Back to share it's all coming up after this. From n.p.r. News in Washington Joel Snyder head of the Thanksgiving holiday vice president Pence's visiting u.s. Troops in Iraq he arrived there today on an unannounced visit N.P.R.'s Are you sure Roscoe's traveling with him vice president his trip to Iraq was kept under wraps for security purposes he stopped at the Al Assad Air Base at the base been spoke by phone with Iraq's prime minister Adel Abdul mocked Dean his later served Thanksgiving meals to the troops he thanked them for 7 their country far from home for the holidays I Surat go in p.r. News traveling with the vice president or the president trumps high profile supporters facing allegations that he met with Ukraine's former top prosecutor about a besa getting Joe Biden and his son Hunter an attorney for the Aparna Sen indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani says Parness is willing to speak to Congress about the meetings Congressman Devin Nunes had in Vienna last year the Daily Beast 1st reported on the beatings earlier this week known as is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee which wrapped up public testimony this week a trickle of protesters emerging from a Hong Kong University under siege N.P.R.'s Emily filing reports an unknown number remain trapped on campus after a dramatic standoff with police it began nearly a week ago police have said that those who give themselves up peacefully will face impartial legal treatment but an estimated dozens have refused to leave Hong Kong Polytechnic University the Red Cross has described conditions inside as a quote humanitarian crisis the standoff began after hundreds of protesters rushed to the campus Sunday shutting down a major tunnel nearby that still remains closed as the standoff appears to be winding down Hong Kong voters are preparing to go to the polls tomorrow and elections for district council seats a man claiming to be a former Chinese spy who is seeking asylum in Australia alleges there are Chinese intelligence operations in Hong Kong Taiwan and Australia the B.B.C.'s Phil Mercer has more used papers they're reporting Mr Wang is in hiding in Sydney after providing us warm statement to Australia's. The mystic spy agency he alleges that they has infiltrated Hong Kong's pro-democracy movements meddled in Taiwan's elections and interfered in Australia's internal affairs a senior official has reportedly said the challenge for security agencies in Canberra is to separate fact from fiction to Britain now where the opposition Labor Party leaders held a campaign rally outside an Amazon Depot to highlight the party's pledge to rein in companies that accuses of dodging taxes and cheating workers Vicki Barker is in London Jeremy carbon is accusing multinationals like Amazon of acting as if the rules we all live by don't apply to them he vowed that a Labor led government would collect an additional $8000000000.00 in corporate taxes by 2024 Amazon insists it's already invested $23000000000.00 in u.k. Jobs and infrastructure since 2010 and you're listening to n.p.r. News Amazon is challenging a decision by the Pentagon to award a lucrative contract to rival Microsoft and is on says it is suing the Defense Department filing a legal complaint with the u.s. Court of Federal Claims and was on have been considered the favorite to win the $10000000000.00 cloud computing contract but it was awarded Microsoft after President Trump said he wanted the Pentagon to take a closer look at the deal Amazon has said there was a mistake about bias and political influence on the part of the government defense secretary Mark esper rejected suggestions of bias last week. The World Anti Doping Agency is recommending that Russia be declared non compliant with anti doping rules N.P.R.'s Tom Goldman reports the announcement could lead to yet another Russian Olympic ban at next year's Summer Games in Tokyo Russia's Anti Doping Agency risotto was declared non-compliant before in 2015 the country's drug testing lab was closed amidst revelations about a widespread state sponsored doping system risotto was reinstated in 2018 it was required to turn over data and samples for further drug testing 2 months ago want to found evidence some of the data was manipulated the want to executive committee meets December 9th to discuss the new noncompliance recommendation Russia could face a limpet ban next year as it did at the last 2 games in 2018 Russian athletes who proved to be drug free competed under a neutral Olympic flag and were not allowed to play the Russian anthem Tom Goldman n.p.r. News and I'm Joel Snyder n.p.r. News from Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from n.p.r. Stations other contributors include f j c a foundation of donor advised Barnes working to maximize the Empacher of charitable giving and to create customized philanthropic solutions learn more at after c dot org and the n.e.a. Casey Foundation. From w. N.y.c. In New York this is on the media Garfield is out this week Gladstone and hears e.u. Embassador Gordon Sunderland famously repeating everyone was in the loop was there a quid pro quo the answer is yes everyone was in the loop he spoke at the impeachment inquiry this week over which Democrat Adam Schiff presided serving up an evidence based narrative countered by Republican Devin newness is unfounded one I make his assessment on facts available to all and here's Ukraine diplomat David Ho the 3 priorities of security economy and justice and our support for Ukrainian Democratic resistance to Russian aggression became overshadowed by a political agenda promoted by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a Qadri of officials operating with a direct channel to the White House and former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a company against a country and the perhaps somehow for some reason Ukraine does this is a fictional Navas if this is being perpetrated isn't propagated by the Russian security services themselves the so-called legacy media has sought testimony confirmed by many a quid pro quo for personal gain what's there trumps defenders had nothing to. Fox News commentator Jesse Watters the hoax