#FICTION (bold highlighted underlined)

[heartbreak-sandwich]

People are always like "omg I can't believe they're a Billy Hargrove apologist," and no. He was a total cunt and deserves a little karma. But anyway, I'm going to fix him in the next 10,000 words, so just hold on a sec.

[mel-the-pirate-prompt-reblog]

Not to bring up "old" stuff, such as the OTW May Signal bit that was removed after some backlash, I wanted to see it. I threw the OTW into the Wayback Machine, went back to May 9th, and was able to see just what they pulled from the Signal after the community backlash to see what they regret adding to this month's Signal.

So I copy-pasted it, since I bet others who didn't read it wanted/want to, too. You can also read it directly from the OTW May Signal on the Wayback Machine here.

Quotes and etc are under the cut. All blue text is a link.

This is what they cut out of May 2023's Signal:

For Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, the OTW’s Legal Chair, Betsy Rosenblatt, was interviewed about AI legal issues*. Betsy pointed out that having AIs learn from works such as fanfiction meant that they weren’t only using old works from the public domain to learn about the world. “That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.” What’s more…

"I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….

Will fans will take up this challenge?"

Thought it might be worth noting that the OTW did add this about AI and Data Scraping on the Archive on May 13th.

*The interview is still up, but just in case, I'll be pulling the link from the Wayback Machine instead of the actual link.

I will be highlighting a few important points (imo) in case people don't want to read the entire interview. For longer highlights, I will be adding bold/italics/underline to help people keep from jumping around the text and read out of order (I know I do, and that tends to help me).

Because I'm having Thoughts about AI scraping, I might make a Tumblr-esque essay and put my English major to use looking into some of this interview (If I ever do, I might add a link to this post). Highlighting things and reading through this interview makes me want to pull my stuff from AO3, and I've only just started posting there a year ago.

Highlighting phrases and sentences does not mean I agree with them. It means I think they are important to see and consider.

Here's the interview that Signal links to:

...Betsy Rosenblatt is the legal chair for the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving fan works.... The interview with Betsy follows.

Katherine: When you think about AI technology, fan works, and copyright, what excites you? And, what keeps you up at night?

Betsy: One of the things that excites me—which is probably a bit off to the side of what most people are talking about with AI and copyright—is that AIs are reading fan fiction now. For a long time, machine learning relied almost exclusively on data sources that were known to be in the copyright public domain, such as works published prior to 1927 and public records. The result of that was that machines were often learning archaic ideas—learning to associate certain professions with certain races and genders, for example. Now, machine learning is turning to broader sources from across the internet, including fan works. That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.

I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….

As for what keeps me up at night, I remain mostly optimistic. I think it would be a very sad turn of events if some of the newly begun litigation about data crawling and scraping ended up preventing machines from building contemporary, inclusive, broad-based data pools to draw on. I think it would be very sad if people turned to AI-created works instead of finding, exploring, and making fan works of their own. But I don’t think either of those things is very likely to happen. Fans make fan works because they love doing it. They feel compelled to tell the stories they imagine, and they want to share those with communities of other fans. They use fan work creation to build skills and find their own voices. I don’t think that the emergence of new technologies will stop them from doing that.

Katherine: Artists have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that AI companies violate copyright law when they create databases of copyrighted images to “train” their AI image products. At least one of the companies in the suit, Stability AI, says that this is a fair use: “Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.” What questions would you like to see a court ask when analyzing whether ingesting copyrighted works to create AI-training databases is a fair use?

Betsy: I tend to agree with Stability AI’s statement. I would like to see courts consider the “training” process separately from the process of generating works. It is, of course, possible that a machine could generate an infringing work. But the process of training that machine involves something very different—turning expressive works into data and creating relationships based on that data collection. We call it machine “learning” for a reason. A well-trained machine won’t generate an infringing work, but it needs as large a pool of data to work from as possible to do that. The mere fact that an AI can create something infringing doesn’t determine whether the gathering of information is infringement. Consider the classic Sony v. Betamax case: The VCR can be used to infringe, but it has noninfringing (fair) uses, and therefore the VCR does not inherently infringe. I recognize that the analogy isn’t perfect, but I find it persuasive. In general, courts have found that “interim” copying isn’t infringement—that is, copying isn’t infringement when it occurs inside a machine and does not, itself, make copyrighted works perceptible to people—and I think courts should continue to follow that logic.

Katherine: Will the Supreme Court’s 2021 Google v. Oracle decision have any bearing on this case?

Betsy: I hope so. That case highlighted that we shouldn’t be locked into one definition of “transformative” work, and that copying for the purpose of engaging in a different technological use can be transformative copying.

Katherine: What would you say to online creators who might be discouraged by AI technology?

Betsy: You will always make your work better than an AI can. What matters about your work is that it comes from you. That makes your work irreplaceable, and it will always remain so.

