Tuesday 29 September 2020

Get FREE podcast transcriptions with Otter.ai (it’s super cool, I promise).

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Did you know that you can get FREE transcriptions of any podcast in English, and that it’s fast and easy to do? That’s right, ANY PODCAST! And did I say FREE? If you are serious about your English learning, you will love Otter.ai — a FREE online service that transcribes audio files. This means podcasts, audio taken from videos, anything at all where the language is fairly clear. All you do is upload the file to otter.ai, and then let the A.I do the rest. It’s unbelievably awesome. You can watch my little YouTube demo video demo here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gw4jviWdno

You can find Otter.ai here:
https://otter.ai

Note: This is not a sales pitch, I don’t have any involvement with Otter.ai other than being a very satisfied customer (I use their paid plan because I need the extra features. You won’t need extra features unless you want to transcribe more than 10 hours of audio per month, or if you need to transcribe files that are longer than 40 minutes each.)

The transcript of this audio podcast is below.

If you get value from my podcasts, please leave a rating or review. It really helps me a lot!

Cheers,
Lori

TRANSCRIPT
Hi, English learners, Lori here, your teacher from betteratenglish.com. Today, I don’t have a conversation for you, I’m actually working on the next conversational episode. And that should be up in the next couple of days. But as I was working on it, I realized that the online service, the tool that I use to transcribe the conversations would be super, super useful for your English learning. So I just wanted to share that with you today, and let you know about it so you can try it yourself.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way. It’s completely free. And I don’t make any money for recommending it to you. No one is asking me to tell you this. It’s simply something that I use myself and that I think, is really awesome. And I think it would almost be a crime for me to not let you know about it.

“Okay, okay, Lori. All right, fine, get on with it, let us know what it is.”

Okay, the tool is called Otter.ai. That’s O T T E R dot A I. And what it is, is an online service where you can upload audio files, and it, the artificial intelligence will create a transcript of the audio.

But that’s not even the best part. For me, I think the most useful thing, the thing that makes it so awesome for learning English, is that once the AI is finished with your transcript, you can listen to the audio as you’re reading the transcript, and then you can click anywhere in the transcript, and the audio will jump to that section.

So just imagine the implications of this. Now you can take any audio file with spoken English, and you can upload it, have it transcribed for free, and then listen to it, click anywhere in the transcript, and listen to just that part. So if you find a section that you want to do some kind of listen-and-repeat practice for your pronunciation or your intonation, or just to kind of “wrap your mouth around” a new piece of language, it’s super, super easy to do now.

I think it’s just so great that you can go and find any podcast in English, anything that you want to listen to anything that you want to learn from, and it doesn’t matter if they have already given you a transcript or not. You can just upload the file and make your own which is super, super awesome.

The free plan on otter.ai does have some limitations. And one of those is that you can only transcribe 10 hours’ worth of audio per month. So every month it resets and you get another 10 hours. And the files that you upload can only be up to 40 minutes long. So if you have a super long, say, an epic Joe Rogan podcast that’s three hours long, you’re going to have to –before you upload it for transcription — you are going to have to cut that up into 40 minute segments if you want to transcribe the whole thing.

kind of difficult to explain these things in an audio podcast. So I have made a YouTube video where I just do a quick little demo to show you what it is and how you can use it and I’ve put the link to that in the show notes. So I hope I’ve managed to get you excited about the idea of giving Otter.ai try.

all I had for this time. I’m going to get back to work now and try to finish up that new episode for you, so you can look for that in the next couple of days. Until then, this is Lori signing off from Better at English headquarters, wishing you and inspired and productive day.
Bye for now!


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Monday 21 September 2020

051 – The good, the bad, and the flat-out liars. Real English Conversation

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Imagine if you will, the following scenario. You’ve volunteered to take part in a psychology study, say, at your university. All you have to do is show up to the lab, sit by yourself in a little booth and play a very simple game of chance, something like flipping a coin, where there’s no skill involved, only luck. You get paid one dollar just for showing up, that’s guaranteed. And if you’re lucky and win the game, you’ll get paid 5 dollars cash. But if you lose, you get nothing.

Here’s the kicker: it’s up to you to tell the researchers if you won or lost, they won’t be able to tell.

So there are three possible outcomes: you can win and get 5 dollars, you can lose and get nothing, or….you can lose, but lie and still get the 5 dollars. And nobody will know. What would you do? What do you think other people would do?

As it happens, a recent study just looked at this, and there was a cunning little twist: those crafty researchers actually DID know if people won or lost. So they also knew if people told the truth about it or if they lied.

The study, called “Cheaters, Liars, or Both? A New Classification of Dishonesty Profiles” is absolutely fascinating. And today you’ll hear a conversation ‒ in American English – with some people discussing it. The conversation is from one of my favorite podcasts, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. It’s a podcast featuring smart people having interesting discussions about science, technology, and critical thinking. If you are at all interested in those topics, I highly recommend it for your English listening practice. This is definitely a show that will make you smarter, and will teach you lots of vocabulary. The episodes don’t always have transcripts, but I’ve transcribed the part you’re going to hear today and put it in the show notes, which you can find at betteratenglish.com/transcripts.

