| Thursday, July 31, 2003 |  |
| Who Killed California? | 3 comments |
 31 Jul 2003 @ 22:22Though his facts may or may not be accurate, doesn't this smack of just a bit of racism? Who Killed California? July 30, 2003 By Patrick J. Buchanan With Gov. Gray Davis facing recall, a budget $38 billion in deficit, and a bond rating dropped three notches by Standard & Poor's to near junk-bond status, the lowest of all 50 states, the Golden State is no more. Who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs? Certainly, Davis, who misled voters about the gravity of his budget crisis in 2002, and won re-election by demonizing his GOP rivals, deserves his 20 percent approval rating. But Gray Davis did not kill California. The United States government did. For what killed California as the golden land was massive and unrestricted immigration from the Third World, an unrepelled invasion from Mexico, and a failure to protect the U.S. manufacturing base and the wages of America's workers. During and after World War II, California became a bastion of our defense, aerospace, auto and TV industries. Hundreds of thousands were hired to become the highest-paid manufacturing workers on earth, giving California the world's highest standard of living. The average California wage once stood at 130 percent of the average U.S. wage. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, Japan, a free rider on America's defense, began to engage in predatory trade, attacking and killing, one by one, U.S. industries and capturing U.S. markets with subsidized exports. California suffered first. Our TV industry was wiped out. Our auto industry was reeling when Ronald Reagan stepped in to impose quotas on Japanese cars. Reagan also intervened to save the semiconductor industry, Big Steel and Harley-Davidson. Unlike today's free-trade fanatics, Ronald Reagan put America first. But it was under Bush-Clinton-Bush that California was irrevocably sacrificed to the gods of the Global Economy. During Bush I's term, millions of Mexicans began to flee north to seek jobs and take advantage of the health care, welfare and free education American citizens provided for their people. For one-third of the illegals, California became the destination of choice. What the U.S. government should have done was obvious, and was demanded by Americans: Enforce our immigration laws, halt the invasion, restrict immigration from the Third World. But America's politicians – out of fear of being branded xenophobic and to curry favor with Big Business, which benefits from an endless supply of low-wage labor – did almost nothing to protect America. Californians tried to defend their state. As illegals poured in by the hundreds of thousands yearly, they passed Proposition 187, denying social welfare benefits to illegal aliens who had broken the law and broken into the United States. The open-borders coalition, repudiated and routed, ran to a federal judge, who annulled the voters' victory. Davis then refused to appeal the overturning of 187 to the Supreme Court. Hispanic voters rewarded him in 2002, and California state and local budgets continued to hemorrhage. By the 1990s, an exodus of taxpayers had begun. Fed up with being fleeced to subsidize illegal aliens, Californians began leaving for Nevada, Idaho, Arizona and Colorado. Two million native-born Californians left the state in the 1990s, as immigrants, legal and illegal, sent poverty rates soaring in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties. This, then, is what killed California: First, open borders. By failing to enforce our immigration laws, America now hosts 31 million legal immigrants and their children and 10 million illegals, most of them net tax consumers. California got the lion's share. Second, global free trade and the trade deficits it produced, now running at an annual rate of $562 billion in May. This has killed millions of manufacturing jobs, as thousands of companies closed factories here and shifted plants to Mexico, Asia and China. The Third Worldization of California is now far advanced. Yet those responsible, Bush Republicans as well as Clinton Democrats, still cannot see what they have done to our country. But what is happening in California is not confined to California. It is happening across America. Unless we elect a president who will enforce our immigration laws and defend our borders, unless we find a Congress that will jettison the free-trade madness that is denuding America of her manufacturing, what has happened to California will happen here. President Bush appears oblivious to it all – but then, so did his father before him. More > |
| Rape Law: Yes Can Become No | 1 comment |
