The Dish

Google is on it:

Jim Edwards calls the Google Translate app “the most astonishing piece of mobile software I’ve seen in months”:

Google Translate lets you read anything in a foreign language; translate any text, even handwriting; and carry on a live conversation with another person as the app translates what you’re saying. The software translates instantly, whether via text, photo, or voice.

Or as Lance Ulanoff explains, “once you select the two speaking languages, Google Translate can auto detect them as they are spoken.” Below is a demo that’s almost as remarkable as the GIF seen above:

Ulanoff tried it with a Turkish-speaking intern:

At first, we stumbled because the intern, who is also fluent in English, kept responding to what I was saying and not waiting for Google Translates’ interpretation. Eventually, she got it right and started waiting for my translated words to be spoken by the app.

Initially, she told me, the translation was perfect, but when I started to speak in longer sentences, it basically fell apart and got a lot of it wrong. As I tested with others who spoke in Greek, German and French, we noticed the same thing. We could never completely rely on Google translate to get the words right.

He found a lot of similarities between Google’s app and Skype Translator. John Pavlus tested out the latter:

The limitations of Skype’s translation software are … revealing, since they show how difficult it is for even the smartest machine to mimic the subtleties of effective human conversation. Determining which meaning of a word is appropriate in different contexts can be vexing. “If software is translating between American and British English, and it recognizes the word ‘football,’ it also needs to know when to change it to ‘soccer’ and when to keep it as ‘football’ or ‘gridiron,’” says Christopher Manning, a professor of linguistics and computer science in Stanford University’s Natural Language Processing Group.

Matthew Braga explains why realtime translation is so difficult:

“The reason that real-time [translation] is difficult for most of us is that it’s really a matter of probabilities,” said Gerald Penn, associate chair of the University of Toronto’s department of computer science, and a specialist in natural language processing. In a modern speech recognition system, a computer is typically trained on a language model—essentially, a database of what people are most likely to say, and in what order. Using this model, a computer gathers speech data from a microphone, and makes some educated guesses about what was actually said.

“The modern approach is not to make the guess right away,” Penn explained, “but to collect the evidence, and then rank it, score it, and augment it.” The challenge is performing this process fast and accurately enough that you can create the illusion of a conversation, where the translation appears to happen in real-time.

A few words to add to my post yesterday on the religious roots of today’s era of terrorism. I think it’s perfectly possible to agree with that analysis of what is going on, while disagreeing on what to actually do about it. There’s this tendency to conflate a willingness to recognize some core illiberal parts of Islam as the problem with an invade-occupy-and-torture strategy of the last administration. But the two are easily separable. In fact, it is perfectly obvious at this point that a military strategy will not only fail but actually make things worse. There is no doubt in my mind that the invasion of Iraq, for example, advanced the cause of Jihadism as much as the brutal torture of Muslims by the CIA and every other branch of the armed services as well. The two brothers behind the Charlie massacre were both converted, we are told, by images from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

So what can we do? We cannot be the reformers of the Islamic world – again, that would make matters worse. Equally, in my view, we must not give an inch on freedom of expression, especially blasphemy. We need to drop the double standards and not self-censor with some religions, while ripping on others. We should have the right to rip on them all. If you’re going to publish photos of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, you sure can publish the rather innocuous cover of Charlie now at large. Ross makes some excellent points on this today.

Our main current tool is NSA spying. It’s very hard to know how necessary our current expansive spying apparatus really is – because it’s cloaked in the secrecy that effectively ends democratic accountability, except via the executive branch, which, even when held by a liberal Democrat, is far too terrified of presiding over another attack to question anything the CIA or NSA tells them. But do I prefer that kind of surveillance to drone wars that seem to be fomenting more Jihadism than they eliminate? I’d say so. I’d rather not do either, but it’s clear we have a real problem, and that terror directed at basic freedoms of travel and expression requires vigilance. If that means a retreat on privacy, that’s a trade-off I’m prepared to make.

But even the best intelligence will fail in the face of well-concealed sleeper cells or lone wolves or lone packs.

The French identified the Charlie mass-murderers long before the attack. They failed to prevent it. (They tell us they are preventing many plots, and again, we have to trust them, even though in the US, little trust can exist when high intelligence officials like Clapper and Brennan lie directly to the Congress and the public and even spy on their over-seers and are never held to account by the president.) But the fact remains that some of these attacks will succeed – because they only need to win once, while we have to win every time. We cannot ultimately control that but we can control our response. We must make sure we do not take the Jihadist bait, with racist or polarization, and ratchet up a cycle that only leads to more Jihadism and more terror. That’s where I think Obama’s strength lies in this: with his remarkable imperturbability and emotional calm. I think that’s a shrewder defense than declaring a “war” on Jihadism with every attack.

