0:05

Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend Edition.

0:07

I'm Oscar Ramirez, and every week I explore

0:09

the top stories making waves in the news

0:12

and some that are just playing interesting. I'll

0:14

connect you with the journalists and the people who know the

0:16

story and bring you news without the noise

0:18

so you can make an informed decision. You

0:20

can catch a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday

0:23

through Friday, and it's ready when you wake up.

0:26

On the weekend edition, I'll be bringing you some of the best

0:28

stories from the week. But

0:32

withholding of recess has long been a punishment

0:34

tactic for teachers when kids misbehavior

0:36

misassignments. Now there's a growing

0:38

momentum to pass laws that protect recess

0:41

time and prohibit schools from taking it away

0:43

to punish kids. Research has shown that

0:45

unstructured free time is important for child

0:47

development as it fosters good social communication

0:50

and coping skills. For more on

0:52

the fight to protect recess, will speak to Jackie

0:54

Mader, early education reporter at

0:56

the Hecken Jury Report. This is a really

0:59

common kindish men. It's been happening for

1:01

a long time in schools. When I was interviewing

1:03

experts, a lot of them said, oh, I

1:05

remember this happening when I was a kid. Um,

1:08

So yeah, we all we all have

1:10

those stories, we remember it happening. But

1:12

there's been a growing understanding of

1:14

both the importance of recess and the benefits

1:17

that come with that, and understanding of the

1:19

importance of free play, especially

1:21

for really young children, and at a time

1:23

when you know they're sitting in schools learning

1:26

more academics than ever before, and

1:29

so this time is really important. And

1:31

then at the same time, pediatricians and

1:33

child development experts they're starting

1:35

to say, this isn't the most appropriate

1:37

punishment. There are other punishments

1:39

that may be more effective, but going a route

1:41

that can be more punitive or even stigmatize

1:44

a child and doesn't really follow a natural

1:46

consequence, right like a child may not be able to

1:48

track. I didn't get my parents to sign this

1:50

form, and now I'm sitting out at recess. So

1:53

it's just not the most appropriate punishment, is

1:55

what child development experts are now saying,

1:57

even though it is common and it has

2:00

been common for a long time, you know, on

2:02

the face of it, and just kind of anecdotally, as I mentioned,

2:04

I do remember this happening to

2:06

me as a kid, right you mess up, it's like, well, now

2:08

you gotta sit down and don't move for

2:11

you know, the half an hour time whatever it is. You

2:13

know, as a kid, yeah, definitely, you feel like that's

2:15

my only free time, I only

2:17

outlet. It's so stressful here,

2:19

and yeah I messed up and whatnot, and but you

2:21

kind of look forward to those moments. So on the

2:23

face of it, yeah, I mean I tend to agree that it is

2:26

a great outlet for the kids and all. But on

2:28

the teacher side of things, I mean, how do they feel, what do

2:31

they do? What are some recommendations for

2:33

other things? When you know they're

2:35

at their limits a lot of times too, they don't know how

2:37

to discipline the kids, right,

2:39

That's a great question, and it's true.

2:42

I mean, teachers need ways to manage their

2:44

classrooms. They need to be able to enforce the rules.

2:46

Kids need to learn. You know, you do have to follow

2:48

rules in school. We're trying to keep everyone safe

2:51

and we're trying to learn. Part of the problem

2:53

that you know, teachers talk to me about

2:55

and schools and administrators

2:57

talked about is there often aren't in a works

3:00

for teachers. So if a teacher has a really challenging

3:03

behavior from a child in their classroom.

3:05

You know, a lot of schools don't have social workers

3:08

or counselors to come in and say, hey,

3:10

we're going to get to the root cause of this issue.

3:12

You know, for some kids, I've talked to plenty

3:14

of family two kids have disabilities, so

3:17

they need more support. And maybe, you

3:19

know, punishing a kid because of a the hater that

3:21

may be due to their disability isn't

3:24

the right way to go. These parents say

3:26

instead they need more support, maybe from

3:28

the special education team. But we know teachers

3:31

are lacking, so there's definitely

3:33

it's a hard time for teachers. And

3:35

I know a lot of teachers are leaving the field and

3:37

many say, I mean, surveys have come out to say classroom

3:40

management is one of the main reasons why teachers

3:42

leave. So you know, two things can be true.

