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like conservative humor, is there conservative theory other than the usual fascism

January 7, 2021 Humor

There’s an article that tries to identify contemporary conservative thoughtthat isn’t the usual amalgam of artistic or literary formalism, Whig history, neoclassical economics, scientism, or logical positivism. It doesn’t succeed, but it remains an interesting project to find something that could rationalize Trumpism. You may find it interesting if only to have something to talk about when convincing Trumpists with college degrees why they shouldn’t support Josh Hawley.

It may be that there is no such thing as a conservative humor other than those which are sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, lookist, ableist, and racist. This would leave us with observational, self-deprecating, ironic humor of an infantile sort. Think Dennis Miller without the intellectual references ceteris paribus. Or maybe Bill Cosby without the crimes.

That’s clearly not what would define as humor of a liberal sort, but it is similar to the relatively circular and often disinformational logic of what might be conservative theory. Such a theory would have some strange idealist libertarianism constructed on racial privilege that scapegoats some classic liberalism with what seems a self-centered, reactionary thought and behavior in a world without imperialism and colonialism, and capitalism is ubiquitous and canonical. Think William F. Buckley’s National Review without the closeted gayness.

This article by Geoff Shullenberger tries to deconstruct whatever conservative theory might be shared by Trumpists who graduated from college and have some position in its political structure. YMMV. It even soft-pedals Heidegger’s Nazism, because math. This is like Trump’s speech to his special, “very fine people” yesterday, except with smaller words.

The career of our next subject points to a similar conclusion. Just prior to becoming a Trump speechwriter and policy adviser, Darrien J. Beattie completed a Ph.D. in Political Theory at Duke, with a dissertation on “Martin Heidegger’s Mathematical Dialectic.” Beattie’s dissertation, the abstract tells us, “attempts to elucidate Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, and, by extension, his thought as a whole, from the neglected standpoint of his understanding of mathematics, which he explicitly identifies as the essence of modernity.” Heidegger was not a postmodernist or a critical theorist, but he was a key influence on French post-structuralists like Foucault and Derrida, and on the Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse.

Beattie’s dissertation overlaps thematically with the bodies of theory brought up in relation to Breitbart and Hahn. The theorists discussed by both of them, as we have seen, shared a preoccupation with the way that power is exercised in the modern era by means ostensibly neutral institutions and ostensibly objective scientific techniques. Heidegger’s famous account of technology as an intrinsically violent “enframing” of nature influenced the way thinkers like Marcuse and Foucault challenged the nominal objectivity and neutrality of scientific expertise and technological control. Beattie’s investigation of Heidegger’s account of mathematics – broadly seen as the epistemological basis of this objectivity and neutrality – as the “essence of modernity” fits in well with this set of concerns.

Beattie’s trajectory has certain parallels with Hahn’s. After a successful career as a student of theory at an elite institution, he went on to become part of the Trump White House communications team. Whereas Hahn preceded this with her stint at Breitbart, Beattie is now involved in revolver.news, a pro-Trump news aggregation site. He is also currently writing a book “in defense of Trumpist nationalism.”

Along with Hahn, Beattie has been heavily criticized by organizations like the SPLC for his associations with extreme anti-immigration groups. An exposé of his participation in a 2016 gathering that also included white nationalists let to his firing from the White House. Recently, he again attracted additional criticism when Trump appointed him to a commission that “helps preserve sites related to the Holocaust.” Beattie, like Hahn and Breitbart, is Jewish, but all have been faulted for excessive proximity to white nationalism.

In Beattie’s case, these controversies are something of an echo of the one that once surrounded his dissertation subject, Heidegger, who notoriously became a member of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. Beattie addresses this fact in a prefatory remark to his dissertation, in which he states that there are “important cautionary lessons to be learned from a careful study of Heidegger’s monumental political blunder,” but also explains that he will not be addressing these lessons at length in his own work. He writes that “out of respect for the magnitude of scholarly literature devoted to this question . . . one must conclude that sheer limitations of space and scope simply prohibit an adequate treatment of Heidegger’s political involvement with National Socialism within the context of a study that intends to explore seriously and comprehensively any separate feature of Heidegger’s thought.” However, he also states the following:

“[T}o study Heidegger’s disastrous political involvement to the exclusion of other aspects of his thought would not only be damaging philosophically, such a stance would also run the risk of unwittingly inviting the repetition of new political misjudgments in the future. To put the matter in more general yet more concrete terms, just as it is important to understand the extent and nature of the philosophical errors behind the 20th century’s most brutal and illiberal totalitarian regimes, it is equally important—indeed, perhaps more so—not to allow an exclusive or inordinate attention to such blunders detract from a deep and critical attention to the dangers that might be lurking within the seemingly more benign political expressions of modernity that have survived the downfall of fascism and communism.”

