5/25/17 THE OVERSEAS DIARIES: BOMBING IN MANCHESTER
Hi everyone -
Yep, I’m here. At yet another horrible, senseless, tragic attack… this one aimed at 14 year old girls. It’s just so sick. And as a soon-to-be-parent… far too easy to imagine being in the middle of this story.
I was in bed Monday night when the phone rang, around 11:30pm.
“Something’s happened in Manchester at a concert,” my boss said. “Can you pack a bag and get into the office?”
Now, I had recently made a stink about how as a pregnant woman I should still be allowed to keep doing my job and working and travelling, etc, until such time as I feel too physically uncomfortable to do so (typical feminist stuff… hehe), so I wasn’t on terribly firm ground to whine about the fact it was midnight and I was pregnant and tired. Instead, I rolled out of bed, threw some clothes in a bag, kissed Ollie goodnight, and headed to the bureau.
As these things always go, at first we had no idea if it was a big deal. There were lots of tweets from concert-goers saying a balloon had popped or a speaker had blown… so I was frankly expecting to be turned around once I got to the office.
But no… within the hour it was pretty clear we were looking at heavy casualties and that this was no accident. So I bundled into a car with Mark Phillips, cameraman Anthony Wood, and a driver, and we headed up to Manchester. We listened to the radio the whole way up, so the four hour trip was a wakeful one, and at 5am we rolled into town and navigated through closed roads to get to our hotel. I told the guys to get 2 hours of sleep and prepare to leave at 7am to start shooting and broadcasting. So the two guys got 2 hours of sleep.
But as soon as I nodded off, about 20 minutes after hitting the pillow and calming down my fizzy brain, my boss called to tell me about some great interview on the BBC. Then 30 minutes after that he called about locations for our live shot. So I gave up, took a shower, begged at the front desk for a pre-dawn coffee, and started the day.
We had set up our live shot close to the arena, behind a police barricade. Nearby was the Premiere Inn, where people escaping the concert hall had turned up for the night. In the chaos of the attack, families had been split up, and no one was sure who had been hospitalized/killed or simply was missing. And with the train station affected, transportation out of Manchester had been at a standstill, so groups of teenaged girls who had come in from out of town were stranded.
As the sun rose, people wandered out of the lobby in a daze, still wearing their concert t-shirts and previous night’s makeup, facetiming their family members, or in the case of one woman I saw, collapsing on the sidewalk in hysterical tears.
We began our morning of live reports on no sleep, standing in the sun with a case of water, a few cups of coffee and a stack of granola bars. At midday a car pulled up with some police officers - and they opened the trunk and started pulling out carafes of coffee, boxed sandwiches, potato chips, Cadbury snacks, and more cases of water. Apparently Mancunians had been turning up in droves to feed the cops, and the police had more than they could handle, so they were passing on the love. I have to say, in my 14 years at CBS, that’s never happened. The people in this town have been some of the nicest, most generous and tolerant, that I’ve ever come across. It has been the one truly bright spot in a very dark week.
In any event, Day One was a long one. I had woken up at 8am on Monday morning and didn’t get into bed until 1am Wednesday morning (Nugget was not happy.). And our anchor had flown in from New York, so it was a hectic, non-stop work day.
Yesterday we spent some time digging around in the neighborhood of the terrorist, and bounced around as police raided different buildings around the city, looking for anyone connected to him. (The bomb he used was fairly complicated… so it’s expected he at least had some help.) Information in stories like these comes at you from all sides, and not all of it is true, and there are too many journalists here, so we all end up running around in circles and pointing our cameras at each other. Chaos.
But today, after a solid 6 hours of sleep (and feeling very much human again), Mark and I covered the moment of silence at the makeshift memorial growing in one of the town squares. At 11am, the church clock chimed, and there was total silence as people prayed… shut their eyes… cried… stared at the mound of flowers, candles, and balloons that has grown over the past couple days. After about a minute, applause rippled through the square, with shouts of “We love you Manchester!!”. Then everyone started singing the ‘90’s Oasis song, “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Next to me was a young man in a motorized wheelchair, singing and crying. Nurses at the clinic in the square stood in the windows on the third floor, watching and hugging each other. If you were in that square and you weren’t moved to tears, your heart is made of concrete.
