Politicians still only talking

Still talking to machines (cognitively speaking)

This overview article reviews the structure of a fully statistical spoken dialogue system (SDS), using as illustration, various systems and components built at Cambridge over the last few years. Most of the components in an SDS are essentially classifiers which can be trained using supervised learning. However, the dialogue management component must track the state of the dialogue and optimise ...

You Might Transmit COVID-19 Only Via Talking; A Speech Therapy Perspective

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was identified in late 2019 and has gradually spread to all countries. Following the outspread of this virus as a community-acquired disease, many researchers have been trying to identify various factors involved in the transmission of the virus, as well as the ways to prevent its transmission from person to person. For example, researchers have found tha...

Overprotected Politicians

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost to his or her survival. The social cost of political assassination is much smaller as politicians are replaceable. Conversely, the private cost of the securit...

Bad Politicians

We present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theory offers three main insights. Low-quality citizens have a ‘comparative advantage’ in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). Hence, voters may find themsel...

When Topologists Are Politicians...