HBM131: A Cure for Carsickness

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David Denton, Bethany’s father, pictured in his Air Force uniform with the reflection of two of his children visible. Photo illustration by Jeff Emtman.

 

Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, when she was four years old, her carsickness was so bad that she made her dad take a detour to look for a cure at the grocery store.

At the time, they were driving through Central Idaho, visiting all her dad’s favorite places from childhood.  They drove to Kooskia and Kamiah, two small neighboring towns where Bethany’s dad lived for some time with his cousins. He used to love playing outside with his cousins, and hear stories about the land around them. One of his favorite places to go was The Heart of the Monster, a landmark that is sacred to the Nez Perce people. They also made the trip to the Denton family plot at the Pine Grove Cemetery in Kooskia, so that Bethany and her brother could visit their Grandpa Bill’s grave. Bethany’s grandpa was Bill Denton, a sportscaster for KREM-TV in Spokane. She never met him, he died years before she was born.

Audio from the Heart of the Monster site courtesy of Nez Perce National Historical Park, used with permission.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM126: Sounding the Deep

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Computer-generated terrain in the style of a bathymetry map. Image by Jeff Emtman.

Computer-generated terrain in the style of a bathymetry map. Image by Jeff Emtman.

 

How familiar are you with the shape of the continents? What about the shape of the seafloor?

If you’re unfamiliar with the contours of our planet’s underwater mountain ranges and plateaus and valleys, then you’re not alone. No one really knows what’s down there; at least, not in any great detail. That’s because, well, the water is in the way, and that makes it hard for our mapping satellites to see down there. Even the seafloor maps we now have, the ones that include prominent underwater features, are often based on predictions from satellite observations of the oceans’ surface instead of observed data. At present, as much as 80% of the seafloor has yet to be mapped in detail. Even the Moon and Mars are mapped at a higher resolution than our own oceans.

Dr. Vicki Ferrini wants to change that. She is a marine geologist who specializes in bathymetry, the science of mapping underwater topography, and uses sonar to take measurements of water depth. She uses these measurements and other data to create topographic maps of the seafloor. Vicki is part of a global effort called Seabed 2030, an initiative sponsored by the Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) to create a high-resolution map of the entire ocean by the year 2030. Having a completed map will inform almost everything we do in the ocean, including modelling currents and the climate, exploring for minerals, oil, and gas, and managing fisheries and underwater habitats. Seafloor mapping was essential to the plate tectonics revolution, and some scientists think that a more detailed map could lead to another major shift in oceanography.

 

Vicki isn’t just interested in mapping the deep ocean. In this episode, Vicki tests a small sonar designed for shallow waters. She and her colleagues need it to map a shallow lake in the middle of a crater on a newly-formed island near Tonga in the South Pacific. Mapping this small lake will give Vicki and her colleagues some insight into how the island formed, and why it hasn’t eroded as quickly as other volcanic islands like it.

Producer James Dinneen went to Vicki’s childhood home on Cape Cod in Massachusetts to record as she tested the sonar device she was about to send off to her colleagues in Tonga.

This episode includes archival tape, used with permission from San Francisco Maritime National Park Association.

Producer: James Dinneen
Editor: Bethany Denton, Jeff Emtman
Music: James Dinneen, Lucky Dragons, The Black Spot

 
A preliminary map of the island's shallow waters, made with data from Vicki's sonar. Image provided by Vicki Ferrini.

A preliminary map of the island's shallow waters, made with data from Vicki's sonar. Image provided by Vicki Ferrini.

HBM125: Deepfaking Nixon

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Graphic by Jeff Emtman.

Graphic by Jeff Emtman.

 

There’s a beautifully written speech that was never delivered. Written for President Richard Nixon by Bill Safire, the speech elegizes astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11, who’d become stuck on the moon, and were left to die there.  In reality, Buzz and Neil made it home safely, but this contingency speech was written anyways, just in case. Sometimes it’s called The Safire Memo and is sometimes called In Event of Moon Disaster.

