Let’s say your relationship is on the rocks. You’ve been trying to work things out together in couples’ counselling, BBC but ultimately, you want to know if it is worth the effort.
Will things get better, or are they doomed to fall apart? It might be worth just pausing for a second to listen to your partner. Really listen.dailymail.co.uk When you speak to each other, your voices hold all sorts of information that could reveal the answer. Subtle inflections in tone, the pauses between phrases, the volume at which you speak - it all conveys hidden signals about how you really feel.
• What single word defines who you are? A lot of this we pick up on intuitively. We use it to fine-tune the meaning of our words. "Why are you here? "Why are you here? "Why are you here? That shift in emphasis is one of the more obvious ways we layer our speech with meaning. But there are many more layers that we add without realising it. But there is a way to extract this hidden information from our speech. Researchers have even developed artificial intelligence that can then use this information to predict the future of couples’ relationships. The AI is already more accurate at this than professionally trained therapists. In one study, researchers monitored 134 married couples who had been having difficulties in their relationships.
Over two years, the couples each recorded two 10-minute problem-solving sessions. Each partner chose a topic about their relationship that was important to them and discussed them together. The researchers also had data on whether or not the couples’ relationships improved or deteriorated and if they were still together two years later. Trained therapists watched videos of the recordings. By assessing the way the couples spoke to each other, what they said and how they looked while they were talking, the therapists made a psychological assessment about the likely outcome of their relationship. The researchers also trained an algorithm to analyse the couples’ speech.
Previous research had given the team some clues that certain features were likely to be involved in human communication, such as intonation, speech duration and how the individuals took turns to speak. The algorithm’s job was to calculate exactly how these features were linked to relationship strength. The algorithm was purely based on the sound recordings, without considering visual information from the videos. It also ignored the content of their conversations - the words themselves. Instead, the algorithm picked up on features like cadence, pitch and how long each participant talked for. Amazingly, the algorithm also picked up on features of speech beyond human perception. These features are almost impossible to describe because we’re not typically aware of them - such as spectral tilt, a complex mathematical function of speech.
"Using lots of data, BBC we can find patterns that may be elusive to human eyes and ears," says Shri Narayanan, an engineer at the University of Southern California, who led the study. After being trained on the couples’ recordings, the algorithm became marginally better than the therapists at predicting whether or not couples would stay together. The algorithm was 79.3% accurate. The therapists - who had the advantage of also being able to understand the content of the couples’ speech and watching their body language - came in at 75.6% accurate. "Humans are good at decoding many pieces of information," says Narayanan.
The idea is that we are ‘leaking’ more information about our thoughts and emotions than we, as humans, can pick up on. But algorithms are not just restricted to decoding the voice features that people tend to use to convey information. In other words, there are other ‘hidden’ dimensions to our speech that can be accessed by AI. "One the advantages of computers is their ability to find patterns and trends in large amounts of data," says Fjola Helgadottir, a clinical psychologist at the University of Oxford. "Human behaviour can give insight into underlying mental processes," she says. An algorithm that predicts whether or not your relationship is doomed may not be the most appealing idea.
Especially as it is only three-quarters accurate, at present. Such a prediction could conceivably change the course of your relationship and how you feel about your partner. But cracking the information hidden in the way we talk - and in how our bodies function - could be used to make our relationships better. Theodora Chaspari, a computer engineer at Texas A&M University, has been developing an AI program that can predict when conflict is likely to flare up in a relationship. Chaspari and her colleagues used data from unobtrusive sensors - like a wrist-worn fitness tracker - that 34 couples wore for a day.
The sensors measure sweat, heartrate and voice data including tone of voice, but also analysed the content of what the couples said - whether they used positive or negative words. A total of 19 of the couples experienced some level of conflict during the day that they wore the sensors. Chaspari and her colleagues used machine learning to train an algorithm to learn the patterns associated with arguments that the couples reported having. Now the team is developing predictive algorithms that they hope to use to give couples a heads-up before an argument is likely to take place by detecting the warning signs that lead up to one.
The way the authors foresee it working is like this: you’ve had a busy day at work, perhaps had a stressful meeting, and you’re on your way home. Your partner has also had a tough day. "At this point, we can intervene in order to resolve the conflict in a more positive way," says Chaspari. This could be done by simply sending a message to couples before the moment heats up, says Adela Timmons, a psychologist on the project based at the Clinical and Quantitative Psychology Center for Children and Families at Florida International University. "We think that we can be more effective in our treatments if we’re able to administer them in people’s real lives at the points that they need them most," she says.