We can end the worst provocations – by closing GTMO and truly pressuring the Israelis to stop the explosive settlement campaign to wipe Palestine off the map. And we can keep calm and carry on. The huge crowds in France last Sunday were magnificent. A bigger test comes now – whether we can soldier on without further polarization and a common defense of core Western ideas. I think we can. Because I think we must. Even as so many dead lie round.

America is no longer the only game in town:

Though the United States is still leading the world in research related to diseases, it is rapidly losing its edge, according to an analysis in the American Medical Association’s flagship journal JAMA. If you look at biomedical research around the globe, the United States funded 57 percent of that work a decade ago. The U.S. share has since dropped to 44 percent, according to the study published online Tuesday.

Jason Millman adds that “medical investment in the United States grew at just .8 percent per year between 2004-2012, a major slowdown from the 6 percent annual growth between 1994 and 2004.” And, using the above chart as evidence, he questions how wisely that money is being spent:

It’s not just that the investment is slipping, the authors argue. The funding priorities are leaving major research gaps. In all, 27 diseases account for 84 percent of U.S. mortality, but together they receive just 48 percent of funding from the National Institutes of Health. Some diseases, like cancer and HIV/AIDS, get funded at better rates than predicted based on the disease burden, while others like stroke and depression fall short, according to an analysis by study author Hamilton Moses III of Alerion Advisors. Research into migraines is particularly underfunded, even though 36 million Americans, or 12 percent of the population, suffer from migraine headaches, according to the American Migraine Foundation.

Bill Gardner thinks America’s declining dominance is a “concern only to the degree that the US is doing less than it could”:

The growth of investment in health research across the rest of the world is only to the good. But here is the thing that shocked me. The authors looked at what health systems (that is, hospitals and hospital systems) and insurers invest in improving the services they provide. I would have hoped that insurers — who finance health care — and health systems — who deliver care to patients — would have invested significantly in service innovations. This is not the case. …

To get a sense of how little health systems (that is, hospitals and larger integrated systems) invest in improving their product, you should know that the median US industry invests about 2% of its revenue in research and development. Health system investment in service innovation is an order of magnitude less than that.

I wrote a little about this yesterday, but the actual details of the fallout of the CIA’s spying on its Senate overseers are jaw-dropping. The CIA “Accountability Review Board” (try not to burst out laughing) put out a report over some Senators’ objections exonerating everyone at the CIA and castigating the CIA’s out-going inspector general, David Buckley, for finding fault with the spying on the Senate ordered by John Brennan, Obama’s duplicitous, self-serving CIA chief. Buckley announced he was quitting only last week.

So the CIA wins yet one more round against the Senate, its purported over-seer, cementing its role as the government agency in which no one is ever held accountable for anything, including torturing innocent prisoners to death:

Feinstein noted that Brennan himself had previously apologized for the actions of some CIA officials in the dispute. “The decision was made to search committee computers, and someone should be found responsible for those actions,” Feinstein said in her statement. But Bayh, in a statement, said the board found that no discipline was warranted for the five CIA employees — two of whom were lawyers — because “they acted reasonably under the complex and unprecedented circumstances.”

That would require reversing every conclusion made by the previous inspector-general; and so the report does exactly that:

The accountability board headed by Bayh and Bauer rejected nearly every finding by the inspector general. It concluded that there was “no basis” for the Justice Department referral, noting that one of the officials who oversaw the matter “reasonably believed” he was acting under the authority of Brennan himself and that the director had cautioned against intruding on the Senate’s internal work product.

The board also found there was no basis for the charges against the officials for showing a lack of candor, noting that the inspector general’s office did not record its interviews with the officials or keep a record of the questions it had asked them. Among the panel’s recommendations were that the inspector general keep “more complete records of interviews.”

So the only two men actually held accountable in any way by the CIA and the president on the issue of torture and of unconstitutionally wire-tapping the Senate staffers’ emails are the whistle-blower on torture and the very inspector-general who had the integrity to call a crime a crime. They are thorough at the CIA. Anyone guilty of war crimes must be protected at all costs; anyone who challenges that cover-up will be jailed or publicly castigated. And the president is fine with all of it. He has created precedents which essentially grant impunity to future torture, which many Republican candidates will surely want to bring back, and to future wire-tapping of Senate staffers tasked with oversight.

Obama has made torture much more likely to return – and will bequeath to his successor a CIA that knows it can do anything and no one can touch it. In this long game, the torturers have won. Because the president surrendered.