The latter title share its name with an installation that’s (as of publish date) on display for the first time at IDFA in the Netherlands.  This project by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund explores an alternate past where Aldrin and Armstrong don’t make it home from the moon.  The film portion of the installation heavily features a reading of The Safire Memo by a computer generated version of President Nixon sitting in the Oval Office, reading from notes, making all the familiar facial expressions, sharing the same vocal tics, presidential timbre, and some of the Nixonian je ne sais quoi that makes the fake nearly believable. 

But it’s not Nixon.  And it’s not entirely accurate to say it’s an actor.  It’s a kind of mix of the two, a synthetic Nixon generated by a booming form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning” which creates mathematical models of complex systems, like speech.  Lewis Wheeler  (the actor tasked with providing the voice of Nixon) did not have to imitate Nixon’s voice, only provide a proper pacing an intonation.  From there, the artists hired several companies (including Re-Speecher and Vocal ID) trained a computer model to translate Lewis’s voice into Nixon’s.

 

Excerpt from the installation In Event of Moon Disaster by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund. This video is a deepfake.

In Event of Moon Disaster on display at IDFA in The Netherlands. Photo by Francesca Panetta.

 

This kind of deep-learned fakery (called “deepfakes”) currently usually falls somewhere in the uncanny valley—the tech is good enough to get create a strong impersonation of a voice, but one that sounds still a bit mechanical, or metallic.  This won’t be the case for long though, as more and more convincing deepfake voices emerge with each generation of new code.  

And on the visual front, current video deepfakes are often so good as often pass the gut check of credibility.  This may have been most famously demonstrated in a Buzzfeed article where comedian Jordan Peele impersonates President Obama’s voice and a video deepfake moves his face along with the spoken words.  

With the 2020 presidential elections looming, it seems almost inevitable that deepfakes will enter the media fray that’s meant to discredit political enemies, creating scandals that never happened.  And outside of politics, deepfake pornographers take up the task of swapping pornographic actresses’ faces with those of celebrities or the faces of female journalists they seek to discredit.  

On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Francesca and Halsey tell producer Jeff Emtman that deepfakes aren’t going to rupture society.  We’ve dealt with this before, whether it’s darkroom manipulations or photoshop, societies eventually learn how to detect deception. But the adjustment period can be rough, and they hope that In Event of Moon Disaster will help educate media consumers on the danger of taking media at face value, regardless of whether it’s deepfakes or just old-fashioned photo mis-captioning.

Also on this episode, Ahnjili Zhuparris explains how computers learn to speak, and we listen to some audio examples of how computer voices can fail, using examples from the paper Location-Relative Attention Mechanisms For Robust Long-Form Speech Synthesis.  Also heard: a presidential  parody deepfake from user Stable Voices on Youtube. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM124: Banana Softies

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Graphic by Jeff Emtman

Graphic by Jeff Emtman

 

“Gene” says it started because he wanted to be a veterinarian. So he took a job as a research associate at a vivarium that studied cancer drugs. He was often alone in the lab at night with hundreds or thousands of research animals around him.  The monkeys were his favorite, especially the rhesus macaques. He loved to give them treats, play movies and Celine Dion for them. And sometimes he’d lean up against the cages to let his monkey friends groom him. He knew the work would be hard, but he believed his  was justified because the primate research helped people in the long run.

Content Note:
Animal euthanasia and language

In his two years at the lab, Gene radiated a lot of monkeys.  He and his colleagues studied the deteriorating effects of radiation and the side effects of experimental cancer drugs seeking FDA approval. Once a monkey became too sick and lethargic, it was Gene’s job to euthanize them. He would hold them as they died and tell them he was sorry. 

After one study with a particularly high radiation doses, Gene found himself alone again in a lab late at night, euthanizing more monkeys and thinking to himself, “Those were my friends... Those were my fucking friends.” These words became the screamed lyrics to the unfinished, unpublished song that Gene performs in this episode.

Gene left the job shortly after writing the song, but he still works in medical research. He no longer performs euthanizations. 

