#Of my computer science research groups founder who in around the same years went so viral

[freebooter4ever]

Definitely NOT skim reading old evegeni malkin articles while half paying attention to this morning's meeting at work

[peace-coast-island]

Diary of a Junebug

A night at the carnival   

It’s carnival weekend at Golden Blossoms Park! The event’s hosted by students and staff at Harper and Denton School for the Blind and all proceeds will be going to charity. They’ve been doing this every year and I’m glad that the camp’s volunteering this year!   

Since my cousin Krista is one of the co-owners (headmaster?) of the school, I’ve dropped by a few times over the years to join in on the festivities. Since the school has been a huge part of her life for as long as I can remember, it was a great experience being behind the scenes of this event! 

Seeing how much of an impact Krista and her husband has on the students - and the community in general - is one of many reasons why I admire them a lot.

Krista's always the kind of person who knew exactly what she wanted to do in life. She loves learning and teaching and often had her nose buried in books. Being the oldest of four, she was also precocious and is considered the mom/big sister friend of the group.   

We’re fifteen years apart but it doesn’t really feel like that much. Like she’s wise beyond her years but not in a way that makes her distant from others. When she was sixteen, Krista became seriously ill with meningoencephalitis, which is an infection involving the brain. As a result the nerves that has to do with vision were permanently damaged. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose your sight like that. From what I’ve heard, it was tough but Krista adjusted. Krista’s blindness isn’t something considered like a taboo or something to be tiptoed around, it just is. I was aware that Krista was different because she couldn’t see like everyone else can but other than that she was my super cool older cousin. 

So ever since she was young, Krista wanted to be a teacher. Getting sick and losing her sight made her more determined to become one. Since her hometown was small and lacked resources for disabled students, she went to a school for the visually impaired in another town. Not only she graduated at the top of her class, but she was a favorite among many of the teachers.   

That school was the A.B. Harper Institute for the Blind. And little did she know at the time that the place where she found her calling was about to become a big part of her life. 

While taking classes at the community college, Krista was training to be a teacher/mentor at the school. During her first year she met Zachary Denton, a new student who was having a lot of difficulty adjusting. Krista was determined to help him. 

Like Krista, Zachary wasn’t born blind. He was seriously hurt in a car accident that killed his mom and spent over a year recovering from his injuries. Along with losing his sight, he also had issues with his memory, was prone to mood swings, and had to go through extensive physical therapy to be able to walk again.   

And on top of all that, he had to deal with his father’s lack of support as he pretty much dropped him off at the school and left. It’s a lot for someone to have to go through so obviously he wasn’t taking it well. Sometimes he’d lash out, then feel bad immediately and apologize, but most of the time he would sit or stand in the corner with a blank look. Since he still had some vision, he’d sometimes act as if he wasn’t blind, then inevitably he’d have difficulty doing something and then get frustrated when someone tries to help him. The faculty did their best to give him time to get used to things and intervene if necessary, but at the same time they felt helpless. 

Krista was the one who managed to get through to him. Since he was about the same age as her when he lost his sight, at least it was something they have in common. She wasn’t a student, but also not exactly part of the faculty yet, so she figured that if he wasn’t going to open up to the faculty, maybe he’ll feel more comfortable talking to someone who’s closer to his age as well as someone who he can turn to for guidance. 

It took a while, but gradually Zachary began to open up. After finding one thing in common, they managed to find more common ground. Like the fact that they’re both musically inclined, especially on the piano. And that they happen to have similar tastes in books and movies. When he wasn’t focusing on his studies or going to therapy sessions, Zachary was hanging out with Krista.   

That summer, instead of going back home, Zachary stayed with Krista’s family. Caroline and Charlie liked him instantly, treating him like a brother. My aunt and uncle are the kind of people who pretty much adopt anyone on the spot so obviously Zachary was no exception. I pretty much grew up seeing Zachary as well when we went to visit the Lims so even long before he and Krista married, I always considered him part of the family. 

Seeing how much Zachary had changed since they met, Krista knew that she found her calling. She didn’t want to be a teacher just for the sake of filling people’s heads with information. No, she wanted to be a lot more than that. She wanted to change people’s lives by being the mentor they needed. The one who plants a seed in someone’s mind that tells them that they can do it. 

In the years that followed, Krista became an English teacher and Zachary a music teacher. Shortly after marrying, they were told that the school was going to shut down and be replaced by a casino. Despite protests from students and faculty, the city was intent on closing the school.   

The grandson of the school’s founder, Elias Harper - who everyone loved and looked up to -announced his retirement and chose Krista and Zachary to succeed in his position. So the school was moved to Saltwater Creek and renamed Harper and Denton. A few months after the move, Harper passed away and the town worked together to build a memorial in his memory. 

After settling in Saltwater Creek and getting the school up and running, the Dentons were ready to settle down. Krista and Zachary always wanted kids but they were uncertain as it wouldn’t be easy since they’re both blind. So as much as they wanted to start a family, they kept putting it off until they were 100% certain. 

Unfortunately it wasn’t so easy for them and that took a toll. Krista’s first pregnancy ended in miscarriage - in her words, it was over before it even started. Later that year she got pregnant again and things seemed to be going well. But shortly after Susan was born, doctors realized that something was wrong. Then it turns out that her brain never fully developed so she only lived for a few days. Another year passed and a son, Zach Jr., was born. Sadly he only lived a few months, dying from a neuromuscular disease, the same disease that killed Krista, Caroline, and Charlie’s brother at six months. 

After losing Zach Jr., Krista and Zachary felt that maybe they weren’t meant to be parents. After all, they have a lot of kids from the school, and they’re like a big happy family. Still, the losses weighed heavily on their hearts. 

Then unexpectedly a few years later Krista became pregnant for the fourth time. They kept things low key so most of the extended family didn’t know until she was far along. That August, Hamilton was born. The first year was rough as Krista and Zachary felt that things were too good to be true.   

Like her parents, Hamilton wants to be a mentor for the students at the school. She’s a computer genius - coding, software, hacking - she knows it all. By the time she was in high school, Hamilton was developing apps for the blind and visually impaired. She’s currently a freshman in Spectrum University studying computer science and working as a mentor at Harper and Denton where she’s been teaching kids how to code. 

When the tornado and blizzard hit Saltwater Creek, the Denton house was hit hard. The school also had extensive damage and had to close. Months later the family and the school made another big move, this time to Spectrum Falls. Moving from a small dying town to a city allowed the school to grow and prosper in ways it never was able to before. Attendance nearly quadrupled as well as access to resources.   

At the suggestion of Hamilton and the students one year, the school set up a carnival fundraising event to spread awareness and donate to research foundations. It turned out to be super successful and since then it became an annual event. 

Like I said, I feel so honored that this year our camp got to be a part of the event! It’s one thing to hear about how Krista, Zachary, and Hamilton run the show, it’s another to experience it as well as participate behind the scenes. 

It’s amazing to see how a small school left such an impact on its students, leading them to take the reins and grow a tight knit community out of it.

[cryptoevent]

The crypto whale who wants to give billions away – Cointelegraph Magazine

Like many people in the cryptocurrency industry, Sam Bankman-Fried is in it for the money. As founder of the quantum trading company Alameda Research, the FTX exchange and the DeFi serum protocol, the 28-year-old man with curly hair has amassed a $10 billion fortune in the sector in just three years.

Unlike most people in the cryptocurrency industry, he’s building a fortune to give half of it away. He is an effective altruist who essentially steals from the rich to give to the poor through his supernatural, coded trading strategies.

Maybe without the robbery, he says. Ultimately, my goal is to have as much impact as possible, whatever that may be. And right now, I think, it’s through donations, so I’m wondering how I can do as much as I can and give as much as I can.

The SBF, as it is sometimes called, has been around for some time. He was director of development for the Center for Effective Altruism for a few months in 2017, and before that he spent half his income working on Wall Street. He plans to donate about 50% of his crypto billions, but only after he reinvests in his ever-growing empire.

Nevertheless, he donates to charities as they arise. He was the second-largest contributor to President Joe Biden’s campaign, behind former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who contributed $5.2 million.

I was excited about the impact this could have. I thought what happened in the election was important.

In addition, the FTX Foundation has recently been established. It donates 1% of the cost of the platform and will double user donations, dollar for dollar, up to $10,000 per day. In its first weeks of operation, the foundation has raised more than $2 million, mostly in the form of donations from users, who can choose from a carefully curated list of charitable organizations.

Old pouffe

SBF’s growing notoriety was further enhanced when the company was included in this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 financial list. I’m honored, he says. I usually look forward more than backward, so it was a little cool, but it went pretty fast.

It also ranked third in a recent Top 100 ranking.

He has been known to sleep on an ottoman chair in his Hong Kong office so as not to miss a deal. It seems that the main reason SBF earns more than anyone else is that it is almost never off-schedule.

I’m in the office, mostly 24 hours a day. Sometimes I just take a nap on the ottoman here and of course I talk to colleagues and sometimes people on the internet, but it’s mostly his job.

He has no girlfriend and doesn’t have many contacts outside of work, although he does find time to talk to his family in the United States on the phone several times a week. It’s safe to say that FBS’ers aren’t the kind of people who are desperate for a perfect work-life balance, or even accept that their productivity declines after the first 11 hours of work.

I think these kinds of stories are vastly overrated, and the cruel or inspiring truth, depending on how you think about it, is that the more you put in, the more you get out, he says. That motivates me, and that’s satisfying, but you know, another part of it is how I think I can have the biggest impact.

How did I get here?

The child of two law professors at Stanford University, SBF discovered the Effective Altruism movement while studying physics at MIT.

Made popular by philosophers and ethicists including Toby Ord and Peter Singer, the movement focuses on pragmatic ways of helping others, using science and reason to maximize benefits rather than the well-intentioned and mediocre results typical of some charities. This practical approach also extends to how best to help a person.

Imagine how much good you can do by working directly for a cause, compared to what you can do by working and donating to Wall Street. In many cases, you could probably help them even more with donations. So, basically, I checked out Wall Street.

Fellow interns at quant trading firm Jane Street Capital pointed him in the direction of Wall Street, and he began working there just after graduating from college in 2014. Why did they hire a physicist with little experience in finance straight out of school, you ask?

It turns out that strategies for quantum trading are valuable trade secrets, which means that effective strategies are not taught in university courses. Instead, companies hire people with raw talent: Mathematicians or people with extensive experience in physics or computer science.

What you need to know about the markets, they will teach you, he says. He has traded various ETFs, futures, currencies and stocks and has developed an automated OTC trading system. There, he became interested in the incredibly profitable arbitrage opportunities in inefficient crypto markets and founded the crypto-quantum trading company Alameda Research in late 2017 to take advantage of them.

Rules applicable to all whales

Alameda Research has grown into one of the largest crypto firms with about $2.5 billion in assets under management, although as with its own assets, SBF puts this into perspective with some caveats about liquid and illiquid assets.

Alameda is the Moby Dick of cryptocurrences, representing up to 10% of cryptocurrences circulating in the markets at any given time. I think sometimes he can get to that part of the volume, he says. I think the average is a little lower. It belongs to the group of five to ten large commercial companies in this sector.

This means that every Alameda transaction has the potential to move the markets and generate liquidity. Last October, Alameda was widely accused of having caused the IFJ’s share price collapse by short selling, although SBF minimized the impact of this practice. He believes that with great power comes great responsibility.

It’s an absolute responsibility, he says, adding that he tries to follow the approach of TradFi Quant’s companies. Their job is to find profitable companies, but also to provide liquidity and promote healthy markets, he says. The greatest responsibility is to do no harm. And to ensure that what you do generally promotes, rather than disrupts, the liquidity of healthy markets and the efficiency of transactions.

He added that arbitrage operations, for example, can have a positive effect because they make markets more efficient and reduce prices where there are premiums. Identifying and developing opportunities to profit from arbitrage transactions was the main reason for founding Alameda. One of the first big gains we made was Litecoin, he recalls.

There was a week in late 2017 when Litecoin was trading at a steady 20% price on the GDAX Coinbase [now Coinbase Pro]. That’s cool, you make 10% every half hour, I guess you make dollars forever? And that, of course, is not the solution.

It proved terribly difficult and necessary to use this facility to circumvent the trade size and withdrawal limits of one million per day. A few years ago in crypto-economics, a big part of the problem was finding the logistics, he says.

In another arbitrage transaction, SBF and its friends moved up to $25 million a day through a series of intermediaries and land banks in Japan to take advantage of Kimchee’s infamous bonus, which allowed Bitcoin to be traded up to a third more in South Korea’s hard-to-reach financial system than in the United States.

But it is the management of the outdated financial system that has caused the biggest problems. The slowest and most difficult, most expensive and frustrating part of arbitration is the fiat, he says, referring to the difficulty of getting accounts that can then be closed at any time, archaic procedures and bureaucracy, and incredibly slow bank transfers.

We worked in physical bank branches for five hours a day for over five months because it took a long time to transfer money, he says, adding:

It’s like arriving at 10am and staying there with a few people until 1pm to make all the appointments we had to have every damn day of the week to send the same recommendation we sent yesterday.

This is one of the reasons SBF is so passionate about the DeFi – its vision is to one day replace the existing financial system, which is already too cumbersome. The current payment rails are not efficient at all, he says. There are billions of companies that just abstract it, and you end up with this incredibly complicated web of shit to make it usable for most people. They work on older systems that were not even designed for the Internet.

Effects of cryptography

For many, the SBF did not become an important figure in cryptography and DeFi until the mid-1920s, when it began to have an impact on Twitter crypto. It was an intentional gesture: He would have liked to have stayed under the radar in 2018 as Alameda focuses on quota trading: Very little advertising is required, which is usually a disadvantage. But when he launched FTX, an innovative cryptocurrency exchange system, in 2019, he had to create a community around it, and he took the lead in becoming its public face on social media.

As regards FTX as a retailer, the following rules apply: The more customers, the better. You can develop the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, it’s worthless, he says.

One of the most challenging and interesting tasks was finding ways to engage users, and a large part of this task was awareness raising.

He seems to have understood this, as the FTX is now the fifth largest derivatives exchange by volume, with a valuation of $3.5 billion. The company has launched a number of innovative markets, including offering token shares to companies like Tesla, Apple and Amazon, as well as trading on Coinbase prior to its IPO.

She is also using her wealth and influence to try to overcome what she sees as the biggest obstacle to widespread WiFi adoption. He believes that Ethereum, including Eth2, is not sufficiently sized for cryptography and DeFi to replace the existing financial system. Currently, DeFi can process about 10 transactions per second, and Layer 2 solutions offer several thousand TPS.

It’s an absolutely solid and immutable barrier to growth, he says. The Fay literally cannot develop as an ecosystem until this problem is resolved. That’s why there is no long-term plan that doesn’t address this problem. …it’s just deadly. Even the Eth2 target of 100,000 GST is not enough for what the SBF has in mind.

If your goal is to reach 100 million or a billion users, […] the application should be able to process about a million transactions per second to become one of the biggest applications in the world. So you can endlessly tick off the list without having to consider other factors, with a scaling solution that will not lead you to your goal.

This has led him to become one of the strongest proponents of Solana, a retail chain that currently handles 65,000 TPS and which the team claims could eventually reach amazing levels : 710,000 TPS on a 1 gigabit connection or 28.4 million TPS on a 40 gigabit connection.

In August 2020, he founded Serum DEX on Solana and launched SRM Cryptocurrency. Bankman-Fried says you can see the benefits of Solana in whey by the order book. The matching engine takes only a hundredth of a cent to place an order, and auctions take only a few seconds.

So get lots of juice from the higher flow. And that has really helped to broaden the product base. So much so that I think our best estimate is that Whey DEX probably consumed more transactions in six months of operation than the entire Ethereum store chain ever did.

Network effects have given Ethereum a hard time, forcing deFi projects and users to migrate to Solana. Even after Chief Nomi handed over control of SushiSwap to him, he was unable to convince the community to hand him over. In the end, it was much more complicated than we thought to migrate existing projects and much easier to create new ones, he explains, adding :

We would be very happy if they had an outpost on Solana. I think they still will at some point. But I also think Seren will go both ways. Ultimately, I want better products and better users, you know, no matter what.

(After our interview, there was a new proposal to build a version of SushiSwap on Solan and Whey, perhaps under the name Bonsai).

While the SBF argues that the network effects of many interconnected applications built on Ethereum are significant, it notes that each project will eventually need to migrate and dismantle assemblies and toolsets with existing options to move to Layer Two, Eth2 or another scalable solution. As for the number of users, he claims that the effects of the ETH network are overestimated.

The other part is that while DeFi’s current user base is very loyal, very large and powerful, it is not very large. The daily active users, I think it’s tens of thousands. I think FTX probably has more active daily users than all the DeFi’s combined.

It appears that SBF is considering implementing the Solana blockchain as infrastructure in applications where it is invisible to most users, to allow millions of users to access the DeFi. In early 2021, Alameda did a $50 million funding round to implement DeFi type tools on Maps.me, an offline European mapping application with 140 million users. Solana will build a multi-currency portfolio with exchange rates and locations. FTX’s purchase of Blockfolio could follow a similar strategy.

I think it will be a very cool product and a powerful suite of products for the application, he says of Maps.me. I’m very excited. I think this could be the start of adoption.

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[shineeink]

Perfectly Dangerous

Description:Areum and Audrey have been friends for years, but when Audrey disappears Areum finds peace in the arms of Jinki. However he isn’t who he seems to be. Apparently he is a secret agent and Areum faces danger. Without knowing who to trust Areum investigates Audrey disappearance and agent Key might know something about it.

Asian Fanfiction Link

Tumblr link

Author Note:

A dream (sexy honeymoon with agent Jinki) and Alex (sweet bunny alexie...kyaaaaa my Audrey

This is my first fic with action scenes on it. So it's probably going to have many mistakes and follow like 414223 action cliches. I promise to try and make it funny and interesting but please keep this in mind. Also this is over everything else a romance story with action, mystery and fantasy elements to it. 