You know, if you like, you can turn this episode into a more challenging task for yourself. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to a New York Times article about the study. In the conversation you’ll hear a woman summarizing this same article to her friends. So before you continue listening, you can hit pause and go read the article yourself. Then imagine how you might summarize it for friend and what you might discuss. What language would you use? What vocabulary would you need? Spend a few moments imagining how you might talk about it with a group of friends. Then listen to the rest of this podcast and compare your ideas with what you hear in the conversation.

All right, let’s get to it. You’ll hear a woman named Cara doing most of the talking. She explains the study’s findings to her friends Steve, Bob, Jay, and Evan. They they all discuss what they make of it. Are you ready? Let’s go:

TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW
Get the full transcript here

Steve: All right, Cara, you’re gonna tell us about the psychology of lying and cheating.

Cara: Right! So this is a field of psychological inquiry that goes back basically to the beginning of experimental psychology, right? Psychologists, psychologists have always been interested in deception. So a new paper said, OK, well, we want to do is we want to see if we can sort of beef up and retest some old concepts in the kind of construct of lying, cheating deception, but we want to go beyond that. And we want to say, Okay, this is not an all or nothing phenomenon, right? Like, you could say, That person’s a liar, or that person lied, or that person’s a cheater, that person’s dishonest, but there are shades of grey, aren’t there?

Steve: Mm hmm.

Evan: Of course, of course.

Bob: Yeah, absolutely. Little white lies.

Cara: Totally. There lies that actually help us.

Bob: There are lies that actually get people killed.

Cara: Yep. Lies to get people killed and lies that we can’t help but but commit, that’s not a good word. But tell? Yeah, because they’re the only they’re the best of a bad situation we’re dealing with or something like that. So they set up, you know, a standard classic laboratory psychology paradigm, which does not necessarily translate to the real world. So let’s keep that in mind. And they set up two paradigms. One of them was a coin flip paradigm, and one of them was a die roll paradigm.

And basically, they said, you know, if you roll heads, you get money. If you roll tails, you get no money. Or if you flip heads, if you flip tails, and then on the die paradigm, they went into levels. So they said, you know, if you roll a one, you get $1, a two, you get $2, a three $3. But if you roll a six, that’s unlucky, so you get no dollars. So those are basically the two experiments that they ran.

And they found that people by and large, had similar response. There were people who were totally honest. So they would flip the coin, they would hit heads, and they would say, got heads, give me my five bucks. Or they would flip tails and they would say, you know, I flipped tails. I don’t get any money. Okay, cool. All right. So you could flip a coin, and you’re gonna be lucky enough that you flip heads you’re, and that’s where you get a $5 payout, you’re probably gonna say, hey, look, I flipped heads, you’re gonna be honest about that, because you want the money.

So they decided, let’s take all those people out of the equation. And let’s just look at the people who flip tails. Because now all the sudden there’s incentive, right? You could either flip tails, and not get the money and be honest about it. And that is what 41% of the people in the lab setting where they did it in front of actual researchers said, only 37% of people in a Mechanical Turk situation.

So Mechanical Turk, have you guys ever used that? I think it’s Amazon’s like survey, study software. And so this is like it’s a coin flip simulation online. So it was this slightly lower number, it was 37%. But still, less than half of the people who flipped tails reported honestly that they flipped tails.

Then there was another group that they called the “cheating non liars.” I love this. So these people flip the coin got tails, and were like, “Crap, I’m just gonna keep flipping until I get heads,” which was breaking the rules, the rules was you flip once, but they said, screw it. I’m just gonna keep flipping. And then when they finally got heads, they were like, Hey, I got heads, let me have my $5.

So this was 17% of the people in front of researchers. 7% of the people online, and another group were what they called “the liars.” So these people flipped the coin got tails, and just straight up, go, “No, I got heads.” 23% of people just straight up lied. And then they found a fourth group. And this group is fascinating, you guys. They called them the “radically dishonest people.” And this is the group that I’m really interested in, like, can we develop a psychometric tool so that we can test these people and then start learning about them? So these people didn’t even bother to flip the coin!

Group: Wow! Whoa!

Cara: They just go, “Oh, yeah, I got heads.”

Group: Wow. Whoa.

Cara: So it’s like, they were like double liars. They lied about participating, and they lied about the outcome.

Steve: What about “lying sack of shit?” What group were they in?

Group: [Laughter]

Cara: I think that’s radically dishonest, the lying sack of shits.

Evan: Oh, man.