[losthomunculus]

Fanfic Formatting on Ao3 For Beginners (and People Looking to Improve)

It's not a rare occurrence to see a story with a great concept and story, but just very very incorrect formatting. Depending on the reader and the exact mistakes being made, this can make or break the readability of your works.

So today I'm going to walk you through what you need to know to make your works understandable for English readers (because this tutorial is in English and different languages have different formatting rules)!

Let's begin under the cut!

Using the right format settings

[ID: Screenshot of Archive of Our Own text input screen for uploading or writing content with the "Rich Text" option selected and underlined.]

Ao3 has two format settings, HTML and Rich Text. HTML will be chosen automatically, but assuming that you are a beginner at formatting and do not know HTML coding, you should select the Rich Text (RTF) option.

RTF was created by Microsoft, but it's not exactly universal. There are slight variations in it's code that might need some corrections if you are copy and pasting from a document, but for the most part it's not too bad.

What does RTF do?

RTF will automatically preserve links, images, italics, bold, underline, strikethrough, bullet points, and text alignment if pasted from a compatible document. If you type directly into the work text box, then it shouldn't be a concern.

Additionally I think the most useful thing it does is automatically increase the line spacing when starting a new paragraph. This is called a paragraph break.

[ID: Screenshot of two paragraphs that have white space between them that indicates they are separate.]

The image above is automatic RTF formatting on Ao3 when pasted into the Work Text box.

[ID: Screenshot of two paragraphs that lack a relatively increased space between them.]

Compare that to my writing in google docs, which doesn't increase the large space between paragraphs. Instead it gives you a line break.

To summarize: Paragaph Break - the big space. Line Break - no big space.

The paragraph break feature is important for readers that have trouble keeping their place in text or processing condensed information. It is especially vital if you're not indenting each paragraph, as the distinction becomes lost.

Downside of RTF

It doesn't preserve or support paragraph indents made with the tab button. Visually, it's not too big of a deal with the additional line spacing, but it might bother some people. Luckily it can be amended by putting 3-4 spaces at the beginning of each paragraph, making a sort of psuedo-indent.

You do not need to indent when you use a paragraph break, but you must indent if you are using line breaks.

There might be additional issues with incompatibility depending on what you're pasting from (if you are pasting from another document). I use Google Docs, and as of now the text alignment and indents are the only things I have lost in translation (in terms of basic formatting). I have not yet seen if Ao3 supports highlights and text color, save for when using a work skin.

Basic Formatting Rules

The most frequent mistakes I see in formatting revolve around paragraph breaks and dialogue. Here are some outlines of the rules.

How to Format Dialogue

When to Start a New Paragraph in Fiction

If you want additional information about formatting, Purdue Online Writing Lab has articles on like, EVERYTHING. I mostly use it for academic writing but it does have creative writing resources as well. If you click around there's details about punctuation, grammar, story structure and aspects, etc etc. All that good stuff.

It's honestly a little bit confusing to navigate if you don't know exactly what you're looking for so here's the Site Map! If you're still having trouble, hit control + F and type the keyword you're looking for to search the page for it :^)

Image Descriptions (IDs)

If you have images in your fic, it’s ideal if you can explain what's going on for people who are visually impaired. A great guide for that can be found here.

Image descriptions can be added under text or included in the code of the image. In the “Misc” section of this guide I linked an HTML code helper that can help you add ID’s and insert images in general.

Fanfic Specific Formatting Gripes

Okay, this last section is more informal. It's to address common things I see in fanfiction that don't have actual rules (that I know of) but are often executed in a way that is confusing.

Use of Multiple Languages

Unless you are writing specifically for a multilingual audience (which you should note in the tags or summary if you are), you shouldn't be putting untranslated text in the middle of your work. Unless none of the characters are supposed to know what it means, you need to have a translation right next to it.

It's okay to have loan words that don't have English equivalents in your story, as long as readers can figure out what it means by the surrounding text.

When the reader needs to scroll all the way down to the author's note in the middle of a conversation to figure out what someone is saying, it breaks the flow of the story and makes it unnecessarily confusing. You can amend this by putting a translation in brackets next to the dialogue.

UPDATE: There’s also multiple work skins that can be used to provide translation easily. Before I link them let me introduce some pros and cons to using them.

PROS: looks very nice I suppose

CONS: incompatible with phones and tablets (or anything without a cursor that can hover), likely incompatible with screen readers, may be confusing to code

Because they’re only compatible with laptops and most likely visually, this method is probably ideal for things that wouldn’t be a big deal to gloss over (like a reminder of the meaning of a fantasy or sci-fi term like a “varga” (~1 hour).

Now there’s 2 methods, I don’t know what they’re actually called but I call them “floating boxes” and “hover text”. Floating boxes will create a small box that shows the note when you hover over text, and hover text will change when a cursor hovers over it. Here’s some images to give you an idea what you might prefer, links to tutorials in the captions.

Floating boxes (image from tutorial by ozhawkauthor):

[ID: previously described floating box text]

Hover text (screenshot from tutorial by La_Temperanza):

[ID: previously described hover text, first image showing the text underlined in it’s original form, second showing the underline gone as it reveals the hidden message].