 31 Jul 2003 @ 22:07Rape Law: Yes Can Become No (AP) A new rape law in Illinois attempts to clarify the issue of consent by emphasizing that people can change their mind while having sex. Under the law, if someone says "no" at any time the other person must stop or it becomes rape. The National Crime Victim Law Institute said it believed the law is the first of its kind in the country. Lyn Schollett, general counsel for the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said the law was important to make it clear to victims, offenders, prosecutors and juries that people have the right to halt sexual activity at any time. "I think it will empower prosecutors in charging cases where the victim and the offender have a sexual history," she said. But the director of the Victim Advocacy & Research Group in Boston said it would be hard to imagine courts not upholding a woman's right to withdraw consent. "To me, it's demeaning," Wendy Murphy said. "It's like the old saying: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' I don't think it was broke." The law was inspired by a California case involving two 17-year-olds who had sex at a party. The girl changed her mind about having sex, but the boy did not stop immediately. He was charged with rape, and it took years for the courts to decide that he could be found guilty under California law. The California Supreme Court ruled in January that a man can be convicted if a woman first consents but later asks him to stop. Lawmakers said they wanted to avoid the same kind of long legal battle in Illinois. Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed the law Friday but did not announce it until Monday. More > |
| Web Spawns Grid And All Will Change | 0 comments |
 31 Jul 2003 @ 18:56Web Spawns Grid And All Will Change July 4 2003 In two weeks' time scientists in Geneva will throw the switch on the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, scrawled "www" on a blackboard in 1989. They will announce that 10 laboratories around the world can now talk to each other through their computers. In the age of high-speed digital communication, this may not seem revolutionary. But this small step for computerkind marks the launch of a new technological concept - the next generation of the web. It is called the grid, and scientists say that before long it will change everything we do, from scientific research to business to tackling fires to booking holidays, and even to the way we watch and craft movies. The internet now consists of huge servers that contain information on web pages that is then downloaded on to computers. As a user, you are limited in what you can do with that information by how much memory or processing power your own computer has. Under the grid, the power of your machine - all those gigabytes, RAM and gigahertz - will become irrelevant. No matter how primitive and cheap your computer, you will have access to more power than now exists in the Pentagon. "You just say I want this information and the [grid] is set up so that it goes out and collects that for you and makes it accessible," said Roger Cashmore, director of research at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, near Geneva. The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. Users will be able to use the programs, processing power or the storage they need as if it all existed on their own computer. And it is seamless - a user could be sitting tapping into a handheld computer on a train in England, using an application on a computer in the United States and storing files in Thailand and still have unlimited computer power. It will be a while before the grid has any impact on everyday lives. Like the web, the grid is being developed to help scientific research into particle physics at CERN. Like the electrical grid, which gives the system its name, the computing power will become available on demand. But it is about more than particle physics. The handheld computer, connected by mobile phone to the internet, would become a supercomputer. Movies could be edited and watched on it. It could access a word processor stored on a computer somewhere in cyberspace. It took eight years for the internet to catch on, said Bob Jones, a grid project manager who was at CERN when the web was invented. This time, governments and scientists are already on board, so the results will be seen a lot sooner. "It'll be like the web," Mr Jones said. "When you have it you'll wonder how you ever got by without it." |
| AT & T Press Release | 0 comments |
 31 Jul 2003 @ 18:42In 1936 H.W. Dudley, a Bell Labs scientist, invented the first electronic speech synthesizer. Since that time AT&T Labs has been at the forefront in developing this technology. In 2001, AT&T unveiled the most advanced synthetic speech system to date, AT&T Natural Voices™. At the heart of this technology is the AT&T Natural Voices Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine, and this engine supports a library of multilingual male and female voice fonts in languages including U.S. English, Latin American Spanish, German, U.K. English, Parisian French and Canadian French (and this list will continues to grow). Also unique to AT&T Natural Voices are custom voice icons, exclusive voices that will provide a fast and effective way for businesses to extend corporate image, brand and personality. AT&T Natural Voices' TTS technology is the key to giving voice-a pleasant, natural and crystal clear voice-to a new generation of AT&T managed business services. Integrated with other AT&T Labs speech technologies-including speech recognition, natural language understanding, and dialog management-Natural Voices is "Closest to the customer?s ear™," providing human-like speech output capabilities that will help accelerate the use of speech technologies in automated customer interaction systems. Although not sold as a stand-alone product, AT&T Natural Voices has been licensed by companies and organizations seeking to make the Web accessible to visually and physically impaired users. Natural Voices is used by Freedom Box, a conversational Web interface that tells users the choices they have and describes exactly what is available on a Web page. Other text reading programs using Natural Voices include NextUp's TextAloud, and ReadPlease. |
