If I had stayed in publishing instead of moving to tech writing and thence into IT, I would have hit the same problem this woman had: it’s hard to be an acquisitions editor when your taste doesn’t match the market’s.
More power to those who can “write to market,” but some of us can’t.
Originally shared by Karen Conlin
Peternelle is one of my Tweeps. Her first novel, The Beast Is an Animal, just hit the shelves. Part of the process was keeping a prologue she added at what she thought was the end of the process, and ditching the other 250 pages to start over.
“The voice that I found in that prologue was my voice.”
The decision to give this five stars was easy; it’s wonderfully executed, with clean copy editing and a plot that escalates stakes in textbook fashion.
Quartz has a great piece on 3D printing, wearables and prosthetics
…Stories of lives devastated by conflict or disease are all too common across low-income countries. Lack of an arm or leg can be tough anywhere, but for people in poorer parts of the planet, with so much less support and more rickety infrastructure, it is especially challenging. Some are victims of conflict, others were born with congenital conditions. Many more are injured on roads, the casualty toll soaring in low-income nations even as it plummets in wealthier ones. Every minute, 20 people are seriously injured worldwide in road crashes. In Kenya, half the patients on surgical wards have road injuries.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates there are about 30 million people like Nhial and Lam who require prosthetic limbs, braces or other mobility devices. These can be simple to make and inexpensive. As one veteran prosthetist told me, his specialism is among the most instantly gratifying areas of medicine. “A patient comes in on Monday on crutches that leave them unable to carry anything. By Wednesday they are walking on a new leg and on Friday they leave with their life transformed.”
Yet more than eight in ten of those people needing mobility devices do not have them. They take a lot of work and expertise to produce and fit, and the WHO says there is a shortage of 40,000 trained prosthetists in poorer countries. There is also the time and cost to patients, who may have to travel long distances for treatment that can take five days—to assess need, produce a prosthesis and fit it to the residual limb. The result is that unglamorous items such as braces and artificial limbs are among the most-needed devices to assist lives. Yet, as in so many other areas, technology may be hurtling to the rescue, this time in the shape of 3D printing.
This is a very well-distilled explanation of an important point: the culture of a company (or of a group of friends, or of a city, or of a country) isn’t captured by asking people what the culture is, but by asking “what do you need to know to get ahead.”
That’s not meant as a motivational statement: it’s meant as a tool for understanding your group. The things which actually get someone ahead or hold them back, things which can be very ugly to look at sometimes, are the things which the society rewards and punishes. And as anyone who’s ever run a team knows, you get what you incentivize; your incentives are your culture, and when they don’t align with your high-flown statements, that just means that your statements are wrong.
The exercise the author presents at the end is quite a valuable one.
“It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)…
“On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”…
“Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles…
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous…
“Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs…
“One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information…
“We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality….”
I am not naive enough to believe that only one side is doing this. Knowledge is power, and there are a lot of people with money who crave power. The responsibility is on us to be awake, to understand what is happening, and ask ourselves if we are as free as we think we are. I have seen so many people recently who have contradicted things they said even just a year ago–who they support and why, what causes are important to them. I was already worried/fascinated about the change, but now I wonder even more: who is driving this narrative. Can you honestly look at who you are right now, hold yourself up the mirror of your core values (whatever they may be), and ask yourself if you are acting or supporting those who act in a way that support those core values? If not, why not? If so, how so? And, in the end it always comes back to this: follow the money. The money trail always stinks.
If real, basically makes stealth aircraft no longer stealth.
Originally shared by brian wang
More technical details about China’s Quantum Radar claims and quantum radar lab work
In September 2016, there were claims from China that they had developed quantum radar. There has been recent articles discussing China’s quantum radar The quantum radar system was developed by the Intelligent Perception Technology Laboratory of the 14th Ins…