In other words, Beattie seems to say, an emphasis on Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism risks sidelining the insights his work offers into the “seemingly more benign political expressions of modernity” that shape our reality. It seems safe to infer that Beattie is referring here to the technocratic liberal consensus ascendant today.

In a more overtly polemical piece of writing, in which he attacks neoconservative interventionism and defends an “America First” foreign policy, Beattie states that “the chief threat to America, and indeed the West, is not an overseas regime like the Soviet Union or a foreign-born movement like radical Islam. To the contrary, it is a home-grown threat: the corruption and de-legitimization of our domestic institutions and the elite entrusted with the custody of the American way of life.” Again, these institutions, as has been evident during the pandemic, rest their assertions of authority on assertions of their own expertise, objectivity, and neutrality – claims that are increasingly in disrepute. Heidegger, as well as a number of the later theorists he influenced, have provided their followers with the means to critique of this form of power. It should be no surprise that such an approach is of interest to some adherents of a political movement that aims to exploit and accelerate the crisis of these institutions.

outsidertheory.com/…

Almost exactly four years ago, 217 people were arrested and prosecuted for protesting when Trump was inaugurated. They faced 60-year prison terms.

Today, after a mob seized the Capitol building for hours in an insurrection that killed someone, the DC Police have made 13 arrests. https://t.co/7CMpIK1hzH

— Andrew Crespo (@AndrewMCrespo) January 7, 2021

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moranbetterDemocrats

It’s the Quiet Ones You Should Be Like in Meetings

December 23, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

You’d be surprised at how much more you can accomplish when you’re not talking.

We’ve all attended meetings–it’s a necessary part of the job. Yet, have you ever been in a meeting discussing your CRM system, and no one can stop talking? Someone wants to discuss how to improve data tracking, while someone else wants to focus on contact management. Team leaders or managers might try to steer the conversation back on track, but everyone keeps talking.

I’ve been in a number of meetings where this exact scenario played out. Heck, I’ve even been the one that’s been talking too much. After leaving a meeting like this, I’ve gone back to my desk, frustrated and a little annoyed that nothing got done. All we did was talk–and talk and talk and talk. Maybe we were all trying to show that we deserved our job title or wanted to make sure we were on the list for a big promotion. Whatever the reason, we were all too busy talking to accomplish anything.

“However,

after spending years in the professional world,

I’ve realized these meetings aren’t a complete waste of time.

And that’s thanks to the quiet ones.”

And no, I’m not referring to the weird character in a scary movie who reveals himself as the killer. Rather, these are the people who go unnoticed during meetings. They sit quietly in meetings, watching the room fill with noise and observe. They may even be known as ‘the quiet guy’ around the office–the one notorious for never talking during a meeting.

While you may think that these individuals don’t speak because they don’t have anything to contribute or are too intimidated to speak up, this couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re thinking. They’re taking in information from the room, coming up with action items, and learning. These incredible quiet creatures do all this without uttering a word.

I’ve always been curious about these individuals, eager to know what their take is on whatever we’re talking about. But these quiet people don’t waste their words–they save them for a fortunate few.

As I’ve worked more closely with these individuals, I’ve changed how I react in meetings. Instead of jumping in and contributing to the throng of voices, I keep quiet and listen. I’m a long way from perfecting this skill, but already I’ve seen great results.

Silence is Actually a Sign of Intelligence

How many times have you sat in a meeting to discuss problems within a team or process pain points and felt ignored? Many problems in a professional setting come from a lack of listening. Managers are overly eager to come up with a solution that they layout in a too-long PowerPoint or team members spend too long discussing their problems that they don’t give anyone a chance to present a solution.

