Book

• She questions whether women like herself – that is, the well-educated, sexually liberated beneficiaries of second-wave feminism – are really better off than their 1940s counterparts.
• But it isn’t quite the avant-garde art crowd looking for anonymous vaginas to cast in their latest 16mm masterpieces either.

• Reconstructed from the travel diary the author kept at the time, the adventure is everything you could possibly hope for in a road trip – provided you (or your daughter) aren’t the one taking it.
• Datsun Angel proves the old adage about time and tragedy making for champagne comedy.
• It self-consciously situates itself as a cross between the substance-induced exuberance of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and the provincially impassioned politics of Australian novelist Xavier Herbert.

• For all her progressivism, there is a note of nostalgia ringing through Broinowski’s recollections.
• Datsun Angel harks back to a looser – dare I say, more enjoyable – university experience.
• The narrative promises, against well-intentioned assurances to the contrary, that what doesn’t kill you will, at the very least, make for a good story later on.
• Broinowski goes part way towards acknowledging as much when she ends her postscript with: “If you’re male and reading this, kudos.

Detachment

• Let me borrow one instead from the middle-aged Elmore Leonard fan whom Gordon encounters in the State Library Victoria early in the book: “dickhead”.
• Yes, that about captures it: the protagonist of Excitable Boy is an unequivocal, grade-A dickhead.
• Fortunately for Gordon (and dickheads more generally), the affliction may be chronic, but it need not be terminal.
• This denotes an overriding structure or cohesion that I felt somewhat lacking from the work as a whole.

• Detachment characterises much of Gordon’s storytelling as he kicks his younger self around the back alleys of Melbourne like a half-squashed can of Monster Energy Drink.
• To be honest, I still haven’t made my mind up if Gordon’s aversion to Aristotelian catharsis is one of the book’s virtues or vices.
• Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you.
• Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you.
• It is often difficult to gauge what overall purpose the details are serving in these essays, beyond fidelity to memory.

Luke Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Abstract
  We evaluate the effects of contagion and common exposure on banks? capital through
  a regression design inspired by the structural VAR literature and derived from the balance
  sheet identity.
• Contagion can occur through direct exposures, fire sales, and market-based
  sentiment, while common exposures result from portfolio overlaps.
• First, we document that contagion varies in time, with the highest levels
  around the Great Financial Crisis and lowest levels during the pandemic.
• Our new framework complements
  traditional stress-tests focused on single institutions by providing a holistic view of systemic risk.
• While existing literature presents various contagion narratives, empirical findings on
  distress propagation - a precursor to defaults - remain scarce.
• We decompose systemic risk into three elements: contagion, common exposures, and idiosyncratic risk, all derived from banks? balance sheet identities.
• The contagion factor encompasses both sentiment- and contractual-based elements, common exposures consider systemic
  aspects, while idiosyncratic risk encapsulates unique bank-specific risk sources.
• Our empirical analysis of the Canadian banking system reveals the dynamic nature of contagion, with elevated levels observed during the Global Financial Crisis.
• In conclusion, our model offers a comprehensive lens for policy intervention analysis and
  scenario evaluations on contagion and systemic risk in banking.
• This
  notion of systemic risk implies two key components: first, systematic risks (e.g., risks related
  to common exposures) and second, contagion (i.e., an initially idiosyncratic problem becoming
  more widespread throughout the financial system) (see Caruana, 2010).
• In this paper, we decompose systemic risk into three components: contagion, common exposures, and idiosyncratic risk.
• First, we include contagion in three forms: sentiment-based contagion, contractual-based
  contagion, and price-mediated contagion.
• In this context,
  portfolio overlaps create common exposures, implying that bigger overlaps make systematic
  shocks more systemic.
• With the COVID-19 pandemic starting
  in 2020, contagion drops to all time lows, potentially related to strong fiscal and monetary
  supports.
• That is, our
  structural model provides a framework for analyzing the impact of policy interventions and
  scenarios on different levels of contagion and systemic risk in the banking system.
• This provides a complementary approach to
  seminal papers that took a structural approach to contagion, such as DebtRank Battiston et al.
• More generally, the literature on networks and systemic risk started with Allen and Gale
  (2001) and Eisenberg and Noe (2001).
• The matrix is structured as follows:
  1

  In our model, we do not distinguish between interbank liabilities and other types of liabilities.

• In other words, we can and aim to estimate different degrees
  of contagion per asset class, i.e., potentially distinct parameters ?Ga .
• For that, we build three major
  metrics to check: average contagion, average common exposure, and average idiosyncratic risk.
• N i j

  et ,
  Further, we define the (N ?K) common exposure matrix as Commt = [A

  (20)

  et ]diag (?C
  ?L

  such that average common exposure reads,
  average common exposure =

  1 XX
  Commik,t .

• N i j

  (22)

  20

  ? c ),

  The three metrics?average contagion, average common exposure, and average idiosyncratic risk?provide a comprehensive framework for understanding banking dynamics.

