George Carlin's American Dream

Right off the bat, I need to tell you, this isn't a review. I could have reviewed the first three/quarters of this two-part film, the part where George Carlin hones his persona--because we get to hear, through George Carlin's own words, that this isn't just an act, it's his own transformation we're being witness to--as a standup comic, where he's cracking jokes, making the audience laugh, playing with words.

And Carlin didn't just play with words: he frolicked, he capered, he staged a three-ring semiotic circus.


But along about the mid-eighties, and definitely by the '90s, George Carlin stopped playing, and his words turned deadly.

While watching the recordings of Carlin's live shows in the 1990s, I kept thinking of those Celtic bards who could curse a king with their song.

But it gets darker than that, much darker, because at one point near the end of the movie there is a montage of all the things George Carlin raged against and his words play over a visual montage of our recent news stories, and you realize this is a man who was seventy-one when he died, and he knew he was dying, and he spent the final decade of his life yelling at us to stop fucking up, because he wanted to warn us that we don't have that many chances left to stop fucking up.

You can read more about the film at this link, and also catch some sound clips. I'm also not surprised at NPR actually censoring and refusing to utter the dirty words, even now, and doesn't the "On Air" show air at night anyway?

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1100342905/american-dream-documentary-examines-george-carlins-triumphs-and-demons

MIT: Making data visualization more accessible for blind and low-vision individuals

Researchers have created prototypes that enable screen-reader users to quickly and easily navigate through multiple levels of information in an online chart.
Adam Zewe | MIT News Office
June 2, 2022

https://news.mit.edu/2022/data-visualization-accessible-blind-0602

Data visualizations on the web are largely inaccessible for blind and low-vision individuals who use screen readers, an assistive technology that reads on-screen elements as text-to-speech. This excludes millions of people from the opportunity to probe and interpret insights that are often presented through charts, such as election results, health statistics, and economic indicators.

When a designer attempts to make a visualization accessible, best practices call for including a few sentences of text that describe the chart and a link to the underlying data table — a far cry from the rich reading experience available to sighted users.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere is striving to create screen-reader-friendly data visualizations that offer a similarly rich experience. They prototyped several visualization structures that provide text descriptions at varying levels of detail, enabling a screen-reader user to drill down from high-level data to more detailed information using just a few keystrokes.

The MIT team embarked on an iterative co-design process with collaborator Daniel Hajas, a researcher at University College London who works with the Global Disability Innovation Hub and lost his sight at age 16. They collaborated to develop prototypes and ran a detailed user study with blind and low-vision individuals to gather feedback.

....The researchers defined three design dimensions as key to making accessible visualizations: structure, navigation, and description. Structure involves arranging the information into a hierarchy. Navigation refers to how the user moves through different levels of detail. Description is how the information is spoken, including how much information is conveyed.

Using these design dimensions, they developed several visualization prototypes that emphasized ease-of-navigation for screen-reader users. One prototype, known as multiview, enabled individuals to use the up and down arrows to navigate between different levels of information (like the chart title as the top level, the legend as the second level, etc.), and the right and left arrow keys to cycle through information on the same level (such as adjacent scatterplots). Another prototype, known as target, included the same arrow key navigation but also a drop-down menu of key chart locations so the user could quickly jump to an area of interest.

“Our goal is not just to work within existing standards to make them serviceable. We really set out to do grounded speculation and imagine where we can push what is possible with these existing standards. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to refitting tools that were designed for images,” says Zong.