is over I mean you guys tried you failed you didn't have one witness to testify the trial directed a quid pro quo involving military aid not one Fox News host Sean Hannity this was the day the Democrats Trump Ukraine quid pro quo who impeached for an attempt and hoax officially died the odd thing about this entire affair is. We've known the truth about the president in the Ukraine almost from the very beginning I mean he said on the White House lawn to reporters that he did it that's David Roberts who covers energy and politics for vox who set out to answer the eternal question how can the president's defenders on Capitol Hill and on Fox News and such like media keep denying the obvious keep repeating narratives and timelines an outright b.s. That is continually definitively debunked. And p.b.s. Newshour Marist poll published earlier this week found that 2 thirds of Americans say nothing they hear in the impeachment inquiry would cause them to change their minds about whether Trump ought to be impeached David Roberts called this a pivotal moment in our epistemic crisis meaning the crisis in how we acquire knowledge right the crisis in how we come to know things how we learn things what we count as true who we trust and by the crisis I just mean we're sort of splitting into 2 worlds not just 2 different sets of values or priorities or sort of visions for the country but 2 different fact sets and you get people dug in to where they're saying things to pollsters like look I picked my side I don't care what anyone says anymore the Democrats have the field they have the talent they have the facts they have the format but you argue that it is very much in doubt that they could win by any sort of objective standard if there were a referee the referee would have stepped in and said this is over you guys have established your case but it is the lack of referees that is precisely the problem you would have to have a referee whose word is respected by both sides of the contest and that's what we don't have anymore so one side is referees can say hey we think it's over and obvious and the other side's referees going to say no we refuse to acknowledge it and in that circumstance there's just no way to finish the game so you argued in a piece last weekend on Vioxx that this moment is defined by tribal a pistol mileage easy and that it's kind of like tribal morality right so it's tribal morality I think is is something people are more familiar with it's when you decide the welfare of my tribe my group. Takes precedence over principles so for instance in the mid 2000 we had a big national debate about torture and the sort of 2 sides one was seeing note don't torture is a principle it applies to everyone right us and them but the other side was saying look no we're good people we're on the side of right so if we torture it's Ok because our tribe is good so what we do is good and tribal epistemology is just the same thing you put your tribal interests ahead of sort of it piston logical principles of evidence and self correction and self criticism and peer review all the sort of mechanisms we have for determining truth you just put your tribe's interests ahead of those so you end up saying we're going to believe whatever is useful for us in the moment to believe. I was thinking about the execs in by the president of members of the tribe for betrayal and as you might put it up a stomach transgressions Yes For example we have a tape of Representative Jim Himes questioning Jennifer Williams On Tuesday she worked for pants she also worked for Obama and the Bush administration before that and for the Bush Cheney reelection campaign is Williams on Sunday the president personally targeted you in a tweet it reads tell Jennifer Williams whoever that is to read both transcripts of the presidential calls and see the just released statement from Ukraine then she should meet with the other never trampers who I don't know and mostly never even heard of and work out a better presidential attack 2 things are notable about that as you say the entire weight of her experience in previous commitments when she crossed the tribe it was tissue paper admit nothing and secondly trying to sort of like exacerbated all this in the sense that his behavior is so erratic and his sort of assertions are sort of changing day by day so there's no way to even kind of pretend anymore that you're basing your defense of him on principles he makes that impossible so if you want to be a member of the tribe in good standing you have to go along with all of Trump's veering back and forth the fact that Mike Pence did nothing to step up in her shows that he knows the game like well if this is the way Trump veered today oh well I got I'm following him come what may people generally are too busy to pay close attention to politics they pay attention to fragments and they use shorthand and I wanted you to talk about those heuristics I think is perfectly normal and it's not in any way derogatory to say that most people just sort of see headlines. Here and there watch the nightly news occasionally the scroll past it on Facebook and so they have to use heuristics or nuts and one heuristic that's very strong in all people I think is this sense that if something is valid if it makes sense it will command at least some agreement from both sides of a controversy right if you can get consensus it's a signal of legitimacy to take an example if we see a Republican come forward and say something's wrong with this behavior the Trump did we sort of Granted a little bit more weight but the problem is what Mitch McConnell the Senate Republican leader figured out when Obama was elected it's fully in my power to just give him consensus and agreement across party lines on nothing the voting public won't understand the mechanisms of Washington well enough to know that it's me doing it they just look up and see the president and they say gosh everything Obama does just causes a big fight so if the public is just grumpy and disgusted and tuned out because the whole thing seems like a ridiculous squabble that never ends that is absolutely to the Republicans benefit our base will fight alongside