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Why Is Closed Captioning So Bad?

by BridgetYGFX Posted on March 22, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at Marginal Revolution, commenter Jan A. asks:

Why is the (global) state of subtitling and closed captioning so bad?

a/ Subtitling and closed captioning are extremely efficient ways of learning new languages, for example for immigrants wanting to learn the language of their new country.

b/ Furthermore video is now offered on phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, televisions… but very frequently these videos cannot be played with sound on (a phone on public transport, a laptop in public places, televisions in busy places like bars or shops,…).

c/ And most importantly of all, it is crucial for the deaf and hard of hearing.

So why is it so disappointingly bad? Is it just the price (lots of manual work still, despite assistive speech-to-text technologies)? Or don’t producers care?

I use closed captioning all the time even though I’m not really hard of hearing. I just have a hard time picking out dialog when there’s a lot of ambient noise in the soundtrack—which is pretty routine these days. So I have a vested interest in higher quality closed captioning. My beef, however, isn’t so much with the text itself, which is usually pretty close to the dialog, but with the fact that there are multiple closed captioning standards and sometimes none of them work properly, with the captions either being way out of sync with the dialog or else only partially available. (That is, about one sentence out of three actually gets captioned.)

Given the (a) technical simplicity and low bandwidth required for proper closed captions, and (b) the rather large audience of viewers with hearing difficulties, it surprises me that these problems are so common. I don’t suppose that captioning problems cost TV stations a ton of viewers, but they surely cost them a few here and there. Why is it so hard to get right?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m not talking here about real-time captioning, as in live news and sports programming. I understand why it’s difficult to do that well.

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Why Is Closed Captioning So Bad?

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I Went to the Launch Party for the World’s First Pot CSA. Here’s What I Can Remember

by HilarioHowse Posted on March 7, 2015

Mother Jones

“Hello and welcome,” the voice said. “Thank you for joining us on this special evening to learn more about the clean cannabis movement.”

I was in a white van, bouncing up a steep hill to a party at an undisclosed location in Berkeley, California. The voice came from an iPhone held up by one of my hosts, a young woman wearing a cocktail dress and a headband of white flowers. “If you do not wish to participate in the cannabis,” the voice continued, as meditative music played in the background, “do not have anything the flower girls are carrying.”

Duly warned, I was deposited at the front steps of Panoramic Sky, a three-story house designed by a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright that rents on Airbnb, I later learned, for $2,800 a night. I was wearing a suit I’d bought earlier that day from Neiman Marcus, worried that I didn’t own any clothes nice enough for the occasion. “Dress Code: Formal Attire (Great Gatsby meets California),” the invitation had said. A subsequent update noted that lots of “very important people” would be there.

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I Went to the Launch Party for the World’s First Pot CSA. Here’s What I Can Remember

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Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s

by ColumbusReilly Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s a fascinating little anecdote about lead and crime from a recent paper by Rick Nevin. It shouldn’t be taken as proof of anything, but it’s certainly an intriguing little historical tidbit about the association between lead exposure and increases in crime rates.

Here’s the background. Homicides increased dramatically between 1900-11, but most of that appears to be the result of increased rural homicides, not urban homicides. If lead exposure is part of the reason, it would mean that rural areas were exposed to increasing levels of lead about 20 years earlier, around 1880 or so. But why? Nevin suggests that the answer to this question starts with another question: Why are barns red?

Professional painters in the 1800s prepared house paint by mixing linseed oil with white lead paste. About 90% of Americans lived in rural areas in the mid-1800s, and subsistence farmers could make linseed (flaxseed) oil, but few had access to white lead, so they mixed linseed oil with red rust to kill fungi that trapped moisture and increased wood decay. Red barns are still a tradition in most USA farming regions but white barns are the norm along the path of the old National Road. Why?

….The reason the red barn tradition never took root along that path is likely because the National Road made freight, including white lead, accessible to nearby farmers. USA lead output was a relatively stable 1000 to 2000 tons per year from 1801-1825, but lead output was 15,000 to 30,000 tons per year from the mid-1830s through the mid-1860s after the completion of the National Road.

….The first American patent for “ready-mixed” paint was filed in 1867; railroads built almost 120,000 track miles from 1850 to 1900; and Sears Roebuck and other mail-order catalogs combined volume buying, railroad transport, and rural free parcel post delivery to provide economical rural access to a wide variety of products in the 1890s.

The murder arrest rate in large cities was more than seven times the national homicide rate from 1900-1904 because lead paint in the 1870s was available in large cities but unavailable in most rural areas. The early-1900s convergence in rural and urban murder rates was presaged by a late-1800s convergence in rural and urban lead paint exposure.

In short, lead paint simply wasn’t available in most rural areas before the 1880s except in very narrow corridors with good transportation. You can see this in the prevalence of white barns along the National Road. Then, starting in the 1880s, revolutions in both rail transport and mail order distribution made economical lead paint available almost everywhere—including rural areas. A couple of decades later, homicide rates had skyrocketed in rural areas and had nearly caught up to urban murder rates.