3:44

Teachers need more support, kids

3:46

need more support, and we can,

3:48

you know, come up with some more effectives

3:51

and what experts say or developmentally appropriate

3:54

punishments if your questions some of those

3:56

punishments. Maybe, I mean, I talked to

3:58

a pediatrician who said, in

4:00

general, stigmatizing adults

4:02

is inappropriate. So we don't want to do that for kids,

4:05

especially really young kids, something

4:07

like explaining why we have these

4:09

rules so kids understand why it's important

4:11

offering positive reinforcement, So

4:13

maybe even offering an extra recess,

4:16

right, and kids can work towards earning that, so

4:18

they're not losing the one recess they have, they're

4:20

working towards a reward. And

4:23

I talked to us classroom management expert

4:25

at a teacher training program who said,

4:27

you know, they really teach their teachers to work

4:29

on this kind of positive reinforcement instead

4:31

of negative reinforcement system

4:34

with their students. So there are alternatives.

4:36

The problem is do teachers have the

4:39

time, you know, even the knowledge they may not know

4:41

some of these routes and the support

4:43

to roll out different methods in their classrooms.

4:45

And when you're managing dirty kids or whatever

4:47

the number may be, it's it gets really increasingly

4:50

difficult, you know. And we you know, just hearing

4:52

stories throughout the pandemic and coming

4:55

back to school, right, kids were

4:57

not as developed because they missed

4:59

that time in school and in that settings and heard

5:01

stories about fights breaking out and everything. So

5:04

it's totally tough on that. So so the movement

5:07

now, right, there's lawmakers in a number

5:09

of states, and you know obviously a lot of individual

5:11

school districts too that are looking to

5:14

either pass laws or policies that say, well,

5:16

no, we have to have this recess

5:18

time for kids. You know, you can't use that

5:20

taking it away as a punishment. Yeah,

5:23

that's correct. So right now they are

5:25

about twelve states that limit this

5:28

in some way. Most of them say you can't use

5:30

physical activity as a punishment or

5:32

withholding physical activity at the punishment,

5:34

so that includes recess. Very few

5:36

outrights say you cannot

5:39

take away recess of the punishment. Illinois is

5:41

one of those states that just passed this in one

5:44

and now four other states are considering

5:46

this. Oklahoma, Connecticut, Pennsylvania,

5:48

and Minnesota. They all have bills moving

5:51

through the legislatures right now that would

5:53

specifically ban withholding recess.

5:55

So there is kind of just growing understanding

5:57

of you know, like you mentioned, you know, children

6:00

are behind in their development, that includes social

6:02

development, and there's this a lot of you

6:04

know, mental health concerns for children. So

6:06

this growing understanding that hey, maybe recess

6:09

is something that needs to be protected to help

6:11

with all of this, and the best way to do that

6:13

maybe creating this law, so it's

6:15

not an option. I think a lot of people

6:17

would argue, you know, on the flip side, you also have to

6:19

support teachers with other options. But

6:22

it has been shown that states

6:24

that have laws to protect recess

6:27

time, those schools in those states are more

6:29

likely to have recess time. So there is

6:31

some evidence that laws are kind of

6:33

the way to go if you really want to

6:35

protect recess. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely

6:37

a difficult conversation. As you mentioned, it's

6:39

important for the kids, but the teachers need some

6:41

resources also there. So we'll continue

6:43

to monitor this conversation see what happens with

6:46

it. Jackie Mader, early education

6:48

reporter at the Heckener Report, Thank

6:50

you very much for joining us. Thank

6:52

you so much for having me work.

6:58

They're about eight different types of differ sical people

7:00

that you can deal with. They range anywhere from

7:02

insecure bosses to office snow at alls

7:04

and political operators only looking out for themselves.

7:07

But the worst people to work with are the passive aggressive

7:10

types because it's so common and

7:12

the hardest to pin down. For more on how

7:14

to handle difficult people, will speak to Amy

7:16

Gallo, contributing editor to the Harvard

7:18

Business Review, an author of getting along

7:20

how to work with anyone. One of the more ubiquitous

7:23

too, although all of these I think will sound familiar

7:25

to people. All right, So we've got the insecure

7:27

boss, right, the person they maybe micromanage,

7:30

They distrust you, They try to keep

7:32

you from interacting with other departments

7:34

or senior people. The pessimist.