us every step of the way and this sort of owning gauged middle is going to see this mess and just tune out so when we talk about Trump's base we're talking about under a quarter of registered voters but what's going on in the hill now isn't about them they're already on board this is about that 30 percent according to the n.p.r. P.b.s. Mare's poll that says their minds are still open to information coming to light in the hearings so what are the president's defenders need this 30 percent of us to do or not do as I said the way to make people. Dismissed something is just to make it look partisan which is why they keep attacking the process itself and what they want is for that 30 percent to look at this spectacle and say oh it's just more of this I don't care I'm going to tune out if that's what they want and need is for nothing to break through to that fuzzy middle I also think that there's this effort to make these proceedings in comprehensible Yes well it's just the starkest dichotomy is you're watching now of these sort of somber Democrats asking factual questions in the newness coming in with these sort of random conspiracy theories that if you aren't closely following Fox in the kind of right wing bubble you wouldn't even recognize what he's referring to like Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people who they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump believe me you don't need to know but it's like there's this whole menagerie of conspiracy theories that you won't even know what they are unless you're in that bubble and those are the people that Republicans are speaking to so if you're just a member of the general public they're literally not going to make sense to you we saw a perfect example of this on Tuesday when Nunez said this Well master Mr Morris and I have some bad news for you t.v. Ratings are way down way down I don't I don't hold it personally I don't think it's you guys. Whatever drug deal the Democrats are cooking up here on the. American people are by what's amazing about that to me is it shows that Trump's mentality is infusing the party now to someone like me or you who cares what are the facts of the case whether or not it's getting good ratings seems very obviously irrelevant but if there is no such thing as truth if there's only one. Sides truth in the other side's truth then the performance of the argument is the only thing and so to noon is the fact that the Democrats performance isn't drawing ratings is entirely relevant in his mind there is nothing but competing performances going on here. You wrote that Democrats are attempting to do something that arguably nothing since the $911.00 attacks has done unite Americans in a clear understanding of a threat and a clear will to action and you wrote that at this point it seems entirely possible that it won't happen so what then. Was the whole I want to predict that it's going to fall apart because you can't operate a movement in a country based on fantasies but on the flip side I kind of thought that a long time ago and sort of defied gravity sort of the other way you know the other way things can go as if this sort of cultish increasingly authoritarian movement takes over the country and in Russia and Turkey and Poland it's a disturbingly longer and longer list we see the countries that we thought were democracies devolve into this in the us so much has happened in the last few years that we thought would never happen I think we should really loosen up our imaginations as to what can happen when a movement that is convinced that everything it knows and loves is in danger of falling apart a movement that thinking like that unconnected any more to facts or reality and got its hands on the power of the federal government is the basic recipe for democracies falling apart. Hannah once said no matter how large the tissue of falshood that inexperience lie has to offer it will never be large enough to cover the immensity of actuality. But I guess she never reckoned with cable news and the Internet. I mean she didn't know about Facebook I mean this is how these things work right like historians are going to look back and they're going to say whoa that was an unpleasant and ridiculous episode and there's going to be you know sort of hearings that we write ourselves eventually it seems like but it would be nice if for once when we were in the middle of one of these episodes we could just stop it while it's happening you have to think what could intervene in stop what looks like a spiral toward a really grim conclusion and that's going to my impulse in writing the column is just sort of smack people upside the head and get them to start thinking like these are not normal times what would be sufficient to break through this frozen partisan drift toward collapse and I really feel like the general public needs to get engaged here because there's a real dangers lurking around every corner here David thank you very much thank you Brooke David Roberts writes about energy and politics from. Coming out how algorithms deep in our dangerous misconceptions about how the world where if I had to define success for myself that's one thing but if Facebook is defining success for me I don't trust the good times this is on the media. On the Media is supported by Progressive insurance providing tools designed to help customers consider options for multiple insurers comparisons available at progressive dot com or 1800 progressive Now that's progressive and by constant contact their automation features automatically send welcome and birthday emails as well as auto responders when users taken action more at constant contact dot com. This is on the media stone so obviously politics has divided us into 2 camps where we don't share any facts but numbers there on the salable right troll well to continue on the path we began this hour about how we fool ourselves for fun and profit let's talk tax one to predict who's going to default on a loan or committed a crime or wash out of work we've got an algorithm for that mostly they stink but now they're taking over algorithms are replacing human advisors and brokers are military there is an algorithm