The endless talking happens for a number of reasons: managers eager to show they’re worthy of their job title or showcase their leadership skills, employees anxious to show off their communication skills to bump themselves upon the promotion list, over-inflated egos, and more. But perhaps the biggest reason is to look smart. Where the idea that the smartest person in the room is the one that talks the most came from, I don’t know.

I’ve found that the opposite is true. The people who sit quietly and take in all the chatter are incredibly smart. Think about how much these people learned or the action items they created while we were all too busy talking.

Even after the meeting ends and many of us linger, anxious to talk more, the quiet ones head back to their desk, ready to get started on their next action item or to further process all the information that was just presented.

“That’s one of the characteristics of quiet people:

they act instead of talk.”

Seeing the results that these silent creatures produce has changed my opinion. I’ve realized that the person who spent the entire meeting talking doesn’t know as much as they think they do. They put on a good show, sure. But the person who never said a word actually knows so much more than the rest of us.

Staying Quiet is Actually a Good Thing

When the time comes that these quiet creatures do have to speak up, it’s an incredible sight. Rather than reference a very detailed spreadsheet, repeat a lengthy conversation with a customer or an email chain between a customer and themselves, they say what they need to say, then shut up.

That’s the mindset I’m working towards but I am a long way from perfect: make your point in as little words as possible, then listen.

Already, I’ve found that I’ve learned more by listening and observing. Additionally, I’ve picked up on what people aren’t saying, which is equally as important.

Intelligent People are Focused on Listening

Focusing on listening instead of talking has, for me, been a game-changer. Primarily because I’ve been able to learn so much more about our customers, processes, and the market by listening to what others have to say rather than showing off my own knowledge.

I’ve had some practice with this throughout the years, beginning with my first job after graduating college. I accepted a job as a content writer with a large software company days after graduating. However, I was concerned about my lack of technological knowledge and was concerned about how well I could do this job. Not one to shy away from a challenge (or the salary for that matter), I accepted.

However, I quickly became known as being “the quiet one” on the team because I rarely, if ever, spoke during team or company meetings. At first, this was because I was afraid of coming off as stupid because I didn’t know much about the technology. Over time, I was able to learn more about our company’s software stack, how our business operated, and what our customers were interested in–all because I focused on listening.

Listen Meeting 1 625x418.jpeg.pagespeed.ce.GoXGmJ6ueC It’s the Quiet Ones You Should Be Like in Meetings

Enough of tooting my own horn though. I also heard an example of someone who used the art of listening to accelerate his career path and attend a meeting with the founders of Google.

Simply by offering to take notes, he gained a wealth of knowledge that allowed him to stay ahead of his competition and accelerated his career. That skill was what earned him a seat in a meeting with the two men who created Google.

I can only imagine what this man learned from these two professionals and how valuable that information is to him now. And how did he do it? He listened.

Welcome Silence

Now when I walk into a meeting, I’m focused on observing rather than adding my voice to an already noisy room. This small change has accelerated my own learning dramatically.

While this change is small, it takes time to master–I’m a long way from it like I’ve said. However, it’s not impossible to do. Rather than allowing your pride, ego, or job title take over in meetings, reign it in. Swallow your words and listen. Not only will your knowledge increase, but so will your productivity. You’ll have a list of things that need to be done rather than having to call yet another meeting to discuss action items.

A final warning I’ll leave you with: have the self-discipline to know when to talk and when to listen. Don’t become known as the guy who can’t stop talking (both in and out of meetings) because you’re actually hurting your career.

Look for the quiet ones around your office. Watch how they work. Pay attention to when they do speak up and follow their example. Again, you’d be surprised at how much more you can accomplish simply by staying quiet.

For more articles on effective meetings, check out these:

How to Work from Home and Stay Productive

Microsoft Remote Work Tech Update: Azure, Teams, 365 Groups

…

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It’s the Quiet Ones You Should Be Like in Meetings Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

OcéanIA treats climate change like a machine learning grand challenge

December 9, 2020 Big Data

Self-driving cars. Artificial general intelligence. Beating a human in a game of chess. Grand challenges are tasks that can seem like moonshots that, if achieved, will move the entire machine learning discipline forward. Now a team of researchers with the recently established OcéanIA is treating the study of the ocean and climate change as a machine learning grand challenge. The four-year project that brings together more than a dozen AI researchers and scientists shared some initial plans this week.

The OcéanIA project begins with a focus on the automated recognition of plankton species, many of which have not been documented. Next to trees and forests, plankton and the processes they’re a part of in the ocean are some of the largest carbon-capturing methods on Earth. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified a correlation between climate change and the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon, produce oxygen, and support biodiversity. A study released in May found that plankton absorb twice as much carbon as scientists previously thought. A team of about 15 researchers are working on OcéanIA across machine learning and fields like biology, said Inria Chile Research Center director Nayat Sánchez-Pi.

“These crucial ecological services provided by plankton need to be better measured, monitored, and protected in order to maintain the ocean’s stability, to mitigate the various effects of climate change, and ensure the food security of population,” Sánchez-Pi said. “Oceans today we can say are the last unknown, and understanding the role of oceans in climate change is not only important but also a challenge for modern AI and applied ML.”

Sánchez-Pi was one of four keynote speakers at the Latinx in AI workshop Monday as part of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference. Affinity workshops at the conference include Black in AI, Jews in AI, Queer in AI, and Women in Machine Learning. For the first time this year, NeurIPS will host Indigenous in AI and Muslims in AI workshops.

Luis Martí and Sánchez-Pi are also lead authors of a paper detailing OcéanIA that was accepted for publication at the Tackling Climate Change workshop being held Friday, the first published work associated with the project. More than 90 research and proposal papers were accepted for publication at the climate change workshop.

Machine learning challenges presented by the need to study plankton and oceans range from working with small datasets and few-shot learning methods to transfer learning, the process of repurposing a model for new tasks.

Unsupervised and semi-supervised methods will be used to identify particular plankton species. There are an estimated 70,000 unknown plankton species in the ocean today. Explainability will be used to tell the difference between different species.

Specific challenges listed in the proposal paper include the creation of models that incorporate complex knowledge about plankton into ocean-climate models and the development of “a metabolic model including the main microbial oceanic compartments and couple it with physics,” as well as computer vision for identifying plankton from satellite images. Satellite imagery is a traditional method researchers use to understand plankton populations.

At the previous Tackling Climate Change workshop at NeurIPS, researchers like Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng argued that making scientific progress toward solving climate change and progress toward machine learning grand challenges is a two-way street.

“I do think [for] the future of AI and ML, a great challenge is scientific discovery. Indeed, how to embed prior knowledge, scientific reasoning, and how to be able to deal with small data,” Institute for Computational Sustainability director Carla Gomes said during a panel discussion one year ago.

Last year at NeurIPS, Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun talked about energy efficiency as another worthy challenge for AI researchers.

OcéanIA treats climate change like a machine learning grand challenge

Above: Tara sampling method

Data to study plankton species will come courtesy of Tara Océans Foundation, which has undertaken 11 expeditions since 2005. The 12th Tara Océans expedition will focus on the study of the ocean ecosystem. It begins this month and continues through July 2022. The expedition will travel along the coast of Africa, Europe, and South America. Along the way, participants will collect samples at depths ranging from the surface of the sea to 1,000 meters deep.

More than 35 scientific institutions from the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil to the University of Cape Town in South Africa will participate in the study of samples and data collected by Tara Océans. An upcoming leg of the expedition will go through the Patagonia region of Chile.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Can President Jim Crow pardon himself like a turkey

November 23, 2020 Humor

Trump could try to pardon himself, but it is more likely that he could resign and VP Pence could pardon him, much like the ceremony on Tuesday, live and domestic. As a WaPo op-ed also shows he may be able to even further obstruct justice before leaving office by manipulating the Department of Justice.

Yet one tradition will continue as planned: The President of the United States will pardon the annual Thanksgiving turkey at the White House on Tuesday, according to a White House official. In a 2020 riddled with disappointments and disaster, the news Wednesday that the annual pardon will go on, is somehow both comforting and unsettling, and sure to ruffle some feathers.