The traditional model of therapy isn’t capable of fulfilling that goal. Typically, a session might take place for an hour a week, when the patients recall what happened since the last session, and talk through problems that arose. "The therapist isn’t able to be there in the moment when someone actually needs the support," says Timmons. But an automated prompt based on consistently monitoring people’s physiology and speech could fulfil the real-time dream of therapy intervention. It could also allow for a more standardised form of treatment, says Helgadottir. "Nobody really knows what goes on in a closed therapy room," says Helgadottir, who has developed an evidence-based platform using AI to treat social anxiety.
"Sometimes the most effective techniques aren’t being used since they require more effort on the part of the therapist. On the other hand, the clinical components of AI therapy systems can be completely open and transparent.sky.com "They can be designed and reviewed by the leading researchers and practitioners in the field. There are potential pitfalls though. There’s no guarantee that a ping from your phone warning of an impending argument won’t backfire and wind you up even more. The timing of the intervention is crucial. "We probably don’t want to actually intervene during a conflict, says Timmons.
"If people are already upset, they aren’t going to be terribly receptive to prompts on their phone that they should calm down.
There are plenty of technological hurdles left to overcome before an app like this can be rolled out. The team needs to refine its algorithms and test their efficacy on a wider range of people. There are also big questions around privacy. A data breach of a device storing data on your relationship with your partner would put a lot of sensitive information at risk. One could also question what would happen to the data if there was an alleged crime, such as domestic violence. "We have to think about how we would handle those situations and ways to keep people safe while protecting their privacy," says Timmons.
If this model of therapy is indeed successful, it could also open doors to similar ways to improve other kinds of relationships - such as within the family, at work, or the doctor-patient dynamic. The more that our different bodily systems are monitored - from our eye movements to our muscle tension - the more could be revealed about what is in store for our relationships. There may prove to be many more layers of meaning, beyond our speech and basic physiological reactions, that can best be decoded by machines. Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Latvia could provide a home to both organizations if the conflict between Russia and the United Kingdom becomes more aggravated than the current tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats over attempted Russian assassinations in the United Kingdom, the ministry said. The British Council is the United Kingdom's international body promoting British culture and education. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the UK's public broadcaster. Like what you're reading? Stay up to date with current events in Latvia via LSM's Facebook and Twitter pages. The UK is accusing Kremlin of using a prohibited chemical weapon in an assassination attempt on British soil. This month London expelled 23 Russian diplomats, and Russia responded by expelling 23 British diplomats and ordering the British Council in Russia to cease operations.
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A crew from BBC World Service recorded a program Thursday at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that will air on Sept.
A panel featuring civil rights activist Bernard Lafayette, who took part in the Freedom Rides in 1961, discussed the role of African-American churches in the fight against social and racial injustice. Simon Pitts, arts and faith editor for BBC World Service.dailymail.co.uk BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation. A recording of the panel discussion will be featured on the weekly radio program "Heart and Soul," which has about 79 million listeners worldwide and focuses on faith, he said.
The "Heart and Soul Gathering" panel included local ministers the Rev. Eva Melton and the Rev. Arthur Price, pastor of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
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Amid the neon-lit diners and coffee shops of New York’s Upper East Side sits a townhouse that’s a world away from the fast-paced drama of Manhattan. In sight of Central Park, but not as far north as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is just one of many such houses on a street full of elite mansions and enviable residences.
No sightseeing map would direct you to East 70th Street, and it’s routinely bypassed by cab drivers, commuters and pedestrians, all of whom have somewhere else more important to be. But beyond the townhouse’s wrought iron doors, under a keystone archway, a world of tightly guarded secrets awaits.
• The origin of life on Earth?
The deepest oceans. The farthest rivers. The highest peaks. Even the moon and outer space itself. All of it has been mapped by the club’s globetrotting members. And on any given day, many can be found in the back room, taking tea while plotting their next extraordinary adventure.
Talk is not of the weather, but of moon landings and blow dart encounters. This is the little-known Explorers Club, the headquarters of one of the world’s most awe-inspiring field science institutions. Now the club’s 44th president, Wiese was drawn into this Indiana Jones world by his father, Richard Wiese Sr, who was the first man to solo the Pacific Ocean in a plane.
He remembers standing on his front lawn in Connecticut looking at cumulus and contrail clouds wishing he could be just as adventurous. By age 12, he had travelled to Africa and climbed Mt Kilimanjaro. "I recall the first time I came to the club in the mid-1980s," Wiese told me, while we sat at a table once owned by former member and US president Theodore Roosevelt in the club’s boardroom.