in there Skynet program to the side of being on the terrorism kill list families being used to everything from diagnosing illnesses to helping police predict climate hotspots. Kathy O'Neill is a mathematician data scientist and investigative journalist she founded the consulting firm o. r C a a Orca which audits algorithms for racial gender economic inequality and all around bad science she loves map she used to be a Wall Street but something about the financial meltdown of 2008 turned her off the use of algorithms for the purposes a prediction something about how no one actually checked to see if they really worked and what happens when they don't and even when they do she is the. Author of weapons of mass destruction how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy I started with the basics let's now go rhythm is just a set of directions long division that you learn in 4th grade as an algorithm I use the word algorithm it's short for predictive algorithm and that's a way of predicting the future based on the past and we use the training data that is all around us when you say training data the information we've collected from the past like it's memories they are used to select to whom to give or deny Alona That's right who gets hired and who doesn't who goes to prison for how long there are algorithms and there are weapons of mass destruction what's the difference most algorithms are totally benign like I could build an algorithm in my basement on my computer I could be trying to predict the stock market and nobody uses it it doesn't matter so I guess the shorthand version is algorithms that are important that are destructive and that are secret that's the weapon of mass destruction let's talk about some algorithms that you note in your book that are maybe one of those things but not the others for instance sports algorithms predicting how teams or players may behave fed data that actually reflect the behavior that they're trying to predict they are regularly updated and though they are widely used you wouldn't regard them as a weapon of mass destruction correct so they're very important in the sense that there's a lot of money behind them and people really care if they're right or wrong but if they make a mistake that gets learned so if we don't trade for a player and they go to another team and do really well the algorithm learns that they made a mistake and that's often not the case for weapons of mass destruction but the real thing that distinguishes that is that it doesn't reek havoc can you give me an example of using proxies you can't actually use the real thing like an apple. It's behavior and that's righ you have to use something that might be an indicator of something else that's a proxy that characterizes a lot of your w m d Absolutely and me an example of that well the most pernicious example of that is in my opinion the predictive policing or the crime risk or as a recidivism risk or as a place in Los Angeles or trying to predict the future we know where crime happened yesterday but where is it going to happen tomorrow in the next day and they're not alone more and more departments are using data driven algorithms to forecast crime so they predict locations of arrests to say that that's where the crime must be rather than acknowledging that police act differently in certain neighborhoods than they act in other neighborhoods we don't really have crime data if you think about it there's lots of crimes that go on that do not lead to arrests there's lots of pot smoking among white people but never get arrested so there's a lot more sort of non arrested white crime than people of color so when we use arrests as a proxy for crime we are really over burdening those people who are already profiled by the police so in that case arrests are used instead of criminal behavior yes when I say something like arrests are a bad proxy for crime a lot I'm sure a lot of your listeners are like but people get arrested for crimes you know I just want to make a point that you know I've talked to a lot of police chiefs and a lot of judges about these kinds of algorithms and one of things they keep on coming back to is almost no real mental health care in this country so people get arrested very consistently for addiction problems or untreated mental health problems that's not crime the police don't think it's crime the judges don't really want to think of it as crime and yet these scoring systems are basically suggesting since this person is much more likely to be rearrested in the future because guess what they're still going to be addicted or they're still going to mental health problems or they're still going to be poor and there's all sorts of crime there still you know you're living in the neighborhood y. Our behavior that could go on. Pretty much unchallenged in a frat house is going to send you into the system exactly so those very predictable things show up quite well statistically so that's that is how your score goes up that's how you're you get to the point where you're considered high risk and you're actually sentenced to prison for longer and the judges don't like it the judges want to be putting people into prison because they're actually a public health risk not because they're not ix that's a proxy that characterizes a lot of your w m d everybody will understand hiring algorithms so let's just say you have a big company broke you just like oh my God we do so at a many applications for these 10 positions and like I get a 1000 applications homing in to sort through them all I would like somebody to help me and I don't want it to be a person because they're too expensive I wanted to be at algorithm. And so you hire me I'm your data scientist and I come and build you an algorithm to sort through these applications where you're going to say Kathy I want to hire people that will be successful at my firm and I'll say Ok well what do you mean by success this is where the proxy comes in you'll say well I don't measure directly whether someone is good at their job because you can't know that because how do you know right I mean what does it mean for someone to do well at your company what do you think Ok