Tag: podcasts

2023.08.09 – media_log

  • August 9, 2023
  • August 10, 2023

media_log is a collection of media that I’ve consumed throughout the day – not in bite-size, headline-only, hot-take form as per social media, but actually reading the article and having a thought. Since taking the social media apps off my phone, I’m being more intentional with how I spend my attention.

Why Televising the Trump Trial Is a Bad Idea
I think it’s important that Nick Akerman compared it immediately to a Mafia trial. And I think he’s right. I think anybody that calls for this child to be televised it’s just looking for ratings, a cash cow, and not thinking about the integrity of the process.

A boy on the autism spectrum struggled with a haircut. His barber saved the day
I love this story! And I am also glad Ree was able to get a diagnosis for her son, Jackson. There’s a history of autism being ignored in Black children. I hope she also has the support she needs

Author Charlotte Ng @pronounced_ing on the Prosecraft situation:
“I hate to break it to anyone thinking of paying for this kind of service, but there’s a limit to what data can teach you about writing. It’s hard to make it in the writing world! But you get better at it by reading & writing & thinking more. Not by faux data analysis.”
I feel like one of the worst lessons being learned by new writers (and it comes from traditional and self-pub marketing) is that the way to write is by gaming the market. That may be the way to sell, but it ain’t the way to write.

The Supreme Court just handed gun groups a rare defeat
The only point of allowing this is for bud-bros who beat their families to be able to buy more guns. Fuck every maker of these killing kits.

Billy Porter says he had to sell his house because of the strikes, offers a “**** you” to Bob Iger Billy Porter has done the work and should be paid fairly. Exploitative, tabloid media makes you think all actors and artists are rich. They are mostly not.

One Froggy Evening – the birth of Michigan J. Frog via @TSting18

Hidden Brain podcast – You 2.0 How to Break Out of a Rut
Turns out that the middle of things is tough. But if you can set some markers and smaller goals, you can make it through.

5-4 podcast – Harisiades v. Shaughnessy
A case that reminds us that the rights in the U.S. Constitution also apply to non-citizen, legal residents…until they don’t.

Smile when you say that

  • November 20, 2022

Thanks to the If Books Could Kill podcast and its co-host, Peter Shamshiri, I started listening to 5-4 — “a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks” which Peter also co-hosts. It’s good, infuriating, and informative. But handing you a new podcast to listen to is not why I’ve asked you here.

There is a promotion at the half-way point for a newsletter — Balls and Strikes — that another co-host, Michael Morbius, narrates. They seem to run it each episode and I’ve started noticing something. Actually, I’ve noticed that I’ve noticed something. It’s a bit meta.

I’m getting there.

At one point as he speaks I could tell that he starts smiling. The change is clear but undescribable. I don’t know why my brain has picked up on this. Less so, do I know why he’s smiling. So I went to the Internet, as I do, to find out why my brain does what it does.

My first stop was this article in Discover Magazine that showcases a study suggesting that if you can sense a smile in a voice you’re hearing, and not someone you can see, you tend to smile back. The article and the study it links to–well done, consumer science journalism–discuss the lack of research on what constitutes this auditory smile. Checking the paper’s sources, I ended up here: “The vocal communication of different types of smile” in Speech Communication. The study is from 2008 and I’m not sure if I’m going to see what builds upon this research. But I was still curious to see who else out there was wondering, “did I just hear you smile?”

Then I got here:

“Smiling voices maintain [increased trust] even in the face of behavioral evidence of untrustworthiness.” (1)

…and here:

“We present an experiment in which participants played a trust game with a virtual agent that expressed emotion through its voice, in a manner congruent or incongruent with its behavior.” (1)

…and here:

“Using an investment game paradigm, we found that positive vocal emotional expression – smiling voice – increases participants’ implicit trust attributions to virtual agents, compared with when agents speak with an emotionally neutral voice. As previously observed, the monetary returns of the agent also affected implicit trust, so that participants invested more money in the agent that was behaving generously.”(1)

And this is the point where I’ve saved the citation in Paperpile, sat back with my arms folded and leaned over to look down into the murky depths of this rabbit hole. I still don’t know what stimuli my brain is picking up that translates into “smile” after Michael says “Supreme Court sucks”, but I can pick up the danger of being able to simulate this in such a way that creates trust between yourself and stranger on the phone.

This is more than just Cash Green’s white voice in Sorry to Bother You, this is the “right voice,” the one that flicks an unknown switch in your head and you picture a reassuring smile. The “right voice” is built upon the research that pull the secrets out of our brains and tools them for algorithmic benefit. The “right voice” won’t just relieve people of their hard-earned money, it will lead them astray, down paths not yet cut.

What do I do? This digression has made me thoughtful. Sigh.

(1) Torre, Ilaria, et al. “If Your Device Could Smile: People Trust Happy-Sounding Artificial Agents More.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 105, Apr. 2020, p. 106215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106215

Looking forward to the “Outliers” episode (there will be one, right?)

  • November 9, 2022

This is classic economics-guy thing, where they act like the narratives that they map onto the data, are themselves just as infallible as the data…The idea that there is always something hidden, right, seems to be lurking here…

Peter Shamshiri, “Freakonomics,” If Books Could Kill

I’ve read enough college composition history to know that there is a long stretch of time in the academy where the English department wanted to be more quantifiable, like the sciences, to justify their importance. This quote reminds me that economics is a pseudoscience with a desire to do the type of interpretation with data that we usually reserve for fiction.

Also, great new podcast: If Books Could Kill podcast with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri