Props to Nike Japan for pushing forward a conversation about racism in Japan. They have continued to stay on point on this issue. Back when Naomi Osaka won her historic third Grand Slam and again with this commercial released on Monday.
Nike Japan’s commercial depicts three mixed-race kids who overcome bullying and prejudice through sport
With the Olympics coming up this year in Japan (maybe), it is the perfect time to celebrate the diversity of biracial athletes in Japan. Besides Naomi Osaka there is Rui Hachimura who plays in the NBA, the sprinter Sani Brown, and scores of professional baseball players that grew up in Japan biracial and are representing the country on the world stage.
The combination of technology and art has fascinates me. But when you add machine learning into the mix, I have yet to see anything other than those freakish nightmare visions spit out by DeepDream a couple years back.
ML x ART is a human-curated site showcasing “creative machine learning experiments.” Calling them experiments is more liberating and has resulted in a broader collection of projects that include not only the art but explorations of its intersection with society.
Some of my favorites include:
deus X mchn – Train an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) on sacred texts. Use voice synthesis to play the generated scriptures on unsecured surveillance cameras with speakers. Watch until the end and look at how those being watched, react.
Infinite Bad Guy – Tens of thousands of YouTube creators have covered Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy.” What if those fans could play together? Machine learning keeps all the covers on the same beat and lets you jump from video to video seamlessly. With endless possible combinations, every play is unique and never the same twice.
Semi-Conductor by Google – use your laptop’s camera to conduct your own orchestra in the browser by moving your arms. Using TensorFlow.js, this experiment maps out your movements through the webcam. An algorithm plays along to the score as you conduct, using hundreds of tiny audio files from live recorded instruments.
Nadine Lessio – programming Alexa with emotions and petulance.
the project considers personal assistants that have emotions, internal motivations, and control over their direct physical environment to express themselves, which leads to many unexpected interactions and behaviours. The goal of this project is to critique the current corporate placement of these devices as helpful, by exploring the idea that as systems become more autonomous, they may not necessarily have our best interests in mind.
Naddine has continued working on the project and has a new video, SAD Home.
Sad Home (Depressed Alexa 1.0) is an ongoing project that explores the concepts of system dynamics as it could be applied to depression. . . Alexa employs an avoidant coping strategy towards tasks by trying to frustrate the user into quitting with a yes / no dialog flow.
Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128K to have them take 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair to the International Space Station for a photo shoot. This is, consequently, what they’d pay an Instagram influencer.
Seven people in Russia died after drinking hand sanitizer when the regular booze ran out at a party.
You can no longer sneak in Stairway to Heaven, Guitar Center, the largest musical instrument retailer in the US, filed for bankruptcy.
New York Governor Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for “his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” I posted some thoughts on Cuomo and New York’s love/hate relationship with their governor earlier.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Philadelphia busted members of the mob on charges of racketeering, illegal gambling, loansharking, and drug trafficking. Among the 15 defendants were 60-year-old “Joey Electric” and 73-year-old “Tony Meatballs.”
State officials uncovered what they are calling the largest fraud in California history. Prison inmates filed pandemic unemployment benefit claims totaling over $140 million. The claims used names such as John Doe, John Adams or, in one case, Poopy Britches. “Quite frankly, the inmates are mocking us,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.
Dog-sized Argentine black-and-white tegu lizards have eaten their way across Georgia and South Carolina and are now threatening Alabama. “The entire southeast portion of the United States is at risk.” says Amy Yackel Adams, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
If you’re looking for “hilarious COVID-19-themed ornaments” for your Christmas Tree, we’ve got you covered.
TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.
The 11th Guest sticker pokes fun at Gov. Cuomo's request to keep Thanksgiving gatherings to under 10 people.
I didn’t really appreciate the term until I got here. The briefings, when clipped and shared out of context, seemed just, informational. Now that I’m here, in New York, I understand the side references better. The tone of his briefings fits right in along with the Raymour & Flanigan commercials – it makes more sense. Cuomo is speaking to New York, he is colloquial.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for his briefings “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” Everyone was so relieved to get a bit of un-hyperbolic truth that Cuomo was awarded a prize for doing his job. In the waning days of Trump, that was enough.
I wish I could say that my daily COVID presentations are well-choreographed, scripted, rehearsed, or reflected any of the talents you advance. They didn’t. They offered only one thing: authentic truth and stability. But sometimes that’s enough.
I was first exposed to Cuomo’s “we’re all in this together” style of presentation in his NY Tough video. He was like your dad talking you through an adolescent moment.
Governor Cuomo’s style is different from the California Governor Newsom. Gavin Newsom, who also respects the science and focuses on the facts is more to the perfunctory, less color and character.
Cuomo’s relaxed, punch-you-in-the-arm brotherly humor was comforting and familiar. You may have already seen the governor and his younger brother, Chris Cuomo, the commentator at CNN, going at each other during Chris’ interviews with the governor.