they stay they stay a long time they generate a lot of good ideas how do you measure that though let's see they get promoted excellent Ok so we have this kind of triumvirate of data points about each employee like how long do they stay how many promotions how many raises this is exactly the way that people measure success at companies and this is exactly the kind of algorithm that gets built so I'm training your data on 20 years of your past practice and hiring people boom implicit bias that we know exists in who gets promoted who gets hired who gets raises who stays for a long time who feels welcome enough to stay for a long time gets begged into. Algorithm I just wrote and you observe in the book that almost all of these algorithms predict behavior not on what you do or what you've done because that's so hard to measure but who you are and I'll just add one last point to emphasize how invisible This might look from the perspective of the employer certain kinds of mistakes are much more obvious when you do it this way namely false positives which is to say I've hired someone they didn't work out that is easy to spot because what a pain what you don't see are the people that you could have hired that would have worked out but were filtered out and that's where we see this sort of narrowing bottleneck of who is deemed future successful Another thing we don't really understand how it works but we have to worry about its implications is facial recognition technology yes what's the problem now well there's a bunch of different levels of problems one of them is that it sometimes just doesn't work so my friend join me mit Media Lab was the 1st to come out with an audit she's on a few audits now Amazon most recently where she found that at a technical level they weren't working very well all companies perform better on that females and all companies also perform better on lighter subjects than on darker subjects we saw that all companies perform the worst on doctor for the mouse in fact as we tested women with darker and darker skin the chance of being correctly gendered came close to us so why why does facial recognition work better on white men than black women it doesn't have to it just happens to because of the training data literally the corpus of pictures that were used to train the algorithm was much more white and much more male I think Joy because of the Pale Male data problem and believe it or not they weren't thinking carefully enough before deploying it to the world to say hey does this work as well on black faces as white faces why don't these companies get ahead of this a little bit and test this and sort of have evidence in advance that this is not going to be unfair. Who determines if the algorithms are working and how that's kind of the craziest part and I'm so glad you asked nobody there is no standard a large company says we don't want to build these algorithms we want to rent them essentially we license them from some data vendor and the data vendor says Oh you can trust this but we're not going to explain it at all it's a black box proprietary that's part of the licensing agreement you don't get to know how this works but you can use it to hire people you can use it if you're the police department to fine people you can use it if you're a Department of Education to fire your teachers blah blah blah there is no particular standard which brings us to the issue of how do you determine when an algorithm is successful what is your definition of success I was really moved by your discussion of Clopas things. Yeah this is a great example of where the definition of success for the people using the algorithm is the opposite of the definition of success for the people who are targeted by the algorithm so close innings is the concept where you are basically a minimum wage worker probably working you know in a large store and you close on one evening and then you open the store the next morning and you probably don't have enough time to even go home and see your kids right barely enough time to sleep and the crazy thing is that these scheduling algorithms will for one week make you close in 3 days in a row and then the next week you don't have any work at all I looked into the research that was developing these algorithms one of the made me cry I mean it was so brutal it was like you have the option if you use this algorithm to toggle the switch to make sure that none of your employees get enough hours a week to qualify for benefits you can just turn this little switch on and like all of your employees will be wage slaves forever they will not be able to go to night school because their hours change every day they will not be able to put their kids in daycare regularly. It is such a small benefit for the employer if you compare it to the wrecking of the life of the employee it's maddening but it's not actually technically illegal so the algorithm exploited it you pose the question should we as a society be willing to sacrifice a little efficiency in the interest of fairness and you talk about Starbucks Starbucks wants to have a good image its scheduling algorithm was exposed it said that it was going to improve it no more Clopas no more employing people short of triggering some benefits right but the trouble was that the incentives to managers to be efficient were so irresistible that they never actually made any changes yeah I mean it's a philosophical question it's basically you're saying do we have any answer to capitalism you know all these algorithms that they're using in these corporate settings are about profitability not about happiness so if we wanted to address that we would actually have to change the incentive structure of corporations it's a big ask how would you assess the way that. We the general public view algorithms I want us to learn to be skeptical I want to say I don't need a math p.h.d. To ask you why I'm getting fired the power that we give to the algorithms is the thing we have the most control over do we let me give you know the example the u.s. News and World Report college ranking model who gives that power us you describe the impact of that ranking colleges turn themselves into