President Donald Trump has not had a public event on his schedule in 11 days. He’s made just four official appearances since November 3, and he’s only spoken publicly twice. With exception of golf on the weekends, and a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veteran’s Day, he has not left the White House.

www.cnn.com/…

The National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation is a ceremony that takes place at the White House every year shortly before Thanksgiving. The President of the United States is presented with a live domestic turkey by the National Turkey Federation, usually males of the Broad Breasted White variety.

x

“One former White House official said Trump asked about self-pardons as well as pardons for his family. Trump even asked if he could issue pardons pre-emptively for things people could be charged with in the future, the former official said.”https://t.co/DEmZcV1PKA

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) November 13, 2020

As the article points out Trump faces significant legal peril from two state based investigations he cannot pardon himself for. Secondly any self pardon would void the protection for self incrimination and this would also be bad for him and others including family members.

— Mathius of Gaff (@mat_3rd) November 11, 2020

The final votes from Pennsylvania and Nevada not only changed President Trump’s political future — they changed his legal prospects, too. When Trump leaves the Oval Office for the last time, he will face potential liability for any criminal acts he committed while in office, and even before. Between now and Jan. 20, though, Trump has a lot of power to make it harder for the Justice Department and FBI to follow through on any investigations once he is no longer president.

Until now, the office of the presidency has largely shielded Trump from the prospect of criminal prosecution. Some of this is because of Justice Department policy: Despite finding substantial evidence of obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation, for example, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III declined to charge Trump, citing a 1973 Justice Department policy memo precluding it. Attorney General William P. Barr has further protected Trump, defending the president’s actions in public and pressuring prosecutors who might harm the president’s interests in private. But without the immunity offered by his position, and with a new attorney general in charge under Joe Biden’s administration, Trump will be accountable to the law like any other citizen.

[…]

He has two options.

First, he could try to pardon himself. This is a risky move, as whether a self-pardon would be constitutionally valid is an unsettled legal question because no previous president has tried it. Most legal scholars agree that it’s not permissible, though, and if a Trump pardon of himself were later challenged and invalidated, he would be back to square one.

Alternatively, Trump could resign at some point before his term ends at noon on Jan. 20, 2021, leaving Vice President Pence to assume the presidency, however briefly — giving him the plenary power to pardon Trump. Thanks to the precedent that Ford set with Nixon, such a pardon, which Pence could also extend to members of Trump’s family, would probably be constitutionally secure if it covered uncharged crimes committed while Trump was in office.

[…]

In short, Trump won’t be in the clear, no matter what he does, once he no longer has the protection of the presidency. This is especially true when we consider that the FBI’s counterintelligence interest in Trump will continue even after he leaves office: He’ll still know highly classified information, so it will be more important than ever for the intelligence community to know whether foreign countries have any leverage they can exploit over the former president. This would provide grounds for further investigation into Trump’s, and the Trump Organization’s, financial entanglements abroad.

Still, before Trump leaves office, he has the power to muck up any cases that could be made against him by a future Justice Department — enough to set up Biden to continue as the villain in the same “witch hunt” narrative Trump has been talking about for the past four years.

www.washingtonpost.com/…

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moranbetterDemocrats

Looks like we’re going to win. Pound sand, Trumpers, on the banks of a river in Egypt

November 12, 2020 Humor

It hasn’t been called yet, but the signs are there and Biden-Harris will speak to the nation tonight. At this writing the swing state margin of victory is less than 2016, but that should change much like the overall plurality is historically high.

Trump could try to corrupt the elector selection process, but that bit of faithlessness is a stretch.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney: “What the president needs to do, frankly, is put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge that he lost. And he needs to congratulate the winner.”

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 6, 2020

An email obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sent at 5:19 p.m. Thursday by Kenosha for Trump reads: “Trump Victory urgently needs volunteers to make phone calls to Pennsylvania Trump supporters to return their absentee ballots.”https://t.co/C1vzKBUSEp

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 6, 2020

Step away from the sociopath….