I hope you like it and it makes you smile. ^^ 

You can say that it all began when Audrey met Areum. 

Song Areum

Charming, passionate Areum, follows her heart on everything. She is the opposite of Audrey, with her sometimes careless and childish decisions that can give her trouble.  

She likes to read manga, collect furry soft toys, flirt with her boyfriend, run and sleep. Also likes girly things like dresses, accessories, makeup but is too lazy to use them. 

Her mom died when she was nine and she was practically raised by her dad with whom she has a distant relationship.

Recently married Lee Jinki. Is a writer because she has "too many ideas running wild in her head that need to be prisoned" but only wrote one successful novel yet and is searching for inspiration on her honeymoon with Jinki. 

   Lee Audrey

Clever, brave Audrey tried to always follow her brain because she was the smartest person she knew until things went really wrong. 

Best friends with Areum since their high school days, she saw her as a sister and put her on a pedestal. 

She liked girly things, dressing up and fashion. Pretty and smart would be a lethal combination to find someone special but Audrey pushed everyone away with her heavy work schedule and her fear of getting hurt. 

Also likes reading, bunnies, telling unfunny jokes, pink, Areum and bad guys (the ones she reads about on books).

Became an orphan when she was five, loosing her parents and older brother in a car accident. Lived with foster families until being a grown up. 

Worked at Dokko Science Development Corporation as a researcher and inventor.

Went missing and is confirmed dead.

  Lee Jinki/ Onew

Jinki married Areum and they are currently on honeymoon. 

Has no known family and doesn’t seem to have many friends. Works as a computer engineer and travels a lot making Areum upset with his workaholic nature. 

Mysterious, funny, gentle Jinki seems to have deep feelings from Areum, being sometimes too over protective, scolding her for her reckless behavior. 

Likes martial arts and self-defense technics and often works out at a club dedicated to it. 

Likes to play phone games, sleep, eat, all kinds of swords and blades, to travel and his biggest wish is to build a family. 

Not much is known about Onew. His enemies call him gentle, soft and yet deadly Onew. His smile and manners make everyone fall for him. The man you want to use on an undercover mission.

Part of the SHINee Team. Has a close relationship with Lee Taemin but clashes with Choi Minho for personal reasons. 

  Kim Kibum/Key

Kibum likes to keep his personal life private so not much is known about him.

Although being very social and having his way with words Kibum likes to keep his true self for himself. 

Adventurous, sensitive and with a sharp tongue, Kibum is the most sincere person you can find. 

He likes art, cooking, drawing and animals. Knows several languages and normally is seen learning them on his free time. 

Works as a photographer for a traveling guides book editor, and spends his time traveling alone around the world.

Both his parents are alive and he tries to visit them as much as he can. 

Key is part of the SHINee Team. He is a very versatile agent, dominating several skills. His language knowledge his useful on foreigner missions. 

He is called Almighty Key by his enemies due to his over the top qualities. He is very professional and hopes the others are like him. That’s the reason that even though he is friendly with the others he still keeps his distance from them. Building bonds with the others is not a possibility.

Failure is not an option.

  Choi Minho/?

Choi Minho was once a famous model until he disappeared from the spotlight for more than a year. 

Still very famous, does some modeling jobs for big companies.

His parents live outside the country. Divorced. 

Rich, elegant, educated and extremely nice, Minho likes to do sports, and always searches for new adrenaline indulging hobbies.

He likes good food and wine, to make collections of almost everything, camping and volunteering. Minho is very popular with women but never gets serious with them. 

Minho code name is a mystery for most people outside SHINee Team. He is as sophisticated as deadly and Minho is perfect as a fighter and a key point to seduce women when needed, something he disputes with Taemin in a game between the two.

Was the last one to enter the team, and did it for special reasons. 

Clashes with Jinki and is close to Taemin.

  Kim Jonghyun/Base

Jonghyun is a rich aristocrat that likes to surround himself with culture. He often promotes cultural events around the country and likes to sing and play instruments.

Since he often interferes in important social and political matters in the country, he is often the victim of retaliations. 

Jonghyun lives in a huge mansion with his wife and baby daughter. 

Jonghyun likes music, dogs, doing magic tricks; make a difference, his daughter and wife and SHINee team members that are his second family.

Base is as his name says the base of SHINee Team and the person everyone goes to, to ask for an opinion about personal or work matters. 

Base is calm, experienced and most of the times the brain, the one behind most of the plans for the missions the Team has. Also he provides the Team hideout and funds most of it. Even though the team has no leader, they see Base as the one.

 Lee Taemin / Ace

Taemin is a perfectionist, hardworking young man that is finishing a major on Film and Movie degree and facing some doubts about what he wants to do with his life. 

Nothing seems to please him more than his secret life and the way he risks his life every day. The only exception is seducing women that he does as a game with Minho.

Loves his bike, dancing, going out with close friends to drink, sex, extreme sports, his dog and horror movies.

Taemin used to live with his grandma and older brother.

Looks up to Jinki as an older brother and sees in Minho the same darkness that he has.

Ace is the oldest member of the SHINee Team even though he is the youngest. He was taught by the founder and is the best assassin of the group and also the most reckless. For Ace, killing comes very easily.

[neptunecreek]

Future Ada: Tech Organizing Through an Intersectional Lens

Ada Lovelace's work on the first analytical engine helped lay the path for our modern world and continues to serve as an inspiration to people worldwide, including Electronic Frontier Alliance member Future Ada.

Based in Spokane, WA, Future Ada was founded in 2017 to advance opportunities and support for underrepresented genders in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. That same year, Forbes noted that closing the gender gap could increase U.S. Gross Domestic Product by two trillion dollars, yet work environments in many of these fields are so hostile to women that over fifty-percent will leave the sector as a result.

"Just because you're not a master at your skill or you don't have something published in your name, doesn't mean you can't bring something to your field."

Since their launch, Future Ada has grown into the understanding that establishing a genuinely representative sector requires an intersectional approach, and that creating inclusive spaces, where individuals from all diverse backgrounds want to be, is key to that mission. In the days leading up to our recent collaboration on panels at this year's HOPE and DEF CON conferences, I spoke with Rebecca Long and Emilie St-Pierre—respectively Future Ada's founder and Security Ambassador—to find out what they've learned since the group’s founding, and how they have adapted to the needs of their community and this unprecedented moment.

How did the idea for Future Ada come about? What inspired it and what were some of the first steps you took toward making it a real thing?

Rebecca: In 2017, I was really struggling with my career. As a woman in tech, I was dealing with some discrimination and sexism in my own career, and I wasn't feeling supported by the leadership in my company. Honestly, I was feeling like I should quit all of tech. I felt like, ‘nobody wants me here, I don't feel welcome, and the messages that I'm getting are that I am not good enough to be here—and no one wants to help me improve to meet whatever mysterious gap that no one will disclose, then maybe I should just go do something else.’ Thankfully, I ended up going to a conference called Write/Speak/Code that happened to be nearby in Portland that year. I went with another woman on my team who's a developer. At this woman- and non-binary-specific tech conference, they had everyone divide up into two groups. One was for the people who were newer in their careers, and one who was for people who were further along. I ended up in that [second] group.

Throughout the week, we had to come up with projects and talk about them. At first, I didn’t know what to do. Then I got a text message from an old boss—also a woman—and she was expressing the same feelings. That’s when I got mad. I felt like, ‘maybe I don't belong here, but I'm sorry, I know for a fact that you belong here because you're awesome.’ I thought, what kind of nonsense is this that we're both feeling like we're being driven out of tech? I have a ton of experience—over a decade of experience at that point—and she had even more than me. I felt, ‘we're well trained and we have every right to be here.’ So, I channeled that into this project at the conference. I decided I was going to create a nonprofit.

I was already running a user group called Spokane Geek Girls and active in the community. I had already been feeling like there was more I wanted to do to help people that were coming to me for mentoring, and help, and feeling similar to me. I had this idea of a nonprofit that would be what I’d need. But, I also felt like ‘no, I don't know how to do that. I have no idea how to start a non-profit or run an organization. That's just a ridiculous idea.’ But it was at this conference I decided, nope, that's not a ridiculous idea. This is really important and I'm going to find out how to do it. So, I bothered all of the organizers of this conference to tell me everything they knew. How do I do this?

I made some friends and they helped me develop our original mission statement and our name. They were all wonderful soundboards for me. There hadn’t been anything like this in Spokane. I just tried to channel all of my anger at the industry for lack of support and all that I'd been experiencing. I thought ‘we need to do better. We need to channel that into positive energy, and I want to help other people.’ It helps me to help other people and I know other people are in similar states. Maybe they don't feel comfortable speaking up, or maybe they just haven't woken up to what's going on around them. Maybe they don't understand why they're never getting that promotion or why they're not getting these career opportunities.

It sounds like maybe that conference was an awakening moment for you in the way that you and other women were experiencing Imposter Syndrome. Are there any tools or strategies that you've been able to use that help women identify that that's what they're feeling and overcome that?

Rebecca: Every speaker—and these are folks who are accomplished, wrote books, high-level management—and they're like ‘I also feel this way.’ And it was just like, ‘what!?” That's incredible. At some level, I'd always known that. But I think hearing it, and hearing it again, and hearing everyone share their stories, that was most powerful for me. Because you feel that you aren’t good enough right now, that doesn't mean that you actually aren't good enough. It's a facade that society or various things are trying to tell you and convince you of.

Hearing other people, who are very successful, talk about that kind of stuff, and share their stories and how they work through it—even if it's ‘I just powered through,’ that’s been really helpful for me.

I try and speak about this stuff and be open with my own experiences with people, and help others know that it's okay if you are also feeling this way. That doesn't mean that you have to stop. That doesn't mean that you don't belong here. It doesn't mean that you don't deserve a promotion or that nice salary or whatever your dream job is. You can still make an impact.

In the last few years, I’ve been picking up the storytelling mantra as a tool. I want to highlight other people's stories and give people a platform, so they feel safe to talk to me about their story and I can share, with them, my story.

One of the other things that, thankfully, Emilie was able to bring was an emphasis on security.  Security has always been a passion of mine but it's always been on the side, because it's not really my main job. So, I've been really happy Emilie's been able to help bring some of that to our organization with our open office hours and with our security workshops. To really make these things approachable for the whole community. We want everyone to feel like technology and all of these things are safe, and you can do it. You don't have to be some math genius to do any of this stuff.

Emilie, have you had any experiences with Imposter Syndrome or starting to buy into folks devaluing your work or your contribution?

Emilie: Yeah, fully. To this day it comes and goes. I have to say, sometimes it’ll come back in moments where I'm going through something hard at work. But I definitely had Imposter Syndrome when I was new to the security industry. I'd hang out at conferences like DEF CON when I was still new. I was learning a lot, but even though I had some skills, I constantly compared myself to the security researchers that had found vulnerabilities. These people that were presenting at these conferences, I was like ‘well, I don't have something like that to bring to the table’ so I just figured I wouldn't belong. But just because you're not a master at your skill or you don't have something published in your name, doesn't mean you can't bring something to your field. I think it took me a while to realize that. Later on, training people that were new to the field helped me realize that. ‘Oh, I can easily tell this person what they can bring to the field so why is it harder to say that to myself?’ I've gotten better with that over time, but it's very relatable.

The name Future Ada, I imagine it's an ode to Ada Lovelace, but can you talk a little bit about how you arrived at that name?

Rebecca: Yeah, it is totally in honor of Ada Lovelace. I find her very inspiring. Our whole computer industry is thanks to her. We have a tendency—over history—to erase certain people from their contributions. She was one of them. Having her as part of our name, I get to talk about her. I can say, ‘hey did you know that computer science, the whole reason we have technology, is thanks to a woman? Did you know that?’ That's been really awesome.

I want our organization to help create future Ada Lovelaces. Ada Lovelaces of today, of tomorrow, of the next day. Our next generation. Where we're inspiring folks to go out there and break those molds. Because she definitely broke molds back in her day. That's what we need to be doing. That's how you get really awesome things and you can change the world. That's what we were going for when I came up with the name.

How did you find Future Ada, Emilie?

Emilie: Thanks to the Diana Initiative, which is a small conference that tags alongside others during hacker summer camp. So, DEF CON, Blackhat, and B-Sides Las Vegas. I had just moved to Spokane, and I had already been doing these workshops over in Las Vegas about security and privacy, and had been hosting crypto parties, and I wanted that to continue in Spokane. But, Spokane is different. There wasn't a hackerspace that was open weekly. So, I just focused on seeing what I could do with other folks. When I saw that Rebecca was speaking at the Diana Initiative and it said she was from Spokane, I was so excited. I went to see her talk, and then after the talk let her know I was also from Spokane and that I’d love to do something together. I told her that I’d been doing these workshops and was looking to bring them. She was super receptive and very welcoming. Since then we’ve been doing these workshops. Learning as we go along. Now we get to offer them online, which is really cool. So, yeah, it's been fun to see our partnership grow and where we took it from there.

What are some of the biggest challenges that you faced creating the group and finding the right people?

Rebecca: Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was surprised that I had people coming to me. I was trying to keep it kind of on the D.L. that I was doing this until I had it really formulated, but word started getting out, and people were saying ‘I want in on this,’ ‘I want to be on your board,’ ‘let me help you.’ That was really inspiring.

Challenges? I'm not a marketing person, that's not my specialty. We don't really have anyone on our board that's a marketing expert. So we learned a lot on that end. I feel like we're learning a lot by doing things wrong. Not wrong, but not very effectively. We think ‘this will work great’. And it works, sort of, but we want to have a bigger reach. Learning more marketing will help us on that front but that takes time. It is a challenge.

We want to be really careful with what we do. We want to make sure that when we expand our board, that we're bringing in the right people. That we’re really mindful about that. We’re also aware of our 100% white board. As we work to expand our board, and organization leadership, we are being mindful to diversify ourselves and bring in better racial perspectives. We are working as an organization to learn how to grow and best speak on the topic of race and injustice. It's a process and it's important so we aren't shying away from it.

Are there any other challenges that you didn't anticipate?

Emilie: Creating the workshops and letting people know that we are available to help them. We spend time creating these workshops. We spend the time to get volunteers to come to workshops and be there to help folks. I thought our biggest challenge would have been managing the demand, because we literally offer free tech support—and privacy and security support—but it's actually been very easy to do that. We have open hours for folks that we want to help, but we're obviously not reaching as far as we can. For me, marketing is like an alien planet. My background is really privacy and security. I think that's the challenge I've never faced before. And definitely the hardest one from my end.

Rebecca: We've had some really successful programs. We ran March for Science last year in Spokane. It was great. It was kind of a last minute thing. We came in to help as the new parent organization, and it was super successful. We had a huge turnout but that was one event. A one-day thing. And, then we've had other one-day events that have been really successful. But then our recurring workshops aren’t even an hour and we have low turnout. We haven't unlocked that piece yet.

Since moving online because of the pandemic, we've seen higher participation in our workshops, and I feel like we're going to have higher participation across the board. So, we're working to transition everything. Next year when we restart some of our year-long programs, they'll be online or a majority online. Maybe part of our problem is that Spokane is a little different and folks have different priorities, but attending something from home, where they don't have to worry about travel or parking, I think that kind of helps avoid it and it's less of a dent in their day. I'm really hopeful that this actually can be a really positive thing for our organization. and that it also expands our reach outside of Spokane. Anyone can participate. Which is really cool because it helps broaden our reach.

Are there any other partnerships in your area that you’ve found to be effective partnerships?

Rebecca: Emilie’s been working with Volunteers of America.

Emilie: Yes. With Crosswalk. We teach teenagers about privacy and security. Online privacy and security. We've even done some introductory cryptography stuff. I'm very big on making sure that it's something fun. It’s a puzzle. We actually use some of EFF’s crypto tools for that. At the end of the workshop I told our participants ‘did you know that crypto is math and you just did math?’ They thought it was really fun and really cool. For kids that are maybe told that they're not good at math, or are uncomfortable with the idea of math, after that they realize that there's all sorts of ways to look at math. That's a big partnership for us.

Rebecca: There's another nonprofit in Spokane, that is more of a general tech nonprofit called Inland Northwest Technologists (INT). Our original Vice President came from that organization. He had brought to Spokane, with INT, this event called Code in the Dark. The last two times that event has been held in Spokane, it's been a partnership between that organization and ours. We bring in more of a diversity, and really work to help and make sure it’s an inclusive space. The first few years they ran it, it was nearly all men that were participating. Only men were in the top three winners. October of last year, the last time we held it, was the first time we had a woman win the competition. It was amazing.

We have been trying to work with the YWCA in Spokane, to help bring some of these security principles and privacy principles to their domestic violence survivors. Emily and I are very passionate about that and we want to be supporting this group of our community. We know the YWCA has been very busy. Just in general. So getting the momentum to really get that partnership off the ground has been a little slow. We're still hopeful. We're not going to give up on it anytime soon.

Emilie: We are already available for service for survivors. When we have our open office hours on Saturdays we are ready to accept survivors. We have a clinical approach to detect compromise. So, we can accept anyone that is in that situation and help them navigate their technology or help them navigate compromises or any kind of stalkerware, spyware. We are ready to do that already.

I think switching to online has been wonderful for certain aspects of what we offer. The workshops are available to a larger population, and more accessible in some ways. My only concern is office hours. We would typically do them downtown at the Spokane Library. This also gave us the opportunity to help homeless folks. We had a few people come in that don't have a computer at home. Don't have a home. How do you make sure that you're helping that population? So that’s something that, when things start to open up, we'll definitely want to make sure that we're not overlooking certain segments of the population that we might be able to help. We said we're going to focus on being very online but not 100% online, because we don't want to miss those folks that we might be able to better serve that way.

