A long article (I haven’t had time to read it all), but the main point is: women took all kinds of roles in historical times; they can do so in fiction, too.
Originally shared by Cora Foerstner
For those of you who write epic fantasy or are interested, I found this interesting article. It’s long but worthwhile reading.
These points are a good summary. I have a fuller explanation here:
csidemedia.com/wellpresentedms
Originally shared by Grammar Girl
15 Ways to Use a Comma http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/how-to-use-commas-a-summary
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/how-to-use-commas-a-summary
Seeing people we can identify with in media, especially when we’re young, helps us build our identities and make choices.
Via Josh Roby.
Originally shared by Laura Anne Gilman
I’m not crying, you’re… I’m totally wet-eyed.
The things we call “phones” are advanced sensing platforms with location awareness that we carry around with us in large numbers.
This – and other massive data, such as tweets or Google searches – can, in aggregate, reveal surprising things about the world, without building any new infrastructure, deploying any additional devices, or asking people to provide any extra data. We can just mine the data that people are already creating by going about their daily lives.
There are obvious privacy and data ownership issues from this.
(28 minutes.)
“High status groups, mainly white men, are given freedom to deviate from the status quo because their competence is assumed based on their membership in the high status group. In contrast, when women and nonwhite leaders advocate for other women and nonwhites, it highlights their low-status demographics, activating the stereotype of incompetence.”
– Harvard Business Review. Includes a real-world study and a confirmational experiment.
Originally shared by Walter Roberson
Good news, everybody!
Having exceeded at least some of the Millennium Development Goals, can we achieve the Global Development Goals by 2030? It’s not impossible.
And there are some good ones – ambitious and complicated. Economic growth by itself won’t get us there – it helped with the Millennium Development Goal to halve poverty, obviously, but it isn’t enough to achieve the GDGs. However, some countries (New Zealand is one) manage social progress that’s above what you’d predict just from the trendline based on GDP.
“Business as usual” won’t get us there. Every country in the world needs to prioritize social progress and equality if we’re going to make it. So that’s what we, as citizens, need to demand.
It might just be crazy enough to work…
A dolphin researcher, a musician, an Internet of Things visionary, and Vint Cerf walk into a bar give a TED talk on the idea of opening up the internet to nonhuman intelligent Earth species.
Very relevant to my interests (among my projects in development is a setting in which living things are all linked into the net with “soft radios”), and also reminiscent of David Brin and his Uplift universe.
Evgeny Morozov argues that we are now well equipped to use “big data” and technology to manage the effects of the problems that we have, as they manifest in the lives of people who are embedded in sociopolitical systems – but, in doing so, to ignore the causes of those problems in the way the systems are set up. For example, “quantified self” apps prompt us about exercise and nutrition, as if our weight is entirely our responsibility, but don’t address the issues of towns designed only for cars, or the pervasiveness and cultural power of junk food.
Technology companies and governments, he says, try to gamify behaviours that in previous eras would have been driven by laws or by a belief in particular values instead. Here I think he’s being naive; usually, people’s behaviour was and is not driven by abstract values as much as by social expectations, and I don’t see being caught up in a mesh of powerful social expectations as necessarily a good thing. I take his point, though, that this is an individualist, market-oriented model of behaviour modification which doesn’t emphasize taking responsibility for a shared social situation. (He speculates that if the reward was removed, the behaviour might also cease, but that’s not what behaviourist psychology has found.)
He has a rant against Google Now and how it removes causality and narrativity from life (by presenting us with a series of reminders of what we are doing next, or could do next) – I didn’t quite agree with that bit, since to me a system like Google Now seems to be drawing out connections rather than suppressing them. It did give me a story idea, though: a character who doesn’t remember who she is, but is coached through her day by a more advanced version of Google Now, which tells her where to go and when, shows her the speech she is to give, feeds her the names of people who talk to her afterwards, and so forth. She doesn’t need to know anything about her life, because her virtual assistant knows everything about it.
He envisions a future, based on the arguments of some current startups, where we sell the data about our daily lives – and therefore start to try to “optimize” the value of our life data in the market. I don’t know that anonymised data (which is what is usually talked about in this context) would really be open to such manipulation, though.
He’s also concerned that the introduction of sensors and connectivity into every domain heralds the introduction of the logic of the market into those same domains, which previously operated by a different set of values. This ignores the many “open data” initiatives being run by cities, governments and citizens worldwide.
In the second half, another speaker (unfortunately not clearly identified other than as “an AI researcher”) joins him to discuss the issues. He draws attention to what Morozov hasn’t talked about, and how framing the problems differently makes them at least partially soluble.
Questions follow. They’re good questions; Morozov uses them as a jumping-off point to circle round to reiterating his points. He does, at one point, admit that “big data” can be joined to a different kind of political project (as in South America); it’s not so much technology itself as neoliberal capitalism that he has a problem with.
Nevertheless, Morozov is (to oversimplify) a technopessimist, which is a viewpoint I don’t share. It’s important to listen to people who have different viewpoints, to provoke ourselves to thought and check our own tendency to ignore the other side. He isn’t offering much in the way of solutions, however, despite several times speaking as if he’s about to do so.
(1 hour 53 minutes.)
One of the benefits of writing short stories is that I get to deal with a lot of different editors. That can also be a problem, if they enter the relationship with too much ego. Or if you do.
Originally shared by David Farland
An editor can be your best friend or your worst enemy. In truth, I don’t think that you want him or her to be either.
An amazing interview with an angry, generous old artist.
Originally shared by Daniel Swensen
“The fight in order to make a real art movie is enormous because everything is against that. It is an awakening of consciousness and all of the industry is against the awakening of consciousness.”
http://www.theawl.com/2016/03/an-eagle-fighting-with-flies-an-interview-with-alejandro-jodorowsky