By itself, of course, this would be merely speculative. What makes it more than this is that it adds to the wealth of other evidence that lead exposure in childhood leads to increased violence in adulthood. In the post-World War II era, lead exposure came mainly from automobile exhausts, but in the post-Civil War era it came mainly from the growth in the use of lead paint. And when lead paint became available in rural areas, farmers found it just as useful as everyone else. Given what we now know about the effects of lead, it should come as no surprise that a couple of decades later the murder rate in rural areas went up substantially.

There’s much more in the full paper, including another question: why did murder rates in St. Louis increase 10-fold from 1910 to 1916? Can you guess the answer? I’ll bet you can.

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Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s

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Quote of the Day: "I am coming after you with everything I have."

by BettyWhitefoord Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Bill O’Reilly, to a reporter who called to ask about a Mother Jones report that he had wildly exaggerated his coverage of the Falklands War:

During a phone conversation, he told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter’s coverage was inappropriate. “I am coming after you with everything I have,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “You can take it as a threat.”

Charming, as always. And once again, this is the difference between O’Reilly and Brian Williams. O’Reilly and Fox News will never admit any wrongdoing, and will fight back with everything they’ve got. There will be no six-month suspension for Bill O’Reilly.

Will it work? Probably yes. After all, O’Reilly is paid to be a windbag, so the fact that he’s exaggerated some stuff on his personal resume seems like it’s just part of the package. Still, I admit that this episode is getting a lot more attention than it was when I first commented on it. The fact that the New York Times is covering it on its front page is proof of that. So maybe it’s going to hurt O’Reilly more than I thought. Stay tuned.

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Quote of the Day: "I am coming after you with everything I have."

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New Retirement Regs Might Pose a Campaign Problem for Republicans

by KeiraPhifer Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Congress is now controlled by Republicans, and it’s unlikely they’re going to pass any of the items on President Obama’s agenda. But what about executive actions? Are there any more of those left in Obama’s toolkit?

Jared Bernstein says yes. Forty years ago, when rules were set regarding retirement programs, most retirement funds were managed by corporations or unions, and it was assumed that the fund managers were financially sophisticated. This meant the rules could be fairly light. But that’s obviously changed: most pensions these days are IRA and 401(k) accounts that are managed by individuals who often have a hard time telling good advice from bad:

The result was a lot of people without a lot of investment acumen trying to wade through thickets of annuities, bonds, securities, and index funds, often guided by advisors and brokers who they assumed were wholly on their side.

Many were — but research shows that many were, and are — not always acting in their clients’ best interest, generating unnecessary fees and charges that erode retirement savings. The newly proposed rule, which does not require Congressional approval, meaning it could actually come to fruition, realigns incentives in the interest of individual investors by requiring retirement financial advisers to follow an established standard (a “fudiciary standard”) to act in their clients’ interest.

….The new fiduciary standard should block what honest brokers call “over-managing:” unnecessary rollovers, churning (over-active buying and selling that generates brokers’ fees at the expense of returns), and the pushing of expensive and risky products like variable annuities.

All of which turns out to be extremely costly to retirees….Conflicted advice reduces returns by about 1 percent per year, such that a poorly advised saver might end up with a 5 percent vs. a 6 percent return. They multiply that 1 percent by the $1.7 trillion of IRA assets “invested in products that generally provide payments that generate conflicts of interest” and conclude that the “the aggregate annual cost of conflicted advice is about $17 billion each year.”

According to Bernstein, a White House study suggests that this difference between 5 and 6 percent returns can amount to five years of retirement savings under plausible assumptions. That’s a lot.

Needless to say, the financial industry is strongly opposed to this rule change, and I think we can safely assume that this means Fox News will be raising the alarums too. Their argument, apparently, is that if they’re prohibited from giving small clients bad advice, it just won’t be worth it to bother with small clients at all. Maybe so. But as Bernstein says, if that’s really the case then “maybe there’s a hitch in your business model.”

This has the potential to be an interesting campaign issue. Most Democrats, even those with close ties to the financial industry (*cough* Hillary *cough*) should have no trouble supporting this rule change. That’s a slam dunk winner with retirees and most of the middle class. Republicans will have a harder time. After all, this represents regulation, and Republicans oppose regulation. They especially oppose financial regulation, as they’ve proven by their relentless efforts to roll back even the modest Dodd-Frank regulation adopted after the financial crash.

So what will they do? Stick to their principles and oppose the new regs? That will sure provide Democrats with an easy sound bite. Jeb Bush opposes a rule that prevents brokers from deliberately giving you bad retirement advice. I don’t think I’d like to be the candidate who has to answer for that.

