demo, but untenable for a shipping product at Google’s scale. With a 20 percent failure rate, Google would need an army of human operators standing by all day long, to support a feature they don’t make any money from. I’m skeptical that this will ever be a product expanded to wide use, and if it is, it might be years away. Google said as much to Ars Technica:
“We’re actually quite a long way from launch, that’s the key thing
to understand,” Fox explained at the meeting. “This is super-early
technology, somewhere between technology demo and product. We’re
talking about this way earlier than we typically talk about
products.”
Right now it feels like a feature in search of a product, but they pitched it as an imminent product at I/O because it made for a stunning demo. (It remains the only thing announced at I/O that anyone is talking about.) If what Google really wanted was just for Google Assistant to be able to make restaurant reservations, they’d be better off building an OpenTable competitor and giving it away to all these small businesses that don’t yet offer online reservations. I’m not holding my breath for Duplex ever to allow anyone to make a reservation at any establishment.
I really like Files Go. I use the file sharing feature fairly often to transfer files from my tablet to my phone or vice versa.
One feature of Files Go is sharing files with people nearby without needing any internet. Today, we’re releasing a major upgrade to this feature—here’s what you can expect:
Easier to find and use: Nearby sharing is now available in its own dedicated tab called “Share.” This tab has a simplified and smoother interface, and it works on any Android phone from the latest Google Pixel back to Android 5.0 (Lollipop).
Faster connections: Thanks to improved connection techniques, the average time it takes to connect two phones is now just five seconds.
Faster transfers: Files Go picks the fastest method of sending files available on your phone, such as 5GHz Wi-Fi Direct, so you get the highest transfer speeds possible. Users have seen speeds up to 490 Mbps—that’s four times faster than before, or 100 original quality photos sent in less than five seconds.
More secure: Files Go helps you verify that you are connecting to the right person and encrypts all your transfers for additional security.
Give it a try with a friend and let us know what you think. Please send any thoughts our way by using the Feedback option in the app.
From Dr. Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch and Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at George Mason University, a list of the ten stages of genocide that all societies move through when the group in power decides to murder a large group of people, typically on the basis of ethnicity. For each stage, Stanton has helpfully listed preventative measures.
4. Dehumanization: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder. At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. The majority group is taught to regard the other group as less than human, and even alien to their society. They are indoctrinated to believe that “We are better off without them.” The powerless group can become so depersonalized that they are actually given numbers rather than names, as Jews were in the death camps. They are equated with filth, impurity, and immorality. Hate speech fills the propaganda of official radio, newspapers, and speeches.
To combat dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable. Leaders who incite genocide should be banned from international travel and have their foreign finances frozen. Hate radio stations should be jammed or shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished.
Ever wonder how far your hometown is from the North Pole? Or maybe, you simply want to measure the length of that hike you just finished. One of the most requested features for Google Earth is the ability to measure distance and areas. So today, we're adding a Measure Tool, available on Chrome and Android today and iOS is coming soon. Check out a few ways to use the tool:
Measurement
Measuring distance and area on Android
Measure
Looking to buy a home? Check the size of the park in the neighborhood you have your eye on.
Measure
If you're a teacher, use the map to create math problems - and challenge your students to find out which is bigger - Colorado or Utah? (without Googling it!)
5. Attribute bad intentions. Whenever you can, attribute the worst possible intentions to your partner, friends, and coworkers. Take any innocent remark and turn it into an insult or attempt to humiliate you. For example, if someone asks, “How did you like such and such movie?” you should immediately think, He’s trying to humiliate me by proving that I didn’t understand the movie, or He’s preparing to tell me that I have poor taste in movies. The idea is to always expect the worst from people. If someone is late to meet you for dinner, while you wait for them, remind yourself of all the other times the person was late, and tell yourself that he or she is doing this deliberately to slight you. Make sure that by the time the person arrives, you’re either seething or so despondent that the evening is ruined. If the person asks what’s wrong, don’t say a word: let him or her suffer.
The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has
admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he
wanted a promotion that he did not receive. In light of these
actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move.
However, there may be considerably more to this situation than
meets the eye, so the investigation will continue in depth this
week. We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others
at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations.
As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want
Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have
already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more.
Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in
the world — they don’t love the idea of Tesla advancing the
progress of solar power & electric cars. Don’t want to blow your
mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not
super nice. Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car
company competitors. If they’re willing to cheat so much about
emissions, maybe they’re willing to cheat in other ways?
Remember when this was called Listen, and it integrated with Google Reader?