| Voice Cloning - Software | 2 comments |
 31 Jul 2003 @ 18:39Voice Cloning - Software Recreates Voices Of Living & Dead By Lisa Guernsey New York Times AT&T Labs will start selling speech software that it says is so good at reproducing the sounds, inflections and intonations of a human voice that it can re-create voices and even bring the voices of long-dead celebrities back to life. The software, which turns printed text into synthesized speech, makes it possible for a company to use recordings of a person's voice to utter new things that the person never said. The software, called Natural Voices, is not flawless -- its utterances still contain a few robotic tones and unnatural inflections -- and competitors question whether the software is a substantial step up from existing products. But some of those who have tested the technology say it is the first text-to-speech software to raise the specter of voice cloning, replicating a person's voice so perfectly that the human ear cannot tell the difference. ``If ABC wanted to use Regis Philbin's voice for all of its automated customer-service calls, it could,'' said Lawrence R. Rabiner, vice president for AT&T Labs Research. Potential customers for the software, which is priced in the thousands of dollars, include telephone call centers, companies that make software that reads digital files aloud and makers of automated voice devices. James R. Fruchterman, the chief executive of Benetech, a non-profit organization that uses technology in social-service projects, tested the software along with a dozen people who evaluate technology for blind people, and they said they were impressed. ``Natural Voices gets into the gray area,'' he said, ``where there is plausible deniability that it is a machine.'' Rabiner said he is excited about the possibility of resurrecting renowned voices, like that of Harry Caray, the Chicago Cubs announcer who delivered rousing play-by-play broadcasts. ``There are probably hours of recordings in archives,'' he said. Wouldn't it be great, he asked, if Harry Caray's voice could once again be broadcasting in Wrigley Field? Ownership issues The technology raises several questions. Who, for example, owns the rights to a celebrity's voice? Rabiner predicted that new contracts will be drawn that include voice-licensing clauses. With computer-generated characters already appearing in place of real ones in some movies, will computer-synthesized voices compete with those of live actors as well? And although scientists say the technology is not yet good enough to perpetrate fraud, synthesized voices may eventually be capable of tricking people into thinking that they were getting phone calls from people they know. For now, technical limitations may temper any worries that a person's voice could be lifted without permission. To build the software that re-creates unique voices -- which AT&T Labs is calling its ``custom voice'' product -- a person must first go to a studio where engineers record 10 hours to 40 hours of readings. Texts range from business news reports to nonsense babble. The recordings are then chopped into fragments of sounds and sorted into databases. When the software processes a text, it retrieves the sounds and re-assembles them to form new sentences. Gains in synthetic speech In the case of long-dead celebrities, archival recordings could be used in the same way. Other companies and research centers, like IBM Research and Lernout and Hauspie, are also experimenting with this technique -- which is called concatenative speech synthesis -- to improve the quality of text-to-speech software. It is a big step up, engineers say, from the speech engines that were built from whole words that had been pre-recorded. And it is also a vast improvement, some say, from the entirely computer-generated and therefore robotic sounds that are used in many versions of text-to-speech software on the market today. Now aided by the declining cost and increasing speed of microprocessors, far smoother sentences are possible, Rabiner said. He said that the speech team at AT&T Labs, led by Juergen Schroeter, an expert in speech synthesis, had created a more refined form of the concatenative technique by breaking a person's voice into ``the smallest number of units possible.'' A demonstration of the technology will be available on the Web beginning today at www.naturalvoices.att.com, said Michael Dickman, a spokesman for AT&T Labs. Still, many engineers are skeptical of claims of a completely simulated voice that is almost indistinguishable from that of a human. Now the pressure is on to perfect the technology. Analysts at McKinsey & Co. have predicted that the market for text-to-speech software will reach more than $1 billion in the next five years. In addition to customers like call centers and manufacturers of automated voice systems, the software could also be used by publishers of video games and books-on-tape and automobile manufacturers whose cars are equipped with software that gives driving directions. In the near future, engineers have said they expect people will want high-end speech technology that enables them to interact at length with their cell phones and Palm organizers, instead of typing on and squintingat a tiny screen. Read on... More > |