Fake News

Hi everyone!

I'm not as active on the blog as I'd like, but in any case I'm glad I can take a little while from time to time to share an activity with you here.

The topic I've chosen is fake news and the impressive advancement of technology that can enable us to create false impressions. Someone once said that, if it's technology that the general public knows about, then it's probably already obsolete! Don't doubt that what we can see in a video like this one is much less advanced than what the actual cutting-edge software can do.

It's still quite shocking that we can manipulate images and sounds in real time, and even if fakes are easy to spot at the moment, the effect that it can have on public opinion is quite unpredictable-- regardless of whether it is finally disproved or not.

So let's go for a bit of sentence completion to accompany this short BBC report:

1. Green screen or __________________ can give us virtual backdrops to interact with.

2. We’re only years away from creating realistic environments: in real time, we can manipulate voices, facial expressions and __________________ .

3. Some software operates by taking take one person’s facial expressions and __________________ on to another person’s features.

4. The development of these technologies requires ethical frameworks that could __________________ the implications they may have on society.

5. A new tool to manipulate voice __________________  by Adobe, the company who invented PhotoShop.

6. To spot a fake, the resulting altered audio would be __________________ , but that wouldn’t stop it from spreading.

7. Fakes can be debunked in __________________ , but this doesn’t stop people from believing them or from becoming viral.

8. One possible consequence of the dissemination of fakes is that solid evidence could be dismissed as __________________  by those who try to deceive us.

9. If there is a high level of distrust in institutions, a term like fake news is deployed in many ways, even to describe what is __________________ and __________________ .

10. This fast-paced technological advancement means we will have to refine how we __________________  from our senses.

Share your answers and your ideas on the topic in the comments section. Key here. Enjoy!

Weaving language and tapestry making

Hi everyone!

I'm very sorry I have been absent for such a long time! But if you know me, you know that this is my usual pattern.

The visit to an exhibition on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement has inspired me to look for videos that show the beauty of craftmanship. This one, apart from being extraordinarily informative as well as wonderfully produced, is intended to remind you of the metaphors we saw in class not long ago.

The "warp and woof", meaning the foundation of something, is a typical example of a metaphor that alludes to the art of weaving (although the technical terms preferred nowadays are warp and weft), but the most interesting idioms we could see were those in which the background metaphor was "storytelling is weaving": the thread of discourse, the loom of language, to weave a story; as well as those where we understand the metaphor "storytelling is lying": to fabricate, the fabric/tissue of lies, to pull the wool over somebody's eyes, to make up of whole cloth, to spin a yarn. Weaving and language thus become intricately interwoven (see what I did there?) through an underlying metaphor: the storyteller and poet as a weaver of language.

With this in mind, it was only natural that the first video about arts and crafts that I wanted to present to you had to do with weaving: here you have the art of tapestry making at the Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins in Paris.

The activities I propose for this video are fairly open questions, because I don't want to detract from the enjoyment of watching the art that these women (only women in the video!) bring to life. The explanations are so clear that I also wanted you to focus on the accuracy of language in the voiceover without thinking much about exercises.

So, share with us in the comments: which of the jobs carried out at the Gobelins do you think is the hardest, and why? Which one would you rather do if you could work there, and why? Try to use the specific language you can hear in the video.

Optional: note down all instances of the passive voice.

Enjoy!