Sources close to the White House said some senior officials inside the White House and the campaign are beginning to quietly back away from Trump, in acts of self-preservation, as the returns in Pennsylvania and Georgia indicate the President will not win reelection. https://t.co/Pi50hRjavO

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) November 6, 2020

The people around Trump could just …not enable him. Like when your toddler wants to do something bonkers and you say no and just let him just have his meltdown about it in his room. https://t.co/CEskzHFO6d

— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) November 6, 2020

Political graffiti appears on the Capital Beltway rail bridge near the Mormon Temple. The bridge is known by some as the “Surrender Dorothy” bridge, when those words put on it decades ago. @WTOP pic.twitter.com/SysfOUp3WP

— Mike Murillo (@MikeMurilloWTOP) November 6, 2020

Networks: If you let Trump scare you out of making the call, you will encourage him to do more things that are intended purely to scare you out of making the call.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 6, 2020

It’s like saying “what if Steph Curry were 6’11?”. He wouldn’t be Steph Curry if he were 6’11.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 6, 2020

one day you would be one of the leading voices in favor of ending American democracy? Did you picture yourself rising to defend an orange tinged Autocrat? Are you so fucking cynical and nihilistic that you can’t see the damage you are doing with this line of bullshit? I have to

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) November 6, 2020

David Sirota, editor-at-large of Jacobin, said that efforts by the anti-Trump ground the Lincoln Project to swing GOP votes away from President Trump were “an epic failure.”

Sirota told Hill.TV’s “Rising” that the group was actually trying to secure a Joe Biden presidency with a GOP-controlled senate, as opposed to actually moving GOP voters towards Democrats.

“In a sense, they went to liberals and said ‘give us money to help us defeat Republicans, that’s our job.’” Sirota said. “So, when Donald Trump actually increases his share of the Republican vote in 2020 versus 2016 when there wasn’t the Lincoln Project, that’s just statistically an epic failure.”

Sirota further said that the group raised more money for “ineffective ads and expensive stunts” than the Democratic party spent to try and win key state legislatures. He noted that those losses could change the course of Congress for the next decade.

A striking feature of America’s presidential results is the degree to which 2020 resembles almost any other recent election https://t.co/DfMB20gLgL

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) November 6, 2020

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moranbetterDemocrats

Doesn’t taste like chicken.

September 17, 2020 Humor

Posted by Krisgo

via

About Krisgo

I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon

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Deep Fried Bits

Researchers’ AI system strips identifiable attributes like gender from speech recordings

July 21, 2020 Big Data

In a study accepted to the 2020 International Conference on Machine Learning last week, researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology and the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden propose a privacy-preserving technique that learns to obfuscate attributes like gender in speech data. They use a model that’s trained
to filter sensitive information in recordings and then generate new and private information independent of the filtered one, ensuring sensitive information remains hidden without sacrificing realism and utility.

Maintaining privacy without dispensing with like voice assistants altogether is a challenging task, given state-of-the-art AI techniques have been used to infer attributes like intention, gender, emotional state, and identity from timbre, pitch, and speaker style. Recent reporting revealed that accidental voice assistant activations exposed workers to private conversations; the risk is such that law firms including Mischon de Reya have advised staff to mute smart speakers when they talk about client matters at home. Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and other major voice recognition platforms allow the deletion of recorded data, but this requires some — and in some cases substantial — effort on users’ parts.

The researcher’s solution employs a generative adversarial network (GAN) called PCMelGAN, a two-part AI model consisting of a generator that creates samples and a discriminator that attempts to differentiate between the generated samples and real-world samples. It maps speech recordings to mel spectrograms, or representations of the spectrum of frequencies of the audio signal as it varies over time, and passes them through a filter that removes sensitive information and a generator that adds synthetic information in its place. PCMelGAN then inverts the mel spectrogram output into audio in the form of a raw waveform.

In experiments, the researchers trained PCMelGAN on 10,000 samples from the open source AudioMNIST data set, which comprises 30,000 audio recordings of the digits one through nine spoken in the English language. They measured privacy by determining whether a classifier could predict with better than 50% accuracy a speaker’s original gender after five runs on the spectrograms and the raw audio.