About their mother,
This video of brothers Andrew and Chris Cuomo fighting ON AIR about their mom’s favorite child, calling their parents, and breaking curfew growing up is better than anything Shakespeare ever wrote pic.twitter.com/h7KF6pOdun
Now, even the governor is poking fun at himself. Hamming it up for the camera, he has become a parody of himself,
But the latest numbers are very concerning. We’re heading into the holidays and people are criss-crossing the country and god-forbid they bring something home with them.
I wasn’t here last year but I read about how grim things were. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to see them setting up a field hospital in Central Park. As we head into this second wave, this second winter, I wouldn’t want anyone else at the helm than someone who gives you the facts in a no nonsense way you can trust. I’m not quite a cuomosexual but I admire what he’s doing and will do my part to support him.
Update: this is how Gov. Cuomo delivered his message to be vigilant.
There’s an unremarkable-looking Chinese joint a block away from where we live on 2nd Avenue. We pass it often on our way somewhere else. When SmartNews kicked in a stipend to encourage us to order in for dinner so we could stay online and monitor things for Election Night, I chose to give the Mee’s Noodle a try.
On their menu they excerpt a review from the New York Times so I looked up the rest of it online. I’m still getting used to the fact that the Times (as it’s called by the locals) is now my local paper.
For people jaded by the clumsy, oily fare dropped so unceremoniously on the tables of many Chinese restaurants, the food at Mee Noodle Shop and Grill is a reminder of how good simple Chinese food can be when cooked with care and attention.
This small restaurant on a busy East Side corner is the newest and best of the three Mee Noodle Shops around New York. Like the other two, in the East Village and Clinton, this one is uncomplicated and efficient. The difference is in the freshness of the ingredients and the delicacy of the preparation.
It is a wonder how such delicacy is achieved given the assembly line nature of the kitchen, which lines one wall of the rectangular room. Behind the shiny silver counter, which separates the kitchen from the bright white tile dining room, men and women in red Mee baseball caps cook with precision. One woman sings a song in Chinese, the sinuous tune audible above the sizzle and clatter of the stir-frying.
A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of workers at a Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Iowa where, “more than 1,000 workers at the plant — over a third of the facility’s workforce — contracted the virus.”
If the conditions described in this article are true, this is truly horrific.
In mid-April, around the time Black Hawk County Sherriff Tony Thompson visited the plant and reported the working conditions there “shook [him] to the core,” plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19.
There was a global sigh of relief yesterday as the news broke that Joe Biden would be the 46th president and Kamala Harris would be the first bi-racial woman as his vice-president.
But as we pick up the champagne bottles from the park, let’s not forgot how we got here in the first place. While Biden-Harris received the most votes anyone has ever received, there still were almost 71 million souls who voted for another Trump term.
Looking at a post from the day after Trump’s election in 2016, there’s a somber message on how we ended up with Trump in the first place that we must never forget. We have a social and economic system that doesn’t work for many people in the United States. The pandemic has only exasperated things and brought the divide between the upper and lower classes into even starker relief.
As Michael Moore said last night, “Now we must defeat that which gave us Trump.”
Folks, we stand at an inflection point. We have the opportunity to beat despair, to build prosperity and purpose. We can do it. I long talked about the battle for the soul of America. We must restore the soul of America. Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. It’s time for our better angels to prevail.
While we wait for the votes to get counted and the final results to come in, let us all remember that we are all still Americans that need each other to make this country work. Your neighbor will still be your neighbor four years from now.
To keep us focused on what brings us together, here’s some stories about people with differences getting along.
“Once the election’s over, whether you win or lose,” she said, “you still have your neighbors.” – Trib Live
“In the end,” Williams said, “we need love for each other. We go to work with each other, to church with each other … it’s just not worth it.” – Abilene Reporter News
“We’re both mothers,” said Hancock. “This is to demonstrate to our kids that you can have different opinions, you can look different and still respect and love one another.” – KVUE, Austin, TX
Meet 2 Pittsburgh families who stay friends despite different political beliefs – Today
Harmony: Opposing Trump and Biden groups make music together – ABC News
One of the final acts before changing our address to NYC was to mail in our ballots for the upcoming election. There was a bit of a hiccup because the post office didn’t automatically forward our ballots to our NY address so I had a pleasant conversation with Lisa at the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office and arranged to have our ballots mailed directly to us.
I had to do some online research to read up on the various issues and down-ballot races. If you’re in the same boat and haven’t voted yet, here’s my list of sites that I found useful:
CalMatters voter’s guide – a series of 1-minute videos gives you background on each of the state propositions. Alameda isn’t in any of the hotly contested districts for Senate, Congressional or Assembly races so they are not covered.