7:37

I think that's pretty self explanatory. Someone who

7:39

keeps continually shoots down ideas, has

7:41

nothing positive to say. There's

7:43

a flavor of the pessimists called the victim,

7:45

which is you have to distinguish this, of course,

7:48

from someone who truly is a victim of mistreatment.

7:50

But this is someone who plays the victims, feels

7:52

like everyone is out to get them. There's been

7:54

no at all person who just thinks

7:57

that they have all the answers can

7:59

when the lives of meeting proclaim whatever

8:02

they want. There's the tormentor, someone

8:04

who you think will be a mentor, but they end

8:06

up actually being the opposite to undermine

8:08

you. It's familiar with that one. There's

8:11

the biased coworkers, someone who commits microaggressions

8:14

toward you or to others. And then

8:16

there's the political operator, the person

8:18

who's really focused on their

8:20

career, doesn't mind whose heads

8:22

to have to step on to get ahead. Now,

8:25

in some of these right, let's say

8:27

your insecure boss or something, they're

8:29

obviously ahead of you and everything.

8:32

That's an interesting one too. I mean, how do you deal with

8:34

positions of authority that might be hampering

8:37

you at work When the

8:39

difficult person is someone who has

8:41

control over how much money

8:43

you make, what opportunities you get,

8:46

right, it can be risky to try to address

8:48

the behavior, and you can also feel particularly

8:50

trapped. There's some interesting research

8:53

though that shows if you can shift

8:55

the balance of power a little bit, and that

8:57

obviously you're not necessarily going to become their

8:59

bass as right, That's not what they're referring to.

9:01

They're talking about gaining a specific

9:04

area of knowledge or skill

9:06

or developing a relationship inside the organization

9:09

that makes you more valuable to that

9:11

boss. You can then make clear to them

9:13

that they need you and therefore need to treat

9:15

you better. That's one skill or

9:18

one tactics that will that has

9:20

shown in research to work with someone who's

9:22

in power, you know, with the insecure

9:24

boss. Unfortunately, what a lot of the research

9:27

shows, and I don't love giving this advice

9:29

because it's the last thing anyone wants to do, but

9:32

is genuine flattery, right,

9:34

actually paying them well times sincere

9:36

compliments can help a suage

9:39

that ego, right, calm down their ego

9:41

a little bit and position you as an

9:43

ally. It's not, again, not my favorite

9:45

thing to do. I'm sure it's the last thing people

9:47

want to do when they're dealing with this insecure boss.

9:50

But it has been shown to work, and you've heard it all

9:52

over the place, right, sometimes you have to play the game

9:54

and that could be part of it, right, you know, giving

9:57

them a little bit of reassurance and then hopefully

9:59

they can lay off view. Okay, let's

10:01

focus a little bit more on the passive aggressive type.

10:03

As you mentioned, it's probably something that

10:05

most people will encounter. It's

10:08

tough to go through because you know, you

10:10

might be getting some of the work done, but they could

10:12

be talking behind your back and all

10:14

this other stuff. I mean that that's really could be a difficult

10:16

one. And one of the tips that you

10:18

have for that is, first off, don't

10:21

label them as passive aggressive. Don't kind of like

10:23

publicly identify them, because that can make

10:25

it go all ways of wrong. Um,

10:28

you know someone behaving passive aggressively

10:30

and you just say you're being passive aggressive.

10:33

It's just going to escalate things. Most of

10:35

us don't feel that we're

10:37

actually behaving passive aggressively. We might

10:39

think we're being petty, or maybe we're

10:41

thinking, no, I'm not being completely straightforward

10:43

or completely honest with them, but we would

10:46

never say, oh, I'm a passive aggressive person.

10:48

That very few people actually would say that.

10:50

It's like it's like telling an angry

10:52

person calm down. That's

10:55

just not gonna work. No one in the

10:57

history of arguments has ever calmed down by

10:59

being yelled at to gonda And in fact,

11:01

in my personal experience, what I see is telling

11:03

someone their passive aggressive actually makes

11:05

them more passive aggressive, because

11:08

you're escalating the fear. Right,

11:10

most of this behavior is based on fear

11:12

of failure or rejection, or

11:14

fear of conflict or not having

11:17

power, and by putting them

11:19

more on edge, you're intensifying

11:21

those fears, therefore intensifying

11:24

the likelihood that they will act out. And

11:26

instead you kind of suggest, you know, maybe we can call

11:29

attention to what's happening.