Here’s a recording of someone saying “four”:

And here’s PCMelGAN’s output:

Here’s someone saying “six”:

And here’s PCMelGAN’s output:

According to the researchers, the results show PCMelGAN makes it empirically difficult for adversaries to, for example, infer the gender of the speaker while retaining qualities including intonation and content. “The proposed method can successfully obfuscate sensitive attributes in speech data and generates realistic speech independent of the sensitive input attribute. Our results for censoring the gender attribute on the AudioMNIST dataset, demonstrate that the method can maintain a high level of utility,” they wrote. As more data is collected in various settings across organizations, companies, and countries, there has been an increase in the demand of user privacy.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Manage Subscriptions and Licenses within Dynamics 365 CRM like a pro!

July 14, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Automation capability in software enhances the accuracy and ensures that maximum time is saved. Users working on Dynamics 365 CRM have a wide scope of automation to expedite the process. In Dynamics 365 for Sales, there is a process of creation of invoices. If these invoices are created manually each time it is required, one can only imagine the time it would cost. Here, we want to ask you do you also need to create recurring invoices at regular intervals, if yes, then you are at the right place.

We would like to introduce you to our app Subscription Management that is designed exclusively for Software Publishers and Value Added Resellers using software as a service model. Subscription Management manages flexible billing schedules, penalty schedules, payment reminders, margin schedules and product licensing. It takes care of whether an invoice should be created, when it should be created, how often it should be created and what value should be there on the invoice.

Let’s delve deeper and understand the app with the help of a use case.

Sam, a sales rep creates invoices for her end customers. She needs to create recurring invoices and send payment reminders and apply penalties in case of overdue invoices. For this Sarah turns to Subscription Management to make the task seamless. She at first creates Reminder Schedule which is used to send reminders to her customers and associates Reminder Rules to it. This ensures when the reminder will be sent to the customers. Her agenda is to send reminder to the customer 30 days before the invoice is due so she create Reminder Rule for the same. Sam defines the functional role to which the reminder is to be sent using selected email template.

After creating the Reminder Schedule she needs to define the penalty on the overdue invoices. She creates a Penalty Schedule for the invoices overdue 30 days and levies a penalty of 2 percent on it.

As soon the Penalty Schedule is created Sam needs to define the margin for resellers who are associated. According to the terms and conditions the resellers are paid a margin of 10 percent so a Margin Schedule is created for the same. For this, first a Margin Group is associated with the Product and Customer and then it is added to the Margin Schedule. Margin Schedule serves the purpose of adding margin for the resellers while calculating Invoices.

After the Margin Schedule is set Sam needs to define the Billing Schedule using which the invoices will be sent to the customers along with reminders, penalty and margins. In the Billing Schedule she defines billing frequency, when to generate invoice, how many invoices should be generated, Reminder Schedule and Default Penalty Schedule.

With the Billing Schedule the Invoice will either be created on-demand or by automation of the process. In the Billing Schedule, Billing Lines are defined against which the Invoices are billed. Also, the Product Platform, Product Version, and Product Series are defined to identify which product’s platform, version and series are being billed for.

As the Billing Schedule is defined Sam can easily create Invoices for her purpose. She runs on-demand workflow which creates Invoices for her purpose, the same can be automated. Therefore by using Subscription Management Sarah is able to generate Invoices for her customers automatically and save plethora of time to be used in other constructive tasks.

If you also need to send payment reminders, create margin schedules, set flexible billing schedules, define penalty, product licensing and create recurring invoices for your organization, all you need to do is explore our app Subscription Management for a free trial of 15 days from our website.

For a live demo or to discuss your requirements please email crm@inogic.com

Happy Invoicing and Stay Safe!

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

What does CPQ actually look/work like in Dynamics?

June 30, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Over-promise, under-deliver. Vaporware. Pie in the sky.

People selling business technology, especially in the initial “generating interest” stages, tend to write all kinds of checks that their posteriors can’t cash.

Case in point: when they talk about what “integrates seamlessly” with Dynamics, and “expedites workflows,” and “optimizes throughput” within your CRM solution.

We’re a CPQ ISV and we’ll be blunt: CPQ does NOT mean a 100% automated sales proposal process: it’s not one button you push and you’re done, it’s not “set it and forget it.”