No two communities are exactly the same. That’s one of the reasons it��s so critical to have groups like Future Ada that are rooted in and can adapt to the needs of their city or town. What are you finding are the core needs of your community? Is it different from what your original expectations were?

Rebecca: My original intention was really limited. The organization was focused on gender diversity. I thought we would just focus in on that. What I've found is you can't really solve that problem without taking an intersectional approach. If you care about women in tech, then great, you're gonna need to have an inclusive environment. Hey, you know what? That also helps all these other people. So, really, focusing on shifting our mindset to be inclusive and approachable really helps everybody. That's been kind of a shift for me that I guess I was a little surprised with, but I'm really happy that we've made this turn. I'm also learning how many people in our community could use more basic support. Not necessarily learning how to program, but ‘how do I fix this on my browser?’ Really turning folks from being afraid of technology to helping them feel that they can do this. That's been a little surprising to me, but I'm really happy that that's something that we can help with. Wherever the community is, that's where we want to be to help lift everybody up.

What is Future Ada’s decision-making process like? What are the voices that are involved? How do you work together to come to a shared path?

Rebecca: We have different committees. Anything security or privacy related, Emilie is in charge of that. So, anything she says we're probably just gonna back it. We have our career mentoring committee. One of our other board members is responsible for that. It’s the same thing, whoever is responsible for a committee we've entrusted them with leading that and reporting back anything that seems more pivotal or in need of a larger decision. But, generally speaking we meet once a month as a board, and we discuss things on a regular basis. I think we're all pretty much in alignment. We're also still a really small group, board wise, and our committees are still pretty small. Once we get bigger we're gonna need a more formal process, but at the moment we're all pretty well in sync, I think. Emilie, what do you think?

Emilie: I was smiling when nash asked that question, because I was like ‘how do we come to decisions?’ Well, first we share all of our cats and cat videos during our meeting. And once we've done that, then we start really having these discussions. But what I like is that everyone is very very receptive and generally considers everyone's point of view and opinion really well. It's been a really nice dynamic, and I think it has a lot to do with, you know, starting the meeting off with cat memes and showing off our real cats, if we can. It makes a big difference.

Future Ada’s work to lift up and support Spokane women in STEAM has extended far beyond their local area, while still being focused on the needs of their own community. As members of the Electronic Frontier Alliance they have been instrumental in contributing to the development of related work for allied groups throughout the U.S.

If you are a member of a community or student-led group in your area working to protect digital security, free expression, privacy, creativity and access to knowledge, consider joining the Electronic Frontier Alliance.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/3aCcg3R

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN NOTHING

Everyone in the sciences, true collaboration seems to be as bad for startups as too much time, so we hope these will be useful to let two people edit the same document, for example, started angel investing about a year after me, and he never tried to turn it on to know it would be even cheaper today. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a good job. You can see the same program written in two languages, and one that would have been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were parts of the world. Debugging, I was taught in college that there were plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing. One way to tell how good they are, because it's no worse than lots of others. The three most prominent people I know personally, but it can be updated without confusing the users. Viaweb, they asked me what I do, I look them straight in the eye and say I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp. And yet, financially at least, there is probably at most one merchant, could probably be hushed up, and in particular that their parents didn't think were important.

I doubt the average Viaweb user ever saw a bug. This recession may be different. But it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. Perhaps one day computer science will, like Yugoslavia. In 1980, it was Stripe. The answer is the fifth counterintuitive point: you can't manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is. Don't companies realize this is a valid approach. We were terrified of starting a startup. Now let's talk about how not to die. If the world had a single, autocratic government, the labels and studios have put themselves in the foot this way—usually, I think this is generally a good idea in the first Altair, and front panel switches, and you'd get that fraction of big hits. If the company raises more money later, the new investor will take a chunk of the company.

In hacking, this can literally mean saving up bugs. But if you make a point of packing? It's not that hard to do it. This time the number of temptations around you. During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they haven't followed it to its conclusion. Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they're probably better at detecting bullshit than you are. And through a combination of shyness and laziness. There is a point where I'll do without books. I never know who to use.

Object code? Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with something plausible-sounding on the fly. Arbitrarily declaring such a border would have constrained our design choices. The stories about sleeping under desks usually end: then at last we shipped it and we all went home and slept for a week. Notice all this time I've been talking about the designer. At Viaweb, as at many software companies, especially at the beginning, have periods where the developers slept under their desks and so on. My mother doesn't really need a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more work. Of course some problems inherently have this character. I wrong.

Our policy of fixing bugs on the fly. They use different words, certainly. No one uses pen as a verb in spoken English. It's not surprising that after being trained for their whole lives to play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a startup is just a matter of personal preference. You may have heard that quote about luck consisting of opportunity meeting preparation. The same is true for funding. I've never liked this question.

You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two founders was still in grad school and your startup fails, you fail. This is an obvious win for collaborative applications, but they're just good enough. And this problem is exacerbated by having few peers. Not merely hardware, but software too. Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with something plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of small, inexpensive computers before the Mac. It's not surprising that after being trained for their whole lives to play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never allow yourself to do a good job. When you negotiate terms with a startup, we never anticipated that founders would grow successful startups on nothing more than filling out a brief form the briefer the better. Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor. I know, one thing they have in common is that they're cheaper to produce.

And I think the same thing. Universities and research labs continue to judge hackers by publications? The problem is not finding startups, exactly, but finding a stream of reasonably high quality ones. Of all the great programmers I can think with noise. The best we can hope for is that when we interview a group and find ourselves thinking they seem like good founders, but what happens when they die, because they only have themselves to be mad at. At its best, it's creating the spec—though it turns out to be the right answer by successive approximations. When you negotiate terms with a startup, then if the startup fails, you can probably make yourself smart too. Starting a startup will make it big is not merely the curse of Y Combinator but part of its raison d'etre. You have to decide what to do next.

Why should anyone care about a startup making it really big is not simply a constant fraction of the probability that those 19 year olds who aren't even sure what they want. Bill Gates knows this. But that was just an artifact of the way desktop software had to approve or even know about a release. I can make up all sorts of strange consequences. Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. The problem is, if you're not a hacker, you can't tell who the good hackers are practically self-managing. Remember, too, that languages are not primarily a form for finished programs, but something that programs have to be profitable, raise more money, or go out of their way to make viewers watch TV synchronously instead of watching recorded shows when it suited them.

[dorcasrempel]

Finding the true potential of algorithms

Each semester, Associate Professor Virginia Vassilevska Williams tries to impart one fundamental lesson to her computer-science undergraduates: Math is the foundation of everything.

Often, students come into Williams’ class, 6.006 (Introduction to Algorithms), wanting to dive into advanced programming that power the latest, greatest computing techniques. Her lessons instead focus on how algorithms are designed around core mathematical models and concepts.  

“When taking an algorithms class, many students expect to program a lot and perhaps use deep learning, but it’s very mathematical and has very little programming,” says Williams, who recently earned tenure in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We don’t have much time together in class (only two hours a week), but I hope in that time they get to see a little of the beauty of math — because math allows you to see how and why everything works together. It really is a beautiful thing.”

Williams’ life is very much shaped by math. As a child of two mathematician parents, she fell in love with the subject early on. But even though she excelled in the subject, her high school classes focused on German, writing, and biology. Returning to her first love in college and beyond, she applied her math skills to make waves in computer science.

In highly influential work, Williams in 2012 improved an algorithm for “matrix multiplication” — a fundamental operation across computer science — that was thought to be the fastest iteration for 24 years. Years later, she co-founded an emerging field called “fine-grained complexity,” which seeks to explain, in part, how fast certain algorithms can solve various problems.

In matrix multiplication, her work has now shifted slightly to showing that existing techniques “cannot do better,” she says. “We couldn’t improve the performance of our own algorithms anymore, so we came up with ways to explain why we couldn’t and why other methods can’t improve the performance either.”

Winding path to math

Growing up in Sofia, Bulgaria, Williams loved math and was a gifted student. But her parents often reminded her the mathematician’s life wasn’t exactly glamorous —especially when trying to find faculty gigs in the same area for two people. They sometimes traveled where work took them.

That included a brief odyssey around the U.S. as a child. The first stop was Laramie, Wyoming. Her parents were visiting professors at the University of Wyoming, while Williams initially struggled through fourth grade because of the language barrier. “I didn’t really speak English, and was thrown into this school. My brother and I learned English watching the Disney channel, which was pretty fun,” says Williams, who today speaks Bulgarian, English, German, and some Russian.

The next stop was Los Angeles — right around the time of the Rodney King riots. “The house on the other side of our street was set on fire,” Williams recalls. “Those were some very strange memories of L.A.”

Returning to Bulgaria after two years, Williams decided to “explore her options” outside math by enrolling in the German Language High School in Sofia, the country’s top high school at the time, where she studied the German language, literature, history, and other humanities subjects. But, when it came to applying to colleges, she could never shake her first love. “I really tried to like the humanities, and what I learned is very helpful to me nowadays. But those subjects were very hard for me. My brain just doesn’t work that way,” she says. “I went back to what I like.”

Transfixed by algorithms

In 1999, Williams enrolled in Caltech. In her sophomore year, she became smitten by an exciting new field: computer science. “I took my first programming course, and I loved it,” she says.

She became transfixed by matrix multiplication algorithms, which have some heavy-duty math at their core. These algorithms compute multiple arrays of numbers corresponding to some data and output a single combined matrix of some target values. Applications are wide-ranging, including computer graphics, product design, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology.

As a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and beyond, she published numerous papers, on topics such as developing fast matrix multiplication algorithms in special algebraic structures, with applications including flight scheduling and network routing. After earning her PhD, she took on a series of postdoc and researcher positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University, where she landed a faculty position in 2013 teaching courses on algorithms.

In 2012, she developed a new algorithm that was faster than the Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm, which had reigned supreme in matrix multiplication since the 1980s. Williams’ method reduced the number of steps required to multiply matrices. Her algorithm is only slightly slower than the current record-holder.

Dealing with complexity

Between 2010 and 2015, Williams and her husband, Ryan Williams, who is also an MIT professor, became main founders of “fine-grained complexity.” The older field of “computational complexity” finds provably efficient algorithms and algorithms that are probably inefficient, based on some threshold of computational steps they take to solve a problem.

Fine-grained complexity groups problems together by computational equivalence to better prove if algorithms are truly optimal or not. For instance, two problems may appear very different in what they solve and how many steps algorithms take to solve them. But fine-grained complexity shows such problems are secretly the same. Therefore, if an algorithm exists for one problem that uses fewer steps, then there must exist an algorithm for the other problem that uses fewer steps, and vice versa. On the flip side, if there exists a provably optimal algorithm for one problem, then all equivalent problems must have optimal algorithms. If someone ever finds a much faster algorithm for one problem, all the equivalent problems can be solved faster.

Since co-launching the field, “it’s ballooned,” Williams says. “For most theoretical computer science conferences, you can now submit your paper under the heading ‘fine-grained complexity.’”

In 2017, Williams came to MIT, where she says she has found impassioned, likeminded researchers. Many graduate students and colleagues, for instance, are working in topics related to fine-grained complexity. In turn, her students have introduced her to other subjects, such as cryptography, where she’s now introducing ideas from fine-grained complexity.

She also sometimes studies “computational social choice,” a field that caught her eye during graduate school. Her work focuses on examining the computational complexity needed to rig sports games, voting schemes, and other systems where competitors are placed in paired brackets. If someone knows, for instance, which player will win in paired match-ups, a tournament organizer can place all players in specific positions in the initial seeding to ensure a certain player wins it all.

Simulating all the possible combinations to rig these schemes can be very computationally complex. But Williams, an avid tennis player, authored a 2010 paper that found it’s fairly simple to rig a single-elimination tournament so a certain player wins, depending on accurate predictions for match-up winners and other factors.

This year she co-wrote a paper that showed a tournament organizer could arrange an initial seeding and bribe certain top players — within a specific budget — to ensure a favorite player wins the tournament. “When I need a break from my usual work, I work in this field,” Williams says. “It’s a fun change of pace.”

Thanks to the ubiquity of computing today, Williams’ graduate students often enter her classroom far more experienced in computer science than she was at their age. But to help steer them down a distinct path, she draws inspiration from her own college experiences, getting hooked on specific topics she still pursues today.

“In order to do good research, you have to obsess over a problem,” Williams says. “I want them to find something in my course they can obsess over.”

Finding the true potential of algorithms syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Shane White (u/guyfromfargo) of The Match Artist, a brand that makes online dating photography service.Some stats:Product: Online dating photography service.Revenue/mo: $5,200Started: January 2018Location: AustinFounders: 2Employees: 0Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hi everyone, my name is Shane and I’m the founder of The Match Artist. We help singles take amazing pictures for their online dating profiles. Our flagship product is the 3 hour Executive shoot, which gets you about 100 different photos in 7 different settings.Most importantly, this package comes with an e-mail course and one-on-one coaching so you can take better photos in the future. Many people (especially guys) are horrible at taking pictures. The Match Artist teaches you how to look at the camera, and how to show your most attractive and authentic self. This empowers you to take better photos, even after the shoot is over.The Match Artist is More Than a Typical Photography CompanyIn addition to coaching individuals, The Match Artist has pioneered a whole different genre of photography. Our pictures are specifically tailored to make our clients look better online. We work with our clients to figure out exactly who they are, and we shoot them doing things they would be doing in their day-to-day life.We want potential matches to understand who you are and what you do without having to read your bio. This ensures that our clients not only match with more people but also match with singles who are a good fit for them. We dive deep into who our clients are and take candid photos of them doing the things they enjoy.We started this business in January 2018, and we have helped over 100 singles take pictures for their profile. We usually average between $5,000- $6,000 a month in revenue.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I have always been an entrepreneur. When I was in high school, I wanted to start my own business, so I took to one thing that I knew how to do- mow lawns.Afterward, while I was in college, I started a mobile DJ business, which was a great way to earn some extra cash in college. After graduating from NDSU with a degree in Computer Science, I took a full-time job working as a software developer. While working as a developer, I really wanted to start a SaaS Company, which translates to “Software as a Service”, so I did just that. I created Midwest Streams - Simple Funeral Webcasting, which helps funeral directors webcast their funerals.I ended up spending too many hours working on Midwest Streams while I was at my software developer job, so my employer fired me. (If you are reading this, I really am sorry!) This happened in February of 2014, and Midwest Streams was only making $400 a month. I decided not to go back to work and try my hardest to grow my company. I had some savings, but burnt through it pretty quick, as it’s really hard to survive with only $400 a month.Unfortunately, that year, I did not have much success with growing Midwest Streams. Driven by the pure need to survive, I went back to my tiny DJ company and did anything I could to get a gig or two so I could pay my rent. It worked! I got my DJ company doing about $80k a year in revenue, which allowed me to live comfortably and focus more on my SaaS.Around that same time, I was a single male in his 20s trying to learn the ropes of online dating. It was surprisingly challenging. I was doing fine with offline dating, but online dating seemed almost impossible. Once someone swiped right on me, I was able to have a conversation and set up a date, but my main problem was that for every 100 girls I swiped right on, only 1 or 2 matched with me. You can see my Tinder profile pictures below.imageimageIt’s cringy to look back at these pictures, but at the time I thought these were okay photos. I did what every other single guy does- we go to our Facebook and choose the most recent photos, even if they are terrible.It was at this same time that I met Nick, a local wedding photographer. We eventually became good friends over our mutual interest in playing music. One night while just messing around, he took some photos of me.Even though it was super casual and just friends goofing around, those photos were the best photos that were ever taken of me. So I uploaded one of the photos to Tinder, and almost instantly a lot more girls were swiping right on me. So I called Nick and asked if we could do a real photo-shoot. Except this wasn’t going to be your typical head-shot session.I wanted photos showing off who I was to highlight that I’m an interesting person. So, I planned a fun day full of activities I enjoyed and had Nick follow me around with his camera.imageimageThese photos were a complete game changer! I was matching with about half the girls that I was swiping on. I had a lot of fun dating for about two years while I was still hacking away on my SaaS. However, in May of 2017, I went on my last first date. I met my wonderful girlfriend, Molly.imageFinally, two years after Nick took those photos of me, I called him up and told him I wanted to start a business that is 100% tailored to taking photos of singles. He agreed, and my girlfriend Molly came up with the name, “The Match Artist”.imageTake us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Nick and I spent about four months perfecting the idea of what we wanted The Match Artist to represent before doing our first shoot.There are thousands of photographers in the world, and it was vital that we weren’t just another photography company. This is where we started pioneering a different genre of photography. We designed the entire process to make sure our customers look their best on their dating profiles. We did countless hours of research on what profiles do best online, and we also figured out how to make people who are bad at taking photos to take better photos.imageDescribe the process of launching the business.Launching The Match Artist was fairly simple. I think a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs overthink this part; the most important thing is to just do it. Most people think your launch is going to be this huge thing, and just overnight you’re going to have a ton of customers. This usually isn’t the case. I find it best to come up with a way to service a small handful of customers and grow from there. After we had an idea of what the final service would look like, we rented an Airbnb for the weekend and posted on many different singles groups that we were offering a free photo-shoot. We had about 10 people take us up on the offer and that’s how we jump-started our business.imageFrom there we got a few recommendations, and most importantly we got a bunch of reviews to help legitimize our business. Another huge benefit of our initial shoot was that it allowed us to reach back out to these clients to ensure that our style of photography was actually helping them get better results online.We learned so much from that weekend packed with photo-shoots. While Nick was taking photos, I was scribbling away on a notepad taking notes. We spent the next two months making our process the best it could be. We finally launched about a month later and in April 2018 The Match Artist had its first paying customer.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?We have tried all sorts of different techniques to get more customers through the door. After a lot of testing, we have decided that our main focus on acquiring new customers is SEO. We have put a lot of effort into ensuring that we rank number 1 for “Online Dating Photographer” in the specific cities that we service.We are always trying new techniques to get more customers to our website, but once someone fills out the contact form, our funnel is completely optimized. You can see our workflow here.If you would like to see the automation in action, I created a mock funnel that readers of Starter Story can go through here.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?Today, The Match Artist is doing great! Every month we are slightly increasing our bookings. Nick has gone completely full time running the business. We have a steady 5k a month in revenue and are finally at the point where we are confident with our pricing and our product. We plan on doubling down and running huge paid ad campaigns in the next few months.We are also planning on launching a “Behind the Scenes” YouTube channel. I love the entrepreneurship community and plan on sharing with other entrepreneurs our journey as we grow this from a small side project into a serious business with 6-7 figures in profit.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?One thing I learned along the way is that once you have product-market fit you should focus 100% of your energy into building trust with your potential clients.People may want to use our services, but we need to make sure that they trust us in the process. Our huge value proposition is “Go on better dates,” and, of course, everyone wants to go on better dates, but they just don’t trust that by forking over their Credit Card and allowing us to take their pictures they will actually go on better dates. This is why everything from our website to our emails is focused on gaining the trust of our customers.Most importantly, as an entrepreneur, you better be prepared to live up to that promise. I’m 100% committed to ensuring that every single one of our clients actually does go on better dates with their new pictures.Another thing I learned was to not automate too early. As a programmer, I love setting up all these complex tools and workflows to optimize my business. However, in the early days, I spent way too much time automating things. Before we even had our first customer, I had a whole automation system setup to auto-send emails, and update our CRM. This was cool, but we quickly changed many things in our business. That’s the downside of automation; it makes changing things much harder. If I were to do it all over again, I would have done everything manually until I had at least a year of The Match Artist under my belt.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Lucid Chart - Lucid Chart is how we plan everything. All of our processes, and automation is completely mapped out in this program.ButterCMS - This is a newer tool that we are bringing on to our stack. We use ButterCMS to power our website. I chose Butter because I wanted to have 100% control over how my website is handled. This tool allows us to write our website in our favorite programming language but still allows our content writers to publish content with ease. This tool also allows us to make a webpage for each client to show information specific to their photo session.Book Like a Boss - This is our appointment booking software. This is how we manage all clients to easily book a call with us.Trello - Using Trello we are able to ensure every client gets a personalized experience. We automatically create cards for every client once someone books a photoshoot. Each card has all the tasks needed to ensure their photoshoot is a success.GSuite - Hands down the best email tool on the market. I have used Outlook and Zoho; GSuite is so much easier to use.Hubspot - Hubspot makes keeping track of our clients a breeze. I’m a big fan of their email scheduling options. So many times someone will not want to pull the trigger on a photoshoot and tells us to reach back out in a few months. With Hubspot, I can compose the followup email, and schedule it to send in a few months.Pixieset - This is our photo gallery software. This is how we deliver all of our photos to our clients.Zapier - Zapier is the glue that holds our entire business together. We use a lot of tools, and all of them are integrated into harmony with Zapier. This is probably my favorite tool out of the entire stack.Typeform - Another favorite tool, Typeform, allows us to collect information from our customers and potential customers. Recently we connected it to Stripe and this is how we take payments. If you are curious about what this looks like you can check it out here.Drip - Drip is our email marketing provider. We chose Drip over Mailchimp because it really allows us to deeply personalize all of our emails. I believe that our customers should never have to give us the same information twice. Using Drip, I can auto-populate all email links to have custom URL parameters so the tools don’t need to ask for their name or email again.Stripe - Every single payment we take is through Stripe. We usually do this through Typeform. We also integrated Stripe directly with our website so customers can pay there as well.Bonjoro - Everything we do at The Match Artist is extremely personalized. This allows me to send good luck videos to our clients on the morning of their shoot.Upwork - Anytime I need help with branding or programming, I turn to Upwork to hire a freelancer to help us out. Our entire branding was done from someone that we hired off of Upwork.Canva - I am not a designer. However, Canva allows me to easily create digital design assets that look professional. I’d highly recommend using Canva for anyone who isn’t a designer.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Start Small, Stay Small. I’m also a big fan of the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us. This book and podcast really focus on bootstrapping a business. I’m not a big fan of raising a big investment round before even having a product, so pretty much all of my books and podcasts focus on entrepreneurship without investment.For marketing, I’m a big fan of the book Traction. This has helped me focus on how The Match Artist should spend its time marketing.Finally, I do want to mention one super influential talk I went to. When I was at NDSU, one of the founders from a local pizza shop called “Rhombus Guys” came in and spoke to our entrepreneurship group. He left me with a quote, “In business, you can only compete on two things, price or being the best, and it’s a hell of a lot more fun to compete on being the best.” That simple quote has really shaped who I became as an entrepreneur. We are quite a bit more expensive than our competitors, however, our steeper price tag is worth it because we have spent the last two years ensuring we are the best.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Your first business should have a business model that allows it to be profitable with just 10 customers. So many first time entrepreneurs have these grand next facebook type of business ideas. This is a horrible first business to start. You should start with something small, and have a rock-solid plan of getting your first 10 customers.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?The Match Artist is hiring extremely talented photographers in major cities across the U.S.Where can we go to learn more?www.thematchartist.comFacebook: TheMatchArtistInstagram: thematchartistIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

