Spotlight on voters with disabilities outreach, a look at the software that can calculate diversity, the Sea Otter population is back and reaching record numbers.
Hillary Clinton's message to disabled workforce particularly pertinent in California
With just 46 days left until election day, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is turning her focus to voters with disabilities.
Speaking at a campaign event in Florida yesterday, she addressed economic opportunity for the often-overlooked voter block.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwhR3gyUebc
Nearly 1 in 5 Americans lives with a disability -- that's about 56 million people. In California, two out of three challenged adults are out of work.
Clinton's campaign has already brought on about 200 disability advocates to spread her message. It's a powerful voting block that has, to date, received little attention from Republican nominee Donald Trump.
For a look at the economic health of disabled persons in California Take Two spoke to Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, president of RespectAbility, a non-partisan group that seeks to advance employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview.
GD-IQ: The new software that breaks down representation in TV and films
We hear all the time how Hollywood gets things wrong when it comes to diversity. So, how do you get the entertainment industry to get it right?
Score them.
That's the idea behind new software being unveiled Thursday at the Global Symposium on Gender in Media.
GD IQ - short for Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient - measures things like screen time and speaking lines for various characters.
Take Two's Alex Cohen recently interviewed the minds behind this project:
- Geena Davis, Founder and Chair of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
- Shri Narayanan, of USC's Viterbi school of engineering and technical research lead
- Julie Ann Crommett, Google's Entertainment industry educator in chief
Interview Highlights
How did this first come about?
Geena Davis: "My very heightened interest with how women are portrayed on screen started when my daughter was a toddler and I immediately realized 'Wow, there's far more male characters than female characters in what we're showing kids. I had played some really great parts in my career, I was aware of what adults were seeing, but I had no clue that in the 21st century, children's media would be so profoundly skewed.
So, I mentioned it around town to a bunch of colleagues, producers and directors and studio executives and every single person said 'No, no, no. That's not a problem anymore. That's been fixed.' So it was then that I became a data head. I decided that I wanted the numbers and once I had that if I was proved to be right I could go back to everybody and share it with them and that's pretty much exactly what happened."
Take me through the process. What happens when you plug-in a movie or film through this software?
Shri Narayanan: "For example just take the visuals, so shot by shot this computer algorithm goes through it and figures out, where are the faces? Once that's done, it tracks them through the scenes and then automatically another algorithm figures out what is their gender and then you can run through the data in real time...and so by the end of that you have specific numbers and in a quick way have how much screen time a person has and how it's distributed across various genders. Likewise, you can process the audio which is like a separate stream of information of figuring out who's talking when and for how long. We can process the music that goes along with it and the words that they're speaking."
And in the end as I understand it there will be a score, so to speak?
Shri Narayanan: "You can look at the raw scores, if you want to know how much screen time males vs. females got, we got that number. How much speaking time and so on. But you also want to put them together with the more sophisticated statistical sort of model to come up with the inclusion quotient that we've been talking about. Sure, we can come up with a number that kind of can summarize what's happening on screen."
There's quantity and then there's also quality. How do you get at that part of it when it comes to how diversity is represented?
Shri: "We can look at some of the psychological meaning of the words that are being put in the mouth of the characters and then with all the data in front of us we can begin to see. For example, in that analysis we found the divide between female characters, the voice that they were given and the male characters. Pretty distinct actually. These kinds of things are possible and our team is thinking about these directions to see how we can start to understand and analyze this content but also how to use it as a tool for discovery."
Julie Ann: "And I think Alex, something to add to what Shri and Geena have said as well. I think this tool is a powerful one also to celebrate the people who are actually doing a great job. I think that needs to be said as well, not everybody is actually sucking at this. We need to honor those people. I think there are actually some shows and some pieces of content that are doing a great job and we'll be able to highlight them through this content and that has to be celebrated as well because they may not be getting their due in some ways."
To hear the full segment, click the blue play button above.
Answers have been edited for clarity.
For the full study, see below:
USC professor Josh Kun named MacArthur fellow
Last night the latest round of MacArthur fellows were revealed to the world, each receiving a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000. As it turns out a few of the fellows are from Southern California and one in particular is a friend of the show: Josh Kun.
He's a USC professor who studies the "ways that music and popular culture can be forces for cross cultural thinking and community building," he said in a recent interview with A Martinez. "I try to work with cultural history and cultural archives as a way to help us rethink contemporary politics. And help us think about ways to shape better, more just futures."
We've profiled him and his work many times on the show.
He found out that he had become a MacArthur fellow a few weeks ago, "First I thought it was my internet company," he said. "It's a validation of the work that so many people in Los Angeles are doing. I am part of a large community of artists writers and scholars and activists and organizers who are doing this vital work around culture and cultural change in the city."
When asked what this means for him and his work he explained that the grant's pushing him to make "a promise to all my friends and family and collaborators that this is the beginning and we're going to keep pushing and keep doing really exciting and valuable work in the years ahead."
