Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday,  Google announced that it would be adding Quechua and a variety of other languages to its digital translation service.  Representatives from the company said new artificial intelligence technology is enabling it to vastly expand Google Translate’s repertoire of the world’s languages. It added 24 of them this week, including Quechua and other Indigenous South American languages such as Guarani and Aymara. It is also adding a number of widely spoken African and South Asian languages that have been missing from popular tech products. The new languages added are: Assamese, Aymara, Bambara, Bhojpuri, Dhivehi, Dogri, Ewe, Guarani, Ilocano, Konkani, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo, Oromo, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sepedi, Sorani Kurdish, Tigrinya, Tsonga and Twi.

As reported by the Associated Press.

“We looked at languages with very large, underserved populations,” Google research scientist Isaac Caswell told reporters.

The news from the California company’s annual I/O technology showcase may be celebrated in many corners of the world. But it will also likely draw criticism from those frustrated by previous tech products that failed to understand the nuances of their language or culture.

Quechua was the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, which stretched from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile. Its status began to decline following the Spanish conquest of Peru more than 400 years ago.

Adding it to the languages recognized by Google is a big victory for Quechua language activists like Luis Illaccanqui, a Peruvian who created the website Qichwa 2.0, which includes dictionaries and resources for learning the language.

“It will help put Quechua and Spanish on the same status,” said Illaccanqui, who was not involved in Google’s project.

Illaccanqui, whose last name in Quechua means “you are the lightning bolt,” said the translator will also help keep the language alive with a new generation of young people and teenagers, “who speak Quechua and Spanish at the same time and are fascinated by social networks.”

Caswell called the news a “very big technological step forward” because until recently, it was not possible to add languages if researchers couldn’t find a big enough trove of online text — such as digital books, newspapers or social media posts — for their AI systems to learn from.

U.S. tech giants don’t have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem that’s also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms. Until this week, Google Translate was offered in European languages like Frisian, Maltese, Icelandic and Corsican — each with fewer than 1 million speakers — but not East African languages like Oromo and Tigrinya, which have millions of speakers.

The new languages will roll out this week. They won’t yet be understood by Google’s voice assistant, which limits them to text-to-text translations for now. Google said it is working on adding speech recognition and other capabilities, such as being able to translate a sign by pointing a camera at it.

That will be important for largely spoken languages like Quechua, especially in the health field, because many Peruvian doctors and nurses who only speak Spanish work in rural areas and “are unable to understand patients who speak mostly Quechua,” Illaccanqui said.

“The next frontier, or challenge, is to work on speech,” said Arturo Oncevay, a Peruvian machine translation researcher at the University of Edinburgh who co-founded a research coalition to improve Indigenous language technology across the Americas. “The native languages of the Americas are traditionally oral.”

In its announcement, Google cautioned that the quality of translations in the newly added languages “still lags far behind” other languages it supports, such as English, Spanish and German, and noted that the models “will make mistakes and exhibit their own biases.” But the company only added languages if its AI systems met a certain threshold of proficiency, Caswell said.

“If there’s a significant number of cases where it’s very wrong, then we would not include it,” he said. “Even if 90% of the translations are perfect, but 10% are nonsense, that’s a little bit too much for us.”

Google said its products now support 133 languages. The latest 24 are the largest single batch to be added since Google incorporated 16 new languages in 2010. What made the expansion possible is what Google is calling a “zero-shot” or “zero-resource” machine translation model — one that learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example of it.

Impressive!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Community,

Several companies including Microsoft, Yelp Inc, Citigroup, Levi Strauss & Co, and Amazon have pledged to cover costs for American employees who need to travel out of state for an abortion.

The issue has gained urgency now that 31 states have introduced abortion bans this year, according to policy analysis by research group Guttmacher Institute.

Here are brief descriptions of their benefits.

Microsoft

Microsoft will “continue to do everything we can under the law to protect our employees’ rights and support employees” in accessing critical healthcare, which includes services like abortion and gender-affirming care, in the United States, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters.

“This support is being extended to include travel expense assistance for these and other medical services where access to care is limited in availability in an employee’s home geographic region.”

Amazon

Retail giant Amazon says it will pay employees up to $4,000 to cover travel expenses related to non-life-threatening medical treatments – including abortion, Reuters reports. The company already offers up to $10,000 in travel costs for life-threatening medical care.

The benefit has already gone into effect and will cover travel costs if a procedure isn’t available within 100 miles of a U.S. employee’s home. Reimbursements apply to both corporate and warehouse employees, according to Reuters.

Levi Strauss & Co.