Like the other mountain-climbing, polar-exploring, zeitgeist-defining club presidents before him, Wiese maintains the society’s purpose is for knowledge enhancement alone, not self-fulfilment. Its 3,500 members - spread across 32 global chapters, including the New York headquarters - are bound by a bond to push the boundaries of science and education.
And these days, membership is predominantly taken up by oceanographers, lepidopterologists, primatologists and conservationists. A case in point: this past summer, a group of club palaeontologists were in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert hunting for fossilised dinosaur remains using drone scanners.
"They found dozens, if not hundreds," Wiese told me, almost as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself. "Exploration for us is now less a cult of personality and more a cult of data. It was 1904 when The Explorers Club was founded by historian, journalist and explorer Henry Collins Walsh and like-minded Arctic explorers. At the time, the race to the North Pole had brought the group together with a broader purpose to explore by air, land, sea and space.
This saw the first meetings held at its original headquarters in the Studio Building at 23 West 67th Street. But as the club grew in stature, so too did its need to expand to house trophies, books and priceless artefacts. Enter American writer and broadcaster Lowell Thomas of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ fame years later. An enthusiastic member in the 1960s, he was instrumental in the club acquiring its current headquarters, once a private family home owned by an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine. "This place used to be about pushing dragons off the map," said the club’s archivist and curator of research collections Lacey Flint, leading me on a fascinating tour of the townhouse. "We still push those dragons, but the club has become so much more.
History is alive in the building’s upper galleries like few other places in New York. It isn’t just the taxidermy polar bear guarding the staircase. Or the sledge used by Robert Peary and Matthew Henson on an expedition to the North Pole in 1909 (now placed above a door in the Clark Room).
It’s in the indigenous totems found by Michael Rockefeller on a trip to collect primitive art from New Guinea (while several artefacts were airmailed to the US, Rockefeller never returned and rumours persist he was eaten by cannibals). It’s in the series of framed club flags, once folded into spacesuit pockets and carried on every Apollo mission into space.
And it’s in the artefacts on the desk of the club’s archivist that still need to be catalogued. Moreover, it’s a place that boggles the senses. On the day of my visit, Flint’s desk was taken over by a prized 17th-Century Persian helmet and a pair of Spanish colonial spurs.
She oversees some 1,000 objects in the club’s collection, as well as a library brimming with 14,000 volumes, photographs, slides and reports. One recent acquisition is a century-old Akeley Pancake Camera, dating to 1919 and first built for rugged expeditions.
The townhouse is an intriguing architectural marvel in itself. There are wooden beams taken from HMS Daedalus (an 1826 frigate warship).
A ceiling bought from a 15th-Century Italian monastery, plus original stained-glass windows inlaid with Tudor roses from Windsor Castle in England. It’s so out-of-this-world, in fact, it feels as if it could have been designed by Jonathan Swift’s fantastical traveller, Lemuel Gulliver.
One floor up, past the Hall of Fame and the Sir Edmund Hillary Map Room, is the extraordinarily detailed Gallery. "The risks these explorers took were crazy," said Flint, pointing to an oil painting of Danish explorer Peter Freuchen that hung above the fireplace.
Freuchen, she told me, wore a coat from a polar bear he killed, and once escaped an ice cave using frozen excrement as an improvised dagger. "These were people who would amputate their own foot.
They were rock stars of their age and their stories are just as radical. Some unearthed burial grounds of ancient kings, while others travelled to the Arctic with a full tea service or crossed a desert with a camel carrying a full-size writing desk. Members’ adventures are just as inspiring today. Archaeologist Joan Breton Connelly - aka ‘Indiana Joan’ - continues to dig for clues at a Cypriot temple built by Cleopatra that she discovered, while deep-sea explorer Jennifer Arnold’s passion is diving for megalodon teeth. 25 during the society’s weekly public lectures - is to experience an expense of spirit most people can only dream of.
While the world of the explorer is changing, the club’s president believes it is a golden era for members - particularly in the fields of palaeontology, anthropology and space exploration. "Our challenge is to stay relevant," Wiese said, looking out the window. "In science, if an organism doesn’t evolve it’ll go extinct.
Yes, we have an illustrious history, but our members are focussed on the future - on climate change and on animal and human preservation. So the more we can promote and popularise science to people that have curiosity about the world the better. CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of the Explorers Club.
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— It is the opinion of two British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalists that the investments that China is making in Jamaica must spark a level of caution in citizens. The ‘World Questions’ team is in Jamaica for the hosting of an episode of their show, which took place last night at Spanish Court Hotel, Valencia in St Andrew.