One of his next projects is examining the role of latin american music in Los Angeles.
To hear more about Kun and what it's like to become a MacArthur fellow, click on the audio at the top of this post.
Fox's new show 'Pitch,' puts a woman on the MLB pitcher's mound
A new series on Fox looks at the fictional life of Ginny Baker, an incredible female baseball pitcher that joins a major league baseball team.
The show features actress Kylie Bunbury, who makes history when she's called up by the San Diego Padres.
Ginny Baker, isn't written as the type of pitcher who can throw 100 mile per hour fastballs. Instead she's modeled her after pitchers who use guile and accuracy, and she's also given a secret weapon ... the screwball pitch.
A Martinez talks to co-creator and executive producer Rick Singer and executive producer Kevin Falls.
Ozomatli and Aloe Blacc to perform at community organized peace festival in Pasadena
Gun violence and mass incarceration are some of the themes being taken on by a local music festival this weekend. Headliners include some big name musicians like Ozomatli and Aloe Blacc.
In response to local shootings, the Pasadena United Peace Festival aims to bring the community together to address the possible causes and solutions related to violence in the neighborhood.
Take Two's A Martinez spoke with one of the organizers, Pablo Alvarado who spoke about using music as a vehicle to not only bring attention to what's happening in his community, but to change the conversation surrounding it.
Pablo Alvarado:
The concert is going to be right where the shootings have taken place. The neighbors have been invited to come. Music is about love- about understanding and celebration. So, when you shed light to this type of situation, the bad stuff becomes visible and then we can address it. Then we can engage people in a conversation.
The Pasadena United Peace Festival will take place Sunday, September 25 from 3 to 7 PM on the corner of Buckeye Street and N. Madison Ave in the Orange Heights neighborhood of Pasadena. Performers include Ozomatli, Aloe Blacc, Maya Jupiter, Los Jornaleros del Norte, and Makoto Taiko.
Are driveway rentals the next big thing for the share economy?
A lot of people who went to the first L.A. Rams game last weekend took the train, but even more of them got there the old-fashioned L.A. way. They drove — and paid a lot of money for parking.
Some fans reported shelling out as much as $200 to park by the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. But a couple new Internet start-ups are pairing residents with available driveways and drivers who’d like to park in them.
The goal is to free up parking spots that are otherwise off limits in an effort to ease congestion and make more parking available.
“Thirty percent of city traffic is caused by people looking for parking,” said Sarah Zurell, chief brand officer for the L.A.-based, peer-to-peer parking app, Pavemint.
Pavemint soft launched Sunday, with 91 parking spots near the Los Angeles Coliseum listed for $30 to $100 during the Rams game.
All the time spent looking for parking spaces comes with an environmental cost, Zurell said. In Los Angeles each year, drivers log 5.5 billion miles and waste 270 million gallons of gas, generating 4.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, just from looking for parking.
Pavemint works in a manner similar to Airbnb. People who have driveways with space for people to park list it through the app and set their driveway’s availability and pricing.
Drivers who want to park in those driveways use the Pavemint app to make a reservation in advance or to book it on the fly and also pay for it through the app. At the end of the transaction, both parties get the chance to review the experience.
Pavemint currently has 309 driveways signed up and is doubling that number each week, Zurell said. It plans to expand to West Hollywood in late October, just prior to the area’s Halloween festival, and launch citywide in January.
While any person with a driveway can sign up, “a prime space would be near a boulevard or near a venue whether it be a sports venue or a music venue, where it is inherently very hard to park and you probably don’t know someone where you can park in their driveway,” Zurell said.
Another parking startup launching in L.A. in October also pairs driveway owners and users — specifically driveways with electric vehicle chargers and drivers of electric vehicles.
It works like other sharing services. People with EV chargers list the charger, when it’s available and how much it will cost to charge there. Drivers who want to use those chargers can make a reservation in advance and pay for charging through the company's web site.
“Charging is a real problem for EV drivers so it keeps people from purchasing these vehicles,” said Shannon Walker, co-founder of EVMatch.co, based in Santa Barbara. “But when we’re able to facilitate this sharing, then we can essentially bring more charging stations into the public network and provide people more charging which in turn can support more EVs.”
In L.A., there are currently 50,000 registered EVs, but the number of public charging stations is far less than that. Locating those chargers requires navigating a maze of competing charging networks.
The popular EV charger site, Plugshare, also lists residential chargers, but it doesn’t include reservations and payment.
The goal of EV Match is to make more home-charging stations available — and to allow EV drivers to reserve charging in advance while allowing the owners of EV chargers to recoup their costs and even make a profit.
EV Match is currently signing up users and will debut in L.A. in October before rolling out to the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego.
State of Affairs: Voter guides, US Senate race, and the first presidential debate
On this week's State of Affairs: what to look out for in your giant voter guide, voters' views on the US Senate race, and a look ahead to the first presidential debate.
Joining Take Two to discuss:
- Mary Plummer, KPCC senior politics reporter
- Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Communication at USC