In a statement Wednesday, the clothing company explained “access to reproductive health care, including abortion, has been a critical factor to the workplace gains and contributions women have made over the past 50 years.”

Levi’s, most known for its denim items, says an overturn of abortion access would jeopardize female progress – the workforce is 58% female. The company also points to data indicating how Black and Hispanic women would be disproportionately affected by a dismantling of Roe.

The company says its position “is aligned with majority public opinion” and that, realistically, allowing states to decide reproductive laws would mean companies would need different health benefits and policies for different employees in different states.

Levi’s says its current benefits plan allows reimbursement for healthcare-related travel expenses not available in an employee’s home state, including abortion.

In its statement, Levi’s writes: “Our position on this is in keeping with our efforts to support employees and family members at all stages of their lives… Given what is at stake, business leaders need to make their voices heard and act to protect the health and well-being of our employees. That means protecting reproductive rights.”

Citigroup

The company behind Citibank filed an annual proxy statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April laying out its year ahead, including its employee development. Citigroup writes: “In response to changes in reproductive healthcare laws in certain states in the U.S., beginning in 2022 we provide travel benefits to facilitate access to adequate resources.”

In addition to reproductive care help, Citigroup says it’s broadening gender affirmation medical coverage for employees.

Lyft

The ridesharing company previously shared statements on reproductive rights challenges.

Ahead of the SCOTUS opinion leak, Lyft spoke out April 29 regarding Oklahoma’s Senate Bill 1508, which would, like Texas’ Senate Bill 8, would allow individuals to sue anyone who helps someone get abortive care. Lyft wrote: “Women’s rights are under attack again, this time in Oklahoma. We believe transportation should never be a barrier to a woman’s access to healthcare.”

Lyft says U.S. employees in Texas and Oklahoma who are enrolled in benefits will have travel costs covered for abortion procedures requiring them to go out of state. Additionally, the company says its drivers who are sued under the Texas and Oklahoma bills will have 100% of their legal fees covered.

Beyond employee benefits, Lyft says it’s also creating a “safe state” program with health care providers to help cover out-of-state travel costs for women in Oklahoma and Texas who are seeking abortion.

Salesforce

Cloud computing company Salesforce announced in September 2021 that it would help Texas employees who are seeking abortions in other states, CNN explains. The company, which owns office messenger Slack, has 56,000 employees and 16 locations.

In a Slack message to workers, Salesforce said: “[We] stand with all of our women at Salesforce and everywhere… if you have concerns about access to reproductive healthcare in your state, Salesforce will help relocate you and members of your immediate family.”

Yelp

In a statement on Tuesday, online business review company Yelp said: “Turning back the clock on the progress women have made over the past 50 years will have a seismic impact on our society and economy… This goes against the will of the vast majority of Americans who agree that decisions around reproductive care should be made by women and their doctors.”

A Yelp representative told CNN that while its health insurance already covers abortive care, its benefits will include travel costs for U.S. employees (and their dependents) who must travel for the procedure.

“It’s a priority for us to offer our employees consistent healthcare coverage, regardless of where they live,” the rep told CNN.

Congratulations to these companies for stepping up,

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

The historically Black Lincoln College in Illinois will cease operations this Friday after 157 years, having failed to raise the funds needed to recover from the pandemic and a cyberattack that originated in Iran.  As reported by The New York Times.

““The loss of history, careers, and a community of students and alumni is immense,” David Gerlach, the college’s president, said in a statement.

Reached by email on Monday, Mr. Gerlach declined to comment further.

Founded in 1865 and named for Abraham Lincoln, the college had survived the 1918 influenza pandemic, multiple recessions and two world wars.

But the pandemic led to a drop in enrollment and forced the college to make costly investments in new technology, according to the statement. Then, in December 2021, a ransomware attack walled off the school’s access to its data and halted its recruitment, retention and fund-raising campaigns.

Lincoln College, in Lincoln, Ill., has not said how much it eventually paid to regain access to its data, though Mr. Gerlach told The Chicago Tribune that it paid a ransom of less than $100,000. The ransomware attack originated in Iran, he told The Tribune.

When the college’s access to its data was restored in March, projections showed “significant enrollment shortfalls” that would require a “transformational donation or partnership to sustain Lincoln College beyond the current semester,” the school’s statement said. Mr. Gerlach told The Tribune last month that Lincoln needed $50 million to stay open. The money did not materialize.

“I believe, if we had more time, that we would have been able to have found someone but, this is all out of our control,” Annette Roter, an associate professor, said in a Facebook post consoling the thousands of students, faculty and alumni who worked to keep the school open.