We’re currently at our hotel, working, waiting for something else to rush off and cover. But a big part of tonight’s story is the blowback from intelligence leaks coming from the US. After all these terror attacks, there’s now quite a sophisticated network of intelligence-sharing among allies… the UK/US alliance being one of the strongest. But this week, the UK shared information with their US counterparts, who turned around and leaked it to the press. So the US press - including us - reported the name of the attacker before UK officials made it public; and the New York Times was given classified photos of the bits of the bomb used in the attack… also not public. It’s a delicate balance between reporting news and compromising an investigation, and the UK is coming down hard on the latter side of the argument. But in the absence of information, there is often panic and misinformation (who did this?! Are there other people out there waiting to do it again? What happened to my family member? etc) so you can make an equal argument for the former.
In any case, these are complicated times we live in, journalistically.
Thanks for checking in with me, and for watching our (sleepless) work… with any luck, I’ll get home over the weekend. And as Ollie pointed out to me on the phone, as I was preparing him for the fact that I may be stuck here for a while… this could be my last big assignment before maternity leave - when the Overseas Diaries will go on hiatus. 😉
Miss you all… hug your loved ones. I’m patting nugget now.
Xxxx
E
Attached: cops at the arena, giving us lunch and candy; scenes from the memorial
Text-to-Speech System Quickly Mimics Hundreds of Accents
Chinese search giant Baidu has introduced Deep Voice 2, the second iteration of its compelling text-to-speech system. The company introduced Deep Voice just three months ago, with the ability to produce speech “in near real time” that was “nearly indistinguishable from an actual human voice,” according to The Verge. While the first system was limited to learning one voice at a time, “and required many hours of audio or more from which to build a sample,” the updated version “can learn the nuances of a person’s voice with just half an hour of audio, and a single system can learn to imitate hundreds of different speakers.”
See the full story here; http://www.etcentric.org/text-to-speech-system-quickly-mimics-hundreds-of-accents/
Get Ready for the Next Big Privacy Backlash Against Facebook – mining emotion
But earlier this month, The Australian uncovered something that felt like a breach in the social contract: a leaked confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability, such as when they felt “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” and like a “failure.”
See the full, long story here: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/welcome-next-phase-facebook-backlash/
The Oculus Rift’s best VR game comes to the HTC Vive
The entire game is a bit like a series of puzzles where you’re dropped in a room with a couple of weapons around you and a bunch of geometric assassins headed to kill you. Time only progresses as you physically move your body, so you have to decide the efficiency and order of your actions in order to take out the baddies before they take you out.
Things are simple enough when they’re holding bats or knives, but when three of them are shooting shotguns at you and you have to navigate some complex “bullet-time” maneuvers, it won’t be long before you’re performing some advanced yoga moves to avoid getting hit.
The title, which was partially funded by Oculus, is actually a port from a PC game, which feels bizarre, given how perfect the mechanics are for VR.
SUPERHOT VR and Robo Recall have been a couple of the most platform-defining games made, and they’ve launched as Oculus exclusives. This has led to some Vive owners downloading a piece of software called “Revive,” which allows them to purchase games on the Oculus store and play them on their HTC headsets.
With today’s update, the game at last comes natively to the Vive, allowing Steam users a simpler and legit route to get playing. The game is generally $24.99, but is $5 cheaper this week.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/25/the-oculus-rifts-best-vr-game-comes-to-the-htc-vive/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter
Augmented reality future, but not yet
Holonize was currently purely for entertainment Rooke said.
But with technology like Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), being tested by Google, it could soon become as common as pen and paper in offices and universities.
SLAM technology is a process where a device or robot can map its surroundings to create an environment where computer generated images or holograms can appear.
Rooke said:
"New Zealand is right on the cusp just waiting on information processing and battery power, then augmented reality will become as familiar as smartphones."
Once SLAM is installed into smartphones to become mainstream, it will be a revolution, Rooke said.
"It's exciting. The real race is on as to who's going to be first."
But the drawback for a launch pad created using SLAM, is that the augmented reality will only be viewable on devices from the specific perspective captured by the camera.