For My Chat Fic Writers

You are actively running off readers with memory issues by using nicknames in your fics that can't automatically be linked to the character. No, putting a guide in the authors note does not fix that, maybe unless you have a cast of under 5 people.

So here is my advice: either use nicknames that can be interpreted easily by someone who only knows the character's name, or include their name in the nickname.

Pulling from real life example, in discord servers I always include my name after my display name. This way I can still use jokes or change my display to the character I'm roleplaying, but people don't have to go back to the introductions to find out who I am. Here's some examples of how I write that:

"retired theatre kid | den"

"Izuru Kamukura [emoji] den"

"den || off brand fischl"

"Monomi (den)"

On another note, please start tagging your Chat Fics as "Chat Fic" or "Chatfic" or something! Ao3 has great tag filtering, but it can't be used unless you are tagging your fics! Chatfics tend to be tag heavy because they often have large ensemble casts, but this is really frustrating to readers who are trying to browse for different kind of fics. Especially for people who can't read chat fics because they can't tell what's going on.

Corrupted Text and Special Fonts

[ID: Screenshot of stylized font that obscures the text saying "you do not have permission to view this file name" with random symbols and lines.]

[ID: Screenshot of stylized text that says "Loading..." and "Audio playback failed" in a retro digital font.]

This stuff. I am admittedly guilty of using this too, as this screenshot is from my own writing.

The problem with "corrupted text" is that unless whatever you are writing is meant to be illegible, people are going to miss whatever is there. It doesn't entirely obscure what is being written, but for many people it's hard to read, and for some, impossible.

"Special fonts" have a similar problem with readability. They're not actual fonts, they're Unicode characters. This article here explains exactly how this is a problem for screen readers and accessibility.

You can still use them, but like with using multiple languages you should either specify that the story is meant to be a visual experience, or you should provide a translation. In this case that would be something akin to an image description, which you can learn how to write- huh oh wait! That's a previous section. And also I did it under the images in this post. BUT please note in the case of the IDs for this post, I don't specify what is being said in the screenshots because it is irrelevant to the context. That will change in the context of your fic.

Misc

If you need to use HTML but don’t know HTML (like for the author’s notes that lack a Rich Text option) I personally use this online HTML editor. You type in RTF on the left and it comes out in html on the right.

[ID: Rich Text input into the left being translated into HTML on the right side of the screen]

It’s pretty easy to use, the one thing to watch out for is after pasting in text I suggest highlighting all the HTML and hitting “clean” before you continue just to get rid of unnecessary formatting.

[debbiewilder]

i might be reading wayyy too much into this but yk that one scene in 3x09 when ruth is auditioning for sam & justine and she says the lines "i got pregnant.. and then i got divorced" and she kinda visibly falters a bit.. like she was thinking abt debbie right? and just last ep while she was w/ sheila reading her lines it just SCREAMED debbie to me. whats w/ the universe trying to make ruth have her gay epiphany

Nah dude you’re not reading too much into it at all. At least based on my understanding of the show. 

Gonna talk broadly about how fiction functions within GLOW for a bit and say that GLOW often has characters use fiction to deal with and understand their own reality. I mean the show is primarily about Ruth and Debbie using the fiction of wrestling as a catharsis to rebuild their relationship. Fiction allows them to rebuild trust, to release that hate and resentment in a safe way. 

Fiction shows up all the time for the characters and in moments like totally fictional audition scenes in 1x01 and 3x09, the writers could choose ANY words in the world when they include totally made up stories within the fictional world. Why those specific ones? In that scene w Sheila in 3x08, why did the writers choose that scene out of any in the world? Those words are there for a reason. 

To really underline bold highlight this, our introduction to the show, the first lines of the series are a random audition scene, it’s not real Ruth we meet first, but acting!Ruth, and we don’t even realize this at first (which is the point, that line between fiction and reality is muddy just like it is in wrestling…Ruth and Debbie trust each other in wrestling, so they learn to in reality etc), and the specific line that opens the series actually say a lot about the series as a whole. “In this world there are good guys and there are bad guys. And we are the good guys. You see that name on my door? It’s my father’s name, son of a bitch. But this isn’t about him. This is about justice. This is about holding on to what’s ours. This is about my company and my name. And I will not be bullied into submission.” First of all, her saying she won’t be bullied into submission turns into a nice contrast for Ruth at the end of the ep (who is bullied into submission by Debbie = last shot in episode vs looking all empowered saying she won’t be bullied into submission in very first shot). The good guys and bad guys thing says a lot about GLOW as a whole, about Ruth as someone who wants to be seen as a good guy and who grows to accept darker parts of herself by playing Zoya, good guys and bad guys deals directly with those roles they have in wrestling, the “holding onto what’s ours” thing plays into what GLOW eventually means for Ruth and especially since she says this is the sort of role she wants we understand her better by it, etc…I mean there’s even more to that line probably but you get the point, which is fiction is so key to understanding the reality of the characters for GLOW that they start the series with it.