[aurelliocheek]

25 years of Frontier Developments

The 25 year tale of Britain’s most ambitious indie.

If there’s one thing that Jonny Watts has learned during more than two decades at Frontier Developments, it’s that the act of making the games is just half of the equation. As chief creative officer and longtime stalwart of one of the UK’s most inventive and ambitious studios, Watts has been at the forefront of many its most famous titles – from classics like Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and LostWinds, to its most recent successes: Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution. But as he explains, the secret to Frontier’s success as a fully independent, self-publishing development house required the whole team to analyse, study and adapt to the changing industry in order to become the success it is today.

Based in the heart of leafy Cambridge, England, Frontier is one of the most eclectic video game studios in the development business, not just in the UK but the world over. Celebrating its momentous quarter century milestone this year, Frontier‘s games have featured everything from cute interactive animals to scientifically accurate black holes; death-defying theme park rides, to authentic recreations of prehistoric lizards. Now with around 30 fully fledged titles under its age-worn belt, this is a truly veteran studio, but one that exudes a passion and a verve that belies its age.

Perhaps more importantly, there’s an inherent intelligence to Frontier that comes across in its games. There‘s an artful comprehension for how interactive experiences need to make players feel; a mechanical understanding of the detail and depth required to create specific niche interest titles; and an operational rigour that allowed the studio to pinpoint how it wants to communicate with and sell to its players. This last bit, crucially, is what has made Frontier Developments such a shining case study for the many benefits of studio independence.

The rise to indie darling was never an overnight transition; in many ways, it was 25 years in the making.

Elite Dangerous, Frontier’s massively multiplayer space epic let’s players take control of their own starship. They can fight, explore and travel throughout an expansive cutthroat galaxy, consisting of more than 400 billion star systems.

The DNA of a startup For Watts himself, the game development dream begun back in 1987, when he would run home from school, leap up the stairs to his bedroom and get to work coding games on his own personal computer. Naturally, his mum didn’t approve of Watts’ creative flights of fancy, insisting there was no financial future in playing games. At the time, she was largely right, but little did she know that it wasn’t playing games that Watts ever dreamed of turning into a feasible profession – it was making them. “I got just as much enjoyment destructing how games worked, learning how to code, learning how to do art,” he says.

Watts did, despite his initial childhood dreams, follow his mum’s wise advice in the latter half of his education – at least through university, where he studied a zoology degree. He was still creating games while studying, though. It was something he could never escape from, and which sustained his creativity through his university career until he pivoted to study a masters in computer science. Back in those days, this was the main academic currency if you wanted to be a video game developer – there were far fewer routes into the industry then, so Watts capitalised on his opportunities where he could.

As an alumnus, he went almost directly to development, firstly at the fellow Cambridge studio, Sensible Software. “[They] were in the same location as where Frontier was founded,” he says, “they were just north of Cambridge and we were south of Cambridge. It’s a development hub, so we all knew about each other, and I’d known about David [Braben, Frontier’s legendary founder] from when I first got my Spectrum, playing Elite on it. Everyone at our age was influenced by that game but I was actually more influenced by another Braben game called Zarch. It was a polygon game but it had real-time particles, light source shading, real-time generated shadows. It was an absolute technical tour de force, so much so that it influenced me to do my masters in computer science, because I was just so interested in graphical programming.”

Little did Watts know that, only several years after he left university he would begin working with his development hero. He reminisces about the earliest days of the studio‘s history, when the studio was based out of a farm in the Cambridgeshire countryside with just ten staff to its name. “My first memory was going through the door – it was all open plan – and seeing David with a microphone doing chicken sounds for some of the proto sound effects in Dog’s Life,” he says, laughing. Braben’s chicken impression was just for the placeholders, but there’s no doubt it’s uncanny. “You saw a very human side to a very friendly company,” Watts continues. “It was very technologically advanced, but if something needed doing we’d all muck in.”

The expansion from ten staff to now over 400 has taken many years, but the studio still retains the DNA of that startup. Elite, co-developed by David Braben and Ian Bell, along with Zarch and Virus were created before Braben founded Frontier Developments. The studio was born out of a desire to make a wider range of games and to make them faster, rather than spend five or six years in a single development cycle. Establishing Frontier allowed Braben to hire like-minded individuals that brought ideas to the table, in order to create a collaborative space where, as Watts puts it, “the egos are left at the door”.

Fast forward 25 years and Watts is still sat just a short way from Braben’s desk at Frontier’s brand new office premises – a pristine multi-level labyrinth of glass and steel that houses the 400+ strong team, all of which are working on their own individual projects. From the talented group still developing updates and expansions for Elite Dangerous, to the developers that are still adding content and new ideas to Jurassic World Evolution. Frontier continues to update its existing games heavily with new ideas and content, but that’s not to say it isn’t busy at work on future unannounced projects that span far into the future. What‘s perhaps most impressive is that the team has retained the spark and soul that made it such a brilliant upstart back in the early nineties.

The highly acclaimed Planet Coaster gives players limitless freedom to build rides and scenery piece by piece, with advanced management simulation gameplay and a connected global village where everyone can share in the creativity of players around the world.

Fired up by new technologies It must’ve been an alien prospect to think about back in 1994, when Braben and his team were hard at work in their tiny studio on a Cambridgeshire farm. But the technological power of Elite and its resounding popularity paved the way for a studio that relied on powerful, advanced proprietary technology to create some of the most believable worlds in video games. “David is a man who, along with Ian Bell, built an entire galaxy on the comparably unpowered BBC Micro, before creating Zarch for the Acorn Archimedes,” Watts says. “It wasn’t a big gaming machine, at all, but it fascinated him because of how powerful it was and what he could do with it. He did similar with Darxide for the 32x, which wasn‘t really well-supported by third parties but he looked at the technology and thought ‘I bet I can do some really crazy stuff with the technology in here’ Sure enough, it‘s one of the most technically advanced games on 32x.”

You can trace this trend all the way through Frontier’s history – instances where the company just saw an exciting piece of new technology and got fired up about it, using the bleeding edge advancements in hardware to enhance the game experience. And not just doing it for visual‘s sake, but learning how to leverage the machines to make the experience even more visceral, real, believable and authentic. With time the games machines themselves have, of course, become more advanced, with storage space and memory reading capacity increasing to the point where games can render enormous 3D environments, improve graphical fidelity to resolutions like 4K, not to mention feature more voice work, deeper simulations and much more. Features like shadow technology all sound like obvious and even boring, unimpressive staples of modern games nowadays, but the team at Frontier has been one of those driving this technology forward for 25 years, always revolutionising and always innovating.

A galaxy like no other Elite Dangerous is perhaps the purest example of this, taking the core components established with the original Elite and using Frontier’s newly expanded, talented team to build a modern 1:1 recreation of the entire Milky Way galaxy. It is, at its very core, a natural evolution of the game created in 1984, its enormous scale and detail made technically possible by the many advancements that Frontier has made since then. At the heart of it is a team who bring untold levels of talent to the process.

“The guys who did the stellar forge – the way we calculate the galaxies from real scientific data – one has a PhD in astrophysics, and one did astronomy in university,” Watts says. “There’s maybe five people in the whole country, in the world, who could do that, who have the strange crossover between a degree in astrophysics and a degree in computer programming, an interest in video games, and an interest in Elite. And of course David has his Cambridge science degree. A lot of us have science backgrounds. We’re, at worst, amateur enthusiasts. At best we’re actually pretty clued up people who have an absolute passion for the subjects we work on. We’re still reading, researching, looking at articles, stimulated by it.”

Elite Dangerous is a wonderful melding of passion and intelligence, and one of the the largest video game worlds ever created. It boasts a scale unlike few others, but the magic of Frontier is that there is depth and detail to match the scale. Not only can you gawp at the macro features of the game; faster-than-light travelling across the galaxy, zipping close to distant stars, landing in space stations and rovering around the rugged, rocky surface of exoplanets; you can also invest hundreds if not thousands of hours into role-playing in an interconnected universe that rewards your intelligence. Players can communicate, trade and fight with one another; team up and explore distant star systems; invest and sell trading goods in an ever changing economic world; create clans that fight it out for territorial control of the many segments of this galactic world. There is politics, economics and real struggle in this universe. It’s not just huge – it’s believable. “It feels very real,” Watts says, “and when you’re in it you feel very vulnerable.”

Authenticity and real science The two other of Frontier’s most recent games – Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution – follow similar trends, creating worlds that are believable despite being completely different to galaxy sized space role-playing games. Planet Coaster revels in a beautiful, charming and gentle aesthetic that welcomes you into its colourful simulations and lets you spend dozens of hours creating your dream theme parks. But hidden under the hood are complex codes and authentic simulations all based on the real life flow systems utilised in actual theme parks. Watts himself is an avid theme park enthusiast, regularly visiting parks across the UK and beyond to get his roller coaster thrills with his two daughters, and it’s an intense passion that clearly comes through in the finished games.

“My favourite theme park is – and this is really hard – Disneyland,” Watts says, explaining how the team had the chance to build a 1:1 recreation of the original Disneyland, in Anaheim, which happens to be the only theme park Walt Disney saw before his death. It was re-created for Disneyland Adventures and Frontier captured the sights and sounds of this original landmark down to the most minute of idiosyncrasies. “We were so committed to authenticity. When you feature a Disney princess from the 60s or 70s we had to use, where possible, the original stars. That kind of detail really did transport you into that magical world.”

“Disneyland is a strange place because once you go there, all your troubles just evaporate. I went there with my 18 and 20 year-old daughters and I‘m suddenly a dad again rather than the person giving them a lift back from the pub or something,” he says. “It‘s a wonderful place. And I really like the theming in parks. It transports me to another world. Again, it goes back full circle to another believable world.”

This hidden authenticity enforces the realism and believability of Planet Coaster, despite the otherwise cartoon looks. It’s an approach that allows Frontier’s game to further stand the test of time simply because the foundations themselves are built on real science. It’s not surface entertainment that relies entirely on the graphics or the characters, instead utilising the real world information that’s baked into the very code itself.

In Jurassic World Evolution players take charge of operations on the legendary islands of the Muertes archipelago and bring the wonder, majesty and danger of dinosaurs to life.

Dinosaurs and Kinect experiments As for Jurassic World Evolution, the real life science is less concrete simply because of the 65 million year old nature of the creatures in question, but it’s “unbelievably authentic to the films,” Watts says. “We’re using the original actors, the things that have been derived from the films and the books. There’s actually a bit of zoology in there; the genetics, going back to my zoology degree. We use science and reality and authenticity to make things believable. We have so much accuracy in our games, and everything we do we want to have this grounding. We had a guy called Dr Jack Horner, and he was a consultant paleontologist on the Jurassic films back in the day, actually working with Michael Crichton. We asked him to come over [to talk about the game] and I like to think he didn’t do it just because of the paycheque, but because he saw that we had a passion, and an intelligence, and a dedication to doing these things.”

Frontier doesn’t just limit that adventurous and authentic approach to scientific accuracy to its software. Many of its hardware experiments have similar traits, including the Kinect experiments that it embarked on in the mid noughties with the Xbox 360, when the team was still partnered with publisher Microsoft. What makes this all fundamentally possible is Cobra, the studio’s own game engine, which it has been consistently and steadily updating for many years. Rich Newbold has been the Executive Producer at Frontier for a while now, joining over 10 years ago. “Cobra is constantly evolving and growing,” he says. “It has a dedicated code team working on improving it as well as us generating new technology for each game and merging that into it. On Kinectimals, we developed technology to improve our animation system to allow a more usable way to use state machines and logic on a character. This then got developed more and more with Kinect Disneyland Adventures and again with Zoo Tycoon, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution. The constant improvements to the render system for each release feeds back into Cobra and we then use that in the new projects. We‘re always looking to develop and re-use the core technologies across our projects. It’s a huge asset to have such a flexible engine in-house.”

The entire brief for Kinectimals was to create animals that look, sound and feel alive to the players. It was a challenge that Frontier relished as it had the chance to bring its creativity into even more physical environments, connecting cute animals on the screen with players in the real world. It hadn’t really been done before – at least not in such a mainstream way – and Frontier was the mastermind behind the code and tech that would give Kinectimals a real sense of life to the players.

“Even though [the animals] are beautifully cute, the AI behind them is super sophisticated,” Watts says. “There’s something like 500, 600, 700 animations on there, all reacting to make that animal feel alive.” The expertise the team built up animating the animals in A Dog’s Life proved beneficial for the work on Kinectimals. “I remember doing a Dog’s Life lecture at Bournemouth university,” Watts continues. “One of the students came up with a question – he said, ‘are those animals alive?’ A few seconds later I realised it was the first time he’d seen an animal on a computer game screen that was reacting in an organic, non-repetitive way. There’s a lot of attention to detail that stands the test of time.