11:31

Um, you know, you had an example here. Hey, you said you

11:33

want to help on a project, Well, you're not helping out anymore.

11:36

Help identify what that issue could be and

11:38

then maybe you can work around it. That's

11:40

right, And I think being clear specifically

11:43

about about what behavior or actions

11:46

or lack of action are problematic

11:48

for you naming those now

11:51

you may not get a satisfying response

11:53

because the passive aggressive person is an expert

11:55

dodger. Right. So you might say you

11:57

didn't show up at the meeting even though you said

11:59

you would, and they say, oh, I couldn't

12:01

get to be there because of this, or it wasn't clear you actually

12:04

wanted me there. Right. But even by calling

12:06

out the behavior or action

12:09

or in action that you're you're dissatisfied

12:11

with, you put them on notice that you're

12:13

paying attention and they can't get away

12:15

with that. And it doesn't mean just because they don't

12:17

acknowledge it or apologize or

12:19

avow to be different, doesn't mean they

12:21

won't change. And I think that's something to keep

12:23

in mind. And it could be angry for a reason.

12:25

Right. So you also suggest, you know, find out what

12:28

it is that person cares about, you know, kind of

12:30

getting to the root of Hey, why are you being

12:32

like this? You know, there's this phrase called

12:34

hypothesis testing, right, is that you

12:37

might say, I noticed you didn't show but

12:39

the meeting, even though you really wanted to participate

12:41

in those projects. Could it be that, and

12:43

then you propose something right? Could it be that

12:45

you didn't get the invite? Could it be that you

12:48

weren't sure how you would contribute? And

12:50

just sort of put that out there and say

12:52

what do you think? Or just aft

12:54

and open ended questions. You know what's

12:56

going on. You might presume you

12:58

know why they're doing what's they're doing, but

13:01

you probably don't know. So that gives them room

13:03

to actually say, well, I

13:05

don't feel included. I feel like you only said

13:08

you wanted my help, but you don't really want myself,

13:10

right Like, it gives them a little space to actually

13:13

vent whatever fear or frustration

13:15

is contributing to their path of aggression.

13:18

Well, just a few tips now for handling passive

13:20

aggressive people. I'm sure there's much more in the book.

13:22

Amy Gallo, author of Getting Along,

13:25

How to Work with Anyone and contributing editor

13:27

at the Harvard Business Review, Thank you very much for joining

13:29

us, Thanks for having me after Earlier

13:36

this year, Amazon held an event where they debuted

13:38

some improvements in their text to speech technology

13:41

and had an AI mimic the voice

13:43

of someone's dead grandmother. What's amazing

13:45

is that it's becoming easier to create these artificially

13:48

generated voices to sound like anyone,

13:50

and in this case they only needed about sixty

13:53

seconds of audio rather than sixty

13:55

hours. For more on how it's just the

13:57

beginning for voice cloning, we'll speak to Adam

13:59

Blues, scene contributor to Fast

14:01

Company. Yeah, it's summoning there dead. So

14:04

the idea is that you're able to take

14:06

a very small sample

14:09

of a person's voice and

14:11

then create what they call

14:13

a generalizable synthetic

14:15

voice out of that, meaning you

14:17

can get that voice to read out any

14:20

text you present it with, which

14:23

is pretty amazing. So the demo showed

14:25

us the voice reading a few sentences from

14:27

a book, but in theory um this could

14:29

be applied to a much longer texts

14:31

as well, with a lot of implications

14:33

for commercial applications

14:35

down the road, I think. And the whole point

14:38

of this is that we've been doing this for some time.

14:40

Both Google and Amazon have had

14:43

you know, celebrity voices on their respective

14:45

smart speakers and all that, but those were done with

14:48

hours and hours of the

14:50

actor or celebrity whoever might be

14:52

recording audio. I think, um

14:55

there was a minimum of like sixty hours

14:57

of stuff that they used for like Shack and Melissa

15:00

McCarthy, Samuel Jackson. But now

15:02

the improvement is that they have this kind of generalized

15:05

model and now you just need about a minute

15:07

of audio from the voice that you

15:09

want to clone, so to speak. And to

15:11

be clear, this is an incredibly

15:14

complicated technology with

15:16

a lot of ways of slicing

15:18

and dicing it. So what Amatroon

15:20

demonstrated here is something that

15:23

they call a voice filter. So

15:25

what it's doing is taking a

15:27

synthetic voice that they've already developed,

15:29

sort of a generic voice, and

15:32

then running it through a filter. And

15:34

it's that filter that's been trained on a very

15:37

small sample of a real person's

15:39

voice. And what it really does is as it goes

15:41

through this filter, the words

15:43

are transformed into the voice

15:46

of this new person. And

15:48

what's interesting is in

15:51

this case it changes the sound

15:53

of the voice. So the tone

15:55

of the voice sounds like the person you know.

