William Lawrence Cassidy is accused of posting some 8,000 tweets to harass Alyce Zeoli, who is described in this NYT article as "a Buddhist leader based in Maryland."
Using an ever-changing series of pseudonyms, the authorities say, Mr. Cassidy published thousands of Twitter posts about Ms. Zeoli. Some were weird horror-movie descriptions of what would befall her; others were more along these lines: “Do the world a favor and go kill yourself. P.S. Have a nice day.”
Here is one of them, as redacted in the criminal complaint: “A thousand voices call out to (Victim 1) and she cannot shut off the silent scream.” Another: “Ya like haiku? Here’s one for ya. Long limb, sharp saw, hard drop.”
Cassidy has been jailed on charges of online stalking and is now the subject of a federal case that suggests the question...
Is posting a public message on Twitter akin to speaking from an old-fashioned soapbox, or can it also be regarded as a means of direct personal communication, like a letter or phone call?
Behold! The greatest moment in modern Hugo Award history, as Chris Garcia has a complete (and utterly charming) meltdown when he realizes that he's won a Hugo for Best Fanzine for Drink Tank. I was so close as to be in the splash-zone, and it was a wonder and a delight to behold (yes, I know there's an ad -- it's worth it).
We found an interesting and simple demo of speech recognition in HTML5 in this presentation on slide 25. To make the demo work with ALICE and Pandorabots, we had to make only a slight change to our custom HTML input files.
Note: The demo uses the Google Speech API. At the time of this writing, not all browsers yet support this HTML5 feature. We have found it works in Google Chrome. Furthermore, we have only tested it successfully with Windows 7.
The only change was to replace
with
There are a couple of "tricks" you need to know to test the speech API:
1. Click on the little mic icon to begin speaking. The speech API will detect when you have finished speaking and, when it has finished processing, will display the text it detected in the text area.
2. If you are satisfied with what the speech API detected, click the "Say" button to transmit it to the bot.
The quality of the speech recognition may not seem very high. There are a number of factors that affect the accuracy of speech recognition: the quality of the microphone, background noise, the accent of the speaker, the type of sound card on your computer and so on. Pandorabots has no control over the Google voice recognition software, but the results should be comparable to using the Google voice API with any other application.
Enabling Chrome Voice API
The Chrome voice recognition API may not be enabled by default. Follow these steps to create a shortcut to Chrome with voice recognition enabled.
1. Create a desktop shortcut to Google chrome with copy and paste. (You may also want to rename this shortcut something like "Chrome Voice").
2. Right click on the shortcut and select "Properties" 3. On the Shortcut tab, modify the Target field to include the flag "--enable-speech-input". For example if the Target was originally C:\Users\drwallace\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
In this video, a fifteen-year-old British student (I think the announcer calls him "Berkeley," but it could be "Rodney" or something else) gives and rousing, articulate call-to-arms for social justice, solidarity, and social justice. This young man is one of the best speakers I've heard, and I salute his passion and his integrity:
They can't stop us demonstrating, they can't stop us fighting back, and how ever much they try to imprison us in the streets of London, those are our streets. We will always be there to demonstrate, we will always be there to fight... We are no longer that generation that doesn't care, we are no longer that generation to sit back and take whatever they give us. We are now the generation at the heart of the fight back.