"It is fantastic to get investment, and Jamaica shouldn’t be scared, but of course, you have to be wary about taking all your aid from one great power," Taylor asserted. "When we do ‘World Questions’ and go around the world to countries like Kenya and Ghana, the same issue of China comes up, too.
The Chinese have wide-scale investment in Jamaica, including a number of businesses and properties, as well as construction of the country’s highways and major roadways. According to Dymond, the Chinese "move very fast", warning that "very few countries in the world give out aid without wanting something.
Without accusing China of any wrongdoing, the veteran journalist said that there are aspects of the Chinese system of governance that Jamaica must be mindful of. "We are here to do ‘World Questions’, because we believe in having a variety of voices, including that of the audience. I don’t see that kind of thing on Chinese television or hear on radio. I happen to think that liberal democracy is a good thing and is a better system than what they have in China," he stated.
"Is China something to be wary of? Jamaica has strong institutions and has the rule of law. You have been independent for decades. I don’t think there is anything to be scared of. I just think you should be wary of other countries, including Britain. Jamaica didn’t throw off Britain simply to become an economic colony of another power.
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines' top diplomat cried foul after the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired a documentary about President Rodrigo Duterte's crackdown against illegal drugs. The documentary, titled "Our World—Philippines: Democracy in Danger?", aired last Saturday. BBC said in the description of the documentary posted on its website. Cayetano said in a statement. Cayetano also accused BBC of being one-sided on the cases of Sen. Leila de Lima, Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, all known critics of Duterte. De Lima has been detained for allegedly being involved in the proliferation of the illegal drug trade at the New Bilibid Prison.
Duterte recently revoked the amnesty granted to Trillanes and ordered his arrest. Sereno's appointment as the country's top judge was nullified following a quo warranto petition that Solicitor General Jose Calida filed. De Lima has been in government custody since February 2017 but releases handwritten "dispatches" through her staff. She is heavily escorted when brought to and from court hearings, with her police escorts at times trying to block media cameras from taking photos. On at least one ocassion, her escorts coughed simultaneously to drown out what she was shouting to reporters covering the hearing. Both Trillanes and Sereno were interviewed in the documentary.
Trillanes warned of a possible declaration of nationwide martial law while Sereno talked about how the administration is threatening the independence of the judiciary. Trillanes told BBC correspondent Howard Johnson. Sereno described how the Duterte administration does not like criticism and shows viciousness to groups that they consider as critics. Cayetano also claimed that the BBC reported did not take into consideration that Duterte continues to enjoy high trust and approval ratings. Citing the latest Pulse Asia survey, the DFA chief said seven out of 10 Filipinos trust the president while three out of four approve of his performance. The latest Social Weather Survey (SWS), meanwhile, found that Duterte's satisfaction rating went up to 70 percent.
What Cayetano failed to mention was that Duterte suffered a double-digit drop in his approval and trust ratings. The latest Pulse Asia poll showed that his approval rating fell from 88 percent in June to 75 percent in October while his trust score decreased from 87 percent to 75 percent in the same period. A recent SWS survey also found that majority of Filipinos consider Duterte's controversial "God is stupid" remark and joke about Davao City rape cases were "bastos" or vulgar. The DFA secretary called on the BBC to present an "accurate" and "balanced" views of the issues in the Philippines next time. Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque had earlier challenged BBC to produce a report on Duterte's supposed links to the Davao Death Squad.
Roque claimed that former United Nations special rapporteur Philip Alston already cleared Duterte of liability in relation to killings blamed on the vigilante group that targeted drug offenders. "I also mentioned in the BBC that what the Philip Alston report said were administrative lapses and it’s there.
Will someone please get the relevant paragraph cited by BBC and will you please write a letter to BBC, because they should not have just limited it to mentioning the paragraphs, they should actually have shown what Philip Alston said? " Roque said in a press briefing Tuesday. The Mayor of Davao City has done nothing to prevent these killings, and his public comments suggest that he is, in fact, supportive. Mayor Duterte responded to the reported arrest and subsequent release of a notorious drug lord in Manila by saying: 'Here in Davao, you can’t go out alive. You can go out, but inside a coffin. Is that what you call extra-judicial killing?
53 year-old Account Coordinator Boigie McGeever, hailing from Levis enjoys watching movies like "Whisperers, The" and Swimming.
Took a trip to Historic Area of Willemstad and drives a Ferrari 400 Superamerica.