Four short links: 14 July 2017
Molecular Sensing, Faking Speech, Radical Technologies, and Bullshit Detection
- Scio — handheld molecular sensing for $300.
- AI Can Fake Speech (IEEE) — The research team had a neural net analyze millions of frames of video to determine how elements of Obama’s face moved as he talked, such as his lips and teeth and wrinkles around his mouth and chin. […] In the new study, the neural net learned what mouth shapes were linked to various sounds. The researchers took audio clips and dubbed them over the original sound files of a video. They next took mouth shapes that matched the new audio clips and grafted and blended them onto the video. Essentially, the researchers synthesized videos where Obama lip-synched words he said up to decades beforehand.
- Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (Adam Greenfield) — none of our instincts will guide us in our approach to the next normal. If we want to understand the radical technologies all around us, and see just how they interact to produce the condition we recognize as everyday life, we’ll need a manual. That is the project of this book.
- Introductory Bullshit Detection for Non-Technical Managers — “I’m creating a framework to…” It means: I’m not interested in solving the actual problem, so I’m going to create something else so that the person who actually will solve the problem has to also fix the problems in my stuff on top of that.