Plus, there’s this idea they come back to about roles and costumes, like in 1x04 with Sheila “It’s not a costume, it’s me.” But she lets go of that she-wolf to become more of herself and there’s this thing where characters believe in stories about their lives but they’re not necessarily true (like Debbie trying to tell a story that she’s happy with Mark and loved giving up working when she def hated it, Ruth believing she needs to be a real actress while destructing any real acting opportunity etc) and have to contend with that…anyway.

Other examples of fiction: In 1x09, Ruth has the attention of this room (including Debbie), and she uses fiction to carefully broach and apologize for her own fucked up behavior, to try and understand it, so she uses the fiction of drug addict-wrestler to help not only save GLOW but also understand herself since it’s a lot to own up to and apologize. Fiction provides the safety to tell/deal with truths she can’t in real life.

In 3x05, Debbie isn’t just asking Ruth to play Liberty Belle but also to step into her “costume” and understand her and connect further. When Debbie talks about loving wrestling in 1x09, it’s clear that this form of fiction allows her to form a new, more empowered relationship with her own body that reality never allowed her. When Debbie says in 2x02 that Liberty Belle already beat Zoya and they have no reason to fight any more, Ruth as Zoya counters in 2x04 by taking Liberty Belle’s kid and saying “We have unfinished business.” She’s not giving up on them in fiction which is her way of fighting for Ruth and Debbie in reality. You see a totally zoned out Debbie in 1x02 consuming Paradise Cove, watching a blonde in a wheelchair just like she says she was a blonde in a wheelchair in 1x01 on the show…the replaceability Debbie felt about her own body is found everywhere, even in the fiction she chose to consume / live vicariously through..not exactly empowering. The fictional escapism of Paradise Cove in 1x02 turns to fictional escapism of GLOW as Sam suggests what GLOW could provide for Debbie and sells a proxy Debbie (Melrose) humiliating Ruth. This fiction slowly allows her to find her own story and catharsis in fiction as 1x02 progresses, as the series progresses, and her own power as she actually starts to use her body in later eps. Fiction isn’t just a random thing in GLOW, it totally defines the story. 

So, now that I’ve pointed to some of the ways that fiction functions within GLOW, I’d say it’s about time we look at these specific scenes you asked about. I’d say again the line in 3x09 audition goes back to Ruth and Debbie stepping into each other’s skins more in season 3 especially in 3x05, understanding each other in this really deep way. I think that line totally relates to Debbie, to stepping inside her point of view for a second. She does falter, and I could even see her using Debbie’s point of view as a weird form of substitution even though it wasn’t Ruth’s divorce or whatever. Because they’re that entwined. Just like I think the bit before about finding the one thing that keeps driving you no matter what relates to Ruth too as she starts to question the role acting has in her life.

Okay, and the 3x08 scene with Sheila totally relates to Ruth and Debbie. Of course Ruth wants to read that scene with Debbie I mean….that scene screams a lot for them and again relates to stepping into each other’s skin. “Besides, I always wondered what it would be like to be you.” I mean….plus the line about blondes being after Ruth. And a certain blonde certainly is. And they stop the scene right at the blonde line and draw attention to it, like come on. She’s so uncomfortable…and yet says she wants to perform the scene with Debbie later soo #gayepiphany

Yeah so basically, the fiction within the fiction functions in a ton of ways, like helping Ruth and Debbie reach a greater understanding of each other (it’s deeper than understanding though….it’s literally stepping into each other’s skin) and just fiction functions in so many cool ways in the series to help characters heal and grow and escape and express things they can’t in reality. I think it’s not reading too much into it to look at that but rather pretty vital to understanding the show as a whole. 

[whitewolfofwinterfell]

So this is a random question... Buy you don’t happen to know any good writing softwares/programs? I recently got a new laptop and I want a decent program to write in (not necessary super advanced or anything, but for writing fiction works and simple stuff), since I know you like to write, I thought I’d see if you’d any tips :)

Aw, it’s so sweet that you’d think to come and ask me about this, anon! Sadly, I don’t have much wisdom to share here. I’m not particularly fussy about where I write and generally write wherever is convinient to me which is usually Microsoft Word, Tumblr (I save posts in my drafts), the docs section on Fanfiction.net, the notes on my iPhone or Evernote. But it all depends on what you’re looking for and whether you’re willing to pay money. Zenwriter is a great app, but you have to pay to use it.

Different programs and softwares will have specific functions. Grammarly, for example, helps with grammar (clue is in the title with that one haha) but something like Evernote is just an app where you can save and organise your writing/notes. 