Have a story to share with us? Call our voicemail line (765) 374-5263 or send us an email.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot and “Gene”

 

Gene says that the monkeys enjoyed watching this adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

An island in South Carolina where rhesus macaques are bred for scientific study

HBM120: Own Worst Interest

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HBM120.jpg
 

In the fall of 1989, in Vancouver, Washington, a short, 29 year-old man named Westley Allan Dodd raped and murdered three young boys. The boys were brothers Cole and William Neer, ages 10 and 11, and four year old Lee Iseli.

Content Note:
Sexual violence, suicide and capital punishment

A few weeks later, police arrested Westley at movie theater after he tried and failed to abduct another boy. He quickly confessed to the three murders. The prosecution sought the death penalty, and Dodd pled guilty.

Death penalty cases take a long time due to all the appeals built into the process. These appeals are designed to make sure the state hasn’t made any mistakes in the death sentence. They check for things like juror misconduct, incompetent defense lawyers, new evidence. Death penalty cases take years, sometimes decades.

Westley Allan Dodd did not want that. Instead, he wanted to be executed as quickly as possible.

In letters to the Supreme Court of Washington, Dodd urged the court to allow him to waive his right to appeal his death sentence. He believed he deserved to die for what he did, and wanted it done as soon as possible. Dodd was what’s known as a “volunteer”–someone who gives up their rights in order to hasten their own execution. The Death Penalty Information Center cites about 150 cases of “volunteers” in the United States.

Dodd’s case sparked debate both among people who supported and opposed the death penalty. Some argued he had the right to choose whether the court would review the validity of his death sentence. Others argued that the law ensures that all defendants have due process whether they want it or not.

In the meantime, Dodd continued to advocate for his own execution in interviews and in exchanges with his pen pals. He said he felt remorseful, and even wrote a self-defense booklet for kids to learn how to stay safe from men like him. The booklet was called “When You Meet A Stranger”.

The debate made its way to the Washington Supreme Court.  In a 7-2 ruling, they decided that Dodd did, in fact, have the right to waive his remaining appeals. After just three years on death row (5 years shorter than the national average at that time) the State of Washington hanged Westley Allan Dodd.

On this episode Bethany Denton interviews  Dodd’s former attorney Gilbert Levy. And defense attorney Jeff Ellis, who was a young lawyer during the time of the Dodd trial.   Bethany also talks to Becky Price, who was one of the recipients of Dodd’s pamphlet  “When You Meet A Stranger”.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music:  The Black Spot

 

HBM116: Finest and Most Rotten (Going Forward)

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Park Row and William Street, several blocks away from 154 Nassau. Photo taken in August I92I by George Balgue. Via OldNYC

Park Row and William Street, several blocks away from 154 Nassau. Photo taken in August I92I by George Balgue. Via OldNYC

 

Mar 21, 1919 - NEW YORK CITY

An anonymous writer for the New York Tribune stands at 154 Nassau.  The writer asks passers-by a simple question: “Do you think this is a good world?”  It’s just four months after Armistice Day, and on the tail of a flu pandemic that killed 55 million worldwide.  The writer publishes five answers, ranging from “damned rotten” to “the finest”.

Mar 21, 2019 - NEW YORK CITY

Producer Ula Kulpa stands at the same spot and flags down passers-by 100 years later and asks the same question, “Do you think this is a good world?”  Today, life expectancies are up, yet we still fight wars. We are still sometimes cruel to loved ones and strangers. So, with the perspective of an additional century, what do New Yorkers think about the world’s goodness?

Producer: Going Forward (Julia Drachman, Ula Kulpa)
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot,  Smiles by Lambert Murphy (1918), You Hear the Lambs a-Cryin' by Fisk University Jubilee Singers (1920)

 
An Armistice Day celebration on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in 1918. Photo by Paul Thompson via The New York Times

An Armistice Day celebration on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in 1918. Photo by Paul Thompson via The New York Times

 

Jeff Emtman is visiting Copenhagen to teach a masterclass on sound design and to do a radio cinema event about sound’s haunting nature.  Join him at Radiobiograf, Copenhagen’s Radio Festival.

April 12, 2019: Masterclass: Jeff Emtman on Sound Design

April 14, 2019: Jeff Emtman Presents: The Haunting Magic of Sound