A sad end to a venerble institution!

Tony

Esper, Trump and Gen. Mark Milley

Dear Commons Community,

In a ludicrous statement, Donald Trump insisted he “had to run the military” when he was president because Defense Secretary Mark Esper was so “weak.”

Trump made the claim in response to a “60 Minutes” interview with Esper, who recounted that he and other military officials had to repeatedly “swat down” Trump’s “dangerous” ideas every few weeks when he was in the White House.

Esper said the former president suggested secretly firing missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs and wanted military troops to shoot racial justice protesters who took to the streets after the police killing of George Floyd.

The former defense secretary also shared that he and other officials helped prevent “really bad things, dangerous things” in the Trump administration “that could have taken the country in a dark direction.”

In a statement that “60 Minutes” shared on Twitter, Trump denied a number of Esper’s claims but notably declined to comment on the plan to hit Mexico with missiles. “Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military,” the Trump statement reads.

Critics immediately pointed out that Trump had never even served in the military, claiming a medical deferment for “bone spurs” that his former attorney Michael Cohen said were fake. As president, Trump also tried to defund the military and sought to undermine NATO.

He once told radio host Howard Stern that his own “personal Vietnam” was avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while sleeping with various women. Stern quipped that Trump had characterized “vaginas” as “potential landmines.”

Trump fired Esper in November 2020 after the defense secretary publicly said he did not support using military troops against the wave of Black Lives Matter protesters.

Esper’s book about his experiences in the White House, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times,” is out today.

As I posted yesterday, Esper will probably sell a million copies of his book.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It seems every month a new book is published on  Donald Trump by one of his appointees. This month it is his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, who in a “A Sacred Oath” reveals the lunacy of our ex-president.

Esper divulges that Trump astonishingly suggested sending missiles into Mexico to target drug labs. “No one would know it was us,” Trump explained, according to Esper.

(Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that he couldn’t figure out what was “so bad” about launching missiles into a foreign country.)

Esper also recounts in his book how Trump asked him if his top military officials could order troops to shoot protesters demonstrating after the police killing of George Floyd. Trump fired Esper in November 2020 after Esper said publicly he did not support using military troops against the wave of Black Lives Matter protesters.

Trump on multiple occasions also complained repeatedly about how “ugly” he found U.S. Navy ships,

Esper writes that Trump preferred the “sleek” lines of Russian and Italian ships.

Esper had to remind the then-commander-in-chief that the ships weren’t competing in a beauty contest, but were made to powerfully and effectively engage in battle.

Esper will probably sell a million copies!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times had a featured article yesterday on former New York City Mayor  Ed Koch revealing the conflicts he went through regarding his sexual orientation. Entitled “The Secrets Ed Koch Carried” and backed by testimony from his closest associates, it describes how Koch agonized over “coming out” as a gay man during his entire political career and beyond.  Here is an excerpt:

“But as his 70s ticked by, Mr. Koch described to a few friends a feeling he could not shake: a deep loneliness. He wanted to meet someone, he said. Did they know anyone who might be “partner material?” Someone “a little younger than me?” Someone to make up for lost time?

“I want a boyfriend,” he said to one friend, Charles Kaiser.

It was an aching admission, shared with only a few, from a politician whose brash ubiquity and relentless New York evangelism helped define the modern mayoralty, even as he strained to conceal an essential fact of his biography: Mr. Koch was gay.

He denied as much for decades — to reporters, campaign operatives and his staff — swatting away longstanding rumors with a choice profanity or a cheeky aside, even if these did little to convince some New Yorkers. Through his death, in 2013, his deflections endured.”

The entire piece is well-researched and respectfully presented.

Tony

Happy Mother’s Day to the most important people in the universe!

And thank you for all you do for the rest of us!

Tony

Soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska at The Met!  Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, my wife, Elaine and I went to our first Metropolitan Opera performance since Fall 2019 due to COVID.  It was a long absence and we missed The Met dearly. 

If you are only going to see one Met opera in more than two years, surely a Franco Zeffirelli production of Puccini’s Turandot is on the top of your list.  The lavish setting, the music, the singers, the chorus, and the emotional story itself all delivered.   Yonghoon Lee as the prince-suitor Calàf was fine and his Nessun Dorma in the Third Act brought the House down.  The other principal singers especially soprano Ermonela Jaho as Liu and bass Ferruccio Furlanetto as Calaf’s father were excellent.  The chorus was exceptional especially in the final scene. However, much of the audience attention was focused on the Ukrainian soprano, Liudmyla Monastyrska, who replaced Anna Netrebko.  She was truly fine in the closing scene as the ice princess melting into “just a woman.”