For your laptop, my number one recommendation would be Microsoft Word (LibreOffice is a good free alternative). I know that’s probably not what you were expecting to hear, but in my opinion, it does everything you need from any writing software. You can change font styles, sizes and colours, highlight text, cross out text, bold, italic, underline etc., it autosaves your work so that if your laptop crashes you don’t lose your writing, it flags spelling and grammar errors and it’s reliable. Other sites and apps might offer additional features, but you don’t need them and in reality, it won’t do anything to improve your writing quality or productivity because only we can control that ourselves. 

It might be worth checking out my writing tag to see if there’s anything else there that’s useful.

I hope that helps! :)

[makingscipub]

The Power of Plasticity: Epigenetics in Science Fiction

This is another guest post by Cath Ennis in our series of posts on epigenetics and popular culture.

***

One of the fascinating things about epigenetics is how quickly some of the public perceptions of the field have raced far beyond the actual state of the science. I’ve seen and heard countless online and real life discussions in which epigenetics is already assumed to play an active role in intergenerational inheritance (especially of trauma), plasticity. sexual orientation and gender identity, and myriad physical and mental health conditions.

Another common theme is the belief that new knowledge of epigenetics allows us to overcome genetics in general, and genetic predispositions to disease in particular, often via changes to diet, exercise, and other lifestyle interventions. (In many cases, this trope is spread by people selling expensive “epigenetic” supplements, sometimes in combination with direct-to-consumer epigenetic tests that supposedly identify deficiencies). Scientists are indeed working on aspects of all of these questions, but most of the findings to date are preliminary and correlative.

Anticipatory discourse analysis

Frustrating? Yes, sometimes – but always an excellent reminder of the need for scientists to be aware of common misunderstandings of this kind, and to be cautious when communicating our research findings to non-technical audiences. This type of premature discourse can also help those of us who are working to translate epigenetics for knowledge users downstream of research labs. For example, if the scientific evidence does eventually develop to the point of showing support for a causal role for epigenetics in intergenerational trauma, then an analysis of the current discourse on this topic will help us to analyse and predict the potential ramifications.

While there’s no lack of examples of premature discussion of epigenetics in the real world, we can find additional material in the realm of science fiction. Here, speculation is the whole point, and epigenetics provides some satisfyingly meaty material, such as non-genetic inheritance of the effects of temporary environmental exposures, and individual and species plasticity in response to external stimuli. I recently read two novels that make good use of the latter theme – The Power by Naomi Alderman, and Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.

Note: there are some (mostly) minor spoilers in the rest of the post (the one major spoiler is marked as such), but nothing that should spoil your enjoyment of either book. Unless you’re only reading them to see what they have to say about epigenetics, of course.

Epigenetics in science fiction

The Power – of epigenetic modifications

The Power explores a world in which young women start to gain the ability to deliver powerful electric shocks. The story follows several different characters as society starts to adapt to this new reality, from riots in Saudi Arabia to religious cults in the United States and the foundation of a new country in the Balkans by liberated victims of human trafficking, all the way to a dystopian far future with familiar, yet inverted, power structures.

This is an interesting case in that it’s not 100% clear whether the power is supposed to be caused by epigenetics, genetics, or both. In the following quotes, I’ve added bold text for parts that appear to suggest an epigenetic origin, and underlined the parts that lean towards genetics. Bold underlined text is ambiguous.

“a multinational group of scientists is certain now that the power is caused by an environmental build-up of nerve agent that was released during the Second World War. It’s changed the human genome. All girls born from now on will have the power – all of them.”

(I’ve seen people talk about epigenetic modifications “changing the genome” in other contexts, hence the ambiguous formatting for this phrase, which I would personally only use if I was describing changes to the actual DNA sequence. The fact that all women will now have the same power is technically also ambiguous, but a mutagenic environmental toxin wouldn’t be expected to induce exactly the same DNA sequence change in every single person exposed to it, so I’m going with epigenetics here).

“Although Guardian Angel [the causative agent] had been forgotten after the Second World War, it continued to concentrate and magnify its potency in the human body. Research has now established it as the undoubted trigger, once certain concentrations had been reached, for the development of the electrostatic power in women.

Any woman who was seven years old or younger during the Second World War may have skein buds on the points of her collarbones – although not all do; it will depend on what dose of Guardian Angel was received in early childhood, and on other genetic factors. These buds can be “activated” by a controlled burst of electrostatic power by a younger woman. […] It is theorized that Guardian Angel merely amplified a set of genetic possibilities already present in the human genome. It is possible that, in the past, more women possessed a skein but that this tendency was bred out over time”. […]

“Not all girls have it; contrary to early thinking, about five girls in a thousand are born without it. […] And there are a few boys with chromosome irregularities who have it, too”.

It’s possible that the author did intend a purely genetic origin for this phenotype. However, I think there are enough clues scattered throughout the text that we can be confident that there is supposed to be some kind of epigenetic component triggered by the nerve agent, probably on top of some underlying genetic variation. Luckily though, the exact origins of this new ability are superfluous to the story, and as such they don’t really need to be explained in any depth greater than what I like to call “epigenetic jazz hands”. So, plausible enough for sci-fi.