“The thing I was most proud of was the subtle things that we did; the way you move your head, the way you move your body, the animal would react and position itself to you,” he continues. “If you didn‘t do anything, the animal would try and get your attention. It was always monitoring you. It was always trying to stimulate you to do something and that‘s what I was quite interesting in with Kinect – we can obviously do the clever stuff where you throw a ball [but] it’s what we can do behind the scenes which made those animals come alive. To be honest, it‘s what Kinect did the best; interpret what you could do behind the scenes. We also did something which I thought was really cool in Zoo Tycoon with Kinect. We wanted to do animal enrichment with chimpanzees. And what was really good is that you could move your face and move and blink and the chimpanzee would come up to the screen and mimic you. That‘s what they try doing in real life. What‘s even better is when it didn‘t quite work, you thought – and this is the illusion of game creation – that the chimpanzee was being a bit cheeky even though it might not have recognised it. That was really subtle. It was really interesting to see people properly interact with human natural movement with essentially what is an AI ability.”

With Kinectimals Frontier succeeded in creating virtual animals that felt, sounded and looked alive to players.

Military doctrine and a DIY approach The same too goes for VR, which the studio invested in heavily for Elite Dangerous. Again, earlier work stood the team in good stead – Frontier had already worked in secret on software for Microsoft’s Hololens. The goal was to create one of the most immersive virtual reality experiences available. In many ways it was the perfect fit – a beautiful, expansive world in which you remain stationary as a player, controlling a moving vehicle without having to move your own body. It dodges the usual problems associated with VR – namely, the gimmicky tacked-on movement controls that mean virtual reality shooters or sports games are nigh on impossible to get right. In Elite, you control your spaceship from the cockpit, but are treated to the immense scale and scope of a space game.

“If you launch in a Lakon ship – they‘re with the ones that have a glass bottom – you come out of the station and look down and you almost have a sense of vertigo,” Watts says. “When I‘ve really got the lights turned down, I almost feel like I‘m insignificant in the world and I‘m just trying to make my way. That was really cool.”

“The second thing from a combat point-of-view; in combat you have an amazing competitive advantage. That‘s why all the canopies are glass – because when you are in VR, if a spaceship goes over the top of your craft, you can move your head and look at them. This is military doctrine – in dogfighting, he who sees first wins and really the absolute premise is that we wanted to get dogfighting to be absolutely as visceral as possible and as accurate. What‘s really interesting is in space, if we were really being super accurate, in space you‘d be going so fast that dogfighting wouldn‘t [really work]. All the best space games mess around with speed to make it more akin to World War Two. There was quite a lot of research in combat, which facilitated the use of VR and that‘s why it‘s an amazing experience, because it‘s not just a mechanism to make you feel part of the world, it gives you a competitive advantage in a very large component of the game.”

Kickstarting Frontier’s success Frontier has always had a DIY approach to its development, typically finding and hiring the right people for the job – rollercoaster experts, astrophysicists and more. It’s created a studio that has a wonderful camaraderie that encourages collaboration, and which allows them to go all in on projects. However, it was the transition to being self-published and fully independent that allowed them to take those risks to the next level, making decisions based on what the studio as an entity wanted to embark on, and not being beholden to outside influences. Digital distribution was the catalyst that made all of that possible.

“In the old days, you release your cassette or your 3.5“ disk and never update it,” Watts says. “Maybe, just maybe, you‘d get another disk as a cover disk on a magazine to do a critical flaw but now we‘re distributing digitally and being independent, we can make decisions and keep telling more stories. It‘s fantastic.”

It’s generally regarded that Elite Dangerous was Frontier’s first real self-published game, but in fact it was LostWinds that paved the way for Frontier’s future. “The beautiful thing about Lost Winds is it‘s highly acclaimed, won awards, people really liked it,” Watts says. “It had a beautiful vibe but it was a game that we started and finished without any publisher involved. But publishers can be very helpful. When you make a game, I think there needs to be a little bit of antagonism like in The Beatles, you need someone to critique what you have done to make it better and not settle for second best. We had to fulfill both roles and be our own harshest critics.”

The happiness clearly inspired the team to push further towards full autonomy over their own destiny. Toward the end of 2012, the team unveiled the aforementioned Kickstarter program for Elite Dangerous, which was one of the most successful crowd-funding projects of the time. It propelled Frontier forward and gave them an answer to the question that Braben, Watts and the other senior team members had been asking themselves: is Elite still relevant? Does it still retain the popularity to be a big hit?

Fast-forward five or six years and it’s a model that Frontier adopts for all of its games. “It’s good from a profit point of view, but we also engage directly with players,” says Watts. “We know what they want and it’s an amazing partnership. One of the things that people say that when you self publish it’s so good because you can do what you want and haven’t got this external producer – when we had the Elite Dangerous kickstarter we had 20,000 external producers. They were our conscience. We had exactly the same goals, obviously different ways of getting to those goals, but they really stimulated us to do better. What was really good about it was that it was sort of a validation for our idea. It gave us such confidence to make the game that we all wanted.”

Elite Dangerous is continually evolving, adding new features, narrative and in-game content with each new season.

A clear vision for the future The transition itself was made possible by learning from their excellent working relationship with major publishers like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Frontier had always had a fantastic game-making ability from the beginning, but there’s a whole host of other things involved in releasing and selling a video game rather than just producing it on the creative side. Frontier learned a huge amount about maintaining quality, and all the nuances of how publishing works, from working with publishers in the decades prior. “We had such an amazing relationship that [publishers] were very open with us,” Watts says, “and we had insight into the other half of releasing a game. We spent thousands and thousands of hours understanding that and being exposed by these very gracious yet demanding publishers, and that really trained us.”

When the Elite Dangerous Kickstarter was launched, Frontier‘s publishing team was a team of no one. A few years later and that publishing team is over 35 people strong, complete with dedicated product managers, graphics artists, trailer editors, a dedicated community team and its own in-house PR and Marketing teams. The entire company approached publishing very seriously, and dedicated a lot of resources to making the publishing side of the business successful, ramping it up at such an incredible rate. Over the last 25 years the studio has gone from the Cambridgeshire farm, to a single space on the Science Park industrial park, to three individual offices on the Science Park, to its own space on the Science Park. It‘s remarkable.

“We‘re still really friendly with the people that we dealt with,” Watts says. “It‘s quite interesting that when we released Elite Dangerous on Xbox, it was like dealing with old friends again. Microsoft, Sony, whoever we work with knew that we were obviously super professional and hit our deadlines and our budgets, but our quality would always exceed. We exceeded it because we are so passionate about making games. In some way, it was never a development issue transitioning. Yes, we can develop games, but guess what: we can also sell them and we can communicate with our players, we can communicate with the world, we get our story out.”

“The relationships we have across every single component of what it takes to get a game out there has grown magnificently. We‘re a super professional company and I think we managed our transition so well on so many levels. Again, I just think that from where I am sitting, I think it‘s an absolute pleasure to be in the games industry. Between developers and publishers we all know how hard it is to make a game, we know how much passion we put into a game and we‘re all working together. It‘s just a really nice industry.”

As for the future, it looks very bright for Frontier. There’s still the passion and love for video games that existed 25 years ago, only now it’s distilled, straight from the makers themselves without any middle men. What you see is what you get, and it seeps into every aspect of the games – from development to PR and community events. “We still approach games in a very similar way,” Watts says, “and the passion that I put into Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is 100 percent [the same level of] passion I put into Planet Coaster. We‘ve grown so much and over the last few years it‘s just this on-going process. Now we‘re relying on our own IP.”

The team are understandably tight-lipped on what’s next, not ready to reveal whatever creative, ingenious project they’re cooking up behind the scenes. No doubt it’ll be something packed with detail, and rich with a British soul. But Frontier is quick to reassure that there’s still an ongoing commitment to the many games they’ve already got out there in the world – Watts himself is still excited about all of them, and they fit exactly into the creatively unique, technologically challenging framework that they want to achieve at Frontier.

  The timeline of Frontier Developments

1994 David Braben had actually been making games since 1983, so he was almost a decade into his development career by the time he founded Frontier Developments. It was a monumental time, with Frontier’s first actual game being the CD32 port of Frontier: Elite II. Braben’s own older games – Zarch and the original Elite (created with Ian Bell) – are considered archival Frontier titles. While they weren’t made under the Frontier name, they influenced the studio’s output and are part of its DNA even today.

2004 It was ten years into Frontier’s life and the team had a huge success with Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. It was a much loved theme park simulation game, and one that sold well over 10 million copies worldwide, making it Frontier’s best-selling game to date. Thanks to the studio’s hard work, it was also a technologically bold game with graphical settings that stretched the most powerful graphics cards of the era. That meant that the game itself had a very long shelf life and didn’t begin looking dated until long after release.

2008 LostWinds acted as one of Frontier’s experimental games, letting the team dip its toes into the water and see how self-published games could be made and marketed. Originally released on the Nintendo Wii, the popularity of LostWinds saw it later ported to iOS and later to PC for a wider player base to experience. It isn’t the most well-known of Frontier’s 30 or so games, but it’s arguably one of the most important in its transition to a fully independent studio.

2014 While 2014 marked the official release of Elite Dangerous, the game’s story starts much earlier. In 2012 the studio embarked on a Kickstarter project to fund the game’s development. It was a resounding success, with players desperate to get a new, modern version of the much-loved space franchise. It also marked the real turning point in Frontier’s history, launching the studio onto the stock market and capitalising on the upticking trend of digital distribution to create a fully independent studio. It’s a model that’s made Frontier and several other studios like it a great success.

2018 Jurassic World Evolution saw the many lessons learned with the success of Elite Dangerous applied to a widespread release across multiple platforms. Whereas Elite Dangerous had a staggered launch across PS4, Xbox and PC, Jurassic World Evolution was released on all three at once. While the team worked with Universal on several parts of the project, it was developed and published by Frontier themselves. When it released last year it fast became the team’s best launch of all time, selling one million copies in just five weeks.

Wolfgang Fischer

The post 25 years of Frontier Developments appeared first on Making Games.

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[bisoroblog]

Can the Right Nudge Help Low-income Kids Go Beyond High School?

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our higher-education newsletter.

NEWARK, Calif. — It’s a few months before she’ll graduate from Newark Memorial High School and Allison Dinsmore doesn’t have a plan for what will happen after that.

Unlike students in the far wealthier cities and towns surrounding hers, she wasn’t prodded since birth by her parents to prepare for college. No one in her family has ever gotten a degree. She never took the ACT or SAT.

“Last year I thought about it a lot because as a junior you start to realize how fast things are going,” she said in the library, otherwise empty but for students playing cards. “I didn’t know better, and it was too late. I feel like I’m not prepared.”

It’s largely the same story among Dinsmore’s friends, with whom she hangs out most days around a blue metal picnic table in the high school’s asphalt courtyard. Just under half the students here are considered poor, more than half are Hispanic and few of their parents have degrees.

Those are exactly the characteristics of the high school students least likely to go to college. It’s not that they have less potential than their counterparts in predominantly white, more affluent communities. What they lack is college-educated relatives, counselors, role models or mentors to make sure they take the courses and meet the deadlines they need to, or who encourage them to think about their further educations.

“This is self-perpetuating,” said the superintendent, Patrick Sánchez, who is trying to change that culture and hangs out with students as a mentor and a coach. “These are smart kids, but they’re not seeing themselves in college, and they’re not hearing enough that they can. And kids will act the way you treat them.”

Meanwhile, Sánchez said, “If you look at a wealthy or predominantly Anglo high school, from the time those kids walk in the door they are continually told they’re highly intelligent, that they’re all going to succeed.”

Newark Unified School District Superintendent Patrick Sanchez, right, visits with high school seniors at Newark Memorial High School in Newark, Calif., Wednesday, February 14, 2018. (Alison Yin for The Hechinger Report)

Newark Memorial does have one thing most high schools don’t: Silicon Valley. And some local entrepreneurs, backed by advisors from nearby Stanford University and elsewhere, think technology can help to solve this problem.

Those entrepreneurs have created a platform, and company, called Siembra — a Spanish word for sowing seeds — that reaches out to low-income, first-generation and racial and ethnic minority high school students on their ever-present smartphones, nagging them to stay on track the same way college-educated parents of wealthier kids do.

“Where do you want to go to college?” asks the very first text, sent to ninth graders.

“No one has ever asked them that,” said Julio Garcia, a consulting senior research psychologist at Stanford who studies how assumptions people make about them — largely based on stereotypes — have as much of an impact on the success of students as their aptitude and preparation. “Many kids have no expectations that they should go to college. They’re below the radar, for all kinds of reasons

He experienced that himself, Garcia said, when he was growing up, near Sacramento.

“Occasionally somebody would ask me about going to college. But nobody asked my classmates. It was not considered a viable option, so why waste your time asking the question?”

Sánchez, too, said he was “low-tracked” in high school. He went to community college to study automotive and diesel repair. Only later did he become an educator. The first in his own family to go to college, “I was a statistical anomaly,” the superintendent said.

He’s right. Far fewer children of parents who did not finish college — so-called first-generation students — go on to higher educations, a study released in February by the U.S. Department of Education confirmed: 72 percent, compared to 93 percent of those whose parents have bachelor’s degrees and 84 percent whose parents have any postsecondary education.

Allison Dinsmore and her boyfriend, Grant Montgomery, students at California’s Newark Memorial High School. Montgomery says college recruiters seldom come to their school. (Alison Yin for The Hechinger Report)

Nearly half of first-generation students who did continue went to community colleges, which spend less per student than many public primary and secondary schools, and where the odds of ever graduating are also comparatively low. That’s twice the proportion of students whose parents have bachelor’s degrees.

“There’s a really tremendous gulf,” said Katie Berger, senior policy analyst for higher education at the nonprofit advocacy organization The Education Trust. “The scope of this problem is huge.”

It’s not because first-generation, low-income and racial and ethnic minority students are less smart than higher-income whites; the lowest-income students with the highest scores on eighth-grade standardized tests are still less likely to go to selective colleges than the highest-income students with the lowest test scores, according to The Education Trust.

But compared to the children of parents with bachelor’s degrees who can help them navigate the complex college application process, far fewer first-generation students take courses in high school such as trigonometry or statistics, often required for college, the Education Department found; only a third as many take calculus and fewer than half as many enroll in Advanced Placement classes.

The high schools they attend are also much less likely to have many college counselors. The average public school counselor in the United States is responsible for 483 students, according to the American School Counselor Association and National Association of College Admissions Counselors, nearly twice the caseload the association recommends. In California, it’s one counselor to 760 students.

The result is that fewer than one in five children in the U.S. of parents without higher educations end up getting degrees themselves, the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation reports. That helps contribute to the fact that students from high-income families are nearly five times more likely to get bachelor’s degrees by the time they’re 24 than those from low-income families, according to the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

Siembra, a for-profit company that’s paid by participating school districts and colleges, has only early results to share. It says students are reading their college reminder texts about 80 percent of the time, and 10 percent respond with follow-up questions for their counselors. In an unrelated project, researchers at the universities of Virginia and Pittsburgh found that text messages sent during the summer after high school graduation improved the likelihood that high school students would follow through on plans to go to college by up to 7 percentage points.

Still, there are inherent shortcomings, Berger said. For example, she said, “It’s not going to help a student to text them to take AP algebra if their high school doesn’t offer it.”

Constant reminders are among the many ways Hispanic young people are being pushed to go to college by a charter school called Luis Valdez Leadership Academy, spread among some prefabricated buildings in San Jose’s low-income east side. College banners plaster the walls, the teachers double as college counselors and the sponsoring foundation raises money to take students on campus tours. Angela Rascon, a senior here and part of the first class, which will graduate this spring, enthusiastically describes her plans to head for college next year. But when she went to take the SAT at a private school in a wealthier town, Rascon said, she realized that “I was the only Latina in the room.”

That’s more than just a sad statistic. With one-third of college-age students now coming from first-generation backgrounds, it’s a big problem for places starved for educated workers — including Silicon Valley, where three-quarters of math and computer workers aged 25 to 44 had to be imported from abroad, according to the 2016 Silicon Valley Index.

In Newark, the water heater and Peterbilt truck factories have closed or moved away and most of the largest employers now are small tech companies that are starting to arrive. Yet only about 30 percent of Newark Memorial graduates meet the requirements for admission to the public University of California system

Students at the Luis Valdez Leadership Academy, a charter school on San Jose’s low-income east side. Students here are strongly encouraged to go to college. (Alison Yin for The Hechinger Report )

“There is increasing recognition that there’s an economic imperative to increasing college attainment,” Berger said.

It’s also increasingly a concern for colleges and universities that need to fill seats.

“This problem has been around for a while, but it’s becoming more urgent,” said Garcia. “Because the demographics are changing so rapidly, if your system excludes this group of people, you are condemning your system to mediocrity.”

Siembra sifts through data from its partner schools and districts — seven so far, it says — and unearths good prospects for its handful of client colleges and universities seeking out, say, female Hispanic sophomores who are good at math and science. Some of the students who might otherwise have never gone to college boast grade-point averages as high as 4.2, said founder Timothy Michael Kral, a former corporate finance director at software companies whose own Mexican-American daughter asked him to help the classmates she saw getting little college-going help.

“These students are invisible to the [college] recruiters,” Kral said. “No one is telling them how valuable they are.”

It’s true, said Grant Montgomery, Dinsmore’s boyfriend and fellow senior, back at Newark Memorial High School. “No one comes and looks at Newark.”