Cara: And so this is really fascinating, because I think there are two components here that we we maybe intuitively thought about, just like Bob mentioned earlier, you know, there’s the lies that could get you killed. There’s also the lies that just feel cruel, or they feel like pathologically dishonest and then there are the lies where it’s like, I understand the ethical or moral reason that this person lied. And I think we can start to dig deep into just this very clean laboratory experiment to tease out some of those issues. For example, you’ve got your straight-up honest people, you’ve got straight-up lucky people, then you’ve got your just straight-up liars.

END TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

If you are enjoying this Better at English podcast, please take a moment to rate it, review it, or share the love :-)

LINKS TO SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

PDF transcript of this podcast episode

Link to the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe Podcast episode
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts/episode-793

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/psychology-dishonesty-lying-cheating.html
The Good, the Bad and the ‘Radically Dishonest’ – New York Times article

Link to full text of the actual study “ Cheaters, Liars, or Both? A New Classification of Dishonesty Profiles.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343591254_Cheaters_Liars_or_Both_A_New_Classification_of_Dishonesty_Profiles

Link to the actual game website used in the study. Try playing it yourself!

http://rollandflip.com

GENERAL ENGLISH LEARNING RESOURCES

Loserthink

This is a great book by Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert cartoons) about critical thinking and all the ways our brain tries to fool us by Scott Adams. This link is to the summary version on Blinkist, which contains audio so you can listen as you read. https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/loserthink


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Thursday 17 September 2020

050 – Help! I have a horrible neighbor (fixed)

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Neighbors can be great friends, but let’s face it: sometimes they can be absolutely horrible. But what do you do when you’re stuck living next to a neighbor who you just can’t get along with, no matter what you try? In this episode of Better at English, Lori introduces you to the “How To” podcast with Charles Duhigg. It’s a conversational podcast that covers ways to deal with all kinds of life problems, and does so in an entertaining and fun way. And best of all, it has free transcripts that you can use for your English learning. Lori plays some extracts from the conversation, and looks at some of the interesting language.

The full transcript of this episode is here:

TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW
Hi English learners! Lori here, your teacher from betteratenglish.com. So nice that you’re here! Come on in, kick off your shoes, sit back and get ready for some English listening practice.

Today I’m going to play you some bits of conversation from one of my current favorite podcasts. It’s not a special English learning podcast; it’s a podcast for native speakers of English. But if you can follow along with the conversations in my own podcast, you should be able to follow this one as well. Just like I do, they have free transcripts available on their website, so you can use them to support your English learning. I’ve put links to everything in the show notes.

The name of the podcast is “How to with Charles Duhigg”. If the name Charles Duhigg is familiar to you, it could be that you’ve heard of his book “T he Power of Habit.” If you’re an upper-intermediate or advanced learner and you’re interested in psychology, I can highly recommend it. The Power of Habit is one of those books that teaches you something useful and just makes your life better. Charles’s podcast is the same: it’s entertaining, of course, but it also teaches you useful strategies that you can apply in your own life.

“How to” is an interview show, so it’s very conversational. Charles helps people figure out how to deal with difficult or awkward problems. He usually has a co-host who is either a celebrity or some kind of expert.

In the episode called “How to confront a crazy neighbor,” Charles’s co-host is comedian and actor Tig Notaro. Their guest is a woman named Sarah. Sarah is in the middle of a very unpleasant and stressful conflict with her neighbor. Charles and Tig are going to help her figure out what to do. First let’s listen to Sarah giving some background information about her living situation:

“My name is Sarah and I’m a college counselor. I work with high school students who are low income, and I just bought a condo this year. This is the first time I’ve ever owned a house or anything. So that was pretty exciting. It’s a small building, there are just three units in it. So it’s me living on the first floor and then a guy who lives behind me and then a family who lives upstairs.”

Sara mentions that she lives in a condo. Condo is short for condominium. In the US, a condo is like an apartment or flat, but with one big difference. Do you know what it is? Can you guess from what you heard? Listen again:

“I just bought a condo this year. This is the first time I’ve ever owned a house or anything. So that was pretty exciting.“

The key word is bought. Sarah said she bought the condo, not that she rents it. So the difference between a condo and an apartment or flat is that in a condo, you own the space that you live in – the unit. You actually buy it, and you can sell it. But in an apartment you just pay rent every month. You don’t actually own an apartment unit. So buying a condo is a much bigger deal than just renting an apartment because it’s such a big financial investment.

In Sarah’s condo building, there are three living units – it sounds like they are all attached. She shares a common front porch area with the other people who live there.

So you’re probably wondering, “What’s the problem?” Sarah had bought a plant – a fern – to hang on the front porch, but she didn’t ask the other neighbors if it was OK. That was the start of the whole trouble. Let’s listen to what happened. You’ll hear Tig, Sarah and Charles in this little extract.

TIG: …what happened?

SARAH: So one day I got this note in my mailbox from the wife who lives upstairs and it said, “I am done trying to communicate with you. It is clear that you, um, are just going to, like, disregard my feelings and you don’t care about anybody but yourself. So from now on, I am only going to communicate with you through condo meetings.”