pretzels students spend tons of money in order to fit the parameters that colleges have adapted to because of the rankings in u.s. News and World Report a a pernicious feedback loop yet the bogus and their game of bull college knows that if they look at exclusive then they look better for the ranking so they just get a bunch of kids they know will never make it to apply and yet of all the stupid things that the u.s. News and World Report pays attention to it doesn't pay attention to the cost it's not $1.00 of the criteria exactly when college admissions officers are crazily gaming the algorithm which is what their job seems to be you know it is they don't care if the twitching goes up why do we keep giving these questionable stupid algorithms so much power if people listening to this interview only take one thing away this is what I'd want them to take away you say that an algorithm is an opinion imbedded in math right I mean there's so many choices that go into every algorithm and the most important one being what do we mean by success. If I had to define success for myself that's one thing but if Facebook is defining success for me I don't trust it as algorithms proliferate which they are applying for credit applying for a job applying to go to college applying for a loan applying for housing all those things are now algorithmic so they all define success for them not for us that's their opinion right it's really really important to remember that it's not necessarily opinion that you have to share. Thank you so much thank you so much Kathy. On the Media is supporting. Providing information on a range of insurance coverage and options. Are 1800 progressive progressive. Source of Truth for thousands of employees are managing projects from start to finish. Unleash the potential of teams with collaboration software more and at last. He presents timeless the 70 a film in the Warren Miller collection of skiing and snowboarding films presented by votes wagon the film will be showing on Saturday December 7th and Sunday December 8th at 7 pm tickets are 12 dollars at Sunflower theater. It is. This is on the media I'm Brooke Ladd stone I had to say often when women show anger it's not fully appreciate it it's often. Deflected on to other people former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill may have been angry but she wasn't shrill she had the accent and spoke from the diaphragm some of us don't and I can make moments behind the mike a challenge not because of our voices because of the mike and the frequency band women who appear in the public eye or rather in the public ear often hard to write it for the way they sound but how they sound is also a product of how they're heard and technology has a hand in that. In a recent article for The New Yorker Clark University professor and musician Tina 'd Turner the noted that quote women who speak publicly and challenge authority have long been dismissed shrill or grating we've often heard that women's voices are no good for the radio Palin says that's been the case since the invention of radio right so there was a great article published in the radio broadcast magazine in 1924 in which one of their editors actually interviewed a number of station managers it was a female editor by the way pretty revolutionary for the time and so she basically went through all of these various complaints that people had and they ranged from everything regarding audio quality saying that female voices or people with higher voices sounded distorted and nasal and tinny 2 things about their personality and their senses of humor saying that they're just not affable they don't manage to really connect with listeners or they sound inauthentic and affected all of these criticisms have been established for nearly a century now and have associated with women in the meat. All the things that were said about Hillary Clinton when she was running after me were the criticism before the sound will that she shouts she doesn't smile lit up like a goose bump the feel every time I hear her shrill voice rising even higher and higher and Hillary has become very sure ill you know the word shrill she's become a shrill we see so much more of that now that we have more women running for president rather than talking about the content of their policy proposals were focused on the Tambour of their voices and of course voices are among the most intimate ways that we encounter people a person's voice is like a person's face the voice is the sight of so much when it comes to identity construction not just for the person speaking but also for the listener and there are so many patterns that we learn about who makes certain sets of sounds and how and so some of it is based upon the way that we observe the world and some of it is also culturally conditioned in the way that we're looking for who is allowed to speak and what contexts there was technology used for government purposes and all of that radio really began in this country in the mid twenty's that's where we need to peg the beginning of this tale Exactly so in 1924 about 5 percent of households had radio receivers by 930 to 60 percent of households had a receiver and they were now in place in cars as well and of course the government needed to step in and start to regulate because you ended up with frequent signal interference especially in a lot of urban environments and so finally in 1927 the Federal Radio commission went and decided to a lot each station its own little 10000 hertz slice of bandwidth real estate so there's a segment before you take the signal and modulating it into something that can be transferred in between. Stations known as the base band or the pre modulating signal that had to be actually limited to $5000.00 hertz because amplitude modulation actually doubles the band with of the signal So initially they said Ok we're going to take all of our base band signals and limit them to 5000 hertz what that meant was all of the microphones and all of the equipment that people were using to record didn't need to go above 5000 hertz because none of that information would get transmitted right so what are we as human beings most to Q 2 and