"As I learned, Stammtisch ("shtom-tish") means "regulars' table".
It's an age-old German tradition where a group of like-minded people —
traditionally men — meet up at a bar or a restaurant at a regular time to have drinks and chat."
'...described the classic Stammtisch: "In every German village there is the corner bar, and in the corner is a table.
It's reserved for the sort of elders or other regulars.
And they sit in the corner and they drink their beer and smoke their cigarettes and pontificate on the town and all of its craziness."
What about a coffee Stammtisch?
"That's called a Kaffeekränzchen," Hein explained. "That's typically more like the women when they meet in the afternoon for a coffee and cake. Also another very traditional German thing."
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/22/nx-s1-5233033/holidays-loneliness-cure-stammtisch
______
The Race to Translate Animal Sounds Into Human Language
"modern machine learning tools require extremely large amounts of data, and up until now, such quantities of high-quality and well-annotated data have been lacking. "
"It’s not just that human data corpora are many orders of magnitude larger than the kind of data we have access to for animals in the wild:
More than 500 GB of words were used to train GPT-3, compared to just more than 8,000 “codas” (or vocalizations) for Project Ceti’s recent analysis of sperm whale communication. "
'We even know what constitutes a “word,” which is a huge advantage over interpreting animal communication,
where scientists rarely know whether a particular wolf howl,
for instance, means something different from another wolf howl,
or even whether the wolves consider a howl as somehow analogous to a “word” in human language."
'Now, new automatic detection algorithms based on convolutional neural networks can race through thousands of hours of recordings, picking out the animal sounds and clustering them into different types, according to their natural acoustic characteristics.
Once those large animal datasets are available, new analytical algorithms become a possibility,
such as using deep neural networks to find hidden structure in sequences of animal vocalizations"
https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-translation-animal-sounds-human-language/
_____
"Champagne’s sordid secret: the homeless and hungry migrants picking grapes for France’s luxury winemakers
Exclusive: Guardian investigation finds an
underpaid, underfed workforce, some of whom are forced to sleep on the streets,
exploited by a system of labour providers"
"Last year,
300 million
bottles of champagne
from the vineyards of northern France were shipped around the world, generating
€6 billion in revenues.
Yet the champagne industry has been hit by a string of controversies related to its treatment of grape-pickers, with
four workers
dying from suspected sunstroke during last year’s harvest"
6 billion$
4 dead
“Every night, we wondered whether we were going to be fired the next morning or not.” Her payslip showed she was paid less than the French minimum hourly wage, and no overtime.
Unions blame vineyards for continuing to blindly accept cheap labour and the sector as a whole for failing to ban exploitative labour providers. They say some vineyard owners try to justify themselves by arguing that they are “helping African migrants” by giving them employment, even if it is underpaid."
____
'Remarkable images taken by automatic cameras in the Brazilian rainforest reveal an isolated community that appears to be thriving despite pressure from ranchers and illegal encroachment into the Amazon.
The pictures, of a group of men, offer the outside world its first glimpse of the community – and give further evidence the population is growing.
The group is known as the Massaco after the river that runs through their lands, but
no one knows what they call themselves,
while their language, social fabric and beliefs remain a mystery.'
No comments:
Post a Comment