A running back for the Cougars (2-8 this season) Montgomery wears a knee brace from a football injury. He’s thinking about going to community college to become a firefighter or electrician. When the team played wealthier schools, he said, he saw students who were bound for four-year-colleges and universities, and bachelor’s degrees.

“Their school gives them the pride,” Montgomery said. “It’s more money over there, and that’s the difference.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our higher-education newsletter.

Can the Right Nudge Help Low-income Kids Go Beyond High School? published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

[our-beginnings]

Bryan Hughes, Dev-Rel at Microsoft

First thing’s first: who are you? What are you up to these days?

I'm Bryan Hughes. I was born and raised in Texas originally, which I think will inform a lot of my answers to the later questions. I’m currently a technical evangelist at Microsoft. It’s also called developer evangelist, or developer relations (“dev-rel”). There's a million different names, but that's what I do now, and it’s kind of a recent change. I started in March, but until then, I was your typical developer at Microsoft, and a few startups before that.

What does it actually mean to be a technical evangelist? What’s your day-to-day look like?

It’s actually a hodgepodge of a bunch of different things, and depends on the organisation and the individual. At Microsoft, it means that I spend about a third of my time engaging in communities in various ways — meetups, conferences, talks, stuff like that. Another third is maintaining an online presence— blogging, for example. And finally, there's coding projects, some documentation work, and working with customers to do some prototyping. Some other evangelists work a lot with universities doing hackathons with students, for example. It's fun! I’m just trying to raise awareness of Microsoft, but also read where the community's at. For me it's really about talking about cool stuff, and give people warm fuzzy feelings about Microsoft, and that's not always directly company-related— just about what we're passionate about as individuals.

You’re very inclusion-focused in your work; is this always the case for tech evangelists?

I'm probably one of the most engaged in doing diversity and inclusivity work within the Microsoft Dev-Rel community, but there's a lot of others on my team doing that work: Suz Hinton and Rachel White, for example.

Do you wish people would do more of that?

Always! But Microsoft’s actually pretty good about it, at least as far as a large tech company goes, and part of that is historical. Microsoft rose to prominence in the 90s and was known for being very aggressive; I've certainly heard internal stories of what it was like then, but things changed. Microsoft shut down in a bunch of markets and was humbled. In trying to reinvent itself (technically and otherwise), they had to change the culture within. That cutthroat attitude served it's place in the 90s— that’s not to say that it was a good thing. It was one way back then, but it doesn't work now.

I think our current CEO has done a really good job of understanding what Microsoft needs to be both as a business and as a culture. Just in the past four years, there's been a huge amount of culture change. Diversity is talked about so much more now, and we are more focused on it— still a long ways to go, of course!

What's your favourite thing about being a technical evangelist? And don't say "the people"!

I love being able to travel and engage with folks in the broader development community in a much more personal way. Going to conferences and actually meeting everyone, talking to people, getting their stories, and understanding what their lives are like, as developers and as people.

Is this where you expected to find yourself, growing up in Texas?

Hah! Definitely not, at all. I had a bunch of childhood dreams— I wanted to be a pilot for a long time because I loved planes. Both of my parents were middle school teachers, so that wouldn't have been impossible either. I also considered technical theatre, because I had a performing arts background and had been doing it for a long time. Computer science emerged as an option in high school. I was starting to look at colleges in both computer science and electrical engineering, because physics was fun, and I liked my teacher.

Growing up, we didn't have much money. There were definitely times where we struggled financially. I think that's something that many people in tech can't relate to, and it's interesting to see how that influences their decision-making. "Starving artist" isn't romantic; I haven't been one, but I lived without much money when I was younger. It's not a romantic life. It's just hard. As much as I respect my parents for their careers, I wanted something stable. When it came to theatre I thought, "I have the talent, and I have enough privilege to make it work," but I didn't want the struggle that I knew would come with it. I think I could have made a life out of that, but for stability reasons, I didn't.

These decisions are practical; electrical engineering was my best chance of finding a good job. Then, when I was looking at colleges in fall of 2000, it was just after the dotcom burst. So I was like, "I like coding, but is computer science going to be an industry in five years? Probably not. I won't do that."

Do you have a “eureka” moment? A single moment where you knew tech was where you wanted to be? 

I don't think I had one moment. My parents say the same thing— they just knew I would make a good engineer. As a kid, I would play with Legos: I’d build the toy once with the instructions, and then I'd throw it out and make my own thing.

My parents tell a story of when I was 4 or 5, and they got me a Lego set for Christmas. I was sleeping, my mom was taking care of my sister (who had bronchitis at the time), and my dad was setting up the Christmas stuff. He built the Lego set and set it up for me, and it took him four hours to do it. In the morning, the first thing I did was take it apart and build it myself— in twenty minutes. So I've always had that knack for taking things apart and putting them back together.

[My dad] set [a Lego set] up for me, and it took him four hours to do it. In the morning, the first thing I did was take it apart and build it myself— in twenty minutes

After college what happened?

I knew I wanted a graduate degree, but I didn't know what to focus on. I was chatting with a professor during my senior year and I had no idea what I wanted to do. He told me to just do a Phd, and I was like, "OK, fuck it." So it was kind of a flippant decision! I was just like, "Sure, I'll do it."

By the time I finished it, though, I had realised that the academic world wasn't for me. Most of your time isn't actually spent teaching. It's more like 10% teaching, 20% with graduate students, 10% on research, and the rest is writing grants and politicking, trying to get money.

So I started looking for a job!

I knew I wanted to be in SF, or at least the bay area. My partner and I moved out here around 2010, after the 2008 recession, so jobs were a bit scarce. After several months of nothing, I got two offers at once: one with Intel, the other with this tiny startup called Particle Code. They were working on this cross-mobile-platform for 2D games. Think Unity but for 2D isomorphic games on mobile phones— think Blackberry and Nokia! I thought, "Well, I know Java, and this is kind of like embedded programming, and you'll pay me? OK!" and I took it because I just needed a job at that point.

He told me to just do a Phd, and I was like, "OK, fuck it."

What was that job like?

That was a great startup— a surprisingly good team with a good culture, something I didn't understand until later when I actually had something to compare it to. The founders were from Israel, and our CEO was a woman and that was awesome! My teammate was my polar opposite: I have a Ph.D and lots of formal training, and he had none whatsoever. He'd taught himself to code in the Israeli special forces; in between doing...various military things...he'd read programming books. We made a great team, but we were so different. That taught me an early lesson: your background doesn't predict your success nearly as much as people think. It taught me the value of different backgrounds and perspectives.

Where’d you go next?

I worked for the startup that acquired us, and got to do some really cool technical work, but there were cultural issues. That's one of the two times that I've left a job in the tech industry.

your background doesn't predict your success nearly as much as people think.

After that, I went to Rdio, and it was the complete opposite. Really good culture, which is what I was looking for first and foremost. We all cared deeply about music, and the product reflected that. I became a technical lead there and helped build the team, and ended up doing leadership and mentorship as well.

Then, when Rdio was acquired, I briefly worked for Pandora. I left and was torn over it! There were a lot of great things, and I was really impressed by their diversity. When me and one of my teammates— both of us queer— arrived there, we were like "There's queer people everywhere, this is amazing!" The people side was spot on. But from the technical side, they were struggling. So, shortly thereafter I went to Microsoft.

Nice! You’re super involved in Node as well— how did that start, and how did the recent events affect you?

That all started in 2013 with JSConfUS. It was there I learned about Nodebots, got involved in Johnny Five, and started speaking at conferences. Through Johnny Five, I got to work with the Node project directly. Then, at NodeConf Adventure in 2015, there was some discussion around culture, diversity and inclusivity in the Node Project. I was passionate about it, so we ended up forming the Inclusivity Working Group there, because there were enough of us who felt there were problems to be solved. I was just in the right place at the right time. That evolved a lot over the years. There was a lot of pushback— some successes, a lot of failure.

"Leadership" is a hybrid of middleman, manager and community voice. Whenever things go wrong, I was the one who had to deal with it, and it could never wait.

The group folded for a variety of reasons, a little over a year ago. We followed that up by creating the Community Committee, which was structured to avoid some issues the Inclusivity Working Group had, and that's going through some turmoil right now. Emotionally, it's really hard to do that stuff. "Leadership" is a hybrid of middleman, manager and community voice. Whenever things go wrong, I was the one who had to deal with it, and it could never wait. It took me away from conferences and people, and that's how it goes.

You’ve taken a break from that now, which makes sense. Do you feel pressure to be a mentor/role model for other queer folks in tech?

It depends on context. I'm constantly re-evaluating how much I want to "flag". A lot of my appearance is based on that duality, and I modify my language to intentionally inject ambiguity. My partner is "my partner". I'm super-careful to not reveal gender right away. I'm not afraid of people knowing. I want that ambiguity. I want people to be confused at first. Especially being bi— as soon as gender is revealed, it's "oh, you're straight! Oh, you're gay!" I think it's a small thing I do to combat that.

I definitely feel the urge to be a role model as well, especially when I'm privileged enough in terms of income and stability. White male privilege is also very much a thing for me, so I try to be as out and outspoken as I can be. With my writing, I try my best to give encouragement to other queer folks.

Growing up, did you have any queer role models in the field? Did you look for them?

That was a very long and slow process for me, and part of it comes from being bi. I was in high school in 90s Texas. Matthew Shepard happened when I was in high school. My brain early on thought, "well, I'm interested in women...." and I just didn't finish the rest of the sentence. Discovering my queer identity took a long time— I didn't embrace it until I was around 30, I think.

I definitely feel the urge to be a role model as well, especially when I'm privileged enough in terms of income and stability.

It's interesting to see how my view of myself has changed over the years. I'm really happy in my mid-30s now. Back then, there were very few gay role models, and I can't remember anyone who was famous or well-known who was bi. Will & Grace was brand new and controversial, and it played to some of its own stereotypes. So, I mostly just forged onwards and figured it out myself. That's always what I've done. I don't think it's something I have to do anymore, but when I was younger, I didn't have much choice. That's just the way I learned to navigate the world.

And now, a few rapid-fires to wrap up: first, what are you nostalgic for from those early days in tech, if anything?

The sense of wonder! There's this cool thing now and we're just on the cusp of something that's really great and it's going to revolutionize the world! We've got email now, we can communicate around the world instantly! The rise of AOL IM was like "oh my gosh, this is instant!" It was bypassing the phone companies, it was deregulated. It's ironic that those ideas were very much socialist, overthrowing-the-establishment kind of feel. That feeling of possibility, I miss.

It's ironic that those ideas were very much socialist, overthrowing-the-establishment kind of feel. That feeling of possibility, I miss.

How do you see your next five to ten years?

I don't have a great answer for that! I switched from dev to evangelism earlier this year, so I actually have a lot of questions around what I'll be doing. I know that I definitely want to continue my inclusivity work, but I don't know what that's going to look like.

Are you looking forward to it?

Yes. I'm not afraid of it. One thing I've learned is that things do get better. They do work out as long as I keep trying. There's some nuance to that, of course. There can be a lot of painful moments, but if we like who we are now (and hopefully we do, or do as we get older), then we shouldn't view those things completely in the negative. We don't have to necessarily forgive anything, but I think it's important to not harbour resentment. That’s very easy for me to say, because it comes from harboring resentment and processing my past. But overcoming that gives me confidence that I'll be able to overcome any adversity in the future.

If you could do everything all over again, would it be the same? Would you want it to be?

I would probably do it the same, which is weird to think! I would do all these things that I know I'd hate, but I think they're an important part of how I got to where I am now. And where I am now is exactly where I want to be.

Much gratitude to Bryan for his time on the call, and his endless patience with my transcription efforts! Find him on Twitter and tell him how wonderful he is!  

[mylenejgarcia]