then. What were we able to hear on the radio right so there was some great research that happened in 1933 that basically look at what are the frequencies that the human hearing apparatus is most sensitive to and what they found is that we hear frequencies between about 1000 hertz and 7000 hertz more loudly than we hear frequencies at 100 hertz so in real life we hear higher voices louder than lower voices and on the radio what happens what happened was there was a common thought at the time that women spoke more softly than men a lot of this came from the result that the equipment that they were using to measure voices were optimized for lower voices by the people developing the technology who were exclusively men in the early 1900 tens and so they actually were missing a lot of the information at higher frequencies and so when you're not getting the same volume for women's voices as you note in your article you get less definition the consonants are heard in the higher frequency ranges and you can't compensate by pumping up the volume for women's voices because we already perceive them as louder the evolutionary theory goes that higher pitched voices were voices of warning or something like. 0 are 1. And so because the microphones were not as good at picking up these high frequencies it was all all or nothing right you either don't pick it up at all or you have none of the maximum amount and it's distorted and has that harsh edge on it a lot of engineers thought well women are quieter as soon as a woman would sit behind the microphone many of them would automatically crank the dial up which meant that you were going to get those distortions and were. Ever higher ranges that the microphone could pick up and this led to a lot of issues with women being called unintelligible. Because we just couldn't figure out what the words they were saying were all we could hear were the vowels There's an engineer you quote in your piece who tested his technology with women's voices and came to an interesting conclusion yes his name is r.c. Steinberg and he was a researcher at Bell Labs he was actually one of the more outspoken engineers who would present his research publicly and so the 1st mention of this disparity was actually in the 1927 Bell Laboratories record and he wrote a little brief and it was untitled understanding women not their voices just women exactly women he quips that man's traditional inability to understand women may have a basis of fact if one so wishes to interpret certain recent experiments in our laboratories and he talks about this disparity with consonants and the fact that people with higher voices tend to have consonants that lie between 5 100-7000 hertz the equipment at the time to simply couldn't pick those up and so there are actually these experiments where they figured out the quote unquote intelligibility percentages at different cutoff levels and they found that women were significantly harder to understand when everything above 5000 Hertz was cut off but what's fascinating here is rather than advocating for changing the technology he ends the article by saying nature has so designed women speech that it is almost always most effective when it is of soft and well moderated tone so here he is just saying Listen leave an Advil for the radio exactly nature has just designed you this way that's a bomber unfortunately. That stuck there's no change in a lot of this technology and this government regulation in terms of the bandlimiting on these signals really really influenced. How manufacturers started making their equipment and it stays that way and so what that means is that if something isn't quite up to the quality that you're used to seeing then we just throw away that material right this audio doesn't quite sound as good and so therefore I'm just not going to include this unfortunately we either completely exclude people or we include them in a way that diminishes them and so this lack of not only lack of representation overall but lack of accurate or lack of quality representation is a huge problem we're leaving out the stories of entire demographics ignoring the contributions of people simply because our technology is limiting their or their ability to exist in our mediums when I began work as an editor at n.p.r. In the late eighty's I talked to a lot of women who were given kind of basic training before they went on the air and this is n.p.r. They were told they sounded too young they needed to lower their voices right the 1st time I've seen it discussed was 906 there actually was a telephone switchboard operators handbook where they talked about training the voice to become low and melodious and soft and part of the reason again for that was because the microphones that were used to pick up sounds and telephone receivers were utter garbage right in the early 1903 were terrible and so all of this kind of started very very early on you know did something across the ocean the Maggie Thatcher effect yes so when she came to power a lot of people dismissed Margaret Thatcher as a quote unquote shrill housewife and so between the sixty's and the eighty's she actually worked with coaches to refine her vocal image and she actually dropped her voice approximately 60 hertz That's about half an octave in that range and she was very transparent about this many scholars have written about this her biographer has written about this and so the fact that she. Was able to become so successful I think a lot of people started looking at that as an example. I've done a good deal of speaking the thinking is quite have to make up about the cabinet very quickly because otherwise the press will discuss it all for me a Lizabeth Holmes the founder of Farah noce which purported to have a great way to test people's blood of it turned out to be a lot of hooey the turns very dark but there was a lot of commentary about her voice and this was one of the most bizarre of the deceptions involved in this whole saga her voice what she could figure out a surprising baritone was that it would likely cost her a few $1000.00 to get these tests done in this interview with n.p.r. From 2005 we hear a very different sounding