During the final curtain call, The Met audience went crazy for Monastyrska when she appeared after all of the other performers, alone draped in a blue and gold Ukrainian flag (photo above).

What an afternoon!

If you going to the opera this season, Turandot at The Met is must see.

Below is a review by critic, David Wright.

Tony

 ————————————————————————————————-

A fresh cast and Ukrainian soprano lift the Met’s spring “Turandot”

Sun May 01, 2022 at 1:39 pm

By David Wright

With a sturdy-voiced Ukrainian soprano replacing the star who withdrew amid controversy over her relationship to the current Russian government, Puccini’s final opera Turandot returned to the Metropolitan Opera stage for its spring run Saturday night.

As always, Franco Zeffirelli’s fantasy setting of a Chinese imperial court, with its gilded terraces, liveried attendants, long-sleeved ladies-in-waiting, dancers, mimes, and acrobats—and the common people slithering around on all fours like lower-level primates—was an eye-popping spectacle. But so is the Rose Parade. The question was, can the new cast make Puccini’s score and story sing?

Vocally, the singers in the principal roles were up to the task, and in the case of tenor Yonghoon Lee as the prince-suitor Calàf, well beyond that. Dramatically, they seemed to be feeling their way through Zeffirelli’s conception of a decadent regime in need of reviving by a virile outsider, without really driving the point home.

Granted, that was a lot to ask in this not-quite-Wagner, not-quite-Stravinsky, not-quite-verismo, not-quite-finished opera. But if the production’s blocking calls for Calàf to wander among the ritually-posed courtiers like a pouty, alienated James Dean, one would like him to project that attitude, rather than look as though he doesn’t quite know where to stand in the tableau.

And after a long history of cuts and rewrites, the final scene of Calàf and Turandot alone onstage, composed by Franco Alfano using the late Puccini’s sketches, remains intractable. It certainly needs something other than revival director J. Knighten Smit’s conventional criss-cross blocking. Maybe it would be best to discard realism entirely and just stipulate that he successfully woos her, and then sit back and enjoy the singing.

Which, for the two leads at that point Saturday evening, was in full flower. Lee’s voice, broad-based yet focused, sounded terrific from Act I on. But even this very assertive role would have benefited from some throttling back here and there—the iconic, nocturnal “Nessun dorma” started loud and just got louder, perhaps to make sure “nobody sleeps.” And Lee’s wide-spaced singing stance quickly became a macho mannerism.

Stepping in for the jettisoned Anna Netrebko as Turandot, soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska at first sounded somewhat fluttery and rough in “In questa reggia” but found true imperious tone as she posed her fateful riddles to the young prince. The closing scene may have been unconvincing dramatically, yet this ice princess’s vocal melting into “just a woman” was aurally satisfying.

In supporting roles, soprano Ermonela Jaho was a model of delicate inflection and exquisite pianissimos as the faithful, secretly-smitten servant Liù. In a night short on ovations by Met standards (except for the applause-begging “Nessun dorma”), Jaho’s beseeching “Signore, ascolta” in Act I earned the warmest audience response.

Celebrated bass Ferruccio Furlanetto was rich casting indeed as Timur. He was a friendly, if indistinct, presence as Calàf’s father in the early scenes, and sang most affectingly to his dead servant girl in the last act. (Though one couldn’t shake the thought of Puccini and librettist Giuseppe Adami saying “some pathos needed here.”)

In the opera’s source, Carlo Gozzi’s 18^th-century Venetian play, the imperial officials Ping, Pang, and Pong were commedia dell’ arte characters, and their names in the opera seem to promise comical Chinese stereotypes.  However, Puccini wrote them, and Zeffirelli staged them, as quite reasonable plot-advancers, urging Calàf to escape this bloodthirsty court while he can. Their Act II trio “Ola, Pang!” about longing for their homes in the country, though a somewhat inartful insertion in the opera, was feelingly sung by the hearty-voiced baritone Alexey Lavrov as the Lord Chancellor Ping, ably supported by Tony Stevenson as the majordomo Pang and Eric Ferring as the head chef Pong.

Jeongcheol Cha was a stout-toned Mandarin announcing edicts and ceremonies, and Carlo Bosi was appropriately dim of voice as Turandot’s doddering father, the “mighty” Emperor Altoum.

Despite having to spend much of the evening in a simian crouch, chorus master Donald Palumbo’s Met chorus enhanced this drama in every mood, be it barbaric or dreamy.