Charles: Whoa! Did you have any idea what she was talking…like, this is literally the first…?

Sarah: No.No. So this is what was so wild about it, was that I just got this letter and I had no idea what it was about. And it just said, “I’m anti power trips. Don’t involve my family in this. If you have any frustrations, you need to bring it up in the condo meeting.”

Tig: First of all, when somebody says “I’m anti power trips,” the translation is “I am all about power trips.”

Wow, I don’t know about you, but I would feel pretty upset if I got a note like that from a neighbor. The language is just so confrontational. Did you notice Sarah’s tone of voice as she read the note? She used a very angry tone of voice. She probably imagines that her neighbor felt very angry when she wrote the note.

And what about this:

Tig: First of all, when somebody says “I’m anti power trips,” the translation is “I am all about power trips.”

Power trip. If somebody enjoys controlling other people, or showing that they have power over them, you can say that they’re on a power trip. Or that they’re power tripping. The feeling of having the power to control other people makes them feel good somehow. They often exert their power in inappropriate ways that make other people feel bad.

Let’s go on and see how Sarah feels about this note.

END TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

LINKS TO SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The How to with Charles Duhigg podcast
How To is a conversational podcast that features smart people talking about interesting things and tackling tricky problems.
Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and the author one of my favorite books, a bestseller titles The Power of Habit (Try the audio book summary of The Power of Habit on Blinkist)

The episode featured in this episode, “How to deal with a Crazy Neighbor,” is here:

You can find the episode transcript here:

How to deal with neighbor harassment
This is an interesting article about how to deal with a neighbor who is harassing you
https://ohmyapt.apartmentratings.com/how-to-deal-with-neighbor-harassment.html


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Wednesday 16 September 2020

050 – Help! I have a horrible neighbor

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Neighbors can be great friends, but let’s face it: sometimes they can be absolutely horrible. But what do you do when you’re stuck living next to a neighbor who you just can’t get along with, no matter what you try? In this episode of Better at English, Lori introduces you to the “How To” podcast with Charles Duhigg. It’s a conversational podcast that covers ways to deal with all kinds of life problems, and does so in an entertaining and fun way. And best of all, it has free transcripts that you can use for your English learning. Lori plays some extracts from the conversation, and looks at some of the interesting language.

The full transcript of this episode is here:
https://ift.tt/3mAwO2j

TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW
Hi English learners! Lori here, your teacher from betteratenglish.com. So nice that you’re here! Come on in, kick off your shoes, sit back and get ready for some English listening practice.

Today I’m going to play you some bits of conversation from one of my current favorite podcasts. It’s not a special English learning podcast; it’s a podcast for native speakers of English. But if you can follow along with the conversations in my own podcast, you should be able to follow this one as well. Just like I do, they have free transcripts available on their website, so you can use them to support your English learning. I’ve put links to everything in the show notes.

The name of the podcast is “How to with Charles Duhigg”. If the name Charles Duhigg is familiar to you, it could be that you’ve heard of his book “T he Power of Habit.” If you’re an upper-intermediate or advanced learner and you’re interested in psychology, I can highly recommend it. The Power of Habit is one of those books that teaches you something useful and just makes your life better. Charles’s podcast is the same: it’s entertaining, of course, but it also teaches you useful strategies that you can apply in your own life.

“How to” is an interview show, so it’s very conversational. Charles helps people figure out how to deal with difficult or awkward problems. He usually has a co-host who is either a celebrity or some kind of expert.

In the episode called “How to confront a crazy neighbor,” Charles’s co-host is comedian and actor Tig Notaro. Their guest is a woman named Sarah. Sarah is in the middle of a very unpleasant and stressful conflict with her neighbor. Charles and Tig are going to help her figure out what to do. First let’s listen to Sarah giving some background information about her living situation:

“My name is Sarah and I’m a college counselor. I work with high school students who are low income, and I just bought a condo this year. This is the first time I’ve ever owned a house or anything. So that was pretty exciting. It’s a small building, there are just three units in it. So it’s me living on the first floor and then a guy who lives behind me and then a family who lives upstairs.”

Sara mentions that she lives in a condo. Condo is short for condominium. In the US, a condo is like an apartment or flat, but with one big difference. Do you know what it is? Can you guess from what you heard? Listen again:

“I just bought a condo this year. This is the first time I’ve ever owned a house or anything. So that was pretty exciting.“

The key word is bought. Sarah said she bought the condo, not that she rents it. So the difference between a condo and an apartment or flat is that in a condo, you own the space that you live in – the unit. You actually buy it, and you can sell it. But in an apartment you just pay rent every month. You don’t actually own an apartment unit. So buying a condo is a much bigger deal than just renting an apartment because it’s such a big financial investment.

In Sarah’s condo building, there are three living units – it sounds like they are all attached. She shares a common front porch area with the other people who live there.