(I found that the most realistic part of the book, though, was the fictional message board entry reading “The government has been causing this change for years through carefully measured doses of hormones called VACCINATIONS. VAC as in VACUOUS, SIN as in our sinful souls, NATION as in the once great people who have been destroyed by this”. Spend enough time on real-life “epigenetics Twitter” and you’ll see exactly how realistic this little snippet is).

Overall The Power is a great read with some interesting concepts and compelling storytelling, but I found the ending a little heavy-handed. I thought while I was reading it that it would make a great movie, so I was excited to hear that Amazon are working on an adaptation.

Seveneves and ‘going epi‘

In contrast, Seveneves has some explicitly epigenetic themes, but is less fun to read, mostly due to its unnecessary length (my paperback edition runs to 860 pages) and inexplicable focus on explaining the precise, complicated details of the maneuvers needed to shift the orbits of space stations, and the physics of how chains move in regular and zero gravity. We don’t even reach the book’s eponymous scenario – that the human race finds itself effectively reduced to seven fertile women living in space, one of whom is a geneticist – until about two thirds of the way through.

Once we finally arrive at this point, we learn that each of the seven “Eves” gets to choose how the geneticist, Moira, manipulates their own genetic material. This is done via automictic parthenogenesis (jazz hands!) for the first couple of generations, until they can figure out how to synthesize a Y chromosome to produce male offspring. Moira offers to fix all existing genetic and radiation-induced mutations, and also to add one “free” genetic alteration or improvement per Eve. One woman chooses to enhance her offspring’s intelligence, another favours strength and discipline, another empathy, and so on. Moira herself chooses an epigenetic twist:

“If [catastrophic event had happened] a couple of decades earlier, Eve Moira wouldn’t have known about epigenetics. It was still a new science at the time she was sent up to the Cloud Ark […] Like most children of her era, she’d been taught to believe that the genome – the sequence of base pairs expressed in the chromosomes in every nucleus of the body – said everything there was to say about the genetic destiny of an organism […] The central promise of genomics – that by knowing an organism’s genome, scientists could know the organism – had fallen far short as it had become obvious that the phenotype (the actual creature that met the biologist’s eye, with all of its observable traits and behaviors) was a function not only of its genotype (its DNA sequence) but also of countless nanodecisions being made from moment to moment within the organism’s cells by the regulatory mechanisms that determined which genes to express and which to silence. […] When creating the children of the other six Eves, Moira had avoided using epigenetic techniques. She had felt at liberty, however, to perform some experiments on her own genome”. This tinkering is later described as “making her children into Swiss Army Knives” (highlighting added).

An updated version of the technique Moira uses to tweak her own genome is also used in the book to help re-seed the recovering Earth with new plant and animal species, in advance of human resettlement:

“thousands of years later, epigenetics was sufficiently well understood to be programmed into the DNA of some of the newly created species that would be let loose on the surface of New Earth. And one of the planks in the Get It Done platform was to use epigenetics for all it was worth. So rather than trying to sequence and breed a new sub-species of coyote that was optimized for, and that would breed true in, a particular environment, the GID approach was to produce a race of canines that would, over the course of only a few generations, become coyotes or wolves or dogs – or something that didn’t fit into any of those categories – depending on what happened to work best. They would all start with a similar genetic code, but different parts of it would end up being expressed or suppressed depending on circumstances.”

The results of these experiments are described as follows: ”Epigenetic transformation had been rampant – and, since Survey was thin on the ground, largely unobserved by humans. Still, when it led to results that humans saw, and happened to find surprising, it was known as “going epi.” Use of the phrase was discouraged for being unscientific”.

Jump forward five thousand years, and the thriving human population is now divided into seven distinct races, each descended from and named after their respective Eve. Epigenetic Swiss Army Knife “Moirans” are unique in that “which of [their] genes were being expressed at a given time, and which were laying dormant, was changeable to a degree far beyond what humans were normally capable of. It would have amounted to a kind of superpower, had there been a way to control it”.

The first Moiran we meet is called Kath Two. Our first hint of how Moira’s tinkering has affected her descendants comes from a conversation with a colleague who’s concerned that Kath Two’s sleepiness means that she might be starting to go epi. The colleague wishes her well: “”I hope your adjustment – whether or not it includes becoming Kath Amalthova Three – is a smooth one””. We later learn that “Kath One had died at the age of thirteen and been replaced by Kath Two, whose brain had a rather different set of emotional responses”, and also that “like a lot of young Moirans, Kath Two didn’t even try to establish a fixed home. With a home came a social circle, and perhaps a family. All of which was fine for the people of the other races. But until a Moiran “took a set,” such permanent arrangements were unwise, placing husband, children, coworkers, and friends at risk of waking up one day to find that their wife, mother, colleague, or pal had effectively died and been replaced by someone else. […] “Sometimes the results were brilliant. Rarely they were fatal. Sometimes they were inconvenient, or downright embarrassing. Most of the latter cases had something to do with what happened, like it or not, when a Moiran fell in love.” […] “As long as a Moiran kept changing, she could keep changing, but if she stayed one way for too long she would “take a set”, as the expression went, and find it hard to change back.”