He said cameras built into eye glasses could resolve this, such as Microsoft's HoloLens, an augmented reality headset that overlays 3D objects in the real-world environment using SLAM technology.
HoloLens currently uses a radar system to map the 3D coordinates and spatial coordinates of everything in a room.
"If you could produce something like that running on your phone or tablet, then you could place an object in 3D space. As you walk around that object, it would maintain its location position and that's the holy grail," he said.
See the full story here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/92605522/augmented-reality-future-but-not-yet
Shakira promotes latest album with augmented reality treasure hunt
Sony Music US Latin has teamed up with the location-based experiences platform Landmrk, for the global launch of Shakira’s latest album ‘El Dorado’.
By placing digital content in the physical world, in the UK and globally, Landmrk’s platform gives fans of the Colombian superstar the chance to unlock exclusive experiences.
By logging into Landmrk’s specially designed mobile web platform, fans are able to find local ‘hidden treasure’ hotspots based on their location.
By travelling to one of Landmrk-generated hot spots, they are given the opportunity to unlock album exclusives, behind-the scenes footage, or even be guided to an exclusive performance by Shakira herself in New York City’s Washington Square Park. Fans are also encouraged to upload their golden selfies to the platform and on social media to ‘turn their city gold’ and share in the experience. Almost 200,000 people have engaged with the platform in the first two days.
See the full story here: http://www.netimperative.com/2017/05/shakira-promotes-latest-album-augmented-reality-treasure-hunt/
Walt Disney’s Recovered Original Disneyland Map to Be Auctioned
The original found its way into the hands of Grenade Curran. Curran was a Disney employee at the time, and asked Walt if he could keep the map sitting in the corner of Disney’s office. While it is doubtful Grenade could understand the full significance that this work would have to fans and Disney historians in the future, he still kept it safe and stored away.
See the full story here: https://www.wdwinfo.com/news-stories/walt-disneys-recovered-original-disneyland-map-to-be-auctioned/
Google now knows when its users go to the store and buy stuff
Google has begun using billions of credit-card transaction records to prove that its online ads are prompting people to make purchases – even when they happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores, the company said Tuesday.
The advance allows Google to determine how many sales have been generated by digital ad campaigns, a goal that industry insiders have long described as “the holy grail” of online advertising. But the announcement also renewed long-standing privacy complaints about how the company uses personal information.
“What’s really fascinating to me is that as the companies become increasingly intrusive in terms of their data collection, they also become more secretive,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He urged government regulators and Congress to demand answers about how Google and other technology companies are collecting and using data from their users.
"While we developed the concept for this product years ago, it required years of effort to develop a solution that could meet our stringent user privacy requirements," Google said in a statement. "To accomplish this, we developed a new, custom encryption technology that ensures users' data remains private, secure, and anonymous."
Voices of VR: For Google, the Future of VR Is on the Open Web with WebVR & WebAR
I had a chance to catch up with primary WebVR spec author, Brandon Jones, at Google I/O to talk about why they’re holding off on shipping WebVR 1.1 and waiting until the latest WebVR “2.0” version is ready. It’ll ship as WebVR 1.0, but there has been such major refactoring to account for augmented reality that internally it’s referred to as the 2.0 spec. Mozilla will be shipping the 1.1 WebVR spec in their browser in August, but Jones says that the Chrome team doesn’t want to have to maintain and support the 1.1 version, which is sure to quickly be deprecated.
Sony’s Richard Marks: Voice commands are key for transforming VR into the Holodeck
Marks talked about what he thinks will be the next big step for PSVR. Surprisingly, it’s not new tracking systems or peripherals, but what we do with our voices and how virtual worlds react to them.
“There’s no limit to the things that we can do with software, right? So my whole world can just be remanufactured by the system at will, by a simple voice command, like, “Let’s go to a castle.” Boom! I can be in a castle. And I can be like, “Oh, no, a castle that has a drawbridge,” and it’ll just happen.
Back at GDC in March Sony showcased its work creating more believable characters in VR, presenting AI that had an understanding of the environments they were in and could react to them. That tech combined with voice control could create some incredibly powerful VR experiences going forward.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/21/sonys-richard-marks-voice-commands-are-key-for-transforming-vr-into-the-holodeck/