So you’re probably wondering, “What’s the problem?” Sarah had bought a plant – a fern – to hang on the front porch, but she didn’t ask the other neighbors if it was OK. That was the start of the whole trouble. Let’s listen to what happened. You’ll hear Tig, Sarah and Charles in this little extract.

TIG: …what happened?

SARAH: So one day I got this note in my mailbox from the wife who lives upstairs and it said, “I am done trying to communicate with you. It is clear that you, um, are just going to, like, disregard my feelings and you don’t care about anybody but yourself. So from now on, I am only going to communicate with you through condo meetings.”

Charles: Whoa! Did you have any idea what she was talking…like, this is literally the first…?

Sarah: No.No. So this is what was so wild about it, was that I just got this letter and I had no idea what it was about. And it just said, “I’m anti power trips. Don’t involve my family in this. If you have any frustrations, you need to bring it up in the condo meeting.”

Tig: First of all, when somebody says “I’m anti power trips,” the translation is “I am all about power trips.”

Wow, I don’t know about you, but I would feel pretty upset if I got a note like that from a neighbor. The language is just so confrontational. Did you notice Sarah’s tone of voice as she read the note? She used a very angry tone of voice. She probably imagines that her neighbor felt very angry when she wrote the note.

And what about this:

Tig: First of all, when somebody says “I’m anti power trips,” the translation is “I am all about power trips.”

Power trip. If somebody enjoys controlling other people, or showing that they have power over them, you can say that they’re on a power trip. Or that they’re power tripping. The feeling of having the power to control other people makes them feel good somehow. They often exert their power in inappropriate ways that make other people feel bad.

Let’s go on and see how Sarah feels about this note.

END TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

LINKS TO SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The How to with Charles Duhigg podcast
How To is a conversational podcast that features smart people talking about interesting things and tackling tricky problems.
Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and the author one of my favorite books, a bestseller titles The Power of Habit (Try the audio book summary of The Power of Habit on Blinkist)

The episode featured in this episode, “How to deal with a Crazy Neighbor,” is here:

You can find the episode transcript here:

How to deal with neighbor harassment
This is an interesting article about how to deal with a neighbor who is harassing you
https://ohmyapt.apartmentratings.com/how-to-deal-with-neighbor-harassment.html


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Tuesday 15 September 2020

Buckle up

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com
Get ready for something exciting or challenging
Đăng ký: Hoc tieng anh
Tieng Anh Vui

Monday 14 September 2020

049 No excuses – The best place to get FREE speaking practice right now

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

This is NOT a sales episode, I promise! Seriously, I have found and tested the BEST place to find people to practice speaking English with for free. It only takes 5 minutes to set up an account, and you’ll be up and running, practicing your English with nice people from all over the world. No hidden charges, no sales, I promise you…as of September 2020 when I am publishing this podcast, it’s 100% free. There aren’t even annoying ads! No excuses. Start speaking NOW. :-)

You can find free4talk.com here. It’s a great place to practice speaking with other non-native speakers.
If you prefer to have structured lessons with a native speaker teacher, italki is probaby still the best value. But for FREE speaking practice, definitely check out free4talk!

TRANSCRIPT
Hi, English learners, Lori here, your teacher from betteratenglish.com.

Today I have a very short and simple episode for you. Now, I know a lot of you really want to get more English speaking practice, because you’re mainly concerned with becoming more fluent with your English speaking. But the problem is that you have a hard time finding people to practice with, especially since, you know, it can be expensive to get an online teacher, and you don’t have money and I totally, totally understand.

So what if I told you that five minutes after listening to this podcast you could be online, joining in a whole community of people just like you who want to practice their English. And you could actually be practicing, literally within five minutes.

I swear it blew my mind when I found this site. It’s called Free4talk.com, and it’s 100% free.

And I promise you, I have no vested interest in this website. I don’t know them. They’re not paying me anything. I don’t make any money for recommending it to you. I just think it’s such an amazing resource that I would actually feel really bad if I didn’t tell you all about it.

Now, if you’re already listening and thinking, “Oh, no, no, that’s not for me. I’ve already tried conversation exchanges and it’s a real pain in the butt because I have to first log in and look at a bunch of profiles and then find somebody and then send a message and, and hope that they’re going to get back to me and then we have to arrange a time and then more often than not, when I show up for our appointment, there’s nobody there, they’ve totally flaked on me.” And I get it. That is a real pain, and that is frustrating. And you’ve spent all this time and still not gotten any practice.

I promise you free4talk is 1000 times easier. Literally, within five minutes, you can find the site, create an account, log in, find a room and start talking to people. And the big difference between free4talk and these other conversation exchange sites is that it’s based on chat rooms. And that makes it super, super easy.

I’ve been logging in off-and-on over the past couple of weeks and giving it a try. And the good news for all of you who are listening who are learning English, is that English is by far the most popular language. Every time that I’ve logged in there’s been at least 40 different chat rooms. Sometimes there’s been close to 100 different chat rooms of learners all over the world, people just like you who are on there to practice their English.

