Women's History
Thomasine Fletcher 3/20 As the years have passed by, women and men have evolved. Women are allowed to do things that they once weren’t able to do. A woman's footprint in history is not always seen as something to be in awe of, but it is. Throughout time women have made amazing contributions to society but are still seen as less than by men. Some women have been more memorable than others, such as Rosa Parks, Mother Teressa, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth the 1st of England, And Catherine the Great. Some have not been as memorable, but they have all done something to further who we are in society. In 400 BC, in Greece, Agnodice was recognised as one of the first women to become a gynecologist. She had the determination to practice medicine in Greece even though she could face the death penalty for doing so. She was later caught but was released because of her patients, who came to her defense because of her skill as a doctor. In 1691, in Mexico Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was criticized for studying texts. She was a celebrated writer and nun. She defended women's rights to learn. In 1860, Anna Filosofova was a women's rights activist and Russian philanthropist who believed it would be better to educate the poor than to just give them cash benefits. She co-founded a society that helped to provide for the poor. This included not only affordable housing but also work for other women. Poverty has always been one of the greatest problems in society and many have ignored it. Kate Sheppard was New Zealand’s most impactful suffragist and was the most celebrated. She, as well as her fellow campaigners, presented a “monster” petition. This petition was to parliament demanding women’s suffrage and got almost 32,000 signatures. This led to New Zealand becoming the first self-governing country to grant voting rights to women in 1893. Raichō Hiratsuka was a pioneering Japanese editor, writer, and political activist. She co-founded Seitō in 1911, which was the first all women run literary journal. She challenged what was seen to be a woman’s role, which was to take care of the house. She wanted women to reveal the genius hidden within. Even now, women are insufficiently represented in the news. Only around ¼ of people in the news are women. Women also only hold only 27% of management jobs in media organizations. In 1951, Doria Shafik catalyzed a women’s rights movement in Egypt. She stood alongside 1,500 other women demanding their full political rights, equal pay, and the reformation of personal status laws. This, and many other women's efforts, helped to pave the way to women's right to vote in 1956. Though gender equality is “guaranteed” by 140 countries, women still face inequality both directly and indirectly. These are just a few of the women that helped to get us to where we are today. There are many others that we have yet to learn about or to even hear of. https://interactive.unwomen.org/multimedia/timeline/womensfootprintinhistory/en/index.html#section05 |
Real Life Body Snatchers?
Julien Sanchez-Levallois 12/19 A new technology is rising that can force celebrities, politicians, and anyone else to say anything against their will. In 1978, a new adaptation of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released. The film featured Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum and Leonard Nimoy, and is about a detective investigating a woman’s complaint that her husband is acting strange. Upon further investigation, the detective discovers that, in fact, aliens are swapping places with everyday people. As the film continues, the arsenal of imposter-people grows more vast until there are only a few non-imposter characters left. They don’t know who they can trust and are pushed into a corner of conspiracy. For a while, the film was unsettling, but a work of pure fiction. No one could convincingly masquerade as another person with their unique annunciation in real life. Now, they can. Recently, the Youtube channel Collider Videos released a fifteen minute video of a roundtable containing Jeff Goldblum, Tom Cruise, Ewan McGregor, Robert Downey Jr., and George Lucas; Obviously, one would think a lot of work must have been put forward in order to get all of those massive figures in one room. In reality, all it took was four impressionists. Jamie Costa (Ewan McGregor), Josh Robert Thompson (Jeff Goldblum and George Lucas), Evan Ferrante (Tom Cruise), and Jeff Richards (Robert Downey Jr.) are the four people who mimicked the celebrities’ voices and body language. A computer did the rest. (Image Above) Roundtable video by Collider Video. Over the course of the past few years, a technological technique has slowly been being developed to do the astonishing things it’s doing today. Several companies have been making breakthroughs in the obscure industry of mimicking other human beings, mainly celebrities. This applies to the technology mentioned previously, Deepfakes, as well as another technology that will be mentioned later on. The deepfake works by taking two artificial intelligences, one to replicate a human face, and one to detect a false human face. Whenever one artificial intelligence detects a false face, the other tries again over and over again until it makes a seamless deepfake. The technique has been used for all sorts of purposes from comedic sketches, as explained before, to political demonstrations. That brings us to our next point. Last year, on April 18, 2018, Buzzfeed released a demonstration in which Barack Obama talks about the dangers of Deepfakes. As the video continues it’s revealed that it is in fact Jordan Peele’s mouth superimposed on a video of Barack Obama. Though much less advanced than a deepfake, an artificial intelligence analyzed the shapes of Mr. Obama’s mouth, resulting in a nearly undetectable video. If we progress any further with this technology, the deepfake could be as common as a hoax news story or even a stolen credit card. The difference is that with both of those scenarios, one can grant the benefit of the doubt. Whereas with deepfakes, you’re seeing a person say something, and to most people seeing is believing. Similar to deepfakes, under specific circumstances VFX companies deage older actors to flawless effect. The Marvel movies are most famous for their deaging technology, deaging actors like Kurt Russell, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeifer, Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, and Clark Gregg. As of now, the technology takes an entire team of VFX artists to perfect to this degree. In the possible future, if made easier for the average person to use, people could use the tech for more optimistic, sentimental reasons, such as a senior citizen being able to see their younger self with the clarity of the cameras we have today. A similar effect has been displayed in Blade Runner 2049, in which Sean Young’s character, Rachael, is recreated entirely using visual effects. Possibly one of the greatest full-human recreations we’ve seen in modern cinema, with the only giveaway being an unnatural fall after the character (Who isn’t the original replicant from the first film) is shot in the head. Obviously not everyone is an impressionist like the four from the collider video, so the technology does have it’s setbacks; Not necessarily. In 2016, Adobe unveiled a new technology they were developing called Project Voco. In the demonstration, the host took an average sentence in which a husband kissed his wife and his dogs, and altered it so that the man said he kissed Jordan Peele, who was present on the stage. Not only did the host demonstrate that you can swap the words in a sentence, but he also demonstrated that you could add in words that were never present in the initial audio. After Jordan Peele embarrassingly brought up the dangers of the technology, the host clarified that Adobe was working on ways to prevent forgery by adding watermarks or cues that suggested it wasn’t an authentic sentence. That being said, the costly Adobe softwares tend to be followed by lower quality, free versions (Ex. Photoshop to Gimp/MS Paint). Adobe has the time and money to develop watermarks and cues, but these other softwares don’t. In a time when not even the news sources are trusted, it seems like we live in enough doubt and paranoia. If Deepfakes and software life Adobe’s project Voco progress, we could potentially dive even deeper into this grave that we’re digging. We don’t want to get to the level of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but things could get worse. |