My first impressions after installing:
Nice interface, but too rigid. No way to import from another app, and no way to subscribe to arbitrary feeds. If Google doesn't already know about it, you can't listen to it. Pretty crappy.
Whether we’re listening to history lessons on the commute, news stories at the gym, or gripping mysteries while preparing dinner, podcasts have become an essential part of life. But, it can still be difficult to get started and find new shows you’ll love—and work still remains in making podcasts accessible and discoverable for all.
Today, we’re releasing the Google Podcasts app for Android, available globally in the Play Store. Integrated with the Google Assistant across your devices and packed with personalized recommendations, Google Podcasts is designed to make it easier than ever for Android users to discover and listen to podcasts. We’re also announcing a partnership with industry experts to improve diversity in podcast creation, and sharing a peek at how AI can help transform podcasting for the better.
Smarter recommendations with Google Podcasts
With Google Podcasts, you can listen and subscribe to any podcast, including popular shows like The Daily, Cyrus Says, Modern Love, Lage der Nation, The Bill Simmons Podcast, and literally millions more. Beyond the podcasts you already know, Google Podcasts uses AI to offer recommendations based on your listening habits—such as your interest in sports or true crime, or podcasts from a particular network.
Google Podcasts seamlessly syncs across a variety of Google products, including the Google Assistant. So if you’re listening to a podcast on your phone during your commute home, you can resume it on your Google Home when you arrive. Over time, we’ll integrate Google Podcasts into more places you use Google.
How podcasters can optimize for Google
With Google Podcasts, we’re focused on helping podcast creators reach a broader audience. To ensure inclusion in the Google Podcasts app, creators should follow our updated developer guidelines, which you may already be familiar with for other Google apps. In today’s update, a few new sections cover how to:
Prompt Google to index new podcasts as quickly as possible
Generate a direct link to your podcast
Download the Google Podcasts brand assets for sharing on your website
Track analytics that come from Google Podcasts
Promoting inclusive storytelling in podcasting
Podcasting holds unbounded promise as a storytelling medium, but its future depends on a rich array of stories, voices and creators. While there are more podcasts than ever before, there continues to be an imbalance in who is creating them. Looking at top charts, only about a quarter of the most popular podcasts tend to be hosted by women, and even fewer by people of color.
That’s why we’re also partnering with the podcast industry on a program to increase the diversity of voices and remove barriers to podcasting. The program will be guided by an advisory board from around the world, with the primary goal of enabling skills development and experimentation from underrepresented voices, as well as cultivating ideas and processes that can scale throughout the industry. We’ll be rolling out more details this summer, and we encourage you to fill out the online form if you are interested.
The future of Google Podcasts
We couldn’t be more excited to help people around the world discover podcasts they’ll love, and this is just the beginning. Looking forward, Google Podcasts will be a launchpad for building an even better podcast listening experience using AI.
For example, as speech-to-text technology continues to improve, we’ll be able to provide new features like automatic subtitling, which is especially helpful if you are hearing impaired or in a noisy area without headphones. Powered by Google Translate, subtitles can then be made available in a wide variety of languages, further improving access to podcasts.
We’re excited about where we’re heading with Google Podcasts. To try out the new experience today, visit the Play store.
Earlier this year, 30,000 teachers in Oklahoma walked out of their classrooms to protest teacher pay and education budget cuts. The walkout ended after nine days with the teachers’ goals partially met. Vice News talked to 18 Oklahoma teachers about why they’ve decided to quit teaching after this year, essentially making their walkouts permanent.
Eric Weingartner worked two side jobs in addition to his role as a full-time 4th grade teacher to make ends meet. Chemistry teacher Becky Smith’s monthly paycheck rose just $300 in sixteen years. Aimee Elmquist spent her own money to stock her biology classroom. Mary West did the same for high school art.
One of the biggest realizations I’ve had in the past few years is that while Americans talk a lot about the importance of children and education, those things actually are not that important to us. You can see it in how we approach our educational system and you can see it in how we our government uses the abuse of children to attempt to curb immigration with relatively little outcry. You can see it in our governance…the people we elect do what’s best for voters, not for future voters. The enthusiasm of hobbyists and desire of gun companies keep our children attending school in fear. Healthcare costs are soaring and coverage for children isn’t guaranteed. Our parental leave policies, maternity care, and all-around treatment of mothers & women in the workplace lags behind other so-called “developed” countries. Children are a priority for the US? Yeah, no.
I accept this theory as law.
Not what he signed up for...or was it?
Minus no Waluigi, THIS is a roster I can get behind!