So I hope this is getting you excited. And that you’re thinking “Yeah, cool. I want to go try it.” So here’s what you’re going to need if you want to try it. All you need is a computer with a mic. Or you can also use an Android phone or an iPhone. And you’re going to need a Google account because that’s how you log in. I think the site is actually based on the same engine that drives Google Hangouts. So you can’t use it if you don’t have a Google account.

I won’t bore you by explaining every detail about how you log in and create your account and all that. I trust that you are competent enough as a user of the internet to be able to figure that out yourself. All I want to do here is just encourage you to take action and actually give it a try and get on there and start practicing your English.

And if you’re listening to this thinking, “Oh, but no, I’m still too shy. Oh, that sounds too scary. I don’t want to go on there and speak to people I don’t know”. In my experience, it’s OK to join one of the rooms and just type in the chat that you’re shy and you really just want to listen. I’ve actually tested that myself. And in the rooms where I’ve tried that, the people there have totally understood and it’s been totally fine.

So if you are shy, and it still feels a bit too scary to go on and start talking to people, you can go on and just try some rooms, join and say, “Can I just listen please?” and just get used to the idea and learn how to use the site.

And then when you feel ready, you can start talking. It’s really that simple. And you really have nothing to lose by giving this a try. I hope this is getting you excited about it and that you’re really keen to finish this podcast and just head over to free4talk.com and sign up and give it a try.

I think I should warn you though, that there are a couple things to watch out for, just like anywhere on the internet. It’s mostly nice people, mostly people just like you who all they want to do is practice their English with other nice people. The vast majority are like that on free4talk. But like anywhere else on the internet, there are also jerks and idiots and trolls who are there to just cause trouble, make other people feel bad. And that’s how they get their kicks. So just beware that you might run into the occasional person who is going to be not very nice.

The good news is, is that free for talk has mechanisms in place to help you kick people out and block people if they’re causing trouble. So please, please don’t let that stop you from using this amazing and fantastic resource.

Now, if this hasn’t convinced you yet, I’ll tell you about my experience yesterday. I knew I wanted to record this podcast. So I wanted to make sure that I had really tested the site properly, and that I knew how everything worked. So I logged on and I quickly created an English chat group and I named it “Just Testing.” And I thought, “OK, that’s safe. I can go on here and it’s called ‘Just Testing’ so I don’t have to worry about wasting people’s time by having them join my group and find out that I’m just testing my mic and trying things.”

That’s what I thought.

I kid you not, within 20 seconds — I had not even really had time to get started with my tests — there were already people joining my group to practice. I talked to two people from Iran. And they were the most lovely people. It was a guy and a girl. And we were there talking for close to 40 minutes, I think it was, and I had the most lovely conversation with them. It was really not how I had planned to spend that 40 minutes, but once I started talking with them, they were so interesting. And we had such a nice discussion. It was really a wonderful experience and they were so, so nice.

So I hope that this will encourage you to go on there, give it a try, and please, let me know how it goes for you. You can go to my website betteratenglish.com and let me know how it goes for you. And, and who knows, I might even see you on there. And we might even have a little chat because I do log in from time to time as Better at English and join chat rooms to be of any help that I can be, or just enjoy listening to the non-native speakers helping each other.

It is truly heartwarming, especially in these horrible times when there’s so much awful stuff going on that I hear how the more advanced learners are there and they’re helping the ones who are not as advanced. And they’re playing games with each other and doing pronunciation practice and having conversations and working on grammar and I can’t say just how wonderful I thought the whole thing was. Again, they’re not paying me to say this. There’s no check in in the mail, I just sincerely am hoping that I, that this will get you excited about it and that you’ll want to give it a try.

So that’s it for me for this time I am working on a new conversation episode for you and I should have that up in another couple of days. But for now, I just wanted to give you this tip about how you can get — today in the next five minutes — how you can be practicing your spoken English with other real, live people just like you. So give it a try. And until next time, this is Lori signing off from Better at English headquarters, wishing you and inspired and productive day. Bye for now.


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Monday 7 September 2020

048 – The Robots are Coming – part 2

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Here comes part 2 of Lori and Will’s discussion about A.I. and automation. If you enjoy these podcasts, please take a moment and rate or review. You can find the full transcript at https://www.betteratenglish.com/transcripts.

TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

Lori: I heard that…I think it’s Pizza Hut already has… or no… Domino’s is already experimenting with robot pizza delivery vehicles. Yeah. I mean, this this is happening now.

Will: Well, you know, a main…I’ve been talking about this whole automation thing….oh, by the way, jot this down. If you’ve never seen it. There’s a, there’s a short 15-minute video on YouTube called Humans Need not Apply. And it puts the entire conversation and frames it into a perfect, digestible, understandable video that explains automation for anybody who’s interested and doesn’t have, you know, hours of time to spend on the topic.

Lori: Oh yeah, great, thanks!