The stimuli that can trigger an epigenetic shift include fatigue; close contact with animals, especially ones that are themselves going epi; and traumatic experiences, the latter effect apparently known in military jargon as POTESH (post-traumatic epigenetic shift). Someone who gives her name as Cantabrigia Barth Five is greeted with “Five. Wow. “You must have seen some crazy shit””, although a famous two-hundred-year old Twelve (“Epigenetic shifts could roll back many of the visible effects of aging”) is also mentioned. Here we see some parallels with real-life epigenetic science, which includes studies of how trauma and other stressful experiences, especially those encountered in the first few years of life, affect gene regulation. (I think there’s also a very interesting parallel here with the way Dæmons in Philip Pullman’s work can change form when their humans are young, but become fixed once their human reaches puberty).

So, in this world, “going epi” is a phrase in common parlance, epigenetic science is used to accelerate the natural process of evolution, and an epigenetic shift in a Moiran human is considered to be as significant as death and rebirth as an entirely different person (albeit with some retention of memories from earlier incarnations). Given that Moira’s epigenetic tinkering isn’t defined or explained in any level of detail (jazz hands!), this is actually a nice example of a somewhat plausible (and at least internally consistent) use of epigenetics in science fiction.

BUT. Do NOT get me started on how this book handles evolution. In this world, a five thousand year-long  population explosion hasn’t been enough to diversify the physical and personality traits of the descendants of each Eve; all members of a given race still have an extremely strong resemblance to each other, as well as to their shared ancestor. Meanwhile, back on Earth, [MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD] a tiny isolated human population that managed to survive after the seven Eves and their companions left for space has somehow evolved at a much higher rate through selective breeding alone – no epigenetic jazz hands here! These humans are now hairless aquatic beings with blubber; mottled skin; flaps over their ears, eyes, and nostrils; webbed fingers; sharp teeth; and no external genitalia. All while the other seven races continue to be defined by the single genetic tweaks their respective Eves asked Moira to make to their genomes.

Stretching the science within science fiction is just fine by me, as long as it’s internally consistent; in my opinion, Seveneves passes on the epigenetics front, but fails when it comes to evolution. Of course, this might not have bothered me so much if I hadn’t had to wade through hundreds of pages of orbital mechanics and physics of chains to reach that point.

Is there more out there?

I’m aware of lots of other instances of epigenetics being used in fiction, including the television shows Orphan Black, The Watchmen, Transparent, and Blackish. I haven’t seen these shows myself yet, but they’re on my list. Let me know if you have any other examples to share!

——

Cath Ennis is a Knowledge Translation Specialist with the University of British Columbia’s Human Early Learning Partnership and the Kobor Lab at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

  Image credit: almapopescu via http://www.jovoto.com

    The post The Power of Plasticity: Epigenetics in Science Fiction appeared first on Making Science Public.

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[annbrighthaus-blog]

Ecommerce started out small with companies such as eBay paving the way for mega internet giants like Amazon to break the glass ceiling. Now, it seems like you can buy just about anything over the internet, and any company which doesn’t provide goods or services online is missing out on potential sales.

Search engine optimization helps businesses improve their rankings on search engine query results listing through sites like Google and Yahoo, as well as video streaming site searches like those performed through YouTube. Experts in the SEO field help companies do this by improving site content quality, user accessibility, loading speeds, and a variety of other changes. If you own an ecommerce business or are considering bringing your company to the digital world, here are some SEO strategies for beginners.

Title Your Pages

To make your pages easy to find and for users to better understand what they are clicking on, all pages should have titles. Each title you use should be unique to that page, short and to the point, and accurate. Remember, you’re essentially explaining what information will be available to an internet user when they click your link, so it must be informative but brief. For example, a home page can include the name of your company, and then a brief introduction to what your company does, and what’s available through the homepage. An example might look like this:

Earwax Away – Ear wax remover tool you desperately need in your bathroom.

www.earwaxaway.com

Learn more about this innovative earwax removal tool and how it can change your daily hygiene routine. Never find yourself with itchy or plugged ears again.

Other pages throughout your site might have lengthier titles. For example, a blog post dedicated to the above fictional tool might look like this:

Best way to use Earwax Away tool before a hot date

www.earwaxaway.com/earwax_removal_hot_date

July 7, 2018 – If you’re heading out on the town with a new love interest and want to look your best, don’t neglect your ears! Earwax build up can be uncomfortable and unsightly…

You can see how the titles make it easy to understand what’s going to be on the page before you open it. It describes it briefly both in the title itself and the following snippet. Google uses this information to determine how relevant your site is to your brand and product, and consumers use this information to decide whether this product is for them before opening the page.

