With the payment I received yesterday, I’ve now passed $500 in total earnings from short stories. But I’ve also already earned 40% as much this year, with that one payment, as I earned in the whole of last year.
Getting up into the pro rates really makes a difference.
AI as a service. Of course, we should have known that one was coming.
Originally shared by Kevin Kelly
You can buy AI on the cloud. Google is selling image recognition for 60 cents per thousand. This is the first example of selling commodity AI on the grid.
Wrote about 6000 words of a short story on Friday, and finished off the last 700-odd this morning. It’s about a princess cursed to turn into a wolf at night, and features an older female protagonist.
Not sure where I’ll send it once it’s been revised. It’s maybe not literary enough for Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It could be another one for Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, perhaps.
Lots of interesting information in this survey. There are very few groups left in the US that contain a majority who are opposed to same-sex marriage; who are opposed to legal protections against discrimination for LGBT people; or who favour allowing a small business to refuse service to same-sex couples on the grounds of religious belief. Unsurprisingly, if you are old, white, male, conservative, Protestant, Republican and live in the Deep South, you’re more likely to hold these views, but even then it’s far from a lock.
(Side note: it always amuses me that US statistics lump Pacific Island people in with Asians. I live in Auckland, which has more Pacific Island citizens than any other city in the world, and the idea of considering them as the same demographic as Asian people is just bizarre.)
Originally shared by Will Shetterly
“majorities of black Protestants (54%), Hispanic Protestants (59%), Mormons (66%), white evangelical Protestants (67%), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (72%) oppose allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. Muslims are divided in their opinions over same-sex marriage (41% favor, 45% oppose).”
Microsoft are interviewing disabled people to figure out how to make products easier to use for everyone. “They are finding the expertise and ingenuity that arises naturally, when people are forced to live a life differently from most.”
I can attest to this. My wife can’t reach above her head or down to the ground, and I have a friend who only has the use of one hand. They’re very ingenious in finding alternative ways to do things, because the alternative is not to get those things done.
Originally shared by Brie “Beau” Sheldon
Really interesting! Via private share
Different writers punctuate very differently, within the general rules of punctuation. This post shows the differences in a few ways, the most attractive being the heatmaps at the bottom.
Originally shared by Walter Roberson
#dataporn
https://medium.com/@neuroecology/punctuation-in-novels-8f316d542ec4#.lzqis01y6
Found this Harvard seminar about the Internet of Things, and it turned out to be a bit different from what I expected – more opinionated, for a start. The lecturer is James Whittaker (medium.com/@docjamesw), and part of what he’s talking about – though he doesn’t use the specific terms – is the kind of situationally-aware computing that Google is working on right now.
One of his speculations gave me an idea for an SF story involving a woman whose living comes from being a taste-setter. A step beyond a blogger; companies give her clothes and accessories because they want other people to see her wearing them and buy them (which generates affiliate income for her), and venues like restaurants and nightclubs pay her to come and be seen in them. She’s an aspiration model. All of this is guided by subtle interactions with machines; a self-driving car turns up at her door and she gets into it and goes to where it takes her.
But what happens when the machines start guiding her away from a man she’s met because being seen with him would lower her aspiration value – and she wants to be with him?
https://itunes.apple.com/nz/course/seminars-internet-things-video/id1069443090?i=359205504&mt=2
While I’m between projects at the day job, I’m making use of the vast amount of free training that’s available on the web these days, in order to skill up on topics that will help me do a better job on the next project.
I found this one about collaborative product development on iTunes U.
The basic idea is that “lead” users build innovations they need or want based on existing products. These are things that the producing companies don’t know that people want; if told that they want them, they may even send the customers away, because they don’t know yet that there’s really a profitable demand, or they don’t even know how to produce the thing.
But talking to lead users helps to identify what are the unmet needs of your user community. They will also know who else (perhaps in a different field) is facing a similar problem and what they’re doing to solve it.
The smart thing for a company to do is partner with these users and make it easy for them to innovate and share their innovations – then support them in the core product. This creates great loyalty, to the point where the user community will actively protect the company’s interests, rather than trying to undermine them (as they’re likely to do if the company lawyers go all cease-and-desist).
A great solution is to provide a toolkit with which the users can design their own solutions to the problems they know they have (but the company doesn’t), and then assemble a product to their design and sell it to them.
The next step is to produce a flexible, customisable product that users can modify themselves “in the field” to fit their specialised needs. This captures a much larger market, including “markets of one,” and the producer doesn’t have to understand the individual problems in depth. They just have to know what is possible in terms of solutions, and make an abstracted toolkit that’s easy to use. This involves hiding everything the user doesn’t need to know in order to solve their problem, and leaving them only thinking about the things they know that the company doesn’t – thinking in terms they understand.
This toolkit should enable “trial and error” and feedback to help improve the solutions.
The professor uses engaging examples, ranging from skateboarding in empty swimming pools through kitesurfing, LEGO, computer chips, protein folding and Barbie Hairstyler. One of the projects he was involved in was as a consultant to 3M, and the products developed in consultation with “lead users” outperformed the ones developed in-house by a factor of 8.
What I’ve been trying to fit my brain around is how this could be used in writing and publishing. Obviously, smart publishing companies (if there were any) would be adopting some of the techniques that the indies have developed for marketing – romance writers are state of the art here, collaborating and sharing best practices, and they’re the big winners in the current publishing landscape. But could we also work with readers to discover the kinds of stories that they want that nobody is writing yet?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/how-to-develop-breakthrough/id674624937?mt=10
Walter Jon Williams demonstrates why people buy from Amazon more than they do from iBooks.
As worldbuilders, we need to bear in mind that the way that seems right and natural to us today is the current point in a long and continuing evolution, and not the way things have always been among all right-thinking people.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t think the way my marriage works is great: legal equality, mutual respect and affection, freely chosen by the partners. It’s just not how marriage tended to work historically. Even my wife’s grandparents married, as far as we can tell, largely for pragmatic reasons.
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-romance-wrecked-traditional-marriage/