• Figure 4 depicts the average level of risks per systemic risk channel: contagion risk, common exposure, and idiosyncratic risk.
• Figure 4: Average levels of contagion (Equation (20)), common exposure (Equation (21)), and idiosyncratic risk
  (Equation (22)).
• The market-based contagion is the contagion due to
  investors? sentiment, and the network is an estimate FEVD on volatility data.
• For most of
  the sample, we find that contagion had a bigger impact on the variance than common exposures.

• “It could be the death of the museum,” says renowned mammalogist Tim Flannery, a former director of the museum.
• “To say research isn’t important to what a museum does – it’s sending shock waves across the world,” she says.

What’s the plan?

• According to the museum’s website, this skeleton crew will focus on “converting new discoveries and research into the visitor experience”.
• Others have tackled global questions such as the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, how eyes evolved in Cambrian fossils, and Antarctic biodiversity.

What’s so special about a museum?

• Their remits are different, says University of Adelaide botanist Andy Lowe, who was the museum’s acting director in 2013 and 2014.
• Unlike universities, he says, the museum was “established by government, to carry out science for the development of the state”.

• “They’re crucial for what goes on above; you need experts not second-hand translators,” says University of Adelaide geologist Alan Collins.
• He wonders what will happen the next time a youngster comes into the museum asking to identify a rock.
• The museum’s Phillip Jones now uses this collection in his research, delivering more than 30 exhibitions, books and academic papers.

Continuity and community

• Without attentive curation and the life blood of research, the collections are doomed to “wither and die”, says Flannery.
• That raises the issue of continuity.
• In Flannery’s words, the job of a museum curator:
  is like being a high priest in a temple.

• Over Jones’ four decades at the museum, his relationships with Indigenous elders have also been critical to returning sacred objects to their traditional owners.
• Besides the priestly “chain of care”, there’s something else at risk in the museum netherworld: a uniquely productive ecosystem feeding on the collections.
• Here you’ll find PhD students mingling with retired academics; curators mingling with scientists; museum folk with university folk.
• In the year ending 2023 for instance, joint museum and university grants amounted to A$3.7 million.

DNA and biodiversity

• The museum has also declared it will no longer support a DNA sequencing lab it funds jointly with the University of Adelaide.
• “No other institute in South Australia does this type of biodiversity research,” says Andrew Austin, chair of Taxonomy Australia and emeritus professor at the University of Adelaide.
• “It’s the job of the museum.” The cuts come while the SA government plans new laws to protect biodiversity.

Elizabeth Finkel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Approaches to Address AI-enabled Voice Cloning

• Today, the FTC announced four winners of the Voice Cloning Challenge, which was launched to address the present and emerging harms of artificial intelligence, or “AI”-enabled voice cloning technologies.
• The FTC received submissions from a wide range of individuals, teams, and organizations.

Leveraging solutions to provide upstream prevention or authentication

• Prevention or authentication refers to techniques that limit the application and misuse of voice cloning software by unauthorized users.
• One commonly discussed approach for prevention and authentication is watermarking, which often refers to a “broad array of techniques” for embedding an identifying mark into a piece of media to track its origin to help prevent the misuse of cloned audio clips.
• [2] Invisible or visible watermarks can be altered or removed, potentially rendering them unhelpful for differentiating between real and synthetic content.

Applying solutions to detect solutions in real-time

Real-time detection or monitoring includes methods to detect cloned voices or the use of voice cloning technology at the time during which a specific event occurs. Studies reveal a spectrum of efficacy for voice cloning detection solutions.[5] The effectiveness of such solutions is especially important when considering the types of AI-enabled voice cloning scams – such as fraudulent extortion scams – that the technology can enable.

Using solutions to evaluate existing content

• The post-use evaluation of existing content includes methods to check if already-created audio clips such as voice mail messages and audio direct messages contain cloned voices.
• One potential way to evaluate existing audio clips is to develop algorithms that detect inconsistencies in voice cloned clips.

Looking forward: Preventing and deterring AI-enabled voice cloning scams and fraud

• While there are many exciting ideas with great potential, there’s still no silver bullet to prevent the harms posed by voice cloning.
• Further, voice service providers – telephone and VoIP companies – need to continue making progress against illegal calls.
• In addition, the Commission has recently enacted a new Impersonation Rule, which will give the agency additional tools to deter and halt deceptive voice cloning practices.
• There is no AI exemption from the laws on the books and the FTC remains committed to protecting consumers from the misuse of “AI”-enabled voice cloning technologies.

[2]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.01953.pdf
[3]https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/09/1077516/watermarking-ai-trus...
[4]https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/voice_cloning_financial_sca...
[5]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.07683.pdf; https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.13770.pdf
[6]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.14970.pdf
[7]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.18085v1.pdf
[8] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.07683.pdf; https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.18085v1.pdf