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New Retirement Regs Might Pose a Campaign Problem for Republicans

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 February 2015

by DegaLockyer Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

The quilts are back! This is Hopper peering down from the second story hallway and surveying her domain from between the quilts hanging over the railing. Amusingly, Hilbert saw her and immediately started fussing and mewling, trying to figure out to get up to her. He jumped on a bench, but that wasn’t high enough. He put his paws up on the wall, but plainly couldn’t climb up it. Finally, after about a minute of this nonsense, a neuron fired somewhere and he remembered that all he had to do was run up the stairs. So he did, and then immediately lost interest in whatever it was he thought he wanted. But it was touch and go there for a while.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 February 2015

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The NSA Has Access to Your Cell Phone’s Encryption Key. And Everyone Else’s Too.

by TobiasKethel Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The surveillance state, it turns out, is even bigger and badder than we thought. Previously, the story from the NSA has been: yes, we have access to petabytes of telephone metadata (who you called, what time you called, etc.), but we don’t have routine access to your actual conversations. And this even made a kind of sense: telephone companies store bulk metadata and can make it available to the NSA. They don’t record phone conversations. Besides, on cell phones those conversations are encrypted anyway.

But guess what? That encryption depends on a key stored on the SIM card inside your cell phone. If you have access to the key, you can listen in to all the conversations you want.

You know what’s coming next, don’t you? Here is Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept:

American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

….The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world.

….According to one secret GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks, planting malware on several computers, giving GCHQ secret access….Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and was working through the vast quantity of product.”

The folks at Gemalto say they had no idea any of this had happened. Apparently it was a very stealthy hack indeed. As you might expect, there is much, much more at the link.

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The NSA Has Access to Your Cell Phone’s Encryption Key. And Everyone Else’s Too.

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Casino Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Is Shocked—Shocked!—by Online Gambling

by MauriciEir Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Casino magnate and conservative megadonor Sheldon Adelson has been on a full-scale crusade against internet gambling. An advocacy group he launched and helps to bankroll is currently at the vanguard of a lobbying effort to pass a federal ban on online wagering. The billionaire, who says he’ll spend “whatever it takes” to support the ban, claims he opposes internet gambling on “moral” grounds, because it preys on the most vulnerable members of society. What he doesn’t say is that for years his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., tested the waters on getting into this business for itself.

Adelson’s pet cause got a boost in Congress earlier this month when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced (for the second time) the Restoration of America’s Wire Act. The bill aims to strengthen the Federal Wire Act of 1961, which prohibited phone and wire-based wagering, by applying it to internet gambling—effectively banning the practice. The Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, an Adelson-launched group whose chairs include former New York Gov. George Pataki (R) and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (D), is lobbying heavily for the bill and running ads online and in print in support of the cause. On its website, the group casts online gambling as an out-of-control phenomenon that “crosses the line of responsible gaming by bringing gambling into our living rooms and onto our smartphones” by “targeting the young, the poor, and the elderly where they live.”

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Casino Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Is Shocked—Shocked!—by Online Gambling

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The Conference Where Guys in Suits Pitch Marijuana Start-Ups to Other Guys in Suits

by ClaudetteKnight Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sitting atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill last week, in a banquet room of the opulent Fairmont Hotel, I began thinking maybe I ought to invest in marijuana. “You really should,” said a woman at my table, who reminded me, in her wholesome, middle-aged earnestness, of my mom. About a year ago she poured money into Poseidon Asset Management, a marijuana hedge fund that requires a minimum investment of $100,000. The fund earned a 67 percent return in 2014, besting the S&P 500 by a factor of six. Now she’s trying to figure out what to do with all of her extra cash.

As we talk, dozens of professional investors are listening to a handful of suit-wearing pot entrepreneurs compete onstage for start-up funding. There’s SweetLeaf, an organic edibles company that will target the Whole Foods demographic; Intelligent Light Source, a maker of hydroponics lamps that has ties to MIT; and VapeXHale, a high-end vaporizer controlled by an iPhone app. I’m feeling pretty good about all of them, not least because they’ve already been vetted and incubated by the ArcView Group, the gathering’s organizer and a sort of Y-Combinator for pot startups.

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The Conference Where Guys in Suits Pitch Marijuana Start-Ups to Other Guys in Suits

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Ty Segall’s new EP, "Mr. Face," Is a Tasty Treat

by Octavia1778 Posted on January 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ty Segall
Mr. Face
Famous Class

Ty Segall just can’t stop making music—solo, in his band, or in collaboration with others; on singles, EPs and albums. He unleashes a flood of psychedelic garage rock with manic fervor, suggesting a condemned man desperate to be heard before his time runs out. If his prolific output sometimes cries out for an editor (especially when it comes to the songwriting) Segall’s unfeigned, life-affirming enthusiasm is never less than irresistible. The physical version of the four-song Mr. Face EP is a pair of translucent red-and-blue seven-inch vinyl records billed as “the world’s first playable pair of 3D glasses,” but it’s a tasty treat whether or not you dig novelty packaging. The jumpy title track is an acoustic rave-up that hints at a strong Violent Femmes influence. Elsewhere Segall is his usual exuberant self, plugged in and happy to blast. And coming next week: the Ty Segall Band’s Live in San Francisco on the Castle Face label, a full-length set of feedback, heavy riffs, big beats and yowling vocals, guaranteed to cure the blahs with caffeinated pizzazz.

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Ty Segall’s new EP, "Mr. Face," Is a Tasty Treat

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