15:57

But this method doesn't capture there.

16:00

It's called their prosody that the unique way

16:02

that they phrase things. That's a

16:04

different level, which is something

16:06

that researchers are also really

16:08

working a lot on. At that point.

16:11

Once they get that and hit that really right, that's

16:13

going it's gonna start really getting creepy.

16:15

But you know, in some of the experts that you spoke to, you

16:17

know, they're talking about, you know, this evolving

16:20

technology, and you think about speech

16:22

recognition and how easy it is to talk to

16:24

our machines already, and what you really

16:26

want on the other side of that is for that

16:28

machine to talk to you back, and if it could be in

16:30

somebody's voice that you do recognize even

16:32

better. I mean, you know, who knows how people are going

16:34

to use it, if it will improve workflow or

16:37

they just want to reconnect, just hear the voice

16:39

of a past loved one, something like that. But this

16:41

is kind of where that industry seems to be heading.

16:43

Absolutely. So there's a huge demand

16:46

for custom voices

16:48

now across different

16:50

industries in healthcare

16:52

for example, in education,

16:55

and a tech where even

16:57

in sort of you know, the ordering

16:59

boy at the burger king drives

17:02

through. Everyone wants to have a unique

17:04

artificial voice that's talking to their customers.

17:07

So this is driving you know,

17:09

a lot of investment the speech

17:11

market, some project to reach what seven

17:14

billion, and

17:17

every big tech company

17:19

basically has a text to speech

17:22

division that is focused on

17:24

this. And that's because the interface

17:26

to technology, many people

17:28

believe and we see it happening, is moving

17:31

more and more towards things like

17:33

voice and away from interactions

17:35

that are just with our keyboard or the screen

17:38

of our phones. So as

17:40

we're interacting more and more with

17:42

our voices, right, we want to hear

17:45

better, more sort of personalized,

17:47

more human voices that are talking

17:50

back to us. You know, so that original robotic

17:53

theory isn't going to cut it anymore.

17:56

Yeah, I mean this is advancing really fast.

17:58

I mean I just got an email from somebody

18:00

within our company saying, hey, we can provide you lifelike

18:03

synthetic voices for radio production,

18:05

like stock voices for radio production,

18:07

which is so interesting. And you know, so we're talking

18:09

about Google, We're talking about Amazon's Are

18:11

they the top two players in this? What else

18:13

are we looking at? Amazon's

18:16

you know, working on Alexa and they

18:18

did this demo. Google bought

18:20

Deep Minds, you know, a few

18:22

several years ago, and that

18:25

I was an AI organization and through

18:27

deep Mind they developed really some of the core

18:30

neural computing technology that

18:32

underlies text to speech today.

18:34

So they've been a big player in developing

18:37

at tech. Microsoft through

18:39

Azure is heavily investing

18:41

in this, and they recently acquired

18:44

voice company called Nuanced by

18:46

Do in China has done a

18:48

lot of work on voice. So,

18:52

you know, at Apple obviously every every

18:54

everyone's pretty much everybody's into it. Yeah,

18:56

yeah, it's super interesting stuff. As this stuff

18:58

gets really a lot better, the technology

19:00

gets a lot better. I think Amazon said,

19:03

you know, there's no word yet when it's gonna

19:05

debut this for developers or even the public,

19:07

you know, this kind of advanced voice

19:09

cloning stuff, but it's coming, you know, so just keep

19:11

an eye out forward and maybe we'll be talking

19:13

to our machines a lot clearer in the very near

19:16

future. Adam Bluestein, contributor

19:18

at Fast Company, Thank you very much for joining

19:20

us. Thank you so much, appreciate

19:23

it. Don't

19:25

forget to join us on social media at

19:27

Daily Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily

19:29

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19:32

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19:40

Rameiras and this is the Daily Dive Weekend

19:43

edition.