Elizabethtown know it had been well if I use conditional words to describe what we're doing at hard that was actually raw audio from an interview that she did back in 2005 she had kind of let her guard down is the theory here and so you suddenly hear something that's a little bit more natural of course she realizes it and dips back into this deep baritone but if you go in Analyze This recording there's actually a disparity of about $100.00 hertz which is a huge amount that's even more than Margaret Thatcher and that's something that surely doesn't just happen naturally although her family did say she never got your voice exactly and certainly there is a wide dynamic range that can occur as we get excited you know when we raise our voices to communicate enthusiasm or intensity but what's very interesting of course is were picking apart her voice and that that has no substance and when it comes to the actual facts of the court case sure it kind of fits into this narrative of deception and so I think it is an interesting thing to criticize and everything about her image was criticised from the black turtlenecks right the way she wore her hair all of that became a part of. SAGAL Yeah which brings us back to the candidates the word shrill certainly was often applied to Hillary Clinton last time around here we hear Tucker Carlson doing precisely that in 2016 bunch of men both running against her and also in the pundit class who are saying things about her that she shrill that she shouting maybe she does for a living she's shouting Listen I have to do with a Christian girl was the last time you had a man because of being shrill That is such a code word I don't know a lot of women a lot of men are sure I don't think I've ever heard a man be called called Ted to reseal and take a obvious guess no man on television has called Hillary Clinton shrill I'll play because that is a felony offense and everybody's going to try to do you know the no nobody I haven't actually heard that I think one of the one of the most hilarious parts of that clip is the fact that Tucker Carlson is yelling and the female host actually is maintaining a very level tone and this is something we see time and time again so many male candidates stand up there and literally yell if a female candidate were to do the same thing she would be viewed as hysterical can't keep her temper in check and so this is another aspect of this there's a scholar who has coined the term animated miss about this the idea that if you do nothing you're viewed as doing something and if you do something it's viewed as a hyperbolic expression So what do you think we're not certainly a better spot than we were there are a lot more women out there I mean have we finally gotten over the technological obstacles of the 1920 s. Or maybe the social cultural ones well I think we've certainly made a lot of progress both on the technical and the cultural fronts but one of the things that we deal with a lot now is compression algorithms now that we have digital technology and streaming is actually one of the made modes of consumption now for any sort of audio or video and what that means is that to reduce the amount of data and get it to your. Computer fast enough forget it to your mobile device fast enough it has to be compressed we have to get rid of some of the information and a lot of these algorithms disproportionately affect higher frequencies again similar to the old microphones and the old transmission modes of the 1920 s. For some reason we haven't been able to transcend that all based on a lot of the same not great research from the 1920 s. So it still haunts us to this day now culturally I think we're definitely getting to a point where we're more critically examining the ways that we talk about women and people with higher voices and people with different identities in the media and we're examining how that influences the way that their stories are told if they're told at all I've noticed a lot of people on Twitter ironically or sarcastically calling men shrill. But it's still kind of feels like this very tongue in cheek type of application because there's still this underlying knowledge of the long and gendered history of this insult. Do you think this figures into this campaign I'm not sure yet we keep running up against this word likeability or electability and I think that that has become the new shrill where there are gendered notions of who has what it takes to actually be in a position of authority we're still not quite to the point where we're able to disentangle bias ease about gender from notions about who can lead and who is fit to lead Tina thank you very much thank you so much for having me Tina Tallon is a composer musician and professor at University. He's. Got a long a. Lot on that. Where. There. And now some on. The audio bad. Poll. And. That's it for this week's show on the media is produced by a lawn a Cazenove a burgess Michael lowing Gerald lay up battered Sean from the hand and asked the catcher Betty we have more help Charlie gardener and you on our show is that you drive me. Direct or is Jennifer Munson an engineer This is Sam when you catch your Rogers is our executive producer on the media's rejection of w n y he's been on for a flagstone. And one. More Day. On the Media is supported by the Ford Foundation the John s. And James l. Knight Foundation and the listeners of the radio.
Related Keywords
Radio Program , American Political Writers , American Politicians , American Roman Catholics , Femail , Health , Political Science , Latin Legal Terms , Psychology , The Heritage Foundation , Federal Architecture In Washington Dc , Alumni Of The University Oxford , Bbc Radio 4 Programmes , Margaret Thatcher , American Businesspeople , American Lawyers , American Political Pundits , Doping In Sport , American Anti Iraq War Activists , Positive Psychology , Tests , International Nongovernmental Organizations , Black Sea Countries , Slavic Countries And Territories , Countries In Europe , Member States Of The United Nations , Philosophical Terminology , Radio Ksjd 91 5 Fm , Stream Only , Radio , Radioprograms ,
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.