Will: So jot that down. Yep, no problem.

Lori: Done.

Will: But Amazon, which everybody knows who Amazon is, the company, they did, they did something about maybe six months ago or so. They implemented a grocery store that had no cashiers, it was set up with turnstiles that using your mobile device, you would log in before you entered the store. You would get whatever you needed at the market, groceries, whatever you needed, and you would leave, you wouldn’t stand in a line you would just walk through the turnstile and be automatically charged to your account. And I remember when Amazon did this I kind of freaked out a little bit because I, I said, you know, I sounded like the crazy preacher man running down the hill, I said to anybody I’d ever spoken to the topic about, they’re testing a patent for this type of framework to be rolled out on a larger scale to the supermarket industry. And in the past week, Amazon has purchased Whole Foods and I am positive that it is connected to their concept of implementing this…you know, cashierless…you know, turnstile, just walk in and walk out, fully automated, market shopping experience.

Lori: Wow, I ….Oh, my goodness. I didn’t know that they had bought Whole Foods.

Will: Yep. In the past week. I lost my mind when I read it.

Lori: Wow. Wow. I mean, it’s something like that, I mean, a lot of people would lose their jobs or you know, the the poor cashiers. But at the same time, it sounds like a nice shopping experience, that you just walk in, get your things and walk out and everything is taken care of…I …provided that it’s all accurately…that you’re accurately charged for your items.

Will: Yes. Of course, and it’s a perfect…it’s a perfect example of “If it works for the consumer…” which it sounds like that’s a no brainer. And there…if the quarterly numbers come out for Whole Foods, and they see massive profits as a result of not having to carry those salaries and that that level of overhead as a result of employing humans, then it’ll also make sense from a business perspective. And we will inevitably start to see the shift into the direction of automation. When it works for people and it works for businesses and the governments are scrambling around trying to figure out what to do with all of these, you know, unemployed unemployable people. It almost like a dirty word, unemployable. You’re unemployable.

Lori: Yeah. But it really depends on how, you know, what is going to happen with society as this, you know, as these changes start taking place, because the point that that…remind me of what his name was. Do you remember the name of the guy who made this this video about the rise of AI?

Will: Aaaah….

Lori: I can’t remember his name. Well, in any case, the point he made was that if these things do happen, we could if things go well, and if we plan properly, we could end up with a society where all we humans are doing is developing ourselves, learning new things.

Will: Exactly.

Lori: You know, just basically living a life of…that… where we can follow our interests and our passions. And…

Will: Yeah.

Lori: …and then the machines, the AI is taking care of all the drudgery and all the things that that we used to have to do just to put food on the table.

END TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

LINKS TO SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

If you use Blinkist, here are some links to read short summaries of books on the topic of A.I. and autimation. Blinkist is great for English learners. You can read along as you listen, plus look up words you don’t know all from the app!

The Future of Work, by Darrell M. West
https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/zLbBe

The Robots are Coming, by Andres Oppenheimer
https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/RvnWa

The A.I. Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare by Roger Bootle
https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/ydbBv

Video about delivery robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujzjZuhE92g

Humans need not apply
Video about how automation and A.I. will affect the job market for humans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Robots will beat humans at every task
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/this-is-when-robots-will-start-beating-humans-at-every-task-ae5ecd71-5e8e-44ba-87cd-a962c2aa99c2

Dirty, Dirty robots
Funny (but still disturbing) video about A.I. from comedian Lee Camp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyfxP6ZyNtw

Link to original Yale / Oxford study about A.I.
This is for learners of academic English. People in the videos about A.I. summarize findings from this study. This is the actual academic study for comparison.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf

Elon musk on the Joe Rogan podcast, talking about A.I.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra3fv8gl6NE

Elon Musk’s talk at SXSW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Osn1gMNtw

Ted talk with neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nt3edWLgIg

Sam Harris on the Joe Rogan Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BChxQHyFIOI&t=1487s

TED talk by Peter Haas A robot designer who is afraid of robots
The Real Reason to be Afraid of Artificial Intelligence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRzBk_KuIaM

How frightened should be be of A.I.?
Article in the New Yorker, free, with full text and audio so you can read along as you listen.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened-should-we-be-of-ai

A Conversation with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. & Founder of SpaceX moderated by H.E. Mohammad Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs & The Future, UAE. Chairman of the World Government Summit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCoFKUJ_8Yo

Oxford word lists
You can look up words and hear American and British English pronunciation at
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/wordlists/oxford3000-5000


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048 – The robots are coming. Are you ready? – part 2

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Here comes part 2 of Lori and Will’s discussion about A.I. and automation. If you enjoy these podcasts, please take a moment and rate or review. You can find the full transcript at https://www.betteratenglish.com/transcripts.

TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

Lori: I heard that…I think it’s Pizza Hut already has… or no… Domino’s is already experimenting with robot pizza delivery vehicles. Yeah. I mean, this this is happening now.

