- Oscar Glow, Today’s Tech Help Short Films Find Their Fandom : NPR 022814
If you, an ordinary non-Academy member, wanted to see an Oscar-nominated short film a few years ago, you couldn’t — not unless you lived in a city with an art-house theater that happened to be showing them. Now, if you want to see an Oscar-nominated short like Mr. Hublot, an animated gem about a steampunk Paris filled with Victorian mechanical gadgetry, all you have to do is download it on iTunes or Amazon. Or you can watch via video on demand. This year’s Oscar-nominated shorts are also playing in more than 400 theaters across the country, where they’ve become an increasingly hot ticket. “Since 2006, we’ve probably had over an 800 percent increase in box office,” says Carter Pilcher, president of ShortsHD, a company dedicated to making shorts more accessible. “Short films used to be kind of out there, and nobody saw them. I would say the technology has caught up with content.” Now we have YouTube, among other things, and it’s created an insatiable appetite for short, easily digestible chunks of content we can watch on our mobile devices. And over the past 15 years, shorts have been redefined by Pixar.
- Soviet Legacy May Fuel Ukraine’s Resistance To Russian Domination : NPR 022814
Nikita Khrushchev transferred the Crimean peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. David Greene talks Nina Khrushcheva, the Soviet leader’s great granddaughter about the history.
- About | VocaliD
In the United States alone, there are 2.5 Million Americans with severe speech impairments many of whom rely on computerized voices to express themselves. Yet many of them use the same voices as there are only a few options. That’s tens of millions of people world wide using generic voices. VocaliD (for vocal identity) aims to help children and adults with severe speech impairment find a voice of their own! | Our VocaliD approach extracts acoustic properties from a target talker’s disordered speech (whatever sounds they can still produce) and applies these features to a synthetic voice that was created from a surrogate voice donor who is similar in age, size, gender, etc. The result is a synthetic voice that contains as much of the vocal identity of the target talker as possible yet the speech clarity of the surrogate talker. It’s a simple idea that could make a powerful impact on the lives of those who rely on synthetic voices to express themselves.
- Speech donors | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio 022314
Until now, people living with severe speech disorders only had a few computerized voices to choose from. With the help of speech donors, Rupal Patel and collaborator Tim Bunnell are creating new, personalized voices that match the individual. | If you are interested in donating your voice or if you know someone who may want to receive a voice, please visit VocaliD.org
- Gil Shaham And When The World ‘Got Much Smaller, Much Faster’ : Deceptive Cadence : NPR 022414
The 1930s were among the most devastating and strife-filled eras in world history. Yet it was a time of spectacular artistic achievements as well, as violinist explores in a new multi-year recording project. The Israeli-American star soloist talked to All Things Considered host about the newly issued first volume in this series, which features Shaham playing concertos by , , , and the now little-heard German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann.
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About the Flaneur
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. Then stay tuned.Letting Go of Sight
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Media in Transition @ MiT
Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]
Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]