You still have to build a quote for each customer. You still have to track each quote you send. And you (or your CPQ vendor) still have to do some work on the front-end to ensure you’re using the right templates, have products/pricing properly configured, discounts structured, etc.

But CPQ does help you make professional quotes faster and cleaner. And optimize pricing. And improve closing rates.

And while we can talk about it all day: it’s time to show you. View a “walkthrough” of how iQuoteXpress (IQX), a SSO solution, works in Dynamics: https://www.iquotexpress.com/dynamics-integration

If you’re not currently offering CPQ as a value-add — especially to your CRM users, your D365 Sales and D365 Field Service customers — it’s time to take a closer look at the benefits your customers will realize.

Because adding CPQ is rarely seen by the end-user as another vague “seamless integration” that “maximizes efficiency.” It’s usually an “ah-hah!” moment for anyone who has ever tried to build, send, and track a sales quote.

The sales proposal templates are immediately understood as beneficial: targeted look and feel, easy way to brand-build, and a great way to build professional quotes quickly. As are the product and pricing configuration engine, and sales quote tracking tools: ensure you’re always presenting your best “bundles” and tracking more than just whether a quote was sent.

And then there’s the financial benefits your customers will soon realize (and thank you for): For Dynamics users who create and send sales quotes, adding IQX to CRM can help them save as much as 70% on processing times and costs.

If you’ve read this far, great: we thank you. But we really hope you’ll take a couple of minutes to see how CPQ works in Dynamics, because that’s way more important than anything we could say in any blog post.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Google’s Duplex is calling businesses to check the availability of ‘critical products’ like toilet paper

June 20, 2020 Big Data

Google has begun using Duplex, its AI chat agent that can arrange appointments over the phone, to contact businesses about the status of certain “in-demand” items like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and cleaning solutions. As reflected in an update to a support webpage and confirmed to VentureBeat by a spokesperson via email, the company is expanding Duplex’s use cases as it looks to help people navigate social distancing and shortages arising from the pandemic.

“To help consumers make more informed decisions about when to leave the house during social distancing, we’re experimenting with ways to surface the availability of critical products [in Google Maps and Search],” the spokesperson said in a statement. Duplex is collecting the info from grocery stores, discount stores, pharmacies, drug stores, convenience stores, and home improvement stores.

The rollout follows a Duplex pilot in New Zealand; a quiet launch in the U.K., Australia, and Canada; and a debut in Spain with support for the Spanish language. It also comes as Google looks to leverage the service to confirm which stores are closed as a result of shelter-in-place orders intended to limit the spread of COVID-19. Back in March, CEO Sundar Pichai said Google would use Duplex “where possible” to contact restaurants and businesses so it can accurately reflect hours, pick-up, and delivery information during the pandemic.

Earlier this week, Google revealed that Duplex has been used to update over half a million business listings to date.

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At the beginning of an exchange, Duplex makes it clear the call is automated, and it doesn’t call late at night or early in the morning. In all countries, Duplex informs the person on the other end that they’re being recorded. If business owners or front of house staff respond with “I don’t want to be recorded” or some variation of the phrase, the call is handed off to a human operator on an unrecorded line. (Those operators also annotate the call transcripts used to train Duplex’s algorithms.)

Part of the reason Duplex sounds so natural is that it taps Google’s sophisticated WaveNet audio processing neural network and intelligently inserts “speech disfluencies” — the “ums” and “ahs” people make involuntarily in the course of a conversation.

In 2019, Google brought Duplex to select “devices that can access Search or Maps,” expanding the agent’s availability beyond Pixel phones, iOS devices, and select third-party Android devices. Still, the tech giant appears to be hedging its bets with Assistant on the Web, a relatively new service that uses Duplex technology to handle things like car rentals and movie ticket bookings on the mobile web.

With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, rollouts and development of Assistant on the Web and Duplex are likely to slow as governments mandate that some businesses remain closed.

Google’s Duplex efforts around the pandemic dovetail with its wider response. This month, the company began showing local store information including product availability, locations, and options such as curbside pickup or delivery within the Search Shopping tab in countries where it’s available. And in May, Google started testing a curbside pickup badge in Local Inventory Ads to give added visibility to retailers now offering the option.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

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