Will: Well, you know, a main…I’ve been talking about this whole automation thing….oh, by the way, jot this down. If you’ve never seen it. There’s a, there’s a short 15-minute video on YouTube called Humans Need not Apply. And it puts the entire conversation and frames it into a perfect, digestible, understandable video that explains automation for anybody who’s interested and doesn’t have, you know, hours of time to spend on the topic.

Lori: Oh yeah, great, thanks!

Will: So jot that down. Yep, no problem.

Lori: Done.

Will: But Amazon, which everybody knows who Amazon is, the company, they did, they did something about maybe six months ago or so. They implemented a grocery store that had no cashiers, it was set up with turnstiles that using your mobile device, you would log in before you entered the store. You would get whatever you needed at the market, groceries, whatever you needed, and you would leave, you wouldn’t stand in a line you would just walk through the turnstile and be automatically charged to your account. And I remember when Amazon did this I kind of freaked out a little bit because I, I said, you know, I sounded like the crazy preacher man running down the hill, I said to anybody I’d ever spoken to the topic about, they’re testing a patent for this type of framework to be rolled out on a larger scale to the supermarket industry. And in the past week, Amazon has purchased Whole Foods and I am positive that it is connected to their concept of implementing this…you know, cashierless…you know, turnstile, just walk in and walk out, fully automated, market shopping experience.

Lori: Wow, I ….Oh, my goodness. I didn’t know that they had bought Whole Foods.

Will: Yep. In the past week. I lost my mind when I read it.

Lori: Wow. Wow. I mean, it’s something like that, I mean, a lot of people would lose their jobs or you know, the the poor cashiers. But at the same time, it sounds like a nice shopping experience, that you just walk in, get your things and walk out and everything is taken care of…I …provided that it’s all accurately…that you’re accurately charged for your items.

Will: Yes. Of course, and it’s a perfect…it’s a perfect example of “If it works for the consumer…” which it sounds like that’s a no brainer. And there…if the quarterly numbers come out for Whole Foods, and they see massive profits as a result of not having to carry those salaries and that that level of overhead as a result of employing humans, then it’ll also make sense from a business perspective. And we will inevitably start to see the shift into the direction of automation. When it works for people and it works for businesses and the governments are scrambling around trying to figure out what to do with all of these, you know, unemployed unemployable people. It almost like a dirty word, unemployable. You’re unemployable.

Lori: Yeah. But it really depends on how, you know, what is going to happen with society as this, you know, as these changes start taking place, because the point that that…remind me of what his name was. Do you remember the name of the guy who made this this video about the rise of AI?

Will: Aaaah….

Lori: I can’t remember his name. Well, in any case, the point he made was that if these things do happen, we could if things go well, and if we plan properly, we could end up with a society where all we humans are doing is developing ourselves, learning new things.

Will: Exactly.

Lori: You know, just basically living a life of…that… where we can follow our interests and our passions. And…

Will: Yeah.

Lori: …and then the machines, the AI is taking care of all the drudgery and all the things that that we used to have to do just to put food on the table.

END TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

LINKS TO SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

If you use Blinkist, here are some links to read short summaries of books on the topic of A.I. and autimation. Blinkist is great for English learners. You can read along as you listen, plus look up words you don’t know all from the app!

The Future of Work, by Darrell M. West

https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/zLbBe

The Robots are Coming, by Andres Oppenheimer

https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/RvnWa

The A.I. Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare by Roger Bootle

https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/ydbBv

Video about delivery robots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujzjZuhE92g

Humans need not apply

Video about how automation and A.I. will affect the job market for humans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Robots will beat humans at every task

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/this-is-when-robots-will-start-beating-humans-at-every-task-ae5ecd71-5e8e-44ba-87cd-a962c2aa99c2

Dirty, Dirty robots

Funny (but still disturbing) video about A.I. from comedian Lee Camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyfxP6ZyNtw

Link to original Yale / Oxford study about A.I.

This is for learners of academic English. People in the videos about A.I. summarize findings from this study. This is the actual academic study for comparison.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf

Elon musk on the Joe Rogan podcast, talking about A.I.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra3fv8gl6NE

Elon Musk’s talk at SXSW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Osn1gMNtw

Ted talk with neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nt3edWLgIg

Sam Harris on the Joe Rogan Podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BChxQHyFIOI&t=1487s

TED talk by Peter Haas A robot designer who is afraid of robots

The Real Reason to be Afraid of Artificial Intelligence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRzBk_KuIaM

How frightened should be be of A.I.?

Article in the New Yorker, free, with full text and audio so you can read along as you listen.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened-should-we-be-of-ai

A Conversation with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. & Founder of SpaceX moderated by H.E. Mohammad Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs & The Future, UAE. Chairman of the World Government Summit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCoFKUJ_8Yo

Oxford word lists

You can look up words and hear American and British English pronunciation at

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/wordlists/oxford3000-5000


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