Satoshi Revolution – Chapter 2: Technology Meets Anarchy. Both Profit (Part 2) The Satoshi Revolution: A Revolution of Rising Expectations. Section 1: The Trusted Third Party Problem Chapter 2: Monetary Theory by Wendy McElroy Technology Meets Anarchy. Both Profit (Chapter 2, Part 2) Bitcoin is the catalyst for peaceful anarchy and freedom. It was built as a reaction against corrupt governments and financial institutions. It was not solely created for the sake of improving financial technology. But some people adulterate this truth. In reality, Bitcoin was meant to function as a monetary weapon, as a cryptocurrency poised to undermine authority. Now it is whitewashed. It is seen as a polite and unassuming technology in order to appease politicians, banksters, and soccer moms. Its purpose is sometimes concealed in order to make the tech palatable to the unwashed masses and power elite. However, no one should forget or deny why the protocol was written.–Sterlin Lujan Technology Meets Anarchy. Both Profit. Cryptocurrency was not created to make money; the blockchain was not forged to render banking more efficient. The core developers did not use open source or eschew patents because they were proprietary or wanted to reap a fortune. They wanted privacy and freedom to be available without cost to all. Anyone who believes Bitcoin was designed for financial gain knows nothing about its history or the idealism built into its algorithms. Profiting from cryptocurrency and using blockchains to economic advantage are laudable by-products, but Bitcoin was conceived as a vehicle for creating political and social change by empowering individuals and weakening government. The developers were revolutionaries. Bitcoin was a blast of rebellion. It came not a moment too soon. The galloping growth of the Internet gave government an incredible weapon against which individuals would have had scant protection without cryptography, the art of secret communication. The Radical History of Bitcoin Before Satoshi, there was the engineer and scientist Timothy C. May to whom Bitcoin is sometimes traced. May’s “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” (1988) first appeared when it was distributed to a few techno-anarchists at the Crypto ’88 conference. The six-paragraph manifesto called for a computer technology based on cryptographic protocols which would “alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation….The technology for this revolution–and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution–has existed in theory for the past decade….But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable.” The manifesto ended with a cry to arms, “Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!” The “barbed wire” reference is quintessentially American. It evokes images of land out West being sectioned off by sharp fences that were snipped apart by cowboys who demanded an open landscape. Even in 1988, May could draw upon crypto-history. In the mid-1970s, cryptography ceased to be the nearly-exclusive domain of military and intelligence agencies who operated in secrecy. The academic research that surged forward was openly shared. One event in particular broke government’s grip on the field. In 1975, computer guru Whitfield Diffie and electrical engineering professor Martin Hellman invented public-key encryption and published their results the next year in the essay “New Directions in Cryptography.” (Arguably, the public key was a re-invention as the British had developed “nonsecret encryption” in 1973 but chose to be silent on the subject, as governments generally do.) In 1977, cryptographers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman created the RSA encryption algorithm, which was one of the first practical public-key systems. Public-key encryption hit the computer community like an explosion. It is brilliant in its simplicity. Every user has two keys – a public and a private one – both of which are unique. The public key scrambles the text of a message which can be unscrambled only by the private key. The public key can be thrown to the wind but the private one is closely guarded. The result is close to impenetrable privacy. Diffie had been inspired by the trusted third party problem. The book “High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace” (1996) quoted him as saying, “You may have protected files, but if a subpoena was served to the system manager, it wouldn’t do you any good. The administrators would sell you out, because they’d have no interest in going to jail.” His solution: a decentralized network with each individual possessing the mathematical key to his own privacy – the right most threatened by a digital society. It obliterated the problem by removing any need for trust. At the same time, public-key encryption also removed the contradiction of sending secure information over insecure channels. It excluded “Eve” – the name cryptographers called unwanted eavesdroppers. And, importantly, public-key encryption was free to all because revolution required participation. Government was displeased. The National Security Agency (NSA) could no longer eavesdrop at will and its domestic monopoly on encryption was suddenly thrown open to all comers. The journalist Steven Levy commented in a Wired article, “In 1979, Inman [then-head of the NSA] gave an address that came to be known as ‘the sky is falling‘ speech, warning that ‘non- governmental cryptologic activity and publication. . .poses clear risks to the national security’.” The Cypherpunk response was captured by a later statement by cryptographer John Gilmore. “Show us. Show the public how your ability to violate the privacy of any citizen has prevented a major disaster. They’re abridging the freedom and privacy of all citizens – to defend us against a bogeyman that they will not explain. The decision to literally trade away our privacy is one that must be made by the whole society, not made unilaterally by a military spy agency.” The first crypto war erupted with the NSA strenuously trying to curtail the circulation of Diffie’s and Hellman’s ideas. The agency went so far as to inform publishers that the two rebels and whoever published them could face jail time for violating laws restricting the export of military weapons. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one of Hellman’s outlets, received a letter that read, in part, “I have noticed in the past months that various IEEE Groups have been publishing and exporting technical articles on encryption and cryptology—a technical field which is covered by Federal Regulations, viz: ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations, 22 CFR 121-128).” Gag orders were issued. Legislation was proposed. The NSA attempted to control funding to crypto research. Inman gave the agency’s first public interview to Science magazine in order to explain his position. NSA also considered requiring people to “escrow” their private keys with a third party who would be vulnerable to a judge’s order or to the police; of course, this would have returned the trusted third party problem which public key encryption was intended to solve. In response, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow declared, “You can have my encryption algorithm…when you pry my cold dead fingers from my private key.” The NSA’s efforts failed. Powerful crypto was now a public good. Arise Cypherpunks! In the late 1980, “Cypherpunks” emerged as something akin to a movement. The deliberately humorous label was coined by hacker Judith Milhon who blended “cipher” with “cyberpunk.” The Cypherpunks wanted to use cryptography to defend against surveillance and censorship by the state. They were also determined to build a counter-economic society that offered an alternative to existing bank and financial systems. Their vision was inspired by the pioneering work of computer scientist David Chaum, nicknamed the “Houdini of crypto.” Three of his papers were particularly influential. “Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms” (1981) laid the groundwork for research into and the development of anonymous communications based on public-key cryptography. “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments” (1983) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-0602-4_18 stated, “Automation of the way we pay for goods and services is already underway….The ultimate structure of the new electronic payments system may have a substantial impact on personal privacy as well as on the nature and extent of criminal use of payments. Ideally a new payments system should address both of these seemingly conflicting sets of concerns.” The essay called for digital cash. “Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete” (1985) further described anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems. A typical cypherpunk distrusted and disliked government, especially the federal variety; the NSA’s near-hysteria over unclassified encryption only heightened this response. Most cypherpunks embraced the counterculture with its stress on free speech, sexual liberation and freedom to use drugs. In short, they were civil libertarians. One of the earliest portraits of the coding radicals was Levy’s Wired article, mentioned above, which appeared in the magazine’s second issue (May 1993). Levy called them “techie-cum-civil libertarians.” They were idealists who “hope for a world where an individual’s informational footprints – everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion – can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish; a world where the tools of prying are transformed into the instruments of privacy.” Levy understood the stakes. “The outcome of this struggle may determine the amount of freedom our society will grant us in the 21st century.” The spread of personal computers, the rise of the modern Internet and the titillating label of “outlaw” were an irresistible combination. Then, in 1991, Phil Zimmermann developed PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, the world’s most popular email encryption software. He viewed it as a human rights tool and believed in it so deeply that he missed five mortgage payments and almost lost his house while designing it. The first version was called “a web of trust” which described the protocol by which the authenticity of the link between a public key and its owner was established. Zimmermann described the protocol in the manual for PGP version 2.0: “As time goes on, you will accumulate keys from other people that you may want to designate as trusted introducers. Everyone else will each choose their own trusted introducers. And everyone will gradually accumulate and distribute with their key a collection of certifying signatures from other people, with the expectation that anyone receiving it will trust at least one or two of the signatures. This will cause the emergence of a decentralized fault-tolerant web of confidence for all public keys.” PGP was initially given away by being posted on computer bulletin boards. Zimmermann commented, “[l]ike thousands of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind” PGP spread around the globe. Government noticed. Zimmermann was targeted in a three-year criminal investigation based on the possible violation of US export restrictions for cryptographic software. Fast forward to 1992. May, Milhon, Gilmore and Eric Hughes formed a small group of coding zealots who met every Saturday in a small office in San Francisco. A Christian Science Monitor article described the group as “all united by that unique Bay Area blend: passionate about technology, steeped in counterculture, and unswervingly libertarian.” The group’s size grew rapidly. The List, an electronic posting forum, became the most active aspect with the “people’s algorithms” drawing staunch support from the likes of Julian Assange and Zimmermann. The Christian Science Monitor article commented, “Radical libertarians dominated the list, along with ‘some anarcho-capitalists and even a few socialists’. Many had a technical background from working with computers; some were political scientists, classical scholars, or lawyers.” Eric Hughes contributed another manifesto: “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cypherpunk-manifesto.txt that opened, “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” But , it continued, “[f]or privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society.” The group quickly encountered an objection that later became a dominant thrust of government’s attack on private encryption: “bad actors” would use anonymity to get away with crimes. During a 1992 interview, a skeptic confronted May. “Seems like the perfect thing for ransom notes, extortion threats, bribes, blackmail, insider trading and terrorism,” he challenged. May calmly replied, “Well, what about selling information that isn’t viewed as legal, say about pot-growing, do-it-yourself abortion? What about the anonymity wanted for whistleblowers, confessionals, and dating personals?” Cypherpunks believed public-key encryption made society less dangerous because it removed the two major sources of violence. First, anonymity neutralized governments, which consisted of “men with guns.” Shutting governments out removed those guns from exchanges. If financial exchanges were invisible, for example, the violence of taxation would be impossible. Second, public-key encryption reduced the risks associated with victim-less crimes, such as drug use. Ordering drugs online, for example, was safer than buying them in a back alley of a shoddy neighborhood. Admittedly, public-key encryption could shield activities that violated rights. A common Cypherpunk response was to view the prospect as irrelevant. Encryption was a reality and it would spread in spite of unpleasant side effects. Perhaps cypherpunks believed a technological or community solution to real online crimes would evolve. The Crypto Wars Continue One incident captures the core of crypto wars between the Cypherpunks and government, especially the NSA. Gilmore was determined to rescue the information from documents that the NSA was attempting to suppress. His first major victory was to distribute a paper by a cryptographer employed by Xerox, which the NSA had persuaded Xerox to kill. Gilmore posted it on the Internet and it went viral. Then, in 1992, Gilmore further enraged the NSA. He filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to acquire the declassified parts of a four-volume work by William Friedman who is often called the father of American cryptography; the manuals were decades old. Gilmore also requested the declassification of Friedman’s other books. While the NSA dragged out its response before refusing Gilmore, he heard from a Cypherpunk friend. Friedman’s personal papers had been donated to a library after his death, and they included the annotated manuscript of one still-classified book Gilmore sought. The friend simply took it off the shelf and Xeroxed it. Then, another of Friedman’s still-classified books was found on microfilm at Boston University; a copy of it was also turned over to Gilmore. He notified the judge, who was hearing what had turned into a FOIA appeal, that the “classified” documents were publicly available in libraries. Before he did so, however, Gilmore made several copies and hid them in obscure places, including an abandoned building. The NSA reacted with extreme prejudice. They raided libraries and reclassified documents that used to be publicly available. The Justice Department called Gilmore’s lawyer to say that his client was close to violating the Espionage Act, which could bring a prison term of ten years. The violation: he showed people a library book. Gilmore informed the judge of the latest development, but he also contacted technology reporters in the press. NSA feared publicity, and the Cypherpunks knew it. Articles began to flow, including one in the San Francisco Examiner. Two days later, the New York Times stated, “The National Security Agency, the nation’s secretive electronic spy agency, has abruptly retreated from a confrontation with an independent researcher over secret technical manuals he found in a public library several weeks ago….[I]t said that the manuals were no longer secret and that the researcher could keep them.” The Aegean Park Press, a California publisher, quickly printed the books in question. The early Cypherpunks were prototypes who set the attitude, technology and political context in which the next generation of cryptocurrency zealots operated. The goals were disobedience, disruption of the system through cryptography, personal freedom, and counter-economics. They set and lit the stage for Satoshi Nakamoto. [To be continued next week.] Thanks to editor/novelist Peri Dwyer Worrell for proofreading assistance. Wendy McElroy has agreed to ”live-publish” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of posts planned to conclude after about 18 months. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”. Read it here first. The post Satoshi Revolution – Chapter 2: Technology Meets Anarchy. Both Profit (Part 2) appearhttps://news.bitcoin.com/satoshi-revolution-chapter-2-technology-meets-anarchy-both-profit-part-5/ To get started: http://bit.ly/unlibitcoin To double its value: http://bit.ly/btc-gold

from Earn Bitcoin Philippines http://www.facebook.com/pages/p/134403977174420 via Rodrigo M. Palacio Tumblr

[samanthasroberts]

Just do it: the experience economy and how we turned our backs on ‘stuff’

New figures show we are continuing to spend less money on buying things, and more on doing things and telling the world about it online afterwards, of course. From theatres to pubs to shops, businesses are scrambling to adapt to this shift

It was an audacious plan for an unloved bit of Manchester. A 25m arts centre to be built on a derelict plot that had not felt a cultural pulse since the closure, 15 years earlier, of the legendary Haienda nightclub. It would be called Home, formed by the merger of two proud but financially imperilled institutions the Cornerhouse cinema and gallery, and the Library Theatre Company and would, its backers hoped, revive a forgotten corner on the citys southern edge.

There was confidence from the city leadership that it would work, but a lot of my peers and colleagues in the arts were saying to me, Whos going to go there? says Sheena Wrigley, executive director of Home, which includes two theatres, five cinema screens, an art gallery and a restaurant and bar. It was a very unprepossessing area with a big car park and one large office block. It wasnt visible or on a main thoroughfare.

Programming would swim far from the mainstream, too. The centre opened in May 2015 with a challenging play about two thwarted lovers trying to survive a recession in a city like Manchester. This week the cinema is showing Lady Macbeth, a subversive Shakespearean noir, and The Handmaiden, an erotic Korean period thriller. The free gallery includes an exhibition of vibrant art from post-Franco Spain and an exploration of the role of vogueing in gay black culture.

Wrigley admits to having been nervous when she and her team set an ambitious target of 550,000 visits for the first year. But we smashed that in six months and did just shy of a million, she says. And they kept coming: as Home approaches its second birthday, it is about to welcome its two-millionth visitor. Its fascinating to me that you can open a venue of this kind and size and it can find its audience straight away in a difficult period, Wrigley adds. Of course, I would like to say its all about good artistic choices, but something else is going on.

Wrigley is right. A series of studies is revealing strange things about our spending habits. They call it the experience economy, which gives it the sense of a grand theory. And there is science behind it, but its also very simple: regardless of political uncertainty, austerity and inflation, we are spending more on doing stuff, choosing instead to cut back on buying stuff.

The restaurant at Home, a major new arts centre in Manchester. Photograph: Alamy

The latest figures come from Barclaycard, which processes about half of all Britains credit and debit card transactions. Figures for April show a 20% increase in spending in pubs compared with the same month last year. Spending in restaurants went up 16%, while theatres and cinemas enjoyed a 13% rise. Meanwhile, department stores suffered a 1% drop, vehicle sales were down 11% and spending on household appliances fell by 2.5%.

Barclaycard says the trend began to emerge about a year ago. And retailers are feeling it. In March, Simon Wolfson, chief executive of Next, blamed the clothing chains first fall in profits for eight years on the move from buying things to doing things. More startlingly, Ikea, the worlds biggest furniture retailer, told a Guardian conference last year that consumption of many goods had reached a limit. If we look on a global basis, in the west we have probably hit peak stuff, said Steve Howard, the companys head of sustainability.

It would be easy to assume that contemporary influences are at work here. The world is a bit of a depressing place right now, so lets have a nice evening out rather than buy a sixth pair of shoes. But theories abound of a much broader shift. And Ikea is arguably late in calling peak stuff. In 2011, Chris Goodall, a British environment writer, used government data called the UKs Material Flows Account to track consumption of stuff, and identified 2001 as a tipping point, long before the 2008 recession and everything that followed. He believed we had decoupled economic growth and material consumption.

And as we consume less, we are doing more. If you think about the 20th century, the big dominant value system was materialism, the belief that if we had more stuff wed be happier, says James Wallman, a trend forecaster and the author of Stuffocation: Living More with Less, in which he charts the move from possessions to experience. The big change to what I call experientialism is more about finding happiness and status in experiences instead.

The happiness bit perhaps stands to reason, but studies suggest the anticipation of an experience has a crucial, additional value. In a 2014 paper called Waiting for Merlot, psychologists Amit Kumar, Thomas Gilovich and Matthew Killingsworth showed how people report being mostly frustrated before the planned purchase of a thing, but mostly happy before they bought an experience. That feeling lingers longer, too, tied up as it is with memory. We call it hedonic adaptation, says Colin Strong, the head of behavioural science at Ipsos, the market research group. And the hedonic payoff of experiences is much greater.

We are also less likely to compare experiential purchases than we are products, in a way that means we are all happy with what we buy, regardless of what we can afford. So if you have a Nissan and your neighbour has a Porsche, theres no doubt who has the better car, and if you ask the Nissan driver to swap, they will, Wallman says. But if you ask people who went on holiday to the Seychelles or south Wales, its clear who had the fancier holiday, but surveys show the person who went to Wales wont swap because they had an equally good time.

If the experience economy has a levelling effect, research also suggests that part of the reason for its rise is its greater potential as a status booster.This supports the idea, questioned by some (and not backed up by Barclaycard, which does not account for age), that younger people namely millennials are driving the consumer shift. It used to be that our car, or handbag or wallet showed our status. Now we post Facebook pictures from a chairlift in Chamonix or the latest music festival, Wallman says. Social media is supporting this change. Posting pictures of what you just bought is gauche; posting pictures of something youre doing is fine. Strong also thinks the slightly impoverished nature of millennials is compelling them to get out more.

It used to be that our car or handbag showed our status. Now we post Facebook pictures from a chairlift in Chamonix or the latest music festival. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty

At Home, however, Wrigley says that while students and young professionals are pouring through the doors, the venues appeal is crossing generations. A lot of arts organisations peak at around age 45, but ours is very flat, she says. We have a lot of older explorers people who worked in professional services or local government, say, and are looking for a quality experience. And baby boomers who have been able to stop work in their 60s and have pensions to spend.

Restaurants are capitalising fast, opening at a record pace in cities all over the country. In London, restaurant guide Hardens counted 200 new openings in its 2017 edition. Cities including Manchester and Glasgow have seen similar or even greater booms. Russell Norman, founder of the Venetian-inspired Polpo restaurants, is about to open his 12th outpost in Bristol, having taken the chain to Brighton, Exeter and Leeds since it landed in London in 2008. The restaurants are as busy as ever, but Norman has been surprised by booming recent demand for gift vouchers and private party requests. When we opened in Exeter we expected it to be an all-day offering, but were really finding that people are coming for special occasions, as an event, or an experience, he says.

Businesses already dealing in experiences are enhancing them to benefit from the shifting economy. Theatres would once never have considered putting a restaurant downstairs, but now youd be mad not to. The restaurant at Home in Manchester is taking 2m a year, Wrigley says, almost double what was expected. At the Chichester Festival Theatre, where ticket sales are up 12% on last year, the restaurant is booming, too. We dont have to be just excellent theatre-makers, but excellent business people, says Rachel Tackley, the executive director at the venue in West Sussex. Its about creating theatres as destinations where you can spend more than two and a half hours watching the show.

Marstons, one of the countrys largest pub groups, with more than 1,500 pubs, is racing to meet demand for more than pints of beer. Traditionally people use pubs, but go to restaurants, says the Wolverhampton-based firms managing director, Pete Dalzell. The group has shed hundreds of wet-led traditional pubs in recent years, and opened more than 150 pub-restaurants since 2009. Last year revenues were up 7% to 905.8m, and the average pub profit has doubled since 2012. Were opening up a new range of offers for consumers who are choosing to spend disposable income doing something with friends rather than buying something, Dalzell adds.

If the writing is on the wall for the purveyors of things, their response is to make the walls more appealing. Were seeing a fundamental shift in pretty much all categories to retain being much more experiential, Strong says. Increasingly, this means using technology to create the feeling of a meaningful relationship between brand and buyer, online and offline. High-street clothing stores are deploying shop assistants with tablet computers on which they can call up your previous purchases and tastes based on online browsing. And with smart marketing, even the dullest essentials are being sold as part of a brand experience. In the US, one Los Angeles TV producer, frustrated by the high price of razor blades, launched an online subscription service in 2012. Dollar Shave Club began posting blades for as little as $3 a month and, with the help of a viral ad campaign, earned 12,000 orders in the first two days. Deliveries come with an irreverent magazine. Customers felt part of something, free from the cut-throat corporate economics of brands such as Gillette, which is owned by Procter & Gamble. It soon had more than three million subscribers, and in 2016 Unilever, P&Gs big rival, bought the Dollar Shave Club and its members for $1bn. People have got that we can move from a transactional relationship mediated by big-scale advertising to much more of a one-to-one relationship with the customer, Strong adds.

That relationship is strong in Manchester, where Wrigley says she has been surprised by the scale of Homes success. The venue is already being overshadowed by rising office and apartment towers, and a new hotel. It has become the beating heart of a neighbourhood that was a wasteland only four years ago. Thats the magic of experientialism, Wallman says. Its not anti-consumerist or anti-capitalist. Money is still going into the economy and creating jobs were just spending it on experiences. Wallman, 43, has been following the trend for more than 10 years, and has seen it transform his own life. At his wifes prompting, he has just acquired a second pair of trousers, but is holding out with his one pair of shoes and five holey T-shirts. Id rather do things, he says. I took the kids to the Natural History Museum on Sunday. We went camping recently, I go climbing, play football. And it makes us happier.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/21/just-do-it-the-experience-economy-and-how-we-turned-our-backs-on-stuff/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/just-do-it-the-experience-economy-and-how-we-turned-our-backs-on-stuff/

[allofbeercom]

Just do it: the experience economy and how we turned our backs on ‘stuff’

New figures show we are continuing to spend less money on buying things, and more on doing things and telling the world about it online afterwards, of course. From theatres to pubs to shops, businesses are scrambling to adapt to this shift

It was an audacious plan for an unloved bit of Manchester. A 25m arts centre to be built on a derelict plot that had not felt a cultural pulse since the closure, 15 years earlier, of the legendary Haienda nightclub. It would be called Home, formed by the merger of two proud but financially imperilled institutions the Cornerhouse cinema and gallery, and the Library Theatre Company and would, its backers hoped, revive a forgotten corner on the citys southern edge.

There was confidence from the city leadership that it would work, but a lot of my peers and colleagues in the arts were saying to me, Whos going to go there? says Sheena Wrigley, executive director of Home, which includes two theatres, five cinema screens, an art gallery and a restaurant and bar. It was a very unprepossessing area with a big car park and one large office block. It wasnt visible or on a main thoroughfare.

Programming would swim far from the mainstream, too. The centre opened in May 2015 with a challenging play about two thwarted lovers trying to survive a recession in a city like Manchester. This week the cinema is showing Lady Macbeth, a subversive Shakespearean noir, and The Handmaiden, an erotic Korean period thriller. The free gallery includes an exhibition of vibrant art from post-Franco Spain and an exploration of the role of vogueing in gay black culture.

Wrigley admits to having been nervous when she and her team set an ambitious target of 550,000 visits for the first year. But we smashed that in six months and did just shy of a million, she says. And they kept coming: as Home approaches its second birthday, it is about to welcome its two-millionth visitor. Its fascinating to me that you can open a venue of this kind and size and it can find its audience straight away in a difficult period, Wrigley adds. Of course, I would like to say its all about good artistic choices, but something else is going on.