Use Internal Links

Unlike external links, which take a consumer away from your page to another site entirely, an internal link simply transports a user from one page in your site to another page in your site. This helps keep the consumer on your website but generates clicks which Google can count toward site traffic and ratings. These internal links also act as navigation tools, which are extremely important; not only for internet users, but for search engine crawler bots which travel your site to determine whether it ranks highly against other similar contenders.

When your site is being ranked against similar site owners in your industry, crawler bots use information such as how easy it is to navigate, how genuine the content is, whether any content seems spammy or fraudulent, how quickly your content loads, and other information. The criteria which search engine optimization is judged by is determined by search engine algorithms, a set of rules designed by search engines to weed out bad seeds and improve user experiences.

Mobile Friendly Browsing

Over the past 5-years, users have become increasingly reliant on smart phones and other mobile devices for internet browsing and shopping. When your website isn’t designed to accommodate these devices, you run the risk of missing out on potential customers. Over the past 2-years, Google has cracked down on mobile first indexing, making search engine optimization a more mobile friendly zone.

If your site isn’t yet outfitted to suit the needs of those on tablets and smart phones, consider optimizing images, removing imbedded videos in exchange for third party streaming, and formatting fonts and borders to fit within the screens of most mobile devices. Some businesses choose to have two sites which automatically load depending on the type of device they are being viewed through. Desktop users are transported to one page, while mobile viewing happens elsewhere. This allows for a more interactive site for desktop users, but also requires more work and upkeep than one site alone.

Make Content Easy and Aesthetically Appealing to Read

Nobody likes squinting at a screen, scrolling around to figure out which subheading they’re looking at, or having to scroll through long sections of content before finding a heading. When you create and post content to your ecommerce site, a great tip is to make that content user friendly to find and read.

Keep paragraphs short and on point and use headings for each different point. To further increase aesthetics and navigational ease, use H1, H2, and H3 heading types to differentiate what users are looking at. You can also use bold and underlines to highlight a title and point out individual headings for pages and paragraphs.

If you’re still not sure where to start on your search engine optimization journey, keep an eye on Google for posts about algorithm changes and updates. The best way to determine what you should be doing to increase your business’ ranking is by monitoring at the source. There’s no one algorithm which explains how google chooses rankings, but by following as many as you can, your site is sure to make its way up there.

[howenstineeng101]

Blog Post 5

In Pitman’s article I can relate to it in the sense that just recently i have succumbed to using my laptop for almost anything. Ever since elementary school taking notes in my notebook was the only way teachers taught and I liked it. I as well practiced in remediation, I made my own key at the first page of my notebook, then i continued to use abbreviations key phrases, and my highlighter were my best friend. Taking handwritten notes gives me this satisfaction that my laptop doesn’t. I love to look at my page and see the colorful words and bolded and underlined letters pop out at me, I feel more accomplished and I feel like i have learned more. I would have never thought that this could be used for fiction writing, but Pitman shows multiple similarities between the two.

[mystephaneblog]

Have fun and motivation with my new Post :

I watched an Olivier Roland’s video  and I learned good stuff.

I bought a lot of books to learn new skills but sincerely, there is little that I have put in place concretely in my life. I took notes, made summaries but it was alwys theoretical.

Here another way to take notes. It has nothing to do with taking the maximum information from the book but rather taking as much information as possible to use it effectively in our lives as quickly as possible.

That things be clear, I don’t talk about science fiction books but practical books that teach us to have a new skill.

A pratical book allows us to take action more effectively than if we hadn’t read the book.

Of course by reading we’ll take notes but we’ll not take notes like at school. We’ll highlight actions we can put in place today in our lives.

Study Case

At this momet I’m reading a book about Tai-Chi. I’m learning to meditate and for years I have been pacticing martial arts so Tai-Chi is perfect for me. Each time that I see an action that I can use today in my life, I put the infomation in highlight. I put this information in uppercase, bold, underlined or in a different color. By this way I’ll read my notes later, this information will jump to my eyes.

We can take notes to have theoretical knowledge, there is no problem.

Once we’ll finish the book when we’ll read back our notes, we can immediately see actions we can use in our lives. The concepts is to choose actions that are the simplest and the fastest to set up in our lives.

Baby step

The best strategy to start is to take only one action. This action is the most interesting and the easiest to set up in your life.

The problem that we have to use book’s information, it’s that we are too ambitious in the first step. We want realize great things in the first step so we don’t have the experience yet.

To avoid falling into this trap and be disappointed, imagine that your evolution is like baby steps. Choose an interesting and easy action to set up in your life today. It’s today that your work on it and not tomorrow or after tomorrow. By this way, you can immdiately adjust this action to improve it step by step.

What is the most ambitious action you wanted to do right after reading a book ?

-Steph

P.S. Do you want free training program ? Click here 

Smartphone apps :

To track my calories, I use MyFitnessPal 

To track my training program, I use Jefit 

Cet article Good Use Of Book Information est apparu en premier sur THE stephane ANDRE.