Conductor Marco Armiliato led Puccini’s percussion-heavy orchestra with panache—the piccolo got a workout, and even the horns seemed to jangle—but also managed some lovely intertwining of the winds with Liù’s vocal curlicues.

After the final curtain, soprano Monastyrska came out for her bow spreading what looked like a colorful cloak, until she wrapped it around her, revealing the blue and yellow bands of the Ukrainian flag. The audience roared its support for her and her country.

Click on to Enlarge

Dear Commons Community,

America’s employers added 428,000 jobs in April, extending a streak of solid hiring that has defied punishing inflation, chronic supply shortages, the Russian war against Ukraine and much higher borrowing costs.

Yesterday’s jobs report from the Labor Department showed that last month’s hiring kept the unemployment rate at 3.6%, just above the lowest level in a half-century.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The economy’s hiring gains have been strikingly consistent in the face of the worst inflation in four decades. Employers have added at least 400,000 jobs for 12 straight months.

At the same time, the April job growth, along with steady wage gains, will fuel consumer spending and likely keep the Federal Reserve on track to raise borrowing rates sharply to fight inflation. The U.S. stock market slumped again yesterday on concern that the strength of the job market will keep wages and inflation high and lead to increasingly heavy borrowing costs for consumers and businesses. Higher loan rates could, in turn, weigh down corporate profits.

“With labor market conditions still this strong — including very rapid wage growth — we doubt that the Fed is going to abandon its hawkish plans,” said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics.

The latest employment figures did contain a few cautionary notes about the job market. The government revised down its estimate of job gains for February and March by a combined 39,000.

And the number of people in the labor force declined in April by 363,000, the first drop since September. Their exit slightly reduced the proportion of Americans who are either working or looking for work from 62.4% to 62.2%. Many industries have been slowed by labor shortages. The nation remains 1.2 million jobs shy of the number it had in early 2020, just before the pandemic hammered the economy.

“We need those people back,” said Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S. economist at S&P Global.

Bovino noted that some Americans are remaining on the sidelines of the workforce out of lingering concerns about COVID-19 or because of difficulty finding affordable daycare for unvaccinated children.

In the meantime, employers keep handing out pay raises. Hourly wages rose 0.3% from March to April and 5.5% from a year ago. Prices, though, are rising faster than pay is.

“Yes, we saw a bump in wages,” Bovino said. But with inflation at 40-year highs “people are still squeezed.″

Across industries last month, hiring was widespread. Factories added 55,000 jobs, the most since last July. Warehouses and transportation companies added 52,000, restaurants and bars 44,000, health care 41,000, finance 35,000, retailers 29,000 and hotels 22,000. Construction companies, which have been slowed by shortages of labor and supplies, added just 2,000.

Yet it’s unclear how long the jobs boom will continue. The Fed this week raised its key rate by a half-percentage point — its most aggressive move since 2000 — and signaled further large rate hikes to come. As the Fed’s rate hikes take effect, it will become increasingly expensive to spend and hire.

In addition, the vast economic aid that the government had been supplying to households has expired. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has helped accelerate inflation and clouded the economic outlook. Some economists warn of a growing risk of recession.

For now, the resilience of the job market is particularly striking when set against the backdrop of galloping price increases and rising borrowing costs. This week, the Labor Department provided further evidence that the job market is still booming. It reported that only 1.38 million Americans were collecting traditional unemployment benefits, the fewest since 1970. And it said that employers posted a record-high 11.5 million job openings in March and that layoffs remained well below pre-pandemic levels.

What’s more, the economy now has, on average, two available jobs for every unemployed person. That’s the highest such proportion on record.

And in yet another sign that workers are enjoying unusual leverage in the job market, a record 4.5 million people quit their jobs in March, evidently confident that they could find a better opportunity elsewhere.

Chronic shortages of goods, supplies and workers have contributed to skyrocketing price increases — the highest inflation rate in 40 years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February dramatically worsened the financial landscape, sending global oil and gas prices skyward and severely clouding the national and global economic picture.

The Fed, which most economists say was much too slow to recognize the inflation threat, is now raising rates aggressively. Its goal is a notoriously difficult one: a so-called soft landing.

“Trying to slow the economy just enough, without causing a recession,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. “Their track record on that is not particularly good.”

Giacomo Santangelo of the jobs research firm Monster is among economists who say they think a recession is coming. Even so, Santangelo said, the Fed “doesn’t have much of a choice” other than raising rates to combat the inflation spike.

For now, many business people, especially in industries like retail and hospitality, are still struggling with a tight labor market.

More jobs and higher wages are something to be proud of.  Biden and the White House need to do a better job of getting this message across.

Tony