Wrigley is right. A series of studies is revealing strange things about our spending habits. They call it the experience economy, which gives it the sense of a grand theory. And there is science behind it, but its also very simple: regardless of political uncertainty, austerity and inflation, we are spending more on doing stuff, choosing instead to cut back on buying stuff.

The restaurant at Home, a major new arts centre in Manchester. Photograph: Alamy

The latest figures come from Barclaycard, which processes about half of all Britains credit and debit card transactions. Figures for April show a 20% increase in spending in pubs compared with the same month last year. Spending in restaurants went up 16%, while theatres and cinemas enjoyed a 13% rise. Meanwhile, department stores suffered a 1% drop, vehicle sales were down 11% and spending on household appliances fell by 2.5%.

Barclaycard says the trend began to emerge about a year ago. And retailers are feeling it. In March, Simon Wolfson, chief executive of Next, blamed the clothing chains first fall in profits for eight years on the move from buying things to doing things. More startlingly, Ikea, the worlds biggest furniture retailer, told a Guardian conference last year that consumption of many goods had reached a limit. If we look on a global basis, in the west we have probably hit peak stuff, said Steve Howard, the companys head of sustainability.

It would be easy to assume that contemporary influences are at work here. The world is a bit of a depressing place right now, so lets have a nice evening out rather than buy a sixth pair of shoes. But theories abound of a much broader shift. And Ikea is arguably late in calling peak stuff. In 2011, Chris Goodall, a British environment writer, used government data called the UKs Material Flows Account to track consumption of stuff, and identified 2001 as a tipping point, long before the 2008 recession and everything that followed. He believed we had decoupled economic growth and material consumption.

And as we consume less, we are doing more. If you think about the 20th century, the big dominant value system was materialism, the belief that if we had more stuff wed be happier, says James Wallman, a trend forecaster and the author of Stuffocation: Living More with Less, in which he charts the move from possessions to experience. The big change to what I call experientialism is more about finding happiness and status in experiences instead.

The happiness bit perhaps stands to reason, but studies suggest the anticipation of an experience has a crucial, additional value. In a 2014 paper called Waiting for Merlot, psychologists Amit Kumar, Thomas Gilovich and Matthew Killingsworth showed how people report being mostly frustrated before the planned purchase of a thing, but mostly happy before they bought an experience. That feeling lingers longer, too, tied up as it is with memory. We call it hedonic adaptation, says Colin Strong, the head of behavioural science at Ipsos, the market research group. And the hedonic payoff of experiences is much greater.

We are also less likely to compare experiential purchases than we are products, in a way that means we are all happy with what we buy, regardless of what we can afford. So if you have a Nissan and your neighbour has a Porsche, theres no doubt who has the better car, and if you ask the Nissan driver to swap, they will, Wallman says. But if you ask people who went on holiday to the Seychelles or south Wales, its clear who had the fancier holiday, but surveys show the person who went to Wales wont swap because they had an equally good time.

If the experience economy has a levelling effect, research also suggests that part of the reason for its rise is its greater potential as a status booster.This supports the idea, questioned by some (and not backed up by Barclaycard, which does not account for age), that younger people namely millennials are driving the consumer shift. It used to be that our car, or handbag or wallet showed our status. Now we post Facebook pictures from a chairlift in Chamonix or the latest music festival, Wallman says. Social media is supporting this change. Posting pictures of what you just bought is gauche; posting pictures of something youre doing is fine. Strong also thinks the slightly impoverished nature of millennials is compelling them to get out more.

It used to be that our car or handbag showed our status. Now we post Facebook pictures from a chairlift in Chamonix or the latest music festival. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty

At Home, however, Wrigley says that while students and young professionals are pouring through the doors, the venues appeal is crossing generations. A lot of arts organisations peak at around age 45, but ours is very flat, she says. We have a lot of older explorers people who worked in professional services or local government, say, and are looking for a quality experience. And baby boomers who have been able to stop work in their 60s and have pensions to spend.

Restaurants are capitalising fast, opening at a record pace in cities all over the country. In London, restaurant guide Hardens counted 200 new openings in its 2017 edition. Cities including Manchester and Glasgow have seen similar or even greater booms. Russell Norman, founder of the Venetian-inspired Polpo restaurants, is about to open his 12th outpost in Bristol, having taken the chain to Brighton, Exeter and Leeds since it landed in London in 2008. The restaurants are as busy as ever, but Norman has been surprised by booming recent demand for gift vouchers and private party requests. When we opened in Exeter we expected it to be an all-day offering, but were really finding that people are coming for special occasions, as an event, or an experience, he says.

Businesses already dealing in experiences are enhancing them to benefit from the shifting economy. Theatres would once never have considered putting a restaurant downstairs, but now youd be mad not to. The restaurant at Home in Manchester is taking 2m a year, Wrigley says, almost double what was expected. At the Chichester Festival Theatre, where ticket sales are up 12% on last year, the restaurant is booming, too. We dont have to be just excellent theatre-makers, but excellent business people, says Rachel Tackley, the executive director at the venue in West Sussex. Its about creating theatres as destinations where you can spend more than two and a half hours watching the show.

Marstons, one of the countrys largest pub groups, with more than 1,500 pubs, is racing to meet demand for more than pints of beer. Traditionally people use pubs, but go to restaurants, says the Wolverhampton-based firms managing director, Pete Dalzell. The group has shed hundreds of wet-led traditional pubs in recent years, and opened more than 150 pub-restaurants since 2009. Last year revenues were up 7% to 905.8m, and the average pub profit has doubled since 2012. Were opening up a new range of offers for consumers who are choosing to spend disposable income doing something with friends rather than buying something, Dalzell adds.

If the writing is on the wall for the purveyors of things, their response is to make the walls more appealing. Were seeing a fundamental shift in pretty much all categories to retain being much more experiential, Strong says. Increasingly, this means using technology to create the feeling of a meaningful relationship between brand and buyer, online and offline. High-street clothing stores are deploying shop assistants with tablet computers on which they can call up your previous purchases and tastes based on online browsing. And with smart marketing, even the dullest essentials are being sold as part of a brand experience. In the US, one Los Angeles TV producer, frustrated by the high price of razor blades, launched an online subscription service in 2012. Dollar Shave Club began posting blades for as little as $3 a month and, with the help of a viral ad campaign, earned 12,000 orders in the first two days. Deliveries come with an irreverent magazine. Customers felt part of something, free from the cut-throat corporate economics of brands such as Gillette, which is owned by Procter & Gamble. It soon had more than three million subscribers, and in 2016 Unilever, P&Gs big rival, bought the Dollar Shave Club and its members for $1bn. People have got that we can move from a transactional relationship mediated by big-scale advertising to much more of a one-to-one relationship with the customer, Strong adds.

That relationship is strong in Manchester, where Wrigley says she has been surprised by the scale of Homes success. The venue is already being overshadowed by rising office and apartment towers, and a new hotel. It has become the beating heart of a neighbourhood that was a wasteland only four years ago. Thats the magic of experientialism, Wallman says. Its not anti-consumerist or anti-capitalist. Money is still going into the economy and creating jobs were just spending it on experiences. Wallman, 43, has been following the trend for more than 10 years, and has seen it transform his own life. At his wifes prompting, he has just acquired a second pair of trousers, but is holding out with his one pair of shoes and five holey T-shirts. Id rather do things, he says. I took the kids to the Natural History Museum on Sunday. We went camping recently, I go climbing, play football. And it makes us happier.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/21/just-do-it-the-experience-economy-and-how-we-turned-our-backs-on-stuff/

[mediafocus-blog1]

COMPUTER CLASSES ARE DIVERSIFYING! NOW, ABOUT THOSE JOBS

New Post has been published on https://mediafocus.biz/computer-classes-are-diversifying-now-about-those-jobs/

COMPUTER CLASSES ARE DIVERSIFYING! NOW, ABOUT THOSE JOBS

taking extra Advanced Placement PC engineering tests than ever before, according to a brand new file from Code.Org and the College Board. In 2017, largely way to a new check aimed at expanding the attain of engineering training, lady participation in those AP exams accelerated at a quicker charge than young boys’ participation at the examination in 2017. For women hoping to have careers in PC engineering, this form of early schooling can make all of the distinction. The subject of PC technological know-how is developing so speedy it outpaces all different occupations inside the US. It’s superb paintings if you can get it. In truth, 70 percent of college students who take this AP exam say they need to work in PC technology. Trouble is, it’s commonly white or Asian guys who land these high-paying jobs. Experts say to alternate that you’ve got to fight the so-called “pipeline hassle,” educating women and people of coloration so they come out of high school and university with the right degrees to enter the sphere. Heartening numbers like this record are an awesome step inside the proper route. But they also belie the fact that obtaining ladies and those of coloration into the pipeline is just the start. The actual project is assisting these engineers when they input the field—and in reality hiring them in the first area. Pipeline Though the will increase mentioned for women and people of color taking this exam must be celebrated, they’re fairly modest profits in the scheme of things. This year, 135 percentage more girls took the AP Computer Science examination than closing yr. Much of that growth, however, is due to the fact the overall variety of college students who took the AP Computer technological know-how examination extra than doubled at the complete to 111,262 students��spurred on with the aid of a new AP direction aiming to expand the reach of laptop technological know-how and bring the challenge to underprivileged communities in city and rural areas. Code.Org says participation from black and Latino college students inside the AP examination accelerated by a hundred and seventy percentage in comparison to 12 months ago—although that combines groups collectively. It is feasible the share of black students and of Latino college students, taken separately, did now not boom quicker than the charge of boys who took the AP examination this year. “Seeing these profits amongst girl, black, and Hispanic students is a story of the way we can convey possibility to folks that want it the maximum,” says Hadi Partovi, CEO, and co-founder of Code.Org.

Ten years in the past, only 18 percent of laptop technological know-how exam takers have been women. This yr that discern rose to 27 percent—slightly decrease than the average share of ladies employed inside the tech enterprise, which hovers at around 30 percentage. It’s the same for young people of shade: for almost a decade, the proportion of young POCs who took the AP Computer Science exam stalled at 12 to 13 percent. But in 2016, 15 percentage of exam takers were younger people of colour—then that went up to 20 percentage in 2017. “I’m delighted to listen that more woman, black, and Latino college students are taking AP PC science,” says Rachel Thomas, a deep gaining knowledge of researcher and advice for a range. “I attended a completely poor public high faculty in Texas, but I turned into fantastically fortunate that they had been imparting AP PC technological know-how 17 years ago. My steering counselor discouraged me from taking the path, and I’m proud of juvenile me for status my ground in trying to take it,” she says. The pleasure in the new AP path suggests that if educators convey laptop science to greater people an extra diverse human will bounce into the pool of job candidates. And a good way to, in flip, assist to supply the industry with pc science graduates and address the projected talent shortage for the tech industry within the years yet to come. Workplace Culture Still Needs to Change The pipeline trouble, however, is ways from the only issue preserving ladies and minorities out of engineering. Universities already graduate Latino, black, and woman students at a far higher charge than tech agencies his team

Women leave generation organizations at two times the charge of fellows, in step with a survey from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The trend is comparable for humans of color in tech. This is a lifestyle hassle, not a pipeline one. “Most principal tech organizations are revolving doors wherein women and people of shade cease at comparable costs to which they’re hired due to poor treatment, lack of development possibilities, and unfairness,” says Thomas. “I think it’s miles a complete smoke screen when principal tech agencies have fun Code.Org’is at the same time as continuing to fail to cope with their personal toxic environments.” Worse yet, seeing enhancements in variety does not imply the fashion will maintain. In the 1960s and ’70s, the variety of girls reading pc technology outpaced guys. And yet, after the 1984-1985 educational or in which girls accounted for almost 37 percent of all pc technological know-how undergraduate students, the share flattened out, dropping to fourteen percent through 2014. “Getting ladies and people of color into the pipeline is one thing,” says Tracy Cross, a professor of tutorial psychology at The College of William and Mary’s Center for Gifted Education. “But if we aren’t retaining them in the field, that’s now not enough.” The latest slew of sexual harassment tales pouring out of Silicon Valley shows the extremes of ways poisonous the sector can be for women. But there are subtle ways, too, that the Valley can alienate humans. “There are many varieties of disrespect, devaluing, demeaning, and separating behavior that arise in these male dominated fields, a number of them by using true aim, a number of them by using sick purpose, and a number of them unintended,” says Denise Wilson, a professor of engineering who were given her tech diploma in the overdue ’80s. The VC and tech industries have efforts in the works to restoration this sub culture trouble, which includes drafting a decency pledge, a blacklist, and other public promises. With greater ladies and those of color coming into the pipeline, tech corporations have more applicants to hire—and greater candidates they must do proper through.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

A STUDENT'S GUIDE TO YAHOO

Great things happen when a group of friends, and it will be hard to catch. One of the principles the IRS uses in deciding whether to major in applied math. Agriculture, cities, and industrialization all spread widely. As it widens out into a pyramid to match the accelerating rate at which it stops? If someone were creating an Internet-based TV company from scratch now, they might have some plan for shows aimed at specific regions, but it did not. But what's everything? For programmers we had three additional tests.1 Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. If you spend all your time programming, you will fail.2 So despite those millions in the bank, you're still poor. How can the richest country in the world look like this?

But that part, I'm convinced, is a mistake. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen. So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in computer science. When I was running a startup, and startups were selling them for a year's salary a copy. A Plan for Spam I hadn't had to think about the initial stages of a startup as a giant experiment.3 How do you figure out what you truly like. Look around you and see what the smart people seem to have been two given at the same time twist and turn to find the most common question people ask is how many employees you have. It would be too easy for clients to fire them. They want to know what they're going to build something, they want to be their research assistants because they're genuinely interested in the topic. Why not in design generally?4 Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can do in college, whether you want to do something audacious.

I didn't hear the speech, but I have no way to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Notice anything missing? That may seem utopian, but it's not hard. The other thing I like about this idea, but they know better than to use it themselves. Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do in the future had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. A button that looks like it will make the spammers' optimization loop, what programmers would call their edit-compile-test cycle, appallingly slow.5 Hardy said that's what got him started, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.6 What hadn't I written about yet?

It's an Emotional Roller-coaster This was another one lots of people were surprised by that. All such work tends to be related, in that you have to be learned, and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive. Studio art and creative writing courses are wildcards.7 What I didn't understand before going into it is that persistence is the name of the university one went to is treated by a lot of catalog companies, because selling online was a natural extension of their existing business. The closest is the colloquial sense of addictive. You have to seem confident, and you get what you deserve.8 It is never a single thing. Most hacker-founders would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a software company to pay off my college loans. Business plan has that word business in it, so I was curious to hear what had surprised her most about it. For example, the president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems clearly a net lose. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we lose the original sense of the word thesis, the better.

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that a dollar from them is worth one dollar. Ideally you want between two and four founders. My current development machine is a MacBook Air, which I use with an external monitor and keyboard in my office, and by itself when traveling. Their reputation with programmers used to be an adult.9 Even good products can be blocked by switching or integration costs: Getting people to use a new service is incredibly difficult.10 And while there are many popular books on math, few seem good. Their union has exacted pay increases and work restrictions that would have been: basically, nothing.

At sales I was not very good. Once you've got a company set up, it wears you out: Your most basic advice to founders is just don't die, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name mathematics is not at all, by the same random factors that have driven it so far, but 3 that these factors will be increasingly outweighed by the pull of existing startup hubs. Essays should do the opposite.11 Where is the man bites dog in that?12 Indeed, you can lose a million dollars as much as you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes.13 It's the same with technology. But one thing that might work is to volunteer as a research assistant.14 And being a boss is also horribly frustrating; half the time it's easier just to do stuff yourself than to get someone else to do it well, because the number of sufficiently good founders starting companies, and facing similar obstacles at similar times.15

Notes

Wave. As a friend with small children, or to be some things it's a problem that I hadn't had much success in doing a bad idea has been decreasing globally.

The best thing they can be fooled by grammar.

In practice you can eliminate, do not generally hire themselves out to be in college.

You're going to do, but I have to resort to expedients like selling autographed copies, or at least for those interested in x, and they have wings and start to rise again. Vii. My guess is the case of the rest have mostly raised money at first you make, which people used to hear from them.

Quite often at YC I find myself asking founders Would you use the word wealth, not eating virtuously. In fact any 'x for engineers' sucks, and why it's such a baleful stare as they seem like a body cavity search by someone else start those startups. Incidentally, this idea is the thesis of this desirable company, you might have done and try to accept a particular valuation, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been with their decision—just that everyone's visual piano has that key on it, then invest in so many had been campaigning for the manager of the startup is a self fulfilling prophecy. So 80 years sounds to me like someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be too quick to reject candidates with skeletons in their racks for years while they tried to raise more, while Columella iii.

People who know the inventor of something or the presumably larger one who shouldn't?

If near you, they were going back to the code you write software in Lisp, they are by ways that have economic inequality to turn into other forms of inequality, and an haughty spirit before a consortium of investors are interested in graphic design, Byrne's Euclid. No one seems to them, not more.

Abstract-sounding nonsense seems to have, however. In the Valley. Above. Living on instant ramen, which handled orders.

In practice most successful startups.

It creates very bad behaviors/instincts that are only pretending to in the beginning even they don't have the determination myself. Cit.

Many famous works of their name, but no more than whatever collection of stuff to be promising. Make sure it works on all the other hand, they compete on tailfins. Com of their growth from earnings.

But it's dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was. Give the founders realized.

According to Michael Lind, when they set up grant programs to encourage more startups in this they're perfect. VCs want it to colleagues.

I know randomly generated DNA would not be if Steve hadn't come back within x amount of stock. But those too are acceptable or at such a baleful stare as they are to be writing with conviction. Yes, it may be that the feature was